Yes, we evidently disagree on that. Let’s identify that as “area of contention #1”, before we dive into the specifics.
Sure. I’m curious, by the way, if you saw my reply to Alienist which discussed some of the basic evidence for this being an issue.
There are many aspects to each of the causal links (for example: is the sexual harassment situation in STEM fields particularly bad, as opposed to other university courses, or as opposed to non-university occupational choices?),
Sure, but it doesn’t need to be substantially worse as a whole to have a disparate impact. Sexual harassment can combine with other problems (e.g. a pre-existing gender imbalance as well as larger cultural issues).
If you saw the public discourse and the attention of the public raptly focussed on the welfare of ponies, to the exclusion or at least neglect of all other pressing problems, you’d discuss such a misallocation of resources as well, even if you didn’t care about ponies one bit. “This is not what we should spend our attention on” would probably be your message, or what other reaction to a hypothetical pony craziness would you implement?
Ignore it completely, just as you and I are ignoring what the vast majority of people really do seem to care about- e.g. celebrities. In general, if there really is a problem and some humans are putting resources into handling that problem, it isn’t likely to be productive to spend time telling them that they should go do something else. It also isn’t helpful to then use language that essentially compares caring about a cause to being somehow complcit in Roman style bread-and-circuses keeping the people down.
Everyone who profits from the status quo. Which is disproportionally the global elites, those who neither suffer from droughts, nor from a lack of healthcare, nor from transmittable diseases (comparatively), nor from job insecurity
How does being well-off and not suffering from any of those problems mean that one somehow benefits from the status quo? If global warming becomes a serious enough problem, it is inconvenient to everyone. If a paperclip maximizer turns all into paperclips everyone has the same problems. And at the same time, if more people are in the STEM fields or more people who can succeed at it, we all benefit.
Ignore it completely, just as you and I are ignoring what the vast majority of people really do seem to care about
The problem with that is that the over-focus isn’t harmless, it’s already having negative effects, e.g., Lewin’s videos being taken down. Also this is not the kind of thing that’s smart to ignore for them same reason that someone living in Salem Village in 1692 probably should not ignore the increasingly popular silly belief that a lot of their problems are caused by witches.
The problem with that is that the over-focus isn’t harmless, it’s already having negative effects, e.g., Lewin’s videos being taken down.
Sure. For any given problem, some degree of focus, whether it is an overfocus or not is going to have some negative side-effects. That’s essentially just the non-onesided nature of policy issues. So the question becomes where do you balance it? And moreover, how do you decide that it really has gone over too far in one direction or aother?
Also this is not the kind of thing that’s smart to ignore for them same reason that someone living in Salem Village in 1692 probably should not ignore the increasingly popular silly belief that a lot of their problems are caused by witches.
I’m curious, by the way, if you saw my reply to Alienist which discussed some of the basic evidence for this being an issue.
Eh, I’m not gonna call “women being stared at” and such sexual harassment, which is what we are talking about. As I’ve mentioned, to discuss sexual harassment in general when our starkest disagreement lies in the sexual chat messages and the like is a Worst Argument In The World situation in any case.
Sure, but it doesn’t need to be substantially worse as a whole to have a disparate impact. (...) can combine with other problems
If you have a phenomenon with multiple causes I wouldn’t characterize a minor causal node as having a “disparate impact” just because it contributes to a much larger phenomenon.
Ignore it completely
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. If you saw MIRI going off on a dead-end tangent, and you are invested in its fate, “ignore it completely” is a bad choice. Same dynamic.
How does being well-off and not suffering from any of those problems mean that one somehow benefits from the status quo?
If the resources were allocated appropriate to the problems, where would the money come from? For carbon licenses and other Pigovian taxes? Yea, from the powers-that-be.
If global warming becomes a serious enough problem, it is inconvenient to everyone.
Solving it inconveniences ExxonMobil more, for the next few hundred quarterly reports.
And at the same time, if more people are in the STEM fields or more people who can succeed at it, we all benefit.
