If me and the eminent Professor Hawking found ourselves sharing an apartment, it would be insane to distribute the labor equally between us. Comparative advantage tells us that he should use his enormously powerful mind and reputation pay a much higher share of the rent while I can use my young and increasingly muscular body to do any household chores which need doing. This turned into a slash-fic way too fast, but you get my drift here; men and women need to pursue tasks which complement their natural advantages.
By “equitable” I’d mean that we each start out with half of the pie; it doesn’t stop being equitable if I like crust and dislike filling and you like filling and dislike crust so we mutually agree to trade my share of filling for your share of crust (i.e. this or a quick-and-dirty informal approximation thereof).
This doesn’t mean women should be barefoot and pregnant, there is plenty of room in the world for exceptional women and men to take each other’s roles, but it does mean that in general the distribution will more closely resemble traditional societies.
What do you mean by “exceptional”, 20% or 0.1%?
Note also that, given larger IQ variance among men than among women, the Flynn effect means that the fraction of people above a given IQ threshold who are male has decreased with time; technological advances mean that low-IQ labour has become less useful; and anyway IQ overweighs visuospatial intelligence compared to its importance today inflating male scores (and deflating Jewish scores). Fun fact: 59.4% of the people who graduated at my university in 2012 were female.
I understand why avoiding it is wise, but it’s not a particularly large discussion. The facts are pretty damning; the least capable elements of society are fast outbreeding the most capable, and immigration is not helping matters. The only solutions which come to mind are either very ugly or rely on the rapid maturation and implementation of technology which the Left strongly opposes.
I suppose there are differences among different parts of the present-day western world with respect to that: if I understand correctly what kind of technology you’re talking about, where I come from it’s the Catholic right that’s opposing it.
By “equitable” I’d mean that we each start out with half of the pie; it doesn’t stop being equitable if I like crust and dislike filling and you like filling and dislike crust so we mutually agree to trade my share of filling for your share of crust (i.e. this or a quick-and-dirty informal approximation thereof).
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what’s equal, it’s about what works. You can’t build a society on the basis of atomized individuals constantly negotiating out every interaction on an ad-hoc basis; that’s just not a stable or realistic foundation. It leads to a culture of divorce and single-parents, generations of unsocialized children and ultimately societal collapse; we’ve seen the same pattern play out in the black community already.
Start with a strong tradition which works well in the aggregate, make that the standard, then we can talk about shifting the details around in any given family.
What do you mean by “exceptional”, 20% or 0.1%?
Closer to 20% would be my guess; women only lag men by about 5 points overall and a lot of that is the aforementioned spatial reasoning. I’d say something akin to the Asian-White proportions would be a good baseline expectation given that the magnitude of difference is similar, with more women at the top levels due to their wide variance.
Of course, the actual representation in the work force might still come in under our expectations; pregnancy and even menstruation are serious problems for women trying to compete with men, even with modern hormonal birth control which mediates the effects of both, and as studies have shown women tend to be happier as homemakers than breadwinners
Fun fact: 59.4% of the people who graduated at my university in 2012 were female.
On the other hand, the university I went to was a top-tier engineering school with about 20% women and more Asians than Whites by a long shot (and most of us ‘whites’ were at least a quarter if not fully Jewish). Was my school suffering from unfair “boy’s club” discrimination against women or was yours caving to the constant push for “better representation” of women in academia?
That’s why I prefer to look at scientific measures like IQ scores and market-based indicators like wages earned than university admissions. Uni is supposed to prepare us for the job market and separate the wheat from the chaff anyhow; the numbers ought to all roughly match up if it’s working properly.
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what’s equal, it’s about what works. You can’t build a society on the basis of atomized individuals constantly negotiating out every interaction on an ad-hoc basis; that’s just not a stable or realistic foundation. It leads to a culture of divorce and single-parents, generations of unsocialized children and ultimately societal collapse; we’ve seen the same pattern play out in the black community already.
And yet Northern European societies, which have very low gender inequality, haven’t collapsed yet. So maybe the reason why the black community (ITYM the one in the US) has is probably a different one. (EDIT: Oh, look at this too.)
(Also, how comes people can ever get along with roommates of the same sex, where there’s no Schelling point as to who should do which chores?)
I’d be surprised if no-one had used that as an argument against gay marriages and adoptions.
(Here too, ‘how comes the Netherlands have had same-sex marriages and adoptions for 12 years and the sky there hasn’t fallen yet?’ sounds like a valid counterargument.)
Oh, they do all the time. And yet, as you say, it turns out that society never quite collapses when we ignore those dire predictions. Which of course doesn’t stop the kinds of people who believe such things from believing that this time it certainly will.
Is there some easily communicable message here for doomsayers that stands a decent chance of kick-starting the “Oy, was I mistaken!” part of their brains into gear?
