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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35341 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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The triumph of the blank slate

an article in the Atlantic recently made the case that separating sport by sex doesn’t make sense, because it ‘reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.’

On a similar theme, a few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece arguing that ‘maternal instinct is a myth that men created’. In the essay, published in the world’s most influential newspaper, it was stated that ‘The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.’

Just recently, Scientific American stated that ‘Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the “two-sex model” served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.’

Yet what is strange is that such ideas are triumphant, even as the scientific evidence against them mounts up, with the expanding understanding of genetics and the role of inheritance. The tabula rasa should by all rights be dead, indeed it should have been killed twenty years ago with the publication of one of the most important books of the century so far, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.

Rather than blank slate-led ideas falling to mockery and obscurity, the opposite has happened — they’ve proliferated and spread. Pinker was obviously right, yet seems to have lost.

i recently was in a seminar discussing fixed versus growth mindsets, and it was argued that believing in any innate/genetic component of intelligence was connected to a 'fixed' mindset. we were discouraged from using the idea of 'talent' as it implied that some people were just naturally better at some things than others. it seems like a core part of the 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' mantra that is finding its way everywhere - the idea of innate difference is anathema to the principle behind caring about equity versus equality.

I want to take issue with the first part of this.

The quote from the Atlantic article is cherry-picked- Yes, it's dumb. Yes, the article used the silly "but gender and sex is a complex issue that isn't so cut and dry" gambit, but if you actually read the article, it's arguing (couched in progressive applause lights and signalling) that sports should have weight/size divisions rather than sex-based divisions, which I entirely agree with. Divisions based on physical attributes neatly sidesteps the transgender problem, it's more obviously fair, it would be fun to watch - it's a fantastic solution. We could split up divisions based on attributes that fit the sport- height or leg length for running, size and weight for football or boxing and so on. Large, muscular women would square off in the higher categories against men, while underweight men would compete against women their own size.

I read through a few comments, and no one seems to have clicked through to the source article and read it - everyone is just using the quote as a jumping-off point to bitch about their issues with modern academia or with those damn progressives that are ignoring biology.

EDIT: fixing some weird phrasing

but if you actually read the article, it's arguing (couched in progressive applause lights and signalling) that sports should have weight/size divisions rather than sex-based divisions, which I entirely agree with.

Sounds kind of like arriving at the correct answer to a math problem through the wrong method.

I think they got to the correct answer by the correct method (it's fair, merit-based, avoids sex-related questions/trans stuff etc), and then tried to decorate the reasoning process with language that would make it palatable to their readers. Reading it gave me a bit of mental whiplash.

I can't argue against an anecdote from your life, because (obviously) I wasn't there. I will say that I don't think anecdotes are a slam-dunk argument against weight classes in sports and that I've met women (rarely) who were stronger than I am. I'm not a small or a weak man.

Lastly, if we imagine a system like what I've described- if larger men reach weight requirements by gaining fat rather than muscle and then compete against smaller men who are stronger, they just lose. If a woman did the same then she would lose. She would either need to lose weight to fit into a lower weight category or spend the time to gain enough muscle to hold her own in the category that she wants to compete in.

Convince me that men are mostly stronger than women? I'm already convinced, man. Convince me that divisions based on measurements are worse (in some way) than divisions based on sex? I'm honestly not sure. If women who are the same weight, height, body fat etc. lose at very high rates when competing against men, that would do it- I'm not sure how you get that data without actually setting up widespread non-sex based competitions and then tracking win rates for a while.

Hey, let me add to the anecdotes: I am a small and weak man and I never met a woman stronger than myself despite doing mixed-gender martial arts for years.

Which makes me wonder: What kinds of women are these strong ones you mentioned? Must one imagine them as female strongmen who spend every waking moment lifting weights, or do they work tough physical jobs, or what else?

I don't know how the women I mentioned became strong- I wasn't close with them. There were several in the military and a few since that could out-lift me along various dimensions- mostly squats. Only one, maybe two that were stronger in the upper body than I was, although I may be stronger now than they were then.

I just thought of this now after coming back to your post...

but if women are just as strong as men, why do they need protection from rapists? Why can't they just fight back?

Jarring question, but I think it reveals one example of how the disattachment from reality can have unforeseen consequences.

Reality is that which, when you stop belieiving in it, doesn't go away.

If men are naturally stronger than women, why is female-on-male rape a problem at all?

The answers to that question should give you the answers to your question as well. Further, given that the article is talking about a competitive context and not in averages, I think it's easy to see why your question misses the point a bit.

Technically, in most Western countries, it is nigh impossible for a woman to legally rape a man.

In the USA, a woman can drug you, tie you up, and force you to have sex with her, but the FBI only considers it rape if she penetrates your anus.

Similar in UK and India.

I've argued with feminists on this point, and they've used essentially the same argument as is widely used to explain female underrepresentation in STEM i.e. women are naturally just as strong and fast as men, but the patriarchy systematically discourages them from pursuing physical activities, so they never develop the relevant skills.

I don't want to Chinese robber the entire movement: most feminists I've met personally are well aware that men are stronger and faster than women for biological reasons.

Doesn't that lead one to wonder: "How did the Patriarchy ever gain power?" Are men just better at organizing? Women were too nice? But doesn't that suggest general differences between men & women.

It's an incoherent (and inconsistent with science and trivial observation) viewpoint.

I long wondered at what the progressive take on the progenitor of all extant "inequalities" is. We're humans in a Garden of Eden state before the cis white males upended everything?

White Supremacy can kind of be explained away by Europeans leveraging advantages in geography, technology, and resources into becoming the dominant civilization, then generating justifications for this post-hoc.

But patriarchy, hmmmm. Males as authority figures appears in EVERY human culture at EVERY point in history (unless the patriarchy rewrote the history books?)

It's replicated in nature, especially amongst primates.

Sexual dimorphism usually results in one sex being smaller, weaker, and "subservient" to the stronger sex, which in turn is expected to use their strength to fight off attackers/to catch prey.

Yes, men could have used their superior strength to place themselves on top of every social hierarchy and build cultures around this ideal, but it still seems firmly rooted in nature and evolutionary history, and thus can't just be explained away as a set of lucky circumstances that allowed on sex to just so happen to get a leg up on the other and then to conspire to keep it that way.

The growth mindset is so wrong yet it endures. There are probably a lot of financial interests--books, seminars, TED talks, careers--in keeping it alive. The replication crisis exists for this reason. Incorrect ideas in the physical sciences seem to be quickly buried but they can last forever in the social sciences. It's always possible to massage the data in a certain way or sample enough times to get the results you want.

Everything coming out of Education is about flooding and streamlining the process of sheering students and their families like sheep at the "Higher" Education gates. Anything that promotes enrollment and retention is good. Learning and even graduation are neutral or sometimes even negatives (especially the learning part since it leads some people to throw themselves on the gears of their machine). DEI, Administration Appartuses, "Woke" K-12 education, prestige/elite political and moral posturing, and absolute obedience to Federal government agencies, departments, and policies -- all of these increase and maintain the input of students each year who carry guaranteed funds in with them like giant bags of Monopoly money, regardless of their own personal situation.