Certainly. The first step for that should be creating better role models, getting rid of the ridiculous “I’m a fragile flower waiting for good things to happen to me, since I deserve everything”-entitlement attitude people are developing, and creating more of a meritocracy (e.g. not turning people away because they have the wrong gender / wrong nationality etc.). Not becoming hysteric over sexual chat messages, when there are already rules in place against that sort of thing (and yes, the professor should be reprimanded and, if repeated, suspended, but goddamn that should not be national news).
I’m curious, by the way, if you saw my reply to Alienist which discussed some of the basic evidence for this being an issue.
Eh, I’m not gonna call “women being stared at” and such sexual harassment, which is what we are talking about.
The point here should be clear: of course it isn’t sexual harassment. Yet the data shows that even that limited form of negative interaction can have a substantial impact on performance. A fortiori you’d expect the same thing for more serious situations.
As I’ve mentioned, to discuss sexual harassment in general when our starkest disagreement lies in the sexual chat messages and the like is a Worst Argument In The World situation in any case
Huh? First of all, it is highly likely that what happened with Lewin went well beyond any sort of mildly sexual chat messages. Second, the primary argument isn’t even about that but the claim that in general, sexual harassment shouldn’t be a high priority.
If you have a phenomenon with multiple causes I wouldn’t characterize a minor causal node as having a “disparate impact” just because it contributes to a much larger phenomenon.
Missing the point. It may not be a minor causal node. The ability to identify one cause among many isn’t a reason to think that it is a minor node. I can identify hundreds of ways humans die: it doesn’t make cancer a minor node just because it is one among them. Moreover, in this sort of context different nodes can interact to have an impact substantially larger than any single one would.
If you saw MIRI going off on a dead-end tangent, and you are invested in its fate, “ignore it completely” is a bad choice.
Sure, but that’s a specific organization with a specific set of goals. If you think this sort of thing is important then why don’t you go around telling everyone who talks about celebrities or Hollywood movies or whatnot how they are wasting their time? Is wasting time your true objection?
If global warming becomes a serious enough problem, it is inconvenient to everyone.
Solving it inconveniences ExxonMobil more, for the next few hundred quarterly reports.
Ok. So it is a problem for almost everyone, and anyone at ExxonMobile who cares about their children. There’s still no large set of “Powers that be” that all these problems apply to. Yes, there are small, specific groups that have interests which are counter to the interests of the general population for specific issues. But none of those will see eye-to-eye on the same issues.
And at the same time, if more people are in the STEM fields or more people who can succeed at it, we all benefit.
Certainly. The first step for that should be creating better role models, getting rid of the ridiculous “I’m a fragile flower waiting for good things to happen to me, since I deserve everything”-entitlement attitude people are developing, and creating more of a meritocracy (e.g. not turning people away because they have the wrong gender / wrong nationality etc.). Not becoming hysteric over sexual chat messages, when there are already rules in place against that sort of thing
This seems more like a series of boo lights and labels for people you don’t like then a substantial point. I am however curious if you’ve been subject to unwanted sexual attention from people in a position of power. Have you? How frequently? How did you react? How did it make you feel? And what makes you so confident that in the actual situation in question that this was so mild that anyone who reatced can be labeled as engaging in hysterics while being a fragile flower?
yes, the professor should be reprimanded and, if repeated, suspended, but goddamn that should not be national news)
This seems inconsistent with your earlier comments. Is your primary problem simply that it happened to become a news story? That seems strange given that everyone else here (and I thought you) saw the primary reason this was on the news as the same as the primary reason that this was an overreaction; that taking down the videos was unnecessary.
The point here should be clear: of course it isn’t sexual harassment. Yet the data shows that even that limited form of negative interaction can have a substantial impact on performance. A fortiori you’d expect the same thing for more serious situations.