I’d be more inclined to discard the category “doomsayers” and instead categorize people, not by the behavior, but by the intent… different people doomsay for importantly different reasons, and not all people motivated by each of those reasons necessarily actually doomsay (as opposed to, for example, feeling vaguely anxious all the time, or expressing outrage about things, or framing themselves as more clever and rational than I am, or something else), and different strategies are optimal for each (and highly differentially so… what works for someone who’s just scared and ignorant is actively a mistake for someone who wants to control my behavior for their own benefit, and vice-versa)
But even with that revision, I think in most cases we care about it’s not easy (because the easy cases tend to get corrected often enough that we care about them less, because only really bad thinkers fall for them). The cognitive biases and incentive structures that encourage believing messages like “issue de jure is causing the negative stuff I experience!” aren’t sound-byte-resolvable.
That said, what I try to do, both for others and for myself when I find myself veering towards this kind of crazy, is start by framing myself as a non-enemy and approaching people with compassion. Often that seems to damp down the worst excesses of fear/hostility, and sometimes it prevents outrage from having anything to latch on to without looking silly. It doesn’t work reliably, though, and sometimes it fails disaterously, and at best all it does is create a space where a different message can be received ungarbled… which is necessary, but not sufficient.
If your house is infested with termites that doesn’t mean it’ll explode the next day in a cartoon cloud of sawdust; it takes years for the full scope of the damage to become apparent, and even then it might still be livable for a while after it’s clear that it can’t be saved.
Look at the predictions of the people opposing the sexual revolution in the 1960s, or hell even the people opposing women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, and you’ll see they were more-or-less right on the money. The American family has dissolved, the birth rate has fallen below the replacement rate, promiscuity and deviant sexual behaviors are rampant, and women are less happy in their new masculine roles while men are being forced to become more effeminate. All this in less than a century, a half-century really, which is pretty damn impressive a timescale for a civilization to fall when you look at it in historical time.
When you see the walls buckling and the floors start giving way under you, it’s time to get out of the house. It might not collapse this month, or even this year, but it’s not a stable place to live.
Look at the predictions of the people opposing the sexual revolution in the 1960s, or hell even the people opposing women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, and you’ll see they were more-or-less right on the money.
Not if you focus on the details- the families that most reflect (for lack of a better term) 1950s values are more likely to divorce,have kids out of wedlock,etc. There is a broad pattern outline that loosely matches with your theory, but when you apply it on a micro scale, it fails.
Well, I certainly agree that if differential predictions of specific societal changes due to the sexual revolution and/or woman’s suffrage are accurate, that should increase my confidence in other similar predictions with longer time-windows, including predictions of eventual societal collapse.
The American family has dissolved, the birth rate has fallen below the replacement rate, promiscuity and deviant sexual behaviors are rampant, and women are less happy in their new masculine roles while men are being forced to become more effeminate.
Wow, it’s hard for me to imagine anyone saying this with a straight face.
Wow, it’s hard for me to imagine anyone saying this with a straight face.
You don’t listen to conservative talk radio. The “top three” headline issues on Focal Point yesterday were 1) gay marriage, 2) transgendered rights, and 3) female dissatisfaction with the consequences of the sexual revolution.
I guess I imagine that LW regulars are less ideologically motivated that this. But, with Multiheaded on one end and Konkvistador on the other, I should have known better.
Really? I find it easy… not just with a straight face, but while leaning forward in their seats and looking me straight in the eyes while making emphatic hand gestures.
Admittedly, I also anticipate as part of the same cluster being told that the solution is for everyone to truly accept the love of Christ into our hearts, which I expect to be less common on LW.
You want to actually engage with any of those points, rather than just smirking and shaking your head?
Remind me; what are our divorce rates like and how many kids are currently raised by a single parent or in foster care these days? Which populations are expanding and which are disappearing (I always get the progressive whites and the traditional hispanics confused)? How old is the average age of someones first sexual encounter, how many lifetime partners do they have, and what is their lifetime risk of contracting an STI? When women are polled on how happy they are is it working women or housewives who come out ahead, and are modern women polled as more or less happy than their ancestors? Has the average male’s testosterone level increased or decreased over the last few decades?
I would link you to the answers myself, but I have this mysterious feeling they’d just get dismissed out of hand if they came from me. So take an hour off some time when you’re not that busy, look at the numbers for yourself and maybe you’ll see why I don’t find the idea as laughable as you do.
Let us suppose for the sake of comity that if we compare today’s statistics to those prior to the sexual revolution in the 1960s, or hell even to those prior to women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, we find that:
divorce rates are higher now
more children are raised by single parents now
more children are in foster care now
some populations expanded and others shrank
average age of first sexual encounter is lower now
number of lifetime partners is higher now
lifetime risk of contracting an STI is higher now
working women now report being less happy than housewives
women now report being less happy than women then reported
average male testosterone level has declined
Is it your position that discovering this should convince me that society is collapsing, and has been doing so since 1960/1900?
My rule is to not engage into specific arguments with anyone with clear signs of motivated cognition, since it is almost invariably futile, as their true objections are not in the arguments they put forward. I tend to try to figure out why it is important for someone in this state to believe what they believe. For example, it is pointless to discuss metallurgy with a 911 truther or a certain purported perpetual motion contraption with a free-energy crank.