What we are seeing is the inevitable, "late-stage" outcome of the structures established in the late 20th century around providing "college education" for everyone via State-backed programs, loans, etc. All of the incentives are topsy-turvy, and the algorithm has been allowed to run freely, out of control. The same could be said for US Health Care, the Military-Industrial Complex, etc.

The "growth mindset" is pure sugar in the mouths of Higher Ed admins, because it applies to literally everyone -- don't worry if you've never been able to master even basic algebra, you can still grow into it! Sign here on the dotted line for a 30k$ semester of Aerospace Engineering classes at your local State school (which you will inevitably fail, only to be "retained" and looped back for another round two or three more times).

The whole "growth mindset" bundle of ideas trades a lot on this motte-and-bailey.

Motte: All else being equal, someone who believes that hard work matters and innate talent does not will perform better than someone who believes the opposite.

Bailey: It is actually the case that hard work matters and innate talent does not.

My understanding is that the studies focus on supporting the motte - to the extent that there is good science here, it supports the motte. (It's social science so of course that extent is very little.) But most of the discussion around growth mindset acts as if the bailey was proven, which the studies don't even attempt to prove.

It's interesting because it's hard to know how self-consciously this substitution is made. Is it done intentionally by people who believe the motte and therefore wish to convince people of the bailey for their own good? Is it simple confusion? Is it bad faith twisting of social science to support a politically desired conclusion (the blank slate hypothesis)?

I suspect that a large component is that believers in the motte want to resolve cognitive dissonance when it comes to acting on the motte. They are convinced that it will be good for others if they are persuaded of the bailey. But this holds whether the bailey is true or not! And trying to convince people of something that's not true for their own good is the kind of thing bad guys do, and they are not bad guys, so the bailey must be true.

Definitely a conundrum. I personally find a 'growth mindset' to make me more effective, but agree that the science does not bear it out. Cognitive dissonance is necessary to function well in the modern world.

On a similar theme, a few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece arguing that ‘maternal instinct is a myth that men created’. In the essay, published in the world’s most influential newspaper, it was stated that ‘The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.’

I don't have data but I do have anecdotes. I have small kids and have been hanging out with lots of other small kids lately in multi-family campouts. One of my small kids is still a baby, and I get to see firsthand how other kids react. Here's how it goes: 100% of the other boys, of all ages, are completely indifferent to my baby, while almost all of the little girls look at the baby with glassy eyes and are clearly having their minds blown by adoration and maternal instinct. It's literally the centerpiece of their whole world on the campout. I'm surrounded by them the whole time I hold my kid. They look like they're on drugs.

Sorry, I just don't believe you can socialize this. It would be really convenient if it could be socialized, because my "potential babysitter?" options would double. Someone let me know if they figure out how to pull off this kind of deep brainstem reprogramming.

This is why it is relevant that so many of our would-be thought leaders are childless 30-somethings. It takes a gargantuan effort at doublethink to raise a few kids and see them interact with other kids, and not have your ape brain sort them into the glaring binary categories that apply 95% of the time.

I think the 95% idea is what confuses people. 'Men and women each have a bell curve on an attribute and there is some overlap' is just too difficult a concept for enough people to grasp that it we end up with 'There are exactly two points' versus 'there is one point'

IDK man. I'm a childless 30-something, and even I know perfectly well that women have a maternal instinct. It's patently obvious, I have no idea how these people can say otherwise. So I think there's gotta be at least some other factor at play here besides "has not watched kids interacting very much".

Some tests are meant to distinguish object-level ability. Take for instance, becoming a fireman or infantryman. It would be sexist to deny a qualified woman these positions because she's a woman. Furthermore, mumbling something about oppression or double standards is stupid, because you want your positions staffed by qualified applicants.

Whether or not something should be test or a competition can be contentious. For example, those college orientations where they say, "look to your left and to your right. One/two of you won't pass." Those always angered me because I figured a certification should be a test and not a competition.

Competitions are a little different than tests because it's not really about object-level ability. If it was, you would never have weight classes in boxing. After all, being heavy is simply part of the ability in boxing. And I think this is the primary argument for sex-segregating sports. But it's unclear what to do about a female (XX) who happens to somehow be naturally stronger. Why reward her, because she was born stronger than her peers? (I'm trying to sidestep any trans issues, that's a different issue).

As far as I can tell, the entire idea of rewarding winners in a competition has to do with spiritual merit, like determination, or how hard someone practiced.

Or something else I had issue with is how a lot of online games use "time played" as a kind of bonus, and let players grind up more powerful equipment to offset differences in mechanical ability.

Do people construct competitions that they'd be good at in a bid to win status for being good at them? Does TheMotte try to push "effortposting" as a spirtual virtue so that society rewards us?

For example, those college orientations where they say, "look to your left and to your right. One/two of you won't pass." Those always angered me because I figured a certification should be a test and not a competition.

That doesn't imply a competition. You can have grading with consistent predetermined standards and still confidently say that ~X% of the incoming student pool will fail just like they did in the previous years.

The trouble is that spiritual merit is also mostly genetic and luck.

The trouble is that spiritual merit is also mostly genetic and luck.

Well that would be the story that failed second-sons tell themselves wouldn't it?

Anything to shift the responsibility for any perceived shortcoming else where, and anything to hold on to whatever perceived greatness they might have inherited.

I think failed second-sons might also tell themselves that growth mindset is false, but that doesn't make it true. Sometimes the grapes really are sour.

But it's unclear what to do about a female (XX) who happens to somehow be naturally stronger. Why reward her, because she was born stronger than her peers?

Being stronger is a kind of merit that takes into account genetics and effort. To be the best at anything you need a combination of effort and luck, with genetics being a portion of luck.

For an individual, their genes are luck, but his/her parents did some selection by choice of mate, and it will be stronger in future when PGS becomes meainstream.

In an academic context, isn't this just curved vs. uncurved grading--mastery compared to the rest of the sample space vs. mastery compared to an external standard?

As far as I can tell, the entire idea of rewarding winners in a competition has to do with spiritual merit, like determination, or how hard someone practiced

No, spectators want to see someone being excellent, beat world records, and show the peak of human performance. Because we like to watch greatness. Yes, effort factors into it, determination etc, but nobody gives a damn if all that hard effort didn't result in actually being excellent. All that sort of stuff would just be niceties, participation trophy, consolation prize.

This would predict more spectators for e.g. male sports than female sports which as far as I know checks out.

Who's greater, heavyweight fighters or mediumweight fighters? My instinct says "heavy" because the number is bigger but I might be wrong.

The conclusion I've been under for awhile has always been that these competitions are segregated like this out of a sense of fun (to participate or to watch); it's boring to watch men beat Serena Williams or watch a heavy guy sit on a toothpick.