Beware the man of one study who uses that study for conclusions concerning different phenomena. That’s not how evidence works, the correct Bayesian update “a fortiori” on different behavior would be negligible. How does that even work, “if they are sexually messaged they do worse on math tests”?
Huh? First of all, it is highly likely that what happened with Lewin went well beyond any sort of mildly sexual chat messages. Second, the primary argument isn’t even about that but the claim that in general, sexual harassment shouldn’t be a high priority.
Hello there “mildly”, I didn’t see you in my original quote. That must be because you came out of thin-air. It can be explicit enough to fit right into some Gangsta rap song, it’s still a chat message which shouldn’t be discussed in the same breath as e.g. violent sexual assaults.
I reject logic along the lines of “A belongs to B, C belongs to B. We should deal with A because C is really serious, and we’ll transfer that association with seriousness to A via B”. If you want to talk about men staring at women, and what policies and punishments we should have for that, we can do that. Or for when an authority figure writes sexual messages to a college student. These are neither in kind nor in degree the same thing as many other forms of assault, sexual or otherwise.
You probably agree, so let’s not strawman “sexual harassment shouldn’t be a high priority” out of “sexual chat messages shouldn’t be a high priority”. Don’t slippery-slope your way from “men staring at women” to sexual harassment as a whole (including e.g. violent rape), these are different problems requiring different solutions and most importantly different amounts of societal attention and anxiety.
Missing the point. It may not be a minor causal node.
What you said was “Sure, but it doesn’t need to be substantially worse as a whole to have a disparate impact. Sexual harassment can combine with other problems (e.g. a pre-existing gender imbalance as well as larger cultural issues)” which I understood as “even if the difference was minor, combined with other factors the overall impact can be large”. If you only intended to say “if it is a significant causal link on its own, it is a significant causal link on its own”, that would merely be a tautology and a reminder that we disagree on #1.
If you think this sort of thing is important then why don’t you go around telling everyone who talks about celebrities or Hollywood movies or whatnot how they are wasting their time?
Those topics don’t replace other policy initiatives, elections aren’t decided on who liked which movie best. There is an ever dwindling budget of attention for “this is unjust and must be changed” issues, and it’s that budget which is spent on the ‘rampant sexual harassment’ chimera. I feel similarly when the news cycle about a climate conference rapidly shifts to some celebrity wedding, or when a candidate’s “celebrity endorsements” outweigh his/her fiscal policies. That is my main objection, though I certainly don’t enjoy the divisive toxic climate that’s created as a side effect of the prominence of the topic.
Yes, there are small, specific groups that have interests which are counter to the interests of the general population for specific issues. But none of those will see eye-to-eye on the same issues.
They don’t have to. It is convenient for all elites who have a disproportionate share of (capital/influence/market share in their sector/etc.) to not see that redistributed. Since such massive undertakings for the public good are the domain of politics, one would predict that elites take great care to capture the political parties. And that’s precisely what we observe. Yes, many of them have different aims (Google versus the MPAA, etc.), but all of them profit from the public spotlight being on something more inconsequential to their interests, not their privileged position specifically.
I am however curious if you’ve been subject to unwanted sexual attention from people in a position of power.
Is this where my opinion is only valid if I have the right gender and am a rape survivor or something? Because you probably haven’t been exterminated by an unfriendly AI to date, yet you presumably care about that risk.
And what makes you so confident that in the actual situation in question that this was so mild that anyone who reatced can be labeled as engaging in hysterics while being a fragile flower?
Ahem, would you read the grandparent comment again? These were general recommendations on how to increase STEM enrollment. The “The first step (to get people in the STEM fields)” should have clued you in on that. It was not meant to refer to someone “in the actual situation”, least of all the student in question.
Is this so you can go off saying “that guy called people who were harassed or who engaged with the situation ‘fragile flowers’”, because in that case this discussion would be worthless?
It would be preposterous to put someone who received online harassment from an old MIT professor, probably in a different state, in the same category as e.g. victims of traumatic physical rape and then discuss the topic ‘as a whole’. Again, Worst Argument In The World if there ever was one. Have you ever seen TwitchChat? So many future PTSD victims!