Here are the signs of your motivated cognition: you use negative connotation-charged descriptions of purported trends and behaviors:
“promiscuity” instead of, say, “reduced incidence and duration of exclusive committed relationships”,
“deviant sexual behaviors” instead of, say, “widening spectrum of sexual norm”,
presuming that “roles” are inherently masculine or feminine,
Clearly you have your reasons for passing judgment, whether consciously or not, and these reasons have to be elucidated before one can have a fruitful discussion on the effects of evolving sexual norms on the American society.
“promiscuity” instead of, say, “reduced incidence and duration of exclusive committed relationships”,
I think “using one word instead of eight” is not very good evidence of motivated cognition. Maybe if Moss had said “sluttishness” instead you would have a point.
The first question is that I don’t see why many of the things you listed are bad.
Why is a high divorce rate bad? Why a lower age of the first sexual encounter (compared to what, by the way?) is bad? Why having many lifetime partners is bad?
The second question is how do you distinguish correlation and causation—I’m looking at the male testosterone level.
Doesn’t work. There are a lot of different countries that have made the same changes. So if there were a survivorship bias one would still see the collapse and chaos in neighboring areas.
Case 1: Someone tells me I will die tomorrow. Case 2: As above, but preceded by 99 people on 99 different days telling me I will die the next day, and I don’t.
Assuming everything else is constant, on your account do I have more evidence for my death tomorrow in case 1, or case 2?
If you insist on oblique evocative responses in lieu of answering questions, I suppose my reply is “I stopped going to church but I haven’t gone to hell. My priest’s warnings must have been lies.” But honestly, I prefer the more boring conversational method of actually answering questions.
I suppose my reply is “I stopped going to church but I haven’t gone to hell. My priest’s warnings must have been lies.”
That doesn’t seem to follow. The priest never predicted that you would go to hell prior to your death. The priest’s prediction has not been falsified. (The fact that it never can be by a live person is a whole separate issue.)
I don’t know what you’re analog of someone telling you that you will die tomorrow is supposed to be. In the topic under discussion the warnings are much more similar to the warnings issued about smoking than saying “if you do this, you die tomorrow”.
And yet Northern European societies, which have very low gender inequality, haven’t collapsed yet.
No, you’re absolutely right they haven’t collapsed yet. Even though their native populations have fallen under the replacement rate and are rapidly aging, they can still function more-or-less by importing huge numbers of cheap foreign immigrants and ignoring any shenanigans they get up to. Even though their cultures and social structures have largely been dismantled, their enormous tax rates and the free military security provided by the US means their welfare states can afford to fill those functions (with varying degrees of success). Even though their economies are growing at the rate of lichen, they’re still big enough (and the rest of the world small enough) that the EU’s protectionist policies can keep them out of the red.
But patches don’t hold forever; you can already see the cracks. It’s only been a little over a half-century and democratic Europe is already seeing a stagnation most empires have to last for centuries to attain. They might well outlast me personally, that’s entirely possible even given my family’s longevity, but I’d bet good money no modern European welfare state makes it to 2099.
(EDIT: Oh, look at this too.)
To be honest, these statistics don’t really impress me much; a fertility rate of 1.8 or 1.6 is better than the European average, but both are tragically low in a country where resources are as abundant as they are in a modern 1st world nation. And the divorce rates, while better than ours certainly, are still absolutely pathetically sad compared to any society which practices arranged marriage.
If you can’t even beat the replacement rate in terms of fertility and 40-50% of marriages fail so spectacularly the courts need to be involved, those are not numbers to be proud of. It is an indictment of the state of the world that this is the best our modern societies can do.
(Also, how comes people can ever get along with roommates of the same sex, where there’s no Schelling point as to who should do which chores?)
To be honest, we don’t. Or at least we don’t get along on the same timescale as a successful marriage. I’ve never had a roommate last longer than two years, much less the decades you need just to raise 3+ kids.
Actually, now that you mention it, people in modern marriages do look more like roomies than spouses. 50% leaving in the first five years actually sounds pretty optimistic for roommates; people that reliable I might actually want to rent to. Of course, you’d be nuts to actually sell them a house unless they paid upfront… you’re just not going to see that 30 year mortgage paid off.
Even though their cultures and social structures have largely been dismantled...
Oh really? I’ve been to Scandinavia recently. And while the center of Stockholm got to be a less than entirely pleasant place (not Gamla Stan, of course, one has to provide for the tourists), Oslo is noticeably better and once you get out of capital cities into small towns and the country, the “cultures and social structures” look entirely intact to me.
You also forgot that Norway has oil. Lots of oil and not too many people. The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is about $730Bn in size and is the largest stock owner in Europe.
and once you get out of capital cities into small towns and the country, the “cultures and social structures” look entirely intact to me
Indeed, I’d be curious whether the downward trends reactionaries point out would still apply when you control for the size of settlements people live in (i.e., comparing people in towns of 10,000 inhabitants today with people in towns of 10,000 inhabitants in the past).