Who's greater, heavyweight fighters or mediumweight fighters? My instinct says "heavy" because the number is bigger but I might be wrong.

There's a reason "Pound for Pound" is a thing: it's a promotional tool designed to let lighter fighters have the prestige of heavyweights (the "baddest men on the planet") by claiming they were pound for pound as good or better fighters.

The very fact that it exists is telling about the hierarchy.

Ultimately heavyweights, in my opinion. When I watch a match I'm not just watching two guys wail on each other, I want to watch the best two guys wail on each other. Young, healthy, fit, strong, etc. I don't hate the versions of sports with less competitive people, but if I'm watching something ideally I want to see peak human performance.

Heavyweight champions are certainly seen as more important and impressive than featherweight ones. The featherweight champion could any day participate in heavyweight matches but would get his ass whooped. Meanwhile the heavyweight champion is banned from featherweight matches because everyone know he'd massacre those guys.

But yes, weight classes are a good comparison to sex segregation. Another example is age segregation, eg U19, U20, U21... tournaments in football. But also there the main one is the unlimited one and few people follow the U20 World Cup.

I always thought that was a great response to the women's soccer pay thing in the US. They're not playing the same sport, any more than the U15s are. The hard question would be "should the U15s be paid the same as the men?"

(Yes, I know that in the end they were actually getting paid more, AND they chose that model after rejecting the same contract as the men. Such a shit show of lies.)

The difference is that a 15 year old will be 25 in 10 years, but a woman doesn't become a man (in general...). And they'd say the reason that people don't watch women's football is sexism.

It's also interesting how the popularity gap is different in different sports. At least in Hungary, women's handball and water polo are not much less popular than men's. Same with swimming. But for football/soccer the gap is enormous, approx zero care about women's football and men's is hugely popular.

Regarding not the same sport: I wonder if someone would argue that all athletes should earn the same, regardless of sport. So a volleyball player should earn the same as a football player, because they both train equally hard, and the only cause of difference in earnings is some form of bias.

I don't think that's quite the whole story because without weight classes, you wouldn't watch a big buy beat up a little guy, you just wouldn't have a little guy in boxing at all.

There might be multiple factors involved, because most sports have a women's version at the top levels, and they obviously have developmental levels like high school and college because otherwise you don't have a pipeline of new players, but not as many have "pro, but not as good" levels which would correspond to boxing weight classes. There's no "short guys" NBA.

I think this is an oversight on basketballs part. There should be height classes for basketball. It would make it much fairer for lots of skilled players.

Isiah thomas is a great player. He can score on anyone. The thing is that due to his height he is a huge liability on defense and there's no way to overcome that.

On the other hand, minor league baseball is very much a thing and soccer(the world's most popular sport, at least officially) is theoretically composed of levels running from "literally kindergartners" to "Man U" with everything in between.

I am naturally a conspiratorial minded person, and yet no possible conspiracy theory could account for the mass mindlessness of modern academic "science."

I have grown weary of reading science fiction because nothing exhibits such extraordinary madness and fantasy as the modern society in which I currently reside.

Many academics posit that the concept of mammalian sexual dimorphism is a conspiracy of straight white men to oppress everyone else. The true believers are 100% convinced they are making the world a better place with their feminism/leftism. The only reason one would disagree with their theories is deep rooted misogyny/white supremacy.

Truly unbelievable!

Many academics posit that the concept of mammalian sexual dimorphism is a conspiracy of straight white men to oppress everyone else. The true believers are 100% convinced they are making the world a better place with their feminism/leftism. The only reason one would disagree with their theories is deep rooted misogyny/white supremacy.

What I think is happening is something that happened in Soviet Russia before. It also required all scientists and everybody really to say the politically correct things, you know the original 1917 Soviet style "political correctness". You guys in the west are just slowly and step-by-step finding out how really feels to live in such inherently dishonest society full of Havel's greengrocers. Of course it won't work and it will cause destruction and damage morally, mentally and for sure physically as well. And then the history will be rewritten as if "no true progressive" ever really believed it, possibly blaming it on reactionary corporate neoliberal fascist forces that distorted the original pure message, and it took some progressive heroine in 2030ies to push back against it proclaiming that true social justice was never tried. Rinse and repeat after two or so generations.

I am naturally a conspiratorial minded person, and yet no possible conspiracy theory could account for the mass mindlessness of modern academic "science."

Well there is no conspiracy there. It is just emergent behaviour of the money allocated for science has been taken over by greed and ideology. There is a long tradition spinning science communication to spread doubt. Tobacco companies pioneered it in modern massmedia with sowing doubt to the absolute scientific fact that they are killing their own customers. They wanted to communicate "alternative facts" that their products caused lung cancer. But the phenomena damages perception on what is science in the public eye because it benefitted their greed. That miseducation on science and scientific continues in the media even today. Somehow an avocado that travelled half way around the world on a fossil fueled transport is better for the climate than me eating a piece of meat that has grown less than a mile away.

There is a replication crisis going on also. That is also a function of allocation and greed. Researchers apply for grants for some research but there is nothing in the system that awards negative outcomes of research. So researchers have now an incentive to tweak, massage and fudge numbers to have positive outcomes on their research, because the moment they don't prove their hypothesis their funds dry up almost instantly.

But there is huge component bad ideas being inserted in that funding process too. The scariest thing that I heard of was an astrophycisist needing to show how it relates to DEI and gettings his grant denied because it wasn't furthering the 'cause'. Which is just plain incompetence.

Somehow an avocado that travelled half way around the world on a fossil fueled transport is better for the climate than me eating a piece of meat that has grown less than a mile away.

It is entirely possible that the extra fossil fuels needed to grow the piece of meat relative to the avocado outweigh the fuel needed to transport the avocado.

And in reality, meat is often transported across large distances.

Well I was trying to get across the point here, if I buy locally produced meat. If I buy meat that has been transported long distances or it comes from a "meat factory" then I'll concede that it can be carbon intesive. I have never touched an avocado tree but I've petted farm animals, so locally produced meat is an option for me and locally grown avocados aren't, so going vegan with something that you can't touch might not be better for the climate.

I agree. It's more like ants marching in a death circle.

Many academics posit that the concept of mammalian sexual dimorphism is a conspiracy of straight white men to oppress everyone else.

I don't think "conspiracy" is the right term for what they're positing. They don't believe in some smokey room where all the old straight cis men gather around to coordinate how to socially engineer everyone else to their liking. It's rather an emergent phenomenon in society that is downstream from all the old straight cis men oppressing everyone else. The upshot is that they get to claim vast nefariousness akin to a conspiracy but also get to stay strong in their views when all the evidence indicates that there's no actual men in smokey rooms coordinating anything of the sort. It really is an innovative worldview that has just enough layers of obfuscation to be acceptable to people who consider themselves intellectual while also retaining the passion and fervor that grand conspiracy theories can inculcate in true believers.