Is your primary problem simply that it happened to become a news story?
My problem is that the topic dominates public discourse to an unwarranted degree. As Time Magazine and RAINN succinctly put it: “It’s time to end rape culture hysteria”, see also Myth 4 in this Time article. The degree to which public perception is overemphasizing the topic is actively harmful, including to prospective female STEM students. Men at playgrounds being reported to the police for being potential pedophiles is a new phenomenon, arising out of the general hysteria about the “sexual harassment/violence”-boogeyman.
MIT taking down the videos was a reaction to get ahead of the inevitable media attention and head off any potential reputational shitstorm. In absence of such societal hysteria, the videos would not have been taken down. This is nothing but a cover-your-ass kneejerk reaction, which isn’t even unreasonablegiven that MIT is reacting to the toxic public discourse on the topic, which is the root problem for the video removal.
That’s relevant when you have other studies that show something in the other direction and one is picking one study exactly. Do you have any similar studies to mention? Since you’ve mentioned exactly zero studies about behavior or any links to any stats in this conversation, my guess no.
who uses that study for conclusions concerning different phenomena. That’s not how evidence works, the correct Bayesian update “a fortiori” on different behavior would be negligible.
Really? This seems pretty clear. If weak examples of A cause some amount of X, then one should expect that more extreme amounts of A cause more of X, and in this case we have an easy causal model that supports that.
Hello there “mildly”, I didn’t see you in my original quote.
You’re right. Poor rephrasing on my part.
t’s still a chat message which shouldn’t be discussed in the same breath as e.g. violent sexual assaults.
But no one here is claiming they are the same as “violent sexual assaults”. Did you see anywhere I or anyone else in this subthread tried to make that claim?
What you said was “Sure, but it doesn’t need to be substantially worse as a whole to have a disparate impact. Sexual harassment can combine with other problems (e.g. a pre-existing gender imbalance as well as larger cultural issues)” which I understood as “even if the difference was minor, combined with other factors the overall impact can be large”. If you only intended to say “if it is a significant causal link on its own, it is a significant causal link on its own”, that would merely be a tautology and a reminder that we disagree on #1.
That’s not what I said. Please reread what I said without trying to make it the stupidest argument you can.
Those topics don’t replace other policy initiatives, elections aren’t decided on who liked which movie best. There is an ever dwindling budget of attention for “this is unjust and must be changed” issues, and it’s that budget which is spent on the ‘rampant sexual harassment’ chimera. I feel similarly when the news cycle about a climate conference rapidly shifts to some celebrity wedding, or when a candidate’s “celebrity endorsements” outweigh his/her fiscal policies.
I’m confused. Do you see the celebrities and movies as in the same category or not? And if you don’t why don’t you spend time telling people to stop focusing on them?
That is my main objection, though I certainly don’t enjoy the divisive toxic climate that’s created as a side effect of the prominence of the topic.
In general, politically involved topics lead to toxic climate. There’s nothing special about the topic in question.
They don’t have to. It is convenient for all elites who have a disproportionate share of (capital/influence/market share in their sector/etc.) to not see that redistributed. Since such massive undertakings for the public good are the domain of politics, one would predict that elites take great care to capture the political parties. And that’s precisely what we observe. Yes, many of them have different aims (Google versus the MPAA, etc.), but all of them profit from the public spotlight being on something more inconsequential to their interests, not their privileged position specifically.
And in your view they coordinate that how? Google and Exxon have wildly different goals as do the MPAA and Google and any other two major powers you can name.
I am however curious if you’ve been subject to unwanted sexual attention from people in a position of power.
Is this where my opinion is only valid if I have the right gender and am a rape survivor or something?
No. A thousands times no. As should pretty obvious since I made zero comment about your gender. But here’s the thing: it is really easy to label people as “fragile flowers” or the like when they’ve had bad experiences you have not.