That’s why I prefer to look at scientific measures like IQ scores and market-based indicators like wages earned than university admissions. Uni is supposed to prepare us for the job market and separate the wheat from the chaff anyhow; the numbers ought to all roughly match up if it’s working properly.
Wages earned are a rather poor proxy for cognitive ability, or for that matter for productivity, since people in different careers can capture markedly different amounts of the value they create. For instance, a person working in the financial sector may have the opportunity to capture a very high proportion, whereas a person working as a public school teacher who performs way above the norm and produces tremendous long term value in increased productivity of their students will not capture any of that value.
Using wages-earned as a proxy to compare output between groups is only useful if we can assume that both groups are on average working in positions where they capture an equal proportion of the value they produce, something which is very much an unsafe assumption in this case.
(This is of course setting aside the issue of whether there are existing biases in our population which affect wages earned between groups given equal quality workers.)
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what’s equal, it’s about what works
To paraphrase Lenin, “Works for whom? To achieve what?” Cui prodest in any particular social arrangement? My personal go-to default hypothesis is that it’s always the side that can harness greater bargaining power through having more overall control of resources. Apply to workplace/labor relations, families, tribal clashes etc.
(Citation! Citation! A very favourable review—by Satoshi Kanazawa of all people—of a book on the game-theoretical causes and consequences of power inequalities.)
To paraphrase Lenin, “Works for whom? To achieve what?”
Society is not a zero sum game. Would you really prefer a situation where, to paraphrase Stalin, “the shortage is distributed equally among the peasants”?
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what’s equal, it’s about what works.
But what works for someone needn’t be what works for someone else! (Non-sexuality-related cognitive differences among each gender are comparable to or smaller than those between the two genders; sure, physical differences are larger, but in how many of today’s jobs are they relevant?) And what works in a society needn’t be what works in a different society. (Another example besides those I already mentioned is that stuff like the washing machine have reduced the time and effort it takes to do housework.)
You can’t build a society on the basis of atomized individuals constantly negotiating out every interaction on an ad-hoc basis;
That needn’t be explicit negotiation the way the author of that post and her husband do; just acknowledge that if I’m better at A and you’re better at B then I should do A and you should do B regardless of who has a chromosome Y. (Maybe the pie was too abstract a metaphor.)
Start with a strong tradition which works well in the aggregate, make that the standard, then we can talk about shifting the details around in any given family.
If you put it that way, I may agree denotationally, but the amount of shifting that there should be is probably at least an order of magnitude larger than there was in early-20th-century Europe, and the amount of social (and institutional) pressure against it a couple orders of magnitude less. I don’t think a world where people hindered Emmy Noether solely because of her gender is an ideal world.
and as studies have shown women tend to be happier as homemakers than breadwinners
First, “tend to be” != “always or almost always are”, and second, probably plenty of men would too if they had a chance.
On the other hand, the university I went to was a top-tier engineering school with about 20% women and more Asians than Whites by a long shot (and most of us ‘whites’ were at least a quarter if not fully Jewish).
Well… You can see a breakdown by faculties (in the European sense, i.e. what would be called colleges or schools in North America) in the link. Most engineers are male here too. Now, I’ll concede that the faculties with the largest fraction of female graduates are largely influenced by Cthulhu, but the mine isn’t (if anything, it’s influenced by anti-Cthulhu) and still 42.7% of the graduates there are female.
If you put it that way, I may ) and still 42.7% of the graduates there are female.
I think there was a formatting issue here and would like the read what you had originally planned to write, as your comments are invariably interesting.
Dammit! Couldn’t Markdown just spit out the stuff it doesn’t understand unchanged, rather than deleting it altogether? (And couldn’t I look at my comments after submitting them for stuff like that?)
I definitely sympathize; trying for coherent formatting online is hard enough even when it’s just an issue of uncooperative html tags.
As to your points, I’d agree that a hard reset to 1700, or even 1900, on gender would do more harm than good and that we would need to be careful to create norms which don’t waste our human capital. Perhaps a natural solution would be class-based gender norms; upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide, while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability. That way we don’t have to worry about losing future Rosalind Franklins / Marie Curies without utterly fracturing our society to do it.
On the exact numbers of women graduates, I’m not too attached to any one figure as an ideal given how wonky the male-female gap gets at the right ends of the curves and how different the score breakdowns look. The main thrust is this; if there is a .33sd gap in general, and a 1sd gap on spatial relations specifically, and men have wider variance at the edges, then why should we expect anything but inequality in fields which rely on exceptionally high IQ and solid spatial reasoning skills? You need to know the exact numbers to see what the exact difference ought to be, but it’s unreasonable not to expect one at all.
upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide
There are more normal (i.e. less Brave New World-reminiscent) ways to make it easier for people with a career to have kids (though of course the future needn’t be normal) -- paid maternity leaves exist pretty much everywhere in the world except the US and so do paternity leaves in a few countries, France has a 35-hour working week and the sky hasn’t fallen there, etc.
while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability
Before solving this problem, shouldn’t you ask who is doing the forcing? It’s not like being a stay-at-home mum is illegal, so why are they working outside the home for money if they’re less happy that way? Once you answer this question, then you can think of possible solutions. (The reason for poor people may be different from that for rich people, and the solutions that would most help the former may be quite different from the ones you’ve thought of so far.)
