How To Believe False Things

[Eneasz]

Intro

[you can skip this section if you don’t need context and just want to know how I could believe such a crazy thing]

In my chat community: “Open Play” dropped, a book that says there’s no physical difference between men and women so there shouldn’t be separate sports leagues. Boston Globe says their argument is compelling. Discourse happens, which is mostly a bunch of people saying “lololololol great trolling, what idiot believes such obvious nonsense?”

I urge my friends to be compassionate to those sharing this. Because “until I was 38 I thought Men’s World Cup team vs Women’s World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn’t figure out why they didn’t just play each other to resolve the big pay dispute.” This is the one-line summary of a recent personal world-shattering I describe in a lot more detail here (link).

I’ve had multiple people express disbelief that this is possible. Here is how it is possible.

Who Are You Going To Believe? Everything Everyone Says Plus Everything You See, or Some Science-Illiterate Jerks?

As I talk about frequently on this blog¹, autistic people have a natural tendency to believe that when other people say things they are trying to truthfully communicate what they actually believe. Because otherwise what’s the point?? Several friends say “Yes ok, but you have eyes, right? You can see things yourself?”

Can I? What is it I saw, when I looked around?

I grew up in a suburb of a small Blue city in the 90s. I did not see men fighting women. My time was spent in school where teachers interact via words and chalkboards. My peers were children and their strength was proportional to what grade they were in, not their sex. My siblings were younger than me, so weaker. My babysitter was older than me, so she was stronger. All adults were functionally infinitely strong.

At recess I read books. I opted out of gym as much as possible, it was humiliating and vulgar. The only post-puberty phys ed class I was forced to take was sex segregated so I wouldn’t have had any opportunity to see differences. In earlier gym classes I didn’t look around much. Why would I? Are people comparing themselves to see how many jumping jacks they can do? I just wanted it to be done with.

I didn’t watch sports, but even when I was exposed to them they were already sex-segregated, so how could I have observed that women are having a hard time against men? Mostly I just noticed that women were excluded from sports altogether. I was told this was due to sexism, which lined up with everything I had been told about the world, so obviously it was true.

But the Olympics!! What about the Olympics?

Men don’t compete against women, so a casual watching of a nearby TV during a conversation doesn’t give any observations. To notice a difference I would have to look for the reported numbers somewhere on the screen, write them down, and compare them across the events. Again, this is not a level of interest I held/​hold for sports.

OK, but what about all of media everywhere?

I grew up in the 90s. My media diet consisted of awesome stuff like Aliens, Terminator 2, Buffy, Xena, Dark Angel, the various Star Treks, The Matrix, Farscape etc. The rule for who kicked ass was “the one that’s the main character.” If an action movie or series had a woman in it, she kicked ass.

My books were science fiction and fantasy and Marvel. What determined the winner of a fight wasn’t muscles, it was cybernetics and laser guns, or dark rituals and spell books and magic swords, or getting the best mutation.

The very earliest RPG I played did have a tiny points-neutral modifier for sex, but by the time I bought my second computer game even that was gone. Stats were allocated by the player, and could be modified by race (elf/​dwarf/​orc, human/​ghoul/​supermutant) but never by sex. Sex was purely an aesthetic choice. Why would whether you have a dick or not affect how hard you can swing a sword?

The one difference everyone did admit to was men have a modest advantage in upper-body strength, so they’ll do more pushups and pull-ups than women can.

So yes, everywhere I looked, men and women were basically identical. It’s actually very easy to not get any evidence of male physical advantage if you don’t spend much time interacting with the physical world and all your second-hand sources are politely not drawing attention to the embarrassingly unequal parts of reality. And every disparity that does exist is easily attributed to the deep sexism of society which is as well established as the heliocentric model of the solar system.

I hold that — given my experience — I was more justified in my belief than anyone who claims that men playing against women for the World Cup would be unfair. All it takes is trusting that people believe what they say over and over for decades across all of society, and getting all your evidence about reality filtered through those same people. Which is actually not very hard.

