I think this goes for “men versus women” less than it does for any other coalitional conflict. Men and women often have their interests aligned: for instance friendships between the sexes are common and family relationships between the sexes are universal. The suggestion that women should form a coalition and seek concessions from men is sometimes called “feminism,” but according to this poll this idea is unpopular in the US. The suggestion that men should form a coalition and seek concessions from women is almost never made explicitly except by some crackpots. (I do understand that many people believe there is a very powerful but less explicit coalition, perhaps called “patriarchy”). For flemish versus french belgians, it’s another story.
Good points, but I think “try to empathize with those who are of a different race/nationality than you” is a stronger meme than “try to empathize with those who are of a different gender than you”. At least where I live (US).
I think the problem is that where you can openly describe the conflicts, you can also openly propose game-theoretical solutions. You can say: “We should live in peace with people of Sylvania… but if they attack us, we will not hesitate to fight against them too.” And then you can explain why you think this is a good strategy, instead of e.g. us attacking first.
In the gender questions today, we are not culturally allowed to describe the nature of the conflict, which is: different reproduction mechanisms leading to different reproduction strategies leading to conflicts of interest.
So instead of stating our true interests, and negotiating about them, we speak about something else. For example: “It is good if a man must pay child support for a child that is not biologically his, because such policy is good for children.” (Instead of admitting openly that such policy allows a woman to increase her utility function, because she does not have to compromise in her choice of partner between his attractiveness and responsibility, and can maximize for attractiveness instead.) On the other hand, forbidding women access to higher education could also be framed as good for children… except that this kind of re-framing was already thoroughly exposed by feminists.
It is difficult to propose a policy of “I will cooperate in Prisonners’ Dillemma if and only if you will cooperate”, if in the first place you are not allowed to admit that the conflict exists, and if speaking about the payoff matrices is such strong taboo that many people even don’t know them.
So instead we randomly optimize for children in some places, and against children in other places, pretending that this is all done around the adult-child axis, and completely unrelated to man-woman axis. (It’s adults who have a right for complete freedom of their bodies and everything that happens to be inside; and it’s children who have a right for income proportional to their biological father’s income. See, this is almost completely gender neutral! But if you try to suggest that instead the children should have a right to live, and adults should have a right for financial freedom, it is culturally allowed to expose how sexist your suggestions are.)
“Not culturally allowed”? What you are describing is the mainstream cultural view of gender and sex roles!
In gist: There are two kinds of people, men and women; God or Nature has given them different sexual likes; notably, men pursue and women are pursued; businessmen want to chase after hot young things in short skirts while secretaries want to cheat with their bosses. Men are supposed to be go-getters and bring home the bacon; women are supposed to be pretty and nice and take care of the kids. (Unsatisfied men become aggressive and abusive; unsatisfied women become passive-aggressive and bitchy. A bad man is a murderer or rapist; a bad woman is a slut or a scold.) Happy and stable relationships come from acknowledging that these fundamental differences are normal, natural, fair, morally good, and unchangeable — and negotiating within them.
This is totally culturally allowed. It’s on daytime TV, popular self-help books, and the plots of romantic comedies. You’re swimming in it.
(It’s also a bunch of what all that feminism and queer theory and such are responding to. They call it things like “patriarchy” and “gender essentialism” and “heteronormativity”.)
There are complex rules about what are you allowed to say where. Saying something as a joke a in romantic comedy may increase your revenues; saying the same thing in academy can get you fired. I should have added the proper disclaimers.
The same message can be at the same time in the same country both popular and forbidden, both mainstream and ostracized, both “of course everybody knows this” and “you must be an evil mutant if you even think about this”.
In their private lives many people find a win-win solution. Also, many don’t. Even without the explicit game theory people gradually gain some insight that (1) with some people pressing the “cooperate” button brings you horrible outcomes, but (2) pressing the “defect” button almost always brings bad long-term outcome; therefore the key to long-term happiness is pressing the “cooperate” button with a person who is able and willing to respond properly.