What this reminds me of is an old English teacher I knew in highschool who used to complain that it was no longer acceptable for students who had a disagreement to just leave the class-room and settle things “out doors”- he thought that this was making a weak generation of students. I believe he actually used the word “sissies” and said that the solution was for nerdy students to “man-up”. But we’ve decided that that’s not acceptable, and I suspect that you agree there. And we’ve all benefited. Let me suggest that maybe you should ask yourself if your comments about sexual harassment fall into the same category.
These were general recommendations on how to increase STEM enrollment. The “The first step (to get people in the STEM fields)” should have clued you in on that. It was not meant to refer to someone “in the actual situation”, least of all the student in question.
So who are you talking about? Be specific. Are you claiming that the solution is to make students more willing to put up with sexual harassment and act less like “fragile flowers”? Because it certainly sounds like that, and having reread your statement it still sounds like that.
Men at playgrounds being reported to the police for being potential pedophiles is a new phenomenon, arising out of the general hysteria about the “sexual harassment/violence”-boogeyman.
The pedophile hysteria is a distinct problem which is not in general related to issues of sexual harassment. You won’t even see the same people talking about it in general.
Since at this point we probably regard each other as fully mindkilled on the subject (at least I can vouch for one half of that statement), we should probably stop. I shall leave you the last word.
My reply would be along the lines of
The pedophile hysteria is a distinct problem which is not in general related
Pedophile hysteria is part of the problem in the same vein as rape hysteria and sexual harassment hysteria in general.
No. A thousands times no. As should pretty obvious since I made zero comment about your gender.
Ok then: why would you even question my personal experiences if not to discount my opinion on that basis, since if you’re not facetious you know I’m male and probably haven’t received unwanted sexual chat messages from female professors. It’s an obvious set-up to an ad hom. Otherwise explain the question.
So who are you talking about?
Entitlement culture and a loss of the ability to concentrate and exhibit mental discipline have become endemic (take obesity as one marker), my ‘fragile flower’ comment was meant to apply stochastically across the board, not to the student in question specifically obviously. You must think me to be some crazy misanthrope or somesuch. It seems like the familiar “enemy detected”-pattern of political discourse.
And in your view they coordinate that how
It seems like we’re regressing … didn’t we already cover that? But since you ask … again … let me quote … a comment like 5 ancestors up:
I’m not saying this particular outbreak of hysteria (and all the other nonsense we spend our hysteria on) is all some sinister plot/smokescreen from the powers-that-be to keep (part of) the bottom 99% busy. More like a happy coincidence, for them.
It’s easy to paint people who disagree as conspiracy nuts. Don’t fall into that temptation.
Please reread what I said without trying to make it the stupidest argument you can.
I did. I have no idea what you were trying to say there, if it apparently was neither “if it is a significant causal link on its own, it is a significant causal link on its own” nor “even if the difference was minor, combined with other factors the overall impact can be large”. Both are apparently the stupidest argument I can make up? Which is why I asked if I understood you correctly?
In general, politically involved topics lead to toxic climate. There’s nothing special about the topic in question.
This is where I expected some sort of troll face following the quote. We seem to live in different slices of society, I can’t explain why our perception would differ so fundamentally otherwise. Except the very first line of this comment, that is. Even Robin Hanson, of all people, became a target of part of the roving mob!
If weak examples of A cause some amount of X, then one should expect that more extreme amounts of A cause more of X
Look, you really need to read up on the noncentral fallacy. I really mean it. Grouping it all as “shades of A” is precisely the trap when putting disparate things into a common artificial bracket (“sexual harassment”). Violent rape is not “a more extreme amount of A on some scale where on the lower end there’s ‘men staring at you’, ergo we can surmise that the effects can be extrapolated up”. That would be the most ridiculous statement I’ve read this week, sorry to say. And I frequent Reddit. A study on men staring, then women doing worse at math test has near-precisely 0 bearing, and that’s not because I don’t look for a study showing that “men staring at women, women doing the same at the math test”. It is because it’s irrelevant to the topic. Wouldn’t that be some bizarre slippery sloping from “men staring leads to worse math tests” to the topic of sexual harassment in toto, a bracket including rape as a central component?