And notably, this phenomenon itself seems to be an emergent one, rather than the result of a bunch of power-hungry "academics" coordinating with each other to produce the ideology with the perfect combination of contagiousness and fervor for their audience. Rather, I think it's the result of simple evolution, as similar ideologies that were too conspiracy-minded or not totalizing enough got weeded out, leaving behind the highly optimized ideology that has been so successful in taking over so many institutions today.

I am naturally a conspiratorial minded person, and yet no possible conspiracy theory could account for the mass mindlessness of modern academic "science."

It's not a conspiracy theory, but I'd argue that for example, The Toxoplasma of Rage explains this fairly well. It's an obviously controversial opinion, so as much, it's going to garner the most out-group derision/in-group status, with the concept of how those things feed into one another.

I agree but my point is that I am a 9/11 truther inasmuch no one has ever convincingly explained to me why WTC7 collapsed.Or why there wasno investigation of The State Farm Arena election fiasco. I believe a group of global world leaders are pushing an agenda called Build Back Better etc.

But none of these explain what's happening on universities. Not even Alex Jones on ayuasca would predict the content coming straightfaced out of tenured University professors.

I found the NIST report on the collapse convincing. Did you read the actual report or only 'internet' analysis?

I'm with you on The State Farm Arena and the crazy at universities. Some of the university crazy is the academic equivalent of fake email jobs. I'm kinda wishing for a long deep recession that culls those with a disconnection from the nature of reality.

https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.18.010119

I'm kinda wishing for a long deep recession that culls those with a disconnection from the nature of reality.

Oh me too. I just hope I don't find out I was one of them.

"The collapse of WTC 7 is the first known instance of a tall building brought down primarily by uncontrolled fires..."

https://www.nist.gov/pao/questions-and-answers-about-nist-wtc-7-investigation

Yes I read it. I didn't find it convincing. I now consider it an early proto- factcheck.

I believe it looked like a controlled demolition because it was likely a controlled demolition.

Any evidence for blasts? I would be more skeptical if it sounded like a controlled demolition.

Weak evidence in one or two videos and witnesses claiming to have hear blasts.

However the perfect collapse into its own footprint is a feature of a controlled demolition.

However the perfect collapse into its own footprint is a feature of a controlled demolition.

It's a feature of any collapse, except where a side component is added by the thing doing the collapsing. It's not intuitive, because we think of buildings as rigid things which can fall over sideways... but they aren't. As soon as they start shearing, their structural members are no longer able to support them and they collapse straight down.

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So assuming it was indeed a controlled demolition, who do you figure did it and why? Does the theory involve the two main towers also having been demolished deliberately? If you are the Shady Cabal and actually managed to orchestrate something as complex as having fake terrorists fly planes into two big towers (and then potentially demolishing them without being noticed), why would you risk it all to demolish another much smaller building that you didn't even have a plane fly into?

Have you heard of the Surfside collapse? There, a reasonably tall building neatly pancaked due to the collapse of an adjacent parking deck. The emerging consensus seems to be that this was due to a combination of water damage, shoddy construction and possibly vibrations from an adjacent construction site serving as the ultimate trigger. If vibrations from a construction site can push a structure over the edge like that, surely fire plus something WTC1-sized collapsing right next to you can.

"If you are the Shady Cabal and actually managed to orchestrate something as complex as having fake terrorists fly planes into two big towers "

You're putting claims into my mouth to make me appear more ridiculous.

This is where conspiracy theorists get into trouble. It's not my job to speculate with meager information as to what actually happened.

I need only point out that the official version doesn't add up and that powerful people benefitted from the event.

If I go into a lizardman theory then I am easily debunked.

Pointing out the obvious and irreconcilable errors in the official story is a position of strength. Speculating on the unknowns is a position of weakness.

For example, is there any evidence that a plane hit the Pentagon outside of officials saying so?

I didn't put any claims into your mouth; I just preemptively addressed what I thought would be the most likely missing part of your story. The official story "adds up", in the sense of not being literally nearly impossible, just fine, since as I pointed out we do have other examples of buildings collapsing neatly from seemingly minuscule external triggers. You can at most argue that it is unlikely, but you haven't done anything rigorous to that end; and if you do, explaining why and how someone would engage in the clearly high-effort act of demolishing 7 WTC shortly after planes flew into an adjacent landmark and it collapsed is the most important (in the sense of being impactful on the probability of the official story being wrong) thing you need to do, not some irrelevant tangent.

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How many controlled demolitions and burning skyscrapers have you seen, such that you would be able to tell the difference between them?

Does watching a lot of "China's Funniest Demolition Accidents" count? I can usually tell it's not going to plan before the engineers even start running.

WTC7 is apparently the only modern tall building to collapse primarily from a fire.

But I've seen videos of dozens of controlled demolitions and they all look like WTC7.

That would be a no then.

The point is that if you haven't seen both kinds of things, you have no way to distinguish one from the other. You're trying to say that looks more like a demolition than it does like something else. In order to make that comparison, you have to have seen the something else.

A telescope looking at the moon makes it look like a piece of fake plastic. Just saying "I've seen lots of plastic and that looks like plastic" is bad reasoning.

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"Nature vs. nurture" is such a contentious question because, in practice, it's just a shallow covering over "who should be in charge." If it's Nurture, then things could be Nurtured better if we had a different society - if better people were in charge - if Our Revolution succeeds! "It's nurture!" is the cry of the revolutionary. But if it's nature, then things can't be nurtured better no matter what society we have, so there's no point in trying to overturn the status quo. "It's nature!" is the cry of the entrenched power.

Complicating this is that both facial claims are probably always at least a little true.

Complicating this is that both facial claims are probably always at least a little true.

Yeah it's a pretty trivially silly distinction. Even if something is "100% genetic," environment is still hugely important. For example, let's imagine math ability is 100% genetically determined. Nevertheless, a math genius born in a modern developed country is going to have a much different set of life outcomes than the same person born in a hunter gatherer society.

What's worse is, "What percent of a thing is environmentally/genetically determined" is itself environmentally determined. In an environment where not everyone is well-fed, height isn't completely genetic, because there are people who are short because they've been malnourished. Once you feed everyone, the environment is no longer determining who is short, it's just genetics.

(Unless I've made a mistake here) This paradox is pretty contentious though because it seemingly undermines many revolutionaries. If something is even a little bit genetic, the revolutionary seems to be steering the future where it becomes more and more genetic. Since revolutionaries aren't out there measuring how genetic and meritocratic society is, I suspect "there is some nurture to it!" is basically said in bad faith, by people who are salty.

That is to say, being short sucks whether its because of your genetics or because you're not well-fed. The Short Revolution uses the nature/nurture argument to justify the guillotine.

The honest blank slatist is then resigned to argue that genetics and biology is unfair. Is he even wrong?

The honest blank slatist is then resigned to argue that genetics and biology is unfair. Is he even wrong?

I'm not sure what this even means, if they are acknowledging that genetics and biology is unfair then they can't be a blank slatist. Yes, biology and genetics is unfair, when did "life isn't fair" stop being a cliche truism?

Complicating this is that both facial claims are probably always at least a little true.