[johnswentworth]

I have a similar story. When I was very young, my mother was the primary breadwinner of the household, and put both herself and my father through law school. Growing up, it was always just kind of assumed that my sister would have to get a real job making actual money, same as my brother and I; a degree in underwater basket weaving would have required some serious justification. (She ended up going to dental school and also getting a PhD working with epigenomic data.)

I didn’t realize on a gut level that this wasn’t the norm until shortly after high school. I was hanging out with two female friends and one of them said “man, I really need more money”. I replied “sounds like you need to get a job”. The friend laughed and said “oh, I was thinking I need to get a boyfriend”, and then the other friend also laughed and said she was also thinking the boyfriend thing.

… so that was quite a shock to my worldview.

[AnthonyC]

I realize this is in many ways beside the point, but even if your original belief had been correct, “The Men’s and Women’s teams should play each other to help resolve the pay disparity” is a non-sequitor. Pay is not decided by fairness. It’s decided by collective bargaining, under constraints set by market conditions.

[Big Tony]

I hold that — given my experience — I was more justified in my belief than anyone who claims that men playing against women for the World Cup would be unfair. All it takes is trusting that people believe what they say over and over for decades across all of society, and getting all your evidence about reality filtered through those same people. Which is actually not very hard.

So, given this happened—was there any update in your belief in the truthfulness of the other beliefs of those people?
What other embarrassingly unequal parts of reality are being politely ignored, except by science-illiterate jerks?

[Eneasz]

This dates back to 2019. I have had a lot of updates and changed views since then, yes.

[quiet_NaN]

What other embarrassingly unequal parts of reality are being politely ignored, except by science-illiterate jerks?

First, I kind of object to the “science-illiterate” part (I know it is a quote from the article). The soft sciences have done many wrongs, but with regard to the average physical ability of men and women, I don’t think that the depiction of women as just as capable is based on published studies.

Second, this is kind of culture war bait, and as such might be better asked at the motte.

Despite that, here are some possible answers.

With regard to gender differences, one might look at Women in chess. WP is quick to tell us that

The low number of women to reach the top level of chess has created a lot of interest as to why women historically have not had more success. There is no evidence that women are innately disadvantaged at chess. It has been demonstrated statistically that the low numbers across all levels can largely account for the lack of women at or near the top. The general paucity of women in chess has contributed to women commonly being the subject of sexism, harassment, and sexual harassment, factors also thought to contribute to women achieving less or leaving chess early.

But also:

Judit Polgár, generally considered the strongest female player of all time,[4] was at one time the eighth highest rated player in the world, and remains the only woman to have ever been rated in the world’s top ten.

Personally, I think that part of the reason is that women are generally less likely to go uber-nerd on a very small topic such as chess or warhammer and dedicate their life to that topic—which is what is likely required to be a top ten chess player. But I am also ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ on there being an inherent male advantage to chess. I think I can entertain that notion without having to adjust the worth of women in general. Emmy Noether shows that we dismiss the intelligence of women at our own peril.

The other thing which comes to mind is HBD, which is it’s own can of worms. See Scott Alexander on the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis, for example.

[Viliam]

I am not even sure some things can be meaningfully attributed to nature or nurture. Consider the following hypothesis:

• Men and women are equally good at chess if they spend the same time and effort learning it.

• By nature, some men are strongly attracted to chess, but practically no women.

What we would observe in this world is men being better chess players. But saying that it is “by nature” is slightly misleading. There is a causal chain, and only a small part of it is different by nature. Fixing that small part—e.g. by making chess your family hobby with local high status and lots of fun—can dramatically change the outcome. While it remains true that such things practically never happen in normal life. Also that men can naturally be highly motivated without so highly supportive families.

Shortly, if you ask “are men biologically better at chess?” it feels like both saying “yes” and “no” is highly misleading. “No” in theory and in some very rare experiments; but also “yes” in practice, if you let the nature have its way… even in an environment that would be 100% free of sexism, it’s just that no one would optimize their household to make their children play lots of chess.