I assume you’ve read the abstract. Shall I link it and ask you to show, precisely, how it translates to either the specific case, or “sexual harassment and STEM enrollment” in general? Is it that “women fail at math tests because men stared at them, ergo there are less women in STEM”?
I have an idea: We need some policy about “things that start with the letter A”. It should be: contain all those things, since there’s an atom bomb in there!
And on a final note: It would have been nice if you addressed my sources (the two Time articles), which I used as evidence that the public attention devoted to the topic doesn’t fit the severity of the problem (or the lack thereof). Maybe you could choose to do so in your closing remarks?
Since at this point we probably regard each other as fully mindkilled on the subject (at least I can vouch for one half of that statement), we should probably stop. I shall leave you the last word
That’s a fascinatingly passive-aggressive way of saying “I think you’re hopelessly mindkilled”. To be blunt, while I do certainly have suspicions in that direction, the outside view suggests that neither of us is mind-killed as much as we think the other person to be since both of us have taken positions with some degree of nuance.
Pedophile hysteria is part of the problem in the same vein as rape hysteria and sexual harassment hysteria in general.
Not really. They aren’t raised by the same people and they don’t even always occur in the same places. For example, much of the UK has massive pedophile hysteria but in many ways much less of a focus on sexual harassment issues than the US does.
why would you even question my personal experiences if not to discount my opinion on that basis, since if you’re not facetious you know I’m male and probably haven’t received unwanted sexual chat messages from female professors. It’s an obvious set-up to an ad hom. Otherwise explain the question.
I did explain it. Please reread what I wrote right after that sentence where I said ” it is really easy to label people as “fragile flowers” or the like when they’ve had bad experiences you have not.” The point is that it may be worth considering whether the labels and descriptions you are attaching are based on you not having been on the receicing end.
This is where I expected some sort of troll face following the quote. We seem to live in different slices of society, I can’t explain why our perception would differ so fundamentally otherwise.
And didn’t you just reference the idea that politics is the mind-killer? Sure, different political subjects will lead to different degrees of toxicity in different contexts but this is very much not the only one which can do so. Try to have a conversation with a random bunch of Americans about abortion or gun control.
Even Robin Hanson, of all people, became a target of part of the roving mob!
I don’t see why you see that as such an extreme thing. Robin is a borderline professional troll who trolled his way to tenure. He first became welll known for his fairly tone-deaf pushing for terrorism futures markets(pdf).
Look, you really need to read up on the noncentral fallacy.
I’m familiar with it, and you need to reread what I wrote since that’s not what is going on here and the fact that you brought up rape (which is genuinely distinct) if anything shows how that’s not what is going on. The point here is that actitivies which in an academic context can sexualize women make them perform more poorly. That’s the common connection between the staring and sexual harassment situations. It has nothing to do with rape at all—I agree that if one were trying to make such a connection that would be stupid.
I’m not going to responde to your “letter A” paragraph accept to note that it may be fun to write but has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
It would have been nice if you addressed my sources (the two Time articles), which I used as evidence that the public attention devoted to the topic doesn’t fit the severity of the problem (or the lack thereof)
There are real problems with aspects of how these issues are handled, and I’d point to Radicalizing the romanceless and Scott Aaaronson’s comments here (especially comment 171) as genuine examples of the problems that the current system causes. The Time piece is to some extent correct about what they are talking about. But as you observed, what we’re talking about is different. The issue at hand is not rape, and that’s running into an important value which is the need for a lack of censorship in a university setting. I was actually at BU when the Robin Thicke controversy occurred, and there were people advocating for “let him come, and we’ll protest outside the concert” which is a much more nuanced position than that which got essentially lost in the shuffle. But the primary problem here isn’t that these problems don’t exist on college campuses: they unquestionably do: the primary problem is that the current focus doesn’t do much to actually impact the people who really are likely to create problems. But it is worth noting that there’s also an inconsistency here in the Time piece- they note RAINN’s emphasis on promoting clearer education on what constitutes consent, which is exactly a major part of what the people who advocate dealing with “rape culture” are trying to do. And again, the fact that a handful of universities have gone overboard on specific issues really isn’t great evidence of a general problem, for reasons we’ve discussed earlier I think.