But even then there is the nagging feeling that your outcome could have been better if you just were allowed to press “defect” while the other person would for some reason press their “cooperate” button. And there are often friendly people telling you that this is exactly what you deserve, and that you should be true to thyself and never compromise for other than the greatest value in your payoff matrix.
Of course the problem is that the buttons are not labelled “cooperate” and “defect” on both sides; that would make the whole situation much easier. Instead, my “cooperate” button comes with a label “Sacrifice”, and the “defect” button comes with a label “Freedom”. I don’t clearly see what is written on your buttons, but considering the effect they have on me, I simply call your “cooperate” button the good button, and your “defect” button the bad button. Therefore it seems obvious to me that you have a moral obligation to push the good button, while I have a moral right to push the freedom button. And I don’t understand why do you always have to discuss this obviously superior solution.
This is what being in a Prisoners’ Dilemma with unacknowledged different values feels like from inside.
My point was that some sort of gender essentialism (“men and women necessarily have different values”) and heteronormativity (“the ideal outcome for every man and every woman is a Cooperate/Cooperate pairing with a member of the opposite sex”) are so mainstream as to be almost entirely uncontroversial until rather recently.
In many contexts, anyone who complains about them, or considers that the world could be otherwise, is dismissed as a loser incapable of dealing with reality. (Whether male or female; one word for a female loser is “ugly”, while one word for a male loser is “immature” and another is “whipped”.)
However, to stick with your Prisoner’s Dilemma theme: Part of the point of the feminist idea of “patriarchy” is that the deal that women get out of the traditional arrangement is not a nice strategy like tit-for-tat. The strategy that patriarchy teaches men to follow in their relations with women is more like an extortionate strategy, where the expected penalties for non-cooperation are much greater for women. (“Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.”)
One thing I wonder about genetic essentialism on sexual behavior is how many generations it would take for moral changes at the social level to be driven into the genome. Here’s a nasty, nasty thought-experiment: Suppose there is (or can be) genetic variation in the tendency of men to rape women. In a society where rape victims are made to bear their assailants’ children, “rape genes” could be quite favored by evolution. In a society where rape victims reliably get abortions, and rapists are castrated or executed, “rape genes” would be extinguished — and a mutation that made rape less likely would be favored.
How’s that? Can I get some of those taboo points? :)
However, to stick with your Prisoner’s Dilemma theme: Part of the point of the feminist idea of “patriarchy” is that the deal that women get out of the traditional arrangement is not a nice strategy like tit-for-tat. The strategy that patriarchy teaches men to follow in their relations with women is more like an extortionate strategy, where the expected penalties for non-cooperation are much greater for women. (“Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.”)
Men are also afraid of being killed by men. US statistics here for which sex has more to fear from men. “The battle of the sexes” is not a two player game; I think analogies to the prisoner’s dilemma are misleading.
One thing I wonder about genetic essentialism on sexual behavior is how many generations it would take for moral changes at the social level to be driven into the genome. Here’s a nasty, nasty thought-experiment: Suppose there is (or can be) genetic variation in the tendency of men to rape women. In a society where rape victims are made to bear their assailants’ children, “rape genes” could be quite favored by evolution. In a society where rape victims reliably get abortions, and rapists are castrated or executed, “rape genes” would be extinguished — and a mutation that made rape less likely would be favored.
If you replace “rape” by more general antisocial behavior, there is some discussion about whether this has been happening in Pinker’s “Angels.”
You’re making assertions which I’m not sure they’re nearly as obvious and universal nowadays as you think they are. Perhaps they’re still true more often than not—but I’d assign roughly 50⁄50 which direction the stereotypes you gave nowadays go.
E.g. on my part I don’t watch TV often, but the last time I saw in comedies businesspeople chase after their “hot young” secretaries, was when in “Friends” Rachel was chasing after her male secretary, and Chandler’s female boss was chasing after him. Just a datapoint, perhaps you have more recent and more frequent “daytime TV” and romantic comedies examples?
Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that—though IIRC educated men also have fewer children in average.
(And personally I lean more to average utilitarianism than total utilitarianism at the moment.)