I was assuming that this was uncontroversial enough that most real people would agree with it, and so nobody would be a true blank slatist. In this way, "blank slatism" would be a spectrum of belief. Someone who thinks that nurture is most of things, and nature is very little would be highly blank slatist.

Still, my post was bad because it assumed that a world without disparate nurture impacts would still look more or less like ours, whereas it might look very different. In that world, all differences really are nature, but maybe those differences are very small. In that case, highly blank slatists are vindicated.

when did "life isn't fair" stop being a cliche truism?

Around the same time that they started handing out participation trophies, if I had to guess.

There's so much that's wrong about these sorts of claims regarding gender parity in sports, but something that I feel usually goes unmentioned is just how belittling and condescending it is to female athletes. The sport that I have the most personal experience with is running, so I'll focus there for this point. Running happens to be a sport where there are smaller gaps between men and women than sports that rely more on size and strength, but there remains a persistent 10-12% difference in speed at every single distance (see world records here if you're curious)). Less statistically provable, I see the same sort of differences pop up at pretty much every level of the sport, including my mediocre hobbyist level (e.g., I can run 20K in 1:18, women with similar weekly mileage, similar physical build, and similar apparent fitness run roughly 1:26-1:26).

So, what's it saying about women to say that the difference is culturally constructed? Well, it must be saying that their training is, in some way, inferior. That when a Kenyan woman blazes an incredible 2:20 marathon and wins the female side of competition, the reason she's so much slower than the men is that she wasn't supported enough or didn't work hard enough or didn't eat right. That seems false, since the men and women do exactly the same thing. Or that in the 20K mentioned above, when I finish like 20th in a local race, but ran by the second-place woman in the last couple miles, she just wasn't pushed hard enough to succeed, or didn't train right. That's even more wrong though - I know her, I know she ran in high school and college (I didn't start running till my mid-20s and have never had a coach) and know that she runs more miles than I do.

This mentality that physical differences between genders are constructed strips these women of the respect they deserve. When I narrowly beat a female runner, I know that she's a better runner than me. I know that she's likely more talented than me, has likely outworked me, and that every bit of speed gain she gets is harder to come by than my testosterone-fueled improvement. The perspective that the reason I'm faster is because of culture rather than biology denies her the respect that she deserves for her hard work, instead making her an object of pity, insisting that if it weren't for some ephemeral oppression, she'd be just as fastest as the boys.

I hate it.

Different context, but I had exactly the same reaction to the girlboss approach that Rings of Power took to Middle Earth. If women warriors are everywhere, and nothing unique...what about Eowyn's entire character arc? Tolkien presented her as accomplishing something rare and difficult; that it was hard for her, but she pushed through and achieved greatness. If half--or even much less!--of the Riders of Rohan were female, then Eowyn just comes off as whiny, not heroic.

I hate it too for the same reasons, and I appreciate men who are willing to support female athletes and not patronize them.

Anyone remember the Battle of the Sexes? Serena Williams, and I think Venus too played far lower ranked male tennis players - and lost decisively.

What would those who deny biology matters have to say about that? She just lacked equal opportunities to men? Not if you know her history. Come on, she was once the Number 1 ranked woman in the world. That she just doesn't try her best? Please.

Martina Navratalova has been very outspoken on these issues as well. Exceptional female athletes with loads of experience are speaking, but non-athletes with agendas just plain aren't listening.

Women's sports ought to be thought of not as a lesser version of men's sports, but as similar yet different sports in their own right. In women's sports rules and uniforms and equipment,etc. are all designed around women's bodies, just as men's are for their own sport. That's as it should be.

I give Curling as an example of a sport I prefer to watch the women's game than the men's. There's a distinct difference, in that the men throw much harder, and as such there tends to be less rocks in play, which makes the women's game more exciting.

I'm just getting into it, but I get the feeling Disc Golf is the same way...that the best men in the world can overpower the courses in a way the women can't, and as such, the women's game is more enjoyable for people to watch. Similar to what I've heard some people say about Tennis, where the power of the men actually hinders the enjoyment.

Coincidentally now that you mention it, the other day Quillette published an article about the controversy surrounding trans women competing in female disc golf events.

https://quillette.com/2022/09/28/is-this-the-lia-thomas-of-disc-golf/

I feel similarly about ultimate Frisbee, which I think has a similar phenomenon as tennis. At the top levels, most male players can throw the full length of the field, and there's more room for error in bad throws due to higher acceleration, jumping height, and top speed, which results what I would consider mostly boring points where whichever team starts with the disc scores without trouble the majority of the time. But even at the top levels, there's only a handful of women in the world who can consistently throw the full length of the field, and the greater likelihood of a turnover from bad throws means there's much more volatility in every point, with possession changes being much more common.

"WNBA players are better at the fundamentals." From what I've heard, this is actually true, and I think for the same reasons you mention with curling and disc golf. If you are a young basketball player trying to learn those fundamentals, the WNBA is better to watch. For entertainment purposes...well, the NBA has a much larger market.

I'm not a basketball fan, I know very little of the strategy of the game. I go to the occasional NBA game because it's fun to watch superhumans fly.

It's interesting; I finally met, in the wild, a woman who claimed there were no biological differences in terms of strength, agility, speed, etc. between men and women. I had thought they were just caricatures on the internet, but I guess they really exist. She was in the army and claimed to have 'outperformed' 90% of the men there before she was injured. She was about 5'6 and maybe 120 pounds, so while I'm not too familiar with the army, I'm a bit skeptical of that one. She claimed testosterone had no effect on athletic performance and that literally the only difference physically between men and women is that men have a wider pelvis. Scientific papers describing any effects of testosterone are just transphobic.

This all grew out of the casual [sport] league I played in over the summer that went out of it's way to encourage inclusion of trans players. Man/lady were replaced with 'female-matching' and 'male-matching.' Traditionally, we played co-ed and matched genders on the field, and trans players (100% trans women in this league at least) would match with the gender they identify as. The women on the field were getting absolutely wrecked. Like, every now and then someone would absolutely blast by me uncovered before I realized it was a trans woman and her defender was struggling 10-15 feet behind her before I'd peel off and try to salvage the situation.

It honestly doesn't affect me and all the most strident pro-trans commissioners in the league are female, so I don't particularly care, but this is just...a step too far. There's no way this can be covered up in smokescreens about hormones or whatever else, it's just an immediately obvious fact that this is true. You just need some video footage of trans women absolutely destroying people at [sport] and it's not really sustainable.

I tried the same argument you just brought up as it seemed the most likely to elicit sympathy from a strident feminist, i.e. that it cheapens the accomplishments of female athletes, but she would just say that those female athletes would be as good as the men if it weren't for the patriarchy. Thankfully, people with that point of view are a vanishingly small minority - on my team of very left-leaning players, it was about 13 people arguing with her and her reluctant boyfriend trying to mediate.