But neither of these pieces are terribly relevant to what we’re talking about. If we’re talking about sex harassment then we’re talking about that. If we’re talking about rape then we’re talking about that. But it is not helpful (and indeed quite strange) to a paragraph earlier accuse someone else of the non-central fallacy while you yourself are bringing up the matter of rape which wasn’t even what was being discussed.
Sure. I’m curious, by the way, if you saw my reply to Alienist which discussed some of the basic evidence for this being an issue.
Sure, but it doesn’t need to be substantially worse as a whole to have a disparate impact. Sexual harassment can combine with other problems (e.g. a pre-existing gender imbalance as well as larger cultural issues).
Ignore it completely, just as you and I are ignoring what the vast majority of people really do seem to care about- e.g. celebrities. In general, if there really is a problem and some humans are putting resources into handling that problem, it isn’t likely to be productive to spend time telling them that they should go do something else. It also isn’t helpful to then use language that essentially compares caring about a cause to being somehow complcit in Roman style bread-and-circuses keeping the people down.
How does being well-off and not suffering from any of those problems mean that one somehow benefits from the status quo? If global warming becomes a serious enough problem, it is inconvenient to everyone. If a paperclip maximizer turns all into paperclips everyone has the same problems. And at the same time, if more people are in the STEM fields or more people who can succeed at it, we all benefit.
The problem with that is that the over-focus isn’t harmless, it’s already having negative effects, e.g., Lewin’s videos being taken down. Also this is not the kind of thing that’s smart to ignore for them same reason that someone living in Salem Village in 1692 probably should not ignore the increasingly popular silly belief that a lot of their problems are caused by witches.
Sure. For any given problem, some degree of focus, whether it is an overfocus or not is going to have some negative side-effects. That’s essentially just the non-onesided nature of policy issues. So the question becomes where do you balance it? And moreover, how do you decide that it really has gone over too far in one direction or aother?
Can you expand on this logic?
Eh, I’m not gonna call “women being stared at” and such sexual harassment, which is what we are talking about. As I’ve mentioned, to discuss sexual harassment in general when our starkest disagreement lies in the sexual chat messages and the like is a Worst Argument In The World situation in any case.
If you have a phenomenon with multiple causes I wouldn’t characterize a minor causal node as having a “disparate impact” just because it contributes to a much larger phenomenon.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. If you saw MIRI going off on a dead-end tangent, and you are invested in its fate, “ignore it completely” is a bad choice. Same dynamic.
If the resources were allocated appropriate to the problems, where would the money come from? For carbon licenses and other Pigovian taxes? Yea, from the powers-that-be.
Solving it inconveniences ExxonMobil more, for the next few hundred quarterly reports.
Certainly. The first step for that should be creating better role models, getting rid of the ridiculous “I’m a fragile flower waiting for good things to happen to me, since I deserve everything”-entitlement attitude people are developing, and creating more of a meritocracy (e.g. not turning people away because they have the wrong gender / wrong nationality etc.). Not becoming hysteric over sexual chat messages, when there are already rules in place against that sort of thing (and yes, the professor should be reprimanded and, if repeated, suspended, but goddamn that should not be national news).
The point here should be clear: of course it isn’t sexual harassment. Yet the data shows that even that limited form of negative interaction can have a substantial impact on performance. A fortiori you’d expect the same thing for more serious situations.