The main thrust is this; if there is a .33sd gap in general, and a 1sd gap on spatial relations specifically, and men have wider variance at the edges, then why should we expect anything but inequality in fields which rely on exceptionally high IQ and solid spatial reasoning skills?
On the other hand, on fields that require average-or-higher (but not necessarily extreme) cognitive skills other than spatial ones, we would expect inequality the other way (and in some cases that’s what we already see, most school teachers being female); do we really want most of those people to stay at home because of social norms that developed long ago, when said cognitive skills were less important than today and manual labour more so?
As to your points, I’d agree that a hard reset to 1700, or even 1900, on gender would do more harm than good and that we would need to be careful to create norms which don’t waste our human capital. Perhaps a natural solution would be class-based gender norms; upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide, while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability. That way we don’t have to worry about losing future Rosalind Franklins / Marie Curies without utterly fracturing our society to do it.
Putting aside the question of aptitude, this sounds likely to be dysgenic given that increasing educational attainment in women tends to decrease birthrate. Plus, “increased societal stability” in this case also amounts to decreased class mobility in cases of exceptional aptitude.
By “equitable” I’d mean that we each start out with half of the pie; it doesn’t stop being equitable if I like crust and dislike filling and you like filling and dislike crust so we mutually agree to trade my share of filling for your share of crust (i.e. this or a quick-and-dirty informal approximation thereof).
What do you mean by “exceptional”, 20% or 0.1%?
Note also that, given larger IQ variance among men than among women, the Flynn effect means that the fraction of people above a given IQ threshold who are male has decreased with time; technological advances mean that low-IQ labour has become less useful; and anyway IQ overweighs visuospatial intelligence compared to its importance today inflating male scores (and deflating Jewish scores). Fun fact: 59.4% of the people who graduated at my university in 2012 were female.
I suppose there are differences among different parts of the present-day western world with respect to that: if I understand correctly what kind of technology you’re talking about, where I come from it’s the Catholic right that’s opposing it.
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what’s equal, it’s about what works. You can’t build a society on the basis of atomized individuals constantly negotiating out every interaction on an ad-hoc basis; that’s just not a stable or realistic foundation. It leads to a culture of divorce and single-parents, generations of unsocialized children and ultimately societal collapse; we’ve seen the same pattern play out in the black community already.
Start with a strong tradition which works well in the aggregate, make that the standard, then we can talk about shifting the details around in any given family.
Closer to 20% would be my guess; women only lag men by about 5 points overall and a lot of that is the aforementioned spatial reasoning. I’d say something akin to the Asian-White proportions would be a good baseline expectation given that the magnitude of difference is similar, with more women at the top levels due to their wide variance.
Of course, the actual representation in the work force might still come in under our expectations; pregnancy and even menstruation are serious problems for women trying to compete with men, even with modern hormonal birth control which mediates the effects of both, and as studies have shown women tend to be happier as homemakers than breadwinners
On the other hand, the university I went to was a top-tier engineering school with about 20% women and more Asians than Whites by a long shot (and most of us ‘whites’ were at least a quarter if not fully Jewish). Was my school suffering from unfair “boy’s club” discrimination against women or was yours caving to the constant push for “better representation” of women in academia?
That’s why I prefer to look at scientific measures like IQ scores and market-based indicators like wages earned than university admissions. Uni is supposed to prepare us for the job market and separate the wheat from the chaff anyhow; the numbers ought to all roughly match up if it’s working properly.
And yet Northern European societies, which have very low gender inequality, haven’t collapsed yet. So maybe the reason why the black community (ITYM the one in the US) has is probably a different one. (EDIT: Oh, look at this too.)
(Also, how comes people can ever get along with roommates of the same sex, where there’s no Schelling point as to who should do which chores?)
...let alone spouses and co-parents of the same sex, where there’s frequently more at stake than dirty dishes.
I’d be surprised if no-one had used that as an argument against gay marriages and adoptions.
(Here too, ‘how comes the Netherlands have had same-sex marriages and adoptions for 12 years and the sky there hasn’t fallen yet?’ sounds like a valid counterargument.)
Oh, they do all the time.
And yet, as you say, it turns out that society never quite collapses when we ignore those dire predictions.
Which of course doesn’t stop the kinds of people who believe such things from believing that this time it certainly will.
Is there some easily communicable message here for doomsayers that stands a decent chance of kick-starting the “Oy, was I mistaken!” part of their brains into gear?