Every woman I've ever met who claimed this has been young without exception. I think it's just a filter you pass through as a woman - you're young, reasonably attractive, men want to impress you and using force on you that might make you feel unsafe or even inferior is verboten, even in a situation like sports where you might expect it. If you're middle class or higher, men using any sort of force is socially unacceptable so you can pass your entire life without realising how much stronger men are.

Eventually you hit the filter - hopefully in the 'my brother/cousin/friend showed me how easily he can manhandle me while wrestling' and nothing worse, and you realise the truth. I have a lot of sympathy for women who believe this and then discover it. I can't imagine finding out that you're almost completely vulnerable half of society is a pleasant feeling.

I don't disagree with what you are saying but you can easily come away with an alternative conclusion - that this demonstrates the average young woman's privilege in our society.

You could easily analogise this situation to a young ignorant rakish noble who isn't aware that he is at the mercy of peasant rabble potentially rising up to kill him, until one day he he is confronted by an angry mob he has to defuse because he raised taxes too high. But the noble is still in the privileged positon, we shouldn't pity him.

Similarly a young woman who remains remarkably ignorant about reality about the differences between men and women enjoys a similar privilege. The fact that a young woman can go decades without a single man even daring to demonstrating a modium of physical strength against her (or even for her) shows how much social power she has.

I think the above post was saying that it's not simply an inherent privilege of gender/sex so much as an inherent privilege of age. The further one gets from being a little girl, the likelihood of experiencing how rough things can get increases.

It's the logical conclusion of the first principle, "gender is merely a social construct."

I often see gendercritical feminists battling what they see as the overreach of transgender ideology but not seeing the root of the issue.

A lot of gender critical feminists would say that they're at the root of the issue.

Sex is not a social construct, but that gender is. Once upon a time wearing powdered wigs might have beeen manly, so too wearing tights, or heeled shoes that today we'd definitely see as looking more feminine. If you met a Leslie or a Sam a hundred years ago, you would probably be meeting a man, not necessarily true today. Some of what we think of as masculine or feminine is true for our culture in our time, but not necessarily for all cultures in all times.

Gender critical feminists tend to believe that sex is real and important but that gendered assumptions and gender roles are what is problematic. And then you would have more conservative feminists who agree that sex is important, but don't really have a problem with gender and gender roles, so long as there is no discrimination placed on women in society. I think gender critical women would say you can't have your cake and eat it too - that as long as there are different gender roles for men and women you will have discrimination, and conservatives would probably disagree that that is a foregone conclusion, and that gender roles serve no benefit to girls and women. Gender criticals would argue what about lesbians and others who might defy gender roles, and find those roles stifling? More conservative feminists would argue that's fine, they can certainly do their own thing but if those roles seem comfortable for the majority of people, it doesn't seem to make sense to abolish them.

Mostly, these people are trying to put aside their differences right now to oppose those who demand we pretend that sex itself is not real, that sex is what is actually the social construct, while gender is what is real, biological and unchangeable.

Feminists tend to believe that gender is MERELY a social construct. I think the reality is that gender is rooted in sex, biology, and evolution.

Most of feminist activism is kicking against the pricks of biological evolution at the expense of society's health.

But I should acknowledge my strong antifeminist bias.

Man/lady were replaced with 'female-matching' and 'male-matching.'

Ultimate Frisbee? I'm still getting used to seeing "FMP" and "MMP" in team emails.

Alas, I've been doxxed. Time to delete my account.

You think the sports thing will generally solve itself organically, as trans/female competition becomes more prevalent and more people see the effects for themselves? Or does it generally not seem to be that much of a deal? People like their sports, but there's a lot more going on than just the top end, so maybe they just tough it out?

You think the sports thing will generally solve itself organically, as trans/female competition becomes more prevalent and more people see the effects for themselves?

I think right now we have the worst of both worlds: we have men transitioning to female (and the major problem is MTF, I haven't yet seen anyone complaining that the 5' 5" FTM who weighs eight stone has an unfair advantage over the guys on the rugby team) who waited until they conveniently went through their male growth spurt and so retain the height and breadth of shoulder advantages (I realise that sounds bitchy but looking at Lea Thomas and how much taller they are than their cis female fellow competitors - well.)

What will happen when the current crop of trans youth mature enough to go into sports? When you have a kid who went on puberty blockers aged ten and then into hormonal/surgical transition as soon as legally old enough, so they're shorter and weaker and more in line with natural cis female biology? I think we'll have to wait and see. Right now, though, I'm not convinced.

I don't think there's any impetus in my league; if anything, it's the reverse. Nobody is conservative, if they are they're closeted big city conservatives who still like most of the conveniences of blue tribe society, have a distaste for the homeless/wokeness and hide their power level to get laid. The men in my league don't really care and would probably be happy playing without the women if it weren't for the sizable fraction who want to play with their girlfriends. The women are broadly and emphatically pro-trans and diversity.

Moreover, there's such a broad range of skills at this level that it doesn't matter all that much and the highlight for many people is hitting the bar after the game. I've at times been matched up with players who are as far below me as the women on my team are below the trans women. Amusingly, trans women are the new ringers and I suspect a quietly sought after prize for many a captain; everyone wins!

I don't know where the professional leagues are headed.

I haven't met anyone that carries that argument all the way to the extreme, but I've met a surprising number of people that seem to believe something approximating it, or at least they wildly underestimate just how large many of the physical differences are. When I first met my wife, we were goofing around, and she claimed that she could sprint across a tennis court faster than me. I was absolutely incredulous that this was a sincere belief - she's a decently fit woman, but not an athlete and had never played any organized sport (I'm not a serious athlete either, but I'm a fit looking guy). Just on priors, I know that I'm faster than something like 99% of women. I laughed at her, we sprinted across a court a couple times, she lost by quite a bit, and just had a weird dismayed look about it. We had a couple other physical tests that we wound up doing (goofy stuff, like who can jump on a kitchen counter without a running start), and it kind of set in that we really aren't close physically. I was absolutely stunned that this was surprising to her, but she'd apparently just never played sports and never had a guy tell her that it wasn't going to be close.

On other occasions, I've had female friends claim that they could beat me in a fight, because I'm skinny. Which... well, I am skinny. But at 5'8", 140, fairly lean, and lifting a couple times a week, this really isn't going to be close. I don't think they'd claim that men and women only differ because of culture, but they do perceive themselves as being something like twice as strong as they actually are, so it's probably not too much of a stretch to convince them that whatever small difference they think exists is constructed.

she would just say that those female athletes would be as good as the men if it weren't for the patriarchy.

This is the part that's so weird to me. There's not really any plausible proposed mechanism there, just a handwave at generic oppression. I'll certainly admit that until fairly recently a hypothesis along the lines of "women might be just as good at endurance sports as men, we don't know because they've never trained for it" was tenable. There was no women's Boston Marathon until 1972! That's just 50 years ago, there are women alive and well that personally fought to be included. There are even plausible sounding reasons for women to be just as good at endurance sports, and pretty much no one was training optimally for it until quite recently. But strength things? Like you said, it's simply too in your face, too obvious, there's just no plausible way to defend the idea that's constructed.