Men don’t get hit as hard, IIRC. And it’s not like men have ever been bottlenecks to reproduction—an educated woman can just go use a sperm bank (significantly better than an old husband in terms of birth defects), engage one-night stands, marry downwards, etc.
I think this goes for “men versus women” less than it does for any other coalitional conflict. Men and women often have their interests aligned: for instance friendships between the sexes are common and family relationships between the sexes are universal. The suggestion that women should form a coalition and seek concessions from men is sometimes called “feminism,” but according to this poll this idea is unpopular in the US. The suggestion that men should form a coalition and seek concessions from women is almost never made explicitly except by some crackpots. (I do understand that many people believe there is a very powerful but less explicit coalition, perhaps called “patriarchy”). For flemish versus french belgians, it’s another story.
Good points, but I think “try to empathize with those who are of a different race/nationality than you” is a stronger meme than “try to empathize with those who are of a different gender than you”. At least where I live (US).
I think the problem is that where you can openly describe the conflicts, you can also openly propose game-theoretical solutions. You can say: “We should live in peace with people of Sylvania… but if they attack us, we will not hesitate to fight against them too.” And then you can explain why you think this is a good strategy, instead of e.g. us attacking first.
In the gender questions today, we are not culturally allowed to describe the nature of the conflict, which is: different reproduction mechanisms leading to different reproduction strategies leading to conflicts of interest.
So instead of stating our true interests, and negotiating about them, we speak about something else. For example: “It is good if a man must pay child support for a child that is not biologically his, because such policy is good for children.” (Instead of admitting openly that such policy allows a woman to increase her utility function, because she does not have to compromise in her choice of partner between his attractiveness and responsibility, and can maximize for attractiveness instead.) On the other hand, forbidding women access to higher education could also be framed as good for children… except that this kind of re-framing was already thoroughly exposed by feminists.
It is difficult to propose a policy of “I will cooperate in Prisonners’ Dillemma if and only if you will cooperate”, if in the first place you are not allowed to admit that the conflict exists, and if speaking about the payoff matrices is such strong taboo that many people even don’t know them.
So instead we randomly optimize for children in some places, and against children in other places, pretending that this is all done around the adult-child axis, and completely unrelated to man-woman axis. (It’s adults who have a right for complete freedom of their bodies and everything that happens to be inside; and it’s children who have a right for income proportional to their biological father’s income. See, this is almost completely gender neutral! But if you try to suggest that instead the children should have a right to live, and adults should have a right for financial freedom, it is culturally allowed to expose how sexist your suggestions are.)
“Not culturally allowed”? What you are describing is the mainstream cultural view of gender and sex roles!
In gist: There are two kinds of people, men and women; God or Nature has given them different sexual likes; notably, men pursue and women are pursued; businessmen want to chase after hot young things in short skirts while secretaries want to cheat with their bosses. Men are supposed to be go-getters and bring home the bacon; women are supposed to be pretty and nice and take care of the kids. (Unsatisfied men become aggressive and abusive; unsatisfied women become passive-aggressive and bitchy. A bad man is a murderer or rapist; a bad woman is a slut or a scold.) Happy and stable relationships come from acknowledging that these fundamental differences are normal, natural, fair, morally good, and unchangeable — and negotiating within them.
This is totally culturally allowed. It’s on daytime TV, popular self-help books, and the plots of romantic comedies. You’re swimming in it.
(It’s also a bunch of what all that feminism and queer theory and such are responding to. They call it things like “patriarchy” and “gender essentialism” and “heteronormativity”.)
There are complex rules about what are you allowed to say where. Saying something as a joke a in romantic comedy may increase your revenues; saying the same thing in academy can get you fired. I should have added the proper disclaimers.
The same message can be at the same time in the same country both popular and forbidden, both mainstream and ostracized, both “of course everybody knows this” and “you must be an evil mutant if you even think about this”.