I think that’s a little bit of a wrong question.
I’d be more inclined to discard the category “doomsayers” and instead categorize people, not by the behavior, but by the intent… different people doomsay for importantly different reasons, and not all people motivated by each of those reasons necessarily actually doomsay (as opposed to, for example, feeling vaguely anxious all the time, or expressing outrage about things, or framing themselves as more clever and rational than I am, or something else), and different strategies are optimal for each (and highly differentially so… what works for someone who’s just scared and ignorant is actively a mistake for someone who wants to control my behavior for their own benefit, and vice-versa)
But even with that revision, I think in most cases we care about it’s not easy (because the easy cases tend to get corrected often enough that we care about them less, because only really bad thinkers fall for them). The cognitive biases and incentive structures that encourage believing messages like “issue de jure is causing the negative stuff I experience!” aren’t sound-byte-resolvable.
That said, what I try to do, both for others and for myself when I find myself veering towards this kind of crazy, is start by framing myself as a non-enemy and approaching people with compassion. Often that seems to damp down the worst excesses of fear/hostility, and sometimes it prevents outrage from having anything to latch on to without looking silly. It doesn’t work reliably, though, and sometimes it fails disaterously, and at best all it does is create a space where a different message can be received ungarbled… which is necessary, but not sufficient.
(And yes, it was intentional.)
If your house is infested with termites that doesn’t mean it’ll explode the next day in a cartoon cloud of sawdust; it takes years for the full scope of the damage to become apparent, and even then it might still be livable for a while after it’s clear that it can’t be saved.
Look at the predictions of the people opposing the sexual revolution in the 1960s, or hell even the people opposing women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, and you’ll see they were more-or-less right on the money. The American family has dissolved, the birth rate has fallen below the replacement rate, promiscuity and deviant sexual behaviors are rampant, and women are less happy in their new masculine roles while men are being forced to become more effeminate. All this in less than a century, a half-century really, which is pretty damn impressive a timescale for a civilization to fall when you look at it in historical time.
When you see the walls buckling and the floors start giving way under you, it’s time to get out of the house. It might not collapse this month, or even this year, but it’s not a stable place to live.
Not if you focus on the details- the families that most reflect (for lack of a better term) 1950s values are more likely to divorce,have kids out of wedlock,etc. There is a broad pattern outline that loosely matches with your theory, but when you apply it on a micro scale, it fails.
Well, I certainly agree that if differential predictions of specific societal changes due to the sexual revolution and/or woman’s suffrage are accurate, that should increase my confidence in other similar predictions with longer time-windows, including predictions of eventual societal collapse.
Wow, it’s hard for me to imagine anyone saying this with a straight face.
You don’t listen to conservative talk radio. The “top three” headline issues on Focal Point yesterday were 1) gay marriage, 2) transgendered rights, and 3) female dissatisfaction with the consequences of the sexual revolution.
I guess I imagine that LW regulars are less ideologically motivated that this. But, with Multiheaded on one end and Konkvistador on the other, I should have known better.
That’s a good thing, right? :-D
Really? I find it easy… not just with a straight face, but while leaning forward in their seats and looking me straight in the eyes while making emphatic hand gestures.
Admittedly, I also anticipate as part of the same cluster being told that the solution is for everyone to truly accept the love of Christ into our hearts, which I expect to be less common on LW.
You want to actually engage with any of those points, rather than just smirking and shaking your head?
Remind me; what are our divorce rates like and how many kids are currently raised by a single parent or in foster care these days? Which populations are expanding and which are disappearing (I always get the progressive whites and the traditional hispanics confused)? How old is the average age of someones first sexual encounter, how many lifetime partners do they have, and what is their lifetime risk of contracting an STI? When women are polled on how happy they are is it working women or housewives who come out ahead, and are modern women polled as more or less happy than their ancestors? Has the average male’s testosterone level increased or decreased over the last few decades?
I would link you to the answers myself, but I have this mysterious feeling they’d just get dismissed out of hand if they came from me. So take an hour off some time when you’re not that busy, look at the numbers for yourself and maybe you’ll see why I don’t find the idea as laughable as you do.
Let us suppose for the sake of comity that if we compare today’s statistics to those prior to the sexual revolution in the 1960s, or hell even to those prior to women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, we find that:
divorce rates are higher now
more children are raised by single parents now
more children are in foster care now
some populations expanded and others shrank
average age of first sexual encounter is lower now
number of lifetime partners is higher now
lifetime risk of contracting an STI is higher now
working women now report being less happy than housewives
women now report being less happy than women then reported
average male testosterone level has declined
Is it your position that discovering this should convince me that society is collapsing, and has been doing so since 1960/1900?
My rule is to not engage into specific arguments with anyone with clear signs of motivated cognition, since it is almost invariably futile, as their true objections are not in the arguments they put forward. I tend to try to figure out why it is important for someone in this state to believe what they believe. For example, it is pointless to discuss metallurgy with a 911 truther or a certain purported perpetual motion contraption with a free-energy crank.