It’s not just nitpicking for the sake of online debate—the more detailed model allows making better predictions. Society can change, if for some reason (not necessarily wokeness, it could also be e.g. fashion) you made lots of chess clubs for little girls, with lots of fun an emotional support, the results could change. I could even imagine this becoming a social attractor, for example at one day for random reasons rich people would start sending their daughters to chess clubs, and suddenly “send your daughter to chess club” would become a symbol of prestige and many parents would want to do that. And then you would get generations of great female chess players. Maybe.

(Personally, I don’t think that chess is worth doing this, but maybe math or computer science is.)

[silentbob]

So what made you change your mind?

[Mo Putera]

The link in the OP explains it:

In ~2020 we witnessed the Men’s/​Women’s World Cup Scandal. The US Men’s Soccer team had failed to qualify for the previous World Cup, whereas the US Women’s Soccer team had won theirs! And yet the women were paid less that season after winning than the men were paid after failing to qualify. There was Discourse.

I was in the car listening to NPR, pulling out of the parking lot of a glass supplier when my world shattered again.³ One of the NPR leftist commenters said roughly ~‘One can propose that the mens team and womens team play against each other to sort this out—’

At which point I mentally pumped my fist in the air and cheered. I had been thinking exactly this for WEEKS. I couldn’t quite understand why no one had said it! As we all know, men and women are largely undifferentiated. Soccer is a perfect example of this, because the sport doesn’t allow men to use their upper-body strength advantage at all. The one thing that makes men stand out is neutralized here, and a direct competition would put this thing to rest and humiliate all the sexists. I smiled and waited to see how the right-wing asshat would squirm out of having to endorse a match that we all knew would shut him up.

The left-wing commentator continued ’—is what one would say if one is a right-wing deplorable that just wants to laugh while humiliating those that are already oppressed. Naturally none of us would ever propose such a thing, we aren’t horrible people. Here’s what they get wrong…”

I didn’t hear any more after that, because my world had shattered again. A proponent of my side was not only admitting that the women’s team would lose badly, but that everyone knew and had always known that the women’s team would lose badly, so the only reason one would even suggest such a thing was to humiliate them.

Here I was, in my late 30s, still believing that men and women are basically the same, like a fucking chump. Do these people realize how much of my life, my personal and public decisions, my views of my fellow man and my plans for the future, were predicated on this being actually true? Not a single person had ever once bothered to take me aside and whisper “Hey, we know this isn’t actually true, we’re just acting this way because it leads to better outcomes for society, on net, if we do. Obviously we make exceptions for the places where the literal truth is important. Welcome to the secret club, don’t tell the kids.”

These were the people who always had told me men and women are equal in all things, explicitly saying that anyone who actually really believed this was a deplorable right-wing troll. I could taste the betrayal in my mouth. It tasted of bile. How had this happened to me again?

A couple years prior I had lost a woman I dearly loved, as well as the associated friend group, when I had Not Gotten The Joke about a different belief and accidentally acted as if I believed something that everyone agreed to say was true was Actually True⁴. I didn’t understand what had happened back then. Now it was starting to make sense. I was too damn trusting and autistic to make a reliable ally in a world bereft of truth.

[Vladimir_Nesov]

Beliefs held by others are a real phenomenon, so tracking them doesn’t give them unearned weight in attention, as long as they are not confused with someone else’s beliefs. You can even learn things specifically for the purpose of changing their simulated mind rather than your own (in whatever direction the winds of evidence happen to blow).

[ChristianKl]

All it takes is trusting that people believe what they say over and over for decades across all of society, and getting all your evidence about reality filtered through those same people.

I seems to me like you also need to have no desire to figure things out on your own. A lot of rationalists have experiences of seeking truth and finding out that certain beliefs people around them hold aren’t true. Rationalists who grow up in communities where many people believe in God frequently deconvert because they see enough signs that the beliefs of those people around them aren’t really fitting together.

Given that most people living in religious communities grow up believing in God just as the people around them do, it’s might be very normal to think that way, but it still feels really strange to me and probably does feel strange to many other rationalists as well.