In their private lives many people find a win-win solution. Also, many don’t. Even without the explicit game theory people gradually gain some insight that (1) with some people pressing the “cooperate” button brings you horrible outcomes, but (2) pressing the “defect” button almost always brings bad long-term outcome; therefore the key to long-term happiness is pressing the “cooperate” button with a person who is able and willing to respond properly.
But even then there is the nagging feeling that your outcome could have been better if you just were allowed to press “defect” while the other person would for some reason press their “cooperate” button. And there are often friendly people telling you that this is exactly what you deserve, and that you should be true to thyself and never compromise for other than the greatest value in your payoff matrix.
Of course the problem is that the buttons are not labelled “cooperate” and “defect” on both sides; that would make the whole situation much easier. Instead, my “cooperate” button comes with a label “Sacrifice”, and the “defect” button comes with a label “Freedom”. I don’t clearly see what is written on your buttons, but considering the effect they have on me, I simply call your “cooperate” button the good button, and your “defect” button the bad button. Therefore it seems obvious to me that you have a moral obligation to push the good button, while I have a moral right to push the freedom button. And I don’t understand why do you always have to discuss this obviously superior solution.
This is what being in a Prisoners’ Dilemma with unacknowledged different values feels like from inside.
My point was that some sort of gender essentialism (“men and women necessarily have different values”) and heteronormativity (“the ideal outcome for every man and every woman is a Cooperate/Cooperate pairing with a member of the opposite sex”) are so mainstream as to be almost entirely uncontroversial until rather recently.
In many contexts, anyone who complains about them, or considers that the world could be otherwise, is dismissed as a loser incapable of dealing with reality. (Whether male or female; one word for a female loser is “ugly”, while one word for a male loser is “immature” and another is “whipped”.)
However, to stick with your Prisoner’s Dilemma theme: Part of the point of the feminist idea of “patriarchy” is that the deal that women get out of the traditional arrangement is not a nice strategy like tit-for-tat. The strategy that patriarchy teaches men to follow in their relations with women is more like an extortionate strategy, where the expected penalties for non-cooperation are much greater for women. (“Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.”)
One thing I wonder about genetic essentialism on sexual behavior is how many generations it would take for moral changes at the social level to be driven into the genome. Here’s a nasty, nasty thought-experiment: Suppose there is (or can be) genetic variation in the tendency of men to rape women. In a society where rape victims are made to bear their assailants’ children, “rape genes” could be quite favored by evolution. In a society where rape victims reliably get abortions, and rapists are castrated or executed, “rape genes” would be extinguished — and a mutation that made rape less likely would be favored.
How’s that? Can I get some of those taboo points? :)
Men are also afraid of being killed by men. US statistics here for which sex has more to fear from men. “The battle of the sexes” is not a two player game; I think analogies to the prisoner’s dilemma are misleading.
If you replace “rape” by more general antisocial behavior, there is some discussion about whether this has been happening in Pinker’s “Angels.”
For the Victorians, the go-to feminine stereotype to match “murderer or rapist” was “poisoner.”
You’re making assertions which I’m not sure they’re nearly as obvious and universal nowadays as you think they are. Perhaps they’re still true more often than not—but I’d assign roughly 50⁄50 which direction the stereotypes you gave nowadays go.
E.g. on my part I don’t watch TV often, but the last time I saw in comedies businesspeople chase after their “hot young” secretaries, was when in “Friends” Rachel was chasing after her male secretary, and Chandler’s female boss was chasing after him. Just a datapoint, perhaps you have more recent and more frequent “daytime TV” and romantic comedies examples?
Er… How so? I can’t see any reason why I’d rather my mother was less educated than she actually is.
It should only take a second or two to think of possible reasons.
Here’s one: Education causes birth rates to plunge. So if existence is a good, then the more you educate women, the more you harm children.
Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that—though IIRC educated men also have fewer children in average. (And personally I lean more to average utilitarianism than total utilitarianism at the moment.)
Men don’t get hit as hard, IIRC. And it’s not like men have ever been bottlenecks to reproduction—an educated woman can just go use a sperm bank (significantly better than an old husband in terms of birth defects), engage one-night stands, marry downwards, etc.