Here are the signs of your motivated cognition: you use negative connotation-charged descriptions of purported trends and behaviors:
“promiscuity” instead of, say, “reduced incidence and duration of exclusive committed relationships”,
“deviant sexual behaviors” instead of, say, “widening spectrum of sexual norm”,
presuming that “roles” are inherently masculine or feminine,
“effeminate” instead of, say, “less gender-normative”.
Clearly you have your reasons for passing judgment, whether consciously or not, and these reasons have to be elucidated before one can have a fruitful discussion on the effects of evolving sexual norms on the American society.
I think “using one word instead of eight” is not very good evidence of motivated cognition. Maybe if Moss had said “sluttishness” instead you would have a point.
The first question is that I don’t see why many of the things you listed are bad.
Why is a high divorce rate bad? Why a lower age of the first sexual encounter (compared to what, by the way?) is bad? Why having many lifetime partners is bad?
The second question is how do you distinguish correlation and causation—I’m looking at the male testosterone level.
As an aside, are you aware of Yvain’s Anti-Reactionary FAQ?
But… but… but… the sluts engage in sex other than for procreation!!!eleven! Clearly the society is doomed!! RUN!!!!!
Classic case of survival/anthropic bias.
Doesn’t work. There are a lot of different countries that have made the same changes. So if there were a survivorship bias one would still see the collapse and chaos in neighboring areas.
Case 1: Someone tells me I will die tomorrow.
Case 2: As above, but preceded by 99 people on 99 different days telling me I will die the next day, and I don’t.
Assuming everything else is constant, on your account do I have more evidence for my death tomorrow in case 1, or case 2?
“I stopped working out and started smoking but I’m still alive. The health warnings must have been lies.”
If you insist on oblique evocative responses in lieu of answering questions, I suppose my reply is “I stopped going to church but I haven’t gone to hell. My priest’s warnings must have been lies.” But honestly, I prefer the more boring conversational method of actually answering questions.
That doesn’t seem to follow. The priest never predicted that you would go to hell prior to your death. The priest’s prediction has not been falsified. (The fact that it never can be by a live person is a whole separate issue.)
Sorry, I thought my point was clear.
I don’t know what you’re analog of someone telling you that you will die tomorrow is supposed to be. In the topic under discussion the warnings are much more similar to the warnings issued about smoking than saying “if you do this, you die tomorrow”.
No, you’re absolutely right they haven’t collapsed yet. Even though their native populations have fallen under the replacement rate and are rapidly aging, they can still function more-or-less by importing huge numbers of cheap foreign immigrants and ignoring any shenanigans they get up to. Even though their cultures and social structures have largely been dismantled, their enormous tax rates and the free military security provided by the US means their welfare states can afford to fill those functions (with varying degrees of success). Even though their economies are growing at the rate of lichen, they’re still big enough (and the rest of the world small enough) that the EU’s protectionist policies can keep them out of the red.
But patches don’t hold forever; you can already see the cracks. It’s only been a little over a half-century and democratic Europe is already seeing a stagnation most empires have to last for centuries to attain. They might well outlast me personally, that’s entirely possible even given my family’s longevity, but I’d bet good money no modern European welfare state makes it to 2099.
To be honest, these statistics don’t really impress me much; a fertility rate of 1.8 or 1.6 is better than the European average, but both are tragically low in a country where resources are as abundant as they are in a modern 1st world nation. And the divorce rates, while better than ours certainly, are still absolutely pathetically sad compared to any society which practices arranged marriage.
If you can’t even beat the replacement rate in terms of fertility and 40-50% of marriages fail so spectacularly the courts need to be involved, those are not numbers to be proud of. It is an indictment of the state of the world that this is the best our modern societies can do.
To be honest, we don’t. Or at least we don’t get along on the same timescale as a successful marriage. I’ve never had a roommate last longer than two years, much less the decades you need just to raise 3+ kids.
Actually, now that you mention it, people in modern marriages do look more like roomies than spouses. 50% leaving in the first five years actually sounds pretty optimistic for roommates; people that reliable I might actually want to rent to. Of course, you’d be nuts to actually sell them a house unless they paid upfront… you’re just not going to see that 30 year mortgage paid off.
Oh really? I’ve been to Scandinavia recently. And while the center of Stockholm got to be a less than entirely pleasant place (not Gamla Stan, of course, one has to provide for the tourists), Oslo is noticeably better and once you get out of capital cities into small towns and the country, the “cultures and social structures” look entirely intact to me.
You also forgot that Norway has oil. Lots of oil and not too many people. The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is about $730Bn in size and is the largest stock owner in Europe.
Indeed, I’d be curious whether the downward trends reactionaries point out would still apply when you control for the size of settlements people live in (i.e., comparing people in towns of 10,000 inhabitants today with people in towns of 10,000 inhabitants in the past).