On other occasions, I've had female friends claim that they could beat me in a fight, because I'm skinny. Which... well, I am skinny. But at 5'8", 140, fairly lean, and lifting a couple times a week, this really isn't going to be close.

People who beleive this have never been in a fight.

I don't have the url on hand(and I'm not sure how we want to be linking to reddit anyways), but I recall a long thread on a female-centric reddit forum that discussed the moment when they realized just how much stronger men were naturally than women.

I distinctly remember a fair number of those moments could basically be summed up as 'I kept pushing my brother/SO/friend to treat me seriously when playing/wrestling/competing and when he did he promptly shut me down cold without even trying'.

I wonder how many women whom claim 'They could win in a fight' are going off of faulty information, because every man in thier life have been playing with them and/or treating them gently, while the woman in question thinks they've been treated seriously.

This is the part that's so weird to me. There's not really any plausible proposed mechanism there, just a handwave at generic oppression.

One proposed mechanism I saw online about 5 years ago was the claim that, throughout history, men underfed women in their patriarchal society, resulting in women being undernourished and thus weaker than men on average and in the extremes. It seemed to subscribe to a Lamarkian-esque view of evolution except descent along sex instead of actual parentage, and also seemed pretty ahistorical with respect to the level of nutrition people used to get in the past. I wish I had saved it somewhere, because it was a really fascinating and deranged idea, and I recall it being passed around approvingly within my circles.

How do you underfeed the person who is doing the shopping and the cooking to begin with? Or if you go back to the farm, the person who is cooking the stew over the hearth, and gathering the eggs and milking the cow and making the bread and canning the vegetables, etc.? If you're the farmer or the cooper or the smithy, you can't stand in your kitchen all day to make sure she's not eating. She'll go pick apples off the tree and berries off the vine and make herself a whole damn pie if she wants to.

How do you underfeed the person who is doing the shopping and the cooking to begin with?

Internalized misogyny is a hell of a drug fully general explanation for any behavior by women that seem to go counter their interests.

One proposed mechanism I saw online about 5 years ago was the claim that, throughout history, men underfed women in their patriarchal society, resulting in women being undernourished and thus weaker than men on average and in the extremes. It seemed to subscribe to a Lamarkian-esque view of evolution except descent along sex instead of actual parentage, and also seemed pretty ahistorical with respect to the level of nutrition people used to get in the past. I wish I had saved it somewhere, because it was a really fascinating and deranged idea

Ooh, ooh (raises hand). Was it from Charlie Stross? I didn't bring that to The Motte's attention until last year, but you might have first seen it in the wild.

and I recall it being passed around approvingly within my circles.

And now I'm wondering if it wasn't Stross, but rather you saw the same idea independently invented elsewhere. Even on his own blog, full of left-wing fans, Stross was getting pushback, and about the closest thing he got to approval was the idea that, if we see sexual selection when women insist on marrying taller husbands, that might not quite be the same as women being underfed but it still ought to count as patriarchy too.

It was indeed not Stross, at least I don't recall it being someone by that name. It was a tweet thread online by some woman I had never heard of before or since. It does seem that the concept was largely the same as that 3rd bullet point in the post you linked, though the Twitter thread I'd read expanded on it quite a bit more, including explicitly making the claim instead of the implausible-deniability-language of "Consider, for example, that a restricted diet stunts growth, and that average adult stature tracks food availability by a generation or three, and ask why men are, on average, taller than women" that tries unconvincingly to make a claim without taking responsibility for it. The fact that the thread was passed along approvingly within my circles is likely more a reflection of how niche and extreme my circles were than anything.

The claims I usually see are that spending more money (and thus, presumably more food) feeding men than women is discriminatory, with the implication that this contributes to performance differences. For example (emphasis mine):

But he said the university failed to show it’s in full compliance with Title IX relating to travel and per diem, and needs to update its policies to ensure equal treatment for both men’s and women’s teams.

...

Schreiner said they’re working on travel and per diem policies and hope to submit a plan to the court within the next few weeks.

It will cover how frequently teams travel by bus or plane, how far they travel, hotel stays and per diem for meals.

It is so dumb, because if you take two men - say a lightweight boxer and a middleweight boxer - you don't put them in the same fight (unless it's some kind of gimmick stunt). Everybody recognises this. A good lightweight will be beaten by a good middleweight. It's down to physical difference in height, weight, reach, etc.

But then you get people trying to deny that women in general are smaller, lighter, slower and weaker than men in general and it's just - do you not have eyes? Have you ever struggled with opening a jar and had to get a male family member to do it? Or lift something heavy for you?

The boxing analogy is instructive, heavyweight was the big draw but I don't know if that is still the case today (my late father used to watch boxing, so I absorbed some by osmosis but haven't watched any myself in years). There is a difference between fighters and boxers, one is generally considered to be more skilful in the art of boxing. The ideal, of course, is to have someone like Ali who could both box beautifully and also slog it out, soaking up punishment and landing heavy hits.

Heavyweight went down for a while because too many big, heavy, guys who were slow and clumsy but their main advantage was they could soak up punishment for the majority of the bout, then if they landed one big punch that was it for their opponent. (That's why lighter weight bouts were more enjoyable, because you got actual fighting and boxing, not one big behemoth lumbering around the ring being a human punching bag until he landed the killer punch). So a big, heavy, clumsy guy will slaughter (metaphorically) a woman who may be more skilled and faster than him, but who can't take the same beating and certainly can't stand up to one huge punch.

Katie Taylor is a great female boxer. She is never gonna stand in a ring with a guy, because he'd hammer her. You watch her bouts for the same reason you'd watch men boxing: skill and stamina. But there is never going to be a man versus woman boxing match, even at the same weights, because it just would not be level. Okay, maybe get a flyweight guy and some Soviet-era style big heavyweight female athlete, but even then I don't think it would be that equal.

I'd been meeting these people in the wild since at least 2014. I remember, for example, when I mentioned this particular technological breakthrough which allowed people to reconstruct audio in a room from capturing vibrations in papery substances on video. I mentioned that the tech wasn't always good enough to be able to actually hear what was said, but was capable of being used for figuring out whether the speaker was male or female, and then I got yelled at from 5 different directions saying that some women have deeper voices than men, and you couldn't generalize about such things.

some women have deeper voices than men

True. I've known some women with deep voices, and at least one guy who had a high, fluting voice

and you couldn't generalize about such things.

False. Yes, you can, because it's general. In general, women will have higher voices than men. Even a deep-voiced woman may not sound like a man's voice, or a high-pitched male voice like a woman's voice. Some women will sound like a man and some men will sound like a woman, but in general you can tell which is which.

I saw a shitpost the other day on 4chan in which some anon argued his litmus test for whether he was speaking to a stupid person or not.

Essentially, if he makes a statement like "Asians are shorter on average than Caucasians" and someone rebuts "but I know an Asian guy who's 6'2"", then he knows he's dealing with an unintelligent person.