Wages earned are a rather poor proxy for cognitive ability, or for that matter for productivity, since people in different careers can capture markedly different amounts of the value they create. For instance, a person working in the financial sector may have the opportunity to capture a very high proportion, whereas a person working as a public school teacher who performs way above the norm and produces tremendous long term value in increased productivity of their students will not capture any of that value.
Using wages-earned as a proxy to compare output between groups is only useful if we can assume that both groups are on average working in positions where they capture an equal proportion of the value they produce, something which is very much an unsafe assumption in this case.
(This is of course setting aside the issue of whether there are existing biases in our population which affect wages earned between groups given equal quality workers.)
To paraphrase Lenin, “Works for whom? To achieve what?” Cui prodest in any particular social arrangement? My personal go-to default hypothesis is that it’s always the side that can harness greater bargaining power through having more overall control of resources. Apply to workplace/labor relations, families, tribal clashes etc.
(Citation! Citation! A very favourable review—by Satoshi Kanazawa of all people—of a book on the game-theoretical causes and consequences of power inequalities.)
Society is not a zero sum game. Would you really prefer a situation where, to paraphrase Stalin, “the shortage is distributed equally among the peasants”?
But what works for someone needn’t be what works for someone else! (Non-sexuality-related cognitive differences among each gender are comparable to or smaller than those between the two genders; sure, physical differences are larger, but in how many of today’s jobs are they relevant?) And what works in a society needn’t be what works in a different society. (Another example besides those I already mentioned is that stuff like the washing machine have reduced the time and effort it takes to do housework.)
That needn’t be explicit negotiation the way the author of that post and her husband do; just acknowledge that if I’m better at A and you’re better at B then I should do A and you should do B regardless of who has a chromosome Y. (Maybe the pie was too abstract a metaphor.)
If you put it that way, I may agree denotationally, but the amount of shifting that there should be is probably at least an order of magnitude larger than there was in early-20th-century Europe, and the amount of social (and institutional) pressure against it a couple orders of magnitude less. I don’t think a world where people hindered Emmy Noether solely because of her gender is an ideal world.
First, “tend to be” != “always or almost always are”, and second, probably plenty of men would too if they had a chance.
Well… You can see a breakdown by faculties (in the European sense, i.e. what would be called colleges or schools in North America) in the link. Most engineers are male here too. Now, I’ll concede that the faculties with the largest fraction of female graduates are largely influenced by Cthulhu, but the mine isn’t (if anything, it’s influenced by anti-Cthulhu) and still 42.7% of the graduates there are female.
I think there was a formatting issue here and would like the read what you had originally planned to write, as your comments are invariably interesting.
Fixed.
Dammit! Couldn’t Markdown just spit out the stuff it doesn’t understand unchanged, rather than deleting it altogether? (And couldn’t I look at my comments after submitting them for stuff like that?)
I definitely sympathize; trying for coherent formatting online is hard enough even when it’s just an issue of uncooperative html tags.
As to your points, I’d agree that a hard reset to 1700, or even 1900, on gender would do more harm than good and that we would need to be careful to create norms which don’t waste our human capital. Perhaps a natural solution would be class-based gender norms; upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide, while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability. That way we don’t have to worry about losing future Rosalind Franklins / Marie Curies without utterly fracturing our society to do it.
On the exact numbers of women graduates, I’m not too attached to any one figure as an ideal given how wonky the male-female gap gets at the right ends of the curves and how different the score breakdowns look. The main thrust is this; if there is a .33sd gap in general, and a 1sd gap on spatial relations specifically, and men have wider variance at the edges, then why should we expect anything but inequality in fields which rely on exceptionally high IQ and solid spatial reasoning skills? You need to know the exact numbers to see what the exact difference ought to be, but it’s unreasonable not to expect one at all.
There are more normal (i.e. less Brave New World-reminiscent) ways to make it easier for people with a career to have kids (though of course the future needn’t be normal) -- paid maternity leaves exist pretty much everywhere in the world except the US and so do paternity leaves in a few countries, France has a 35-hour working week and the sky hasn’t fallen there, etc.
Before solving this problem, shouldn’t you ask who is doing the forcing? It’s not like being a stay-at-home mum is illegal, so why are they working outside the home for money if they’re less happy that way? Once you answer this question, then you can think of possible solutions. (The reason for poor people may be different from that for rich people, and the solutions that would most help the former may be quite different from the ones you’ve thought of so far.)
On the other hand, on fields that require average-or-higher (but not necessarily extreme) cognitive skills other than spatial ones, we would expect inequality the other way (and in some cases that’s what we already see, most school teachers being female); do we really want most of those people to stay at home because of social norms that developed long ago, when said cognitive skills were less important than today and manual labour more so?
Putting aside the question of aptitude, this sounds likely to be dysgenic given that increasing educational attainment in women tends to decrease birthrate. Plus, “increased societal stability” in this case also amounts to decreased class mobility in cases of exceptional aptitude.
Are you using “upper class” to mean “high IQ” and “lower class” to mean “low IQ”? Because that’s not what it usually means...