It's staggering the number of people I've met - people with Master's degrees, people who've succeeded in their chosen fields - who seem completely unable to grasp the concept of averages and distributions. There are so many people who hear a statement like "on average, women have lower sex drives than men" and interpret it to mean "literally every woman is less horny than literally every man, there is not a single woman anywhere in the world who is hornier than a man". Like, the idea of outliers is built into the concept of an "distribution". The entire concept of an average presupposes that there are members within that set which fall above and below it.

It's incredible to me how so many people think that "but I know an Asian guy who's 6'2"" or "I'm a woman and my sex drive is way higher than my boyfriend's" is some kind of "gotcha".

There was no source for it I was able to hunt down, but I'd really love to find out that the half-recollected factoid about Piraha children being able to learn the arithmetic their parents never could (that I read here recently) turns out to really be true. The common first-world adult inability to grok distributions reminds me of nothing more than the typical Piraha adult inability to work with numbers, and yet if there's hope for their future generations then maybe there's hope for ours too.

There’s a reason why it’s called the Standard Social Science Model. Genetics is assumed to play no role in behaviour, contra all evidence in nature. This is what the best and brightest at Ivy League institutions believe, deeply, and they will brook no disagreement, which is automatically assumed to be racist, sexist, transphobic, etc

There’s this myth of progress, that we humans are getting smarter and better al the time. Rationalists fall hard for this type of belief, yet they ignore all the signs of societal decay everywhere. The effective altruists are even worse - they misunderstand where the true threats to societal progress stand “ooooh its malaria! It’s HIV! 🤓” the quokkas in the end discredit themselves both in their foolish and naive attempts to improve things and their shrinking cowardice at pointing out obvious truths

Actually most effective altruists I know push back against that type of ideology quite strongly, arguably the capture of scientific institutions by idiots who can't face reality is one reason why effective altruism has become so large.

Sad to see this blatant strawman being upvoted.

I hope you’re right! Perhaps I’m being too harsh

‘reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls

My 5' 4" female self looks around at all the guys around me, who are between 3-6" taller than me at a pinch.

Gosh, wherever did they get that idea from? 🙄

EDIT: I work in a childcare service, so yeah, right now the kids both boys and girls are roughly around the same size, and it's perfectly possible to have girls who are bigger than boys. These kids are 2-5 years old, though; around 12 or so when puberty hits, that won't remain the same. So yeah, a kindergarten race can have boys and girls running together, but after that no way.

My 5' 4" female self looks around at all the guys around me, who are between 3-6" taller than me at a pinch.

Have you tried just being taller? Grow more smh

Hey, in First Class, I was bigger than at least two of my male classmates! Most of them were bigger than me, but I think I sort of unintentionally bullied one of them into lending me his comics (the benefits? of lack of social awareness/autism spectrum, where I had no idea I was coming across as menacing when I said 'you will lend me those') 😁

And then between ages 12-15 I stopped growing so much, and my height was fixed at what it is now.

Growing quick young is always a doozy. I have some pictures of myself around eight years old playing youth soccer, and in the team pictures I'm standing in the back with the adult coaches because I had some ridiculous early growth spurts. It's funny to look back on how much I out-huged my peers my entire life.

But because I'm a hard-working man and not a quitter, I kept going after 5'4".

My 5' 4" female self looks around at all the guys around me, who are between 3-6" taller than me at a pinch.

Gosh, wherever did they get that idea from? 🙄

I've legit spoken with women (granted at least 5 years ago) who claimed that men are taller because women are malnourished, because of societal beauty standards leading to women being given less nourishment.

I mean, yeah, in some cases, in the past, especially where working-class people were concerned because you gave the men and boys of the family the best/most food since they needed it for the labour which earned the wages which kept the family afloat. Women ate less/less nourishing food. Also, having many pregnancies did take a toll on physical reserves.

So you had some upper-class women who were six feet tall. But also a lot of working-class men who were undernourished and stunted, to the point where it shocked army officers conscripting recruits for the First World War.

But in our modern era, unless we are talking severe poverty, there is no such gap between men and women and access to food and nutrition.

I think the growth vs. fixed mindset paradigm is bunkum . Its obvious that although practice can improve absolute ability, relative differences will persist, which is more important. People want to not just get better at things, but better relative to other people or good enough to make a living or attain some recognition. competitors train equally hard for marathons, yet some runners are still clearly better than others. Despite law school prospects using the same apps and study methods, why do some individuals score higher on the LSAT than others? Likely IQ.

an article in the Atlantic recently made the case that separating sport by sex doesn’t make sense, because it ‘reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.’

I think women can be more competitive at endurance-like events relative to men, but the women-in-sports debate focuses on activities in which men are massively better, like mma (anything to do with combat, speed, strength). I have observed this myself...women climbing mountains as well as men, which would be like going to the gym and seeing women doing 225+ reps on the bench with good form, which you will never see. Indeed, the best women's marathon time is 2:14 vs, 2:02 for men, a 10% difference. By comparison, the best men's deadlift is about 70% greater than the best women's deadlift. I think this is why marathon or 5k,10k events tend to be more diverse than other sports activities.

It should be uncontroversial that if you want to see who can run the fastest, or lift the heaviest, or whatever, that it will be a male athlete. So if you're watching a sport for extreme limits, you will be watching men's sports. Want to watch the fastest runners in the world? Then you're going to be watching the men's 100m sprint, no question about it.

But if you're interested in skill, then you can watch women's sports too (not that men are brawn over brains). And in, for instance, a woman's 5,000 metre race, while the men's time might be faster, both of the races will involve strategy (when to go to the front, when to hang back and let someone take the lead for the first laps, can you pull off that final stretch burst of speed to pass them out) which is interesting to watch.

I think the mindset idea has some value - innate talent might be important, but for practical purposes, you can't change the genes you were born with, whereas you can practice hard. At the same time, it might be that people are better off trying to identify their talents and disposition and act in a way that matches them, rather than trying to shove their square self into a round hole.

I think the growth vs. fixed mindset paradigm is bunkum .

It's a Current Hot Thing in pedagogy. Those are usually a core of wishful thinking with a thin science-flavored veneer on top, for the same reason that star basketball players are usually very tall: it's a big competitive advantage in the marketplace of ideas, as long as the participants in that marketplace don't particularly care about what's actually true.

(Regarding the growth mindset stuff in particular: attempted replications keep failing to show much effect except when Carol Dweck is personally involved, which at the very least does not inspire confidence in its ability to accomplish anything real at scale.)

Jesus Christ, wasn't Scott dunking on the "growth mindset" literally years ago?

Short version of my theory:

  • Fixed mindset is what is true.

  • But people who believe in growth mindset actually work to their fullest potential instead of sitting on their ass.

I am very uncomfortable with The Noble Lie but telling someone that they are just going to end up wherever mother nature decides is robbing them of something big.

This is related to having an internal versus external locus of control. The difference has a massive impact on motivation and perseverance.

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