Huh? First of all, it is highly likely that what happened with Lewin went well beyond any sort of mildly sexual chat messages. Second, the primary argument isn’t even about that but the claim that in general, sexual harassment shouldn’t be a high priority.
Missing the point. It may not be a minor causal node. The ability to identify one cause among many isn’t a reason to think that it is a minor node. I can identify hundreds of ways humans die: it doesn’t make cancer a minor node just because it is one among them. Moreover, in this sort of context different nodes can interact to have an impact substantially larger than any single one would.
Sure, but that’s a specific organization with a specific set of goals. If you think this sort of thing is important then why don’t you go around telling everyone who talks about celebrities or Hollywood movies or whatnot how they are wasting their time? Is wasting time your true objection?
Ok. So it is a problem for almost everyone, and anyone at ExxonMobile who cares about their children. There’s still no large set of “Powers that be” that all these problems apply to. Yes, there are small, specific groups that have interests which are counter to the interests of the general population for specific issues. But none of those will see eye-to-eye on the same issues.
This seems more like a series of boo lights and labels for people you don’t like then a substantial point. I am however curious if you’ve been subject to unwanted sexual attention from people in a position of power. Have you? How frequently? How did you react? How did it make you feel? And what makes you so confident that in the actual situation in question that this was so mild that anyone who reatced can be labeled as engaging in hysterics while being a fragile flower?
This seems inconsistent with your earlier comments. Is your primary problem simply that it happened to become a news story? That seems strange given that everyone else here (and I thought you) saw the primary reason this was on the news as the same as the primary reason that this was an overreaction; that taking down the videos was unnecessary.
Beware the man of one study who uses that study for conclusions concerning different phenomena. That’s not how evidence works, the correct Bayesian update “a fortiori” on different behavior would be negligible. How does that even work, “if they are sexually messaged they do worse on math tests”?
Hello there “mildly”, I didn’t see you in my original quote. That must be because you came out of thin-air. It can be explicit enough to fit right into some Gangsta rap song, it’s still a chat message which shouldn’t be discussed in the same breath as e.g. violent sexual assaults.
I reject logic along the lines of “A belongs to B, C belongs to B. We should deal with A because C is really serious, and we’ll transfer that association with seriousness to A via B”. If you want to talk about men staring at women, and what policies and punishments we should have for that, we can do that. Or for when an authority figure writes sexual messages to a college student. These are neither in kind nor in degree the same thing as many other forms of assault, sexual or otherwise.
You probably agree, so let’s not strawman “sexual harassment shouldn’t be a high priority” out of “sexual chat messages shouldn’t be a high priority”. Don’t slippery-slope your way from “men staring at women” to sexual harassment as a whole (including e.g. violent rape), these are different problems requiring different solutions and most importantly different amounts of societal attention and anxiety.
What you said was “Sure, but it doesn’t need to be substantially worse as a whole to have a disparate impact. Sexual harassment can combine with other problems (e.g. a pre-existing gender imbalance as well as larger cultural issues)” which I understood as “even if the difference was minor, combined with other factors the overall impact can be large”. If you only intended to say “if it is a significant causal link on its own, it is a significant causal link on its own”, that would merely be a tautology and a reminder that we disagree on #1.
Those topics don’t replace other policy initiatives, elections aren’t decided on who liked which movie best. There is an ever dwindling budget of attention for “this is unjust and must be changed” issues, and it’s that budget which is spent on the ‘rampant sexual harassment’ chimera. I feel similarly when the news cycle about a climate conference rapidly shifts to some celebrity wedding, or when a candidate’s “celebrity endorsements” outweigh his/her fiscal policies. That is my main objection, though I certainly don’t enjoy the divisive toxic climate that’s created as a side effect of the prominence of the topic.
They don’t have to. It is convenient for all elites who have a disproportionate share of (capital/influence/market share in their sector/etc.) to not see that redistributed. Since such massive undertakings for the public good are the domain of politics, one would predict that elites take great care to capture the political parties. And that’s precisely what we observe. Yes, many of them have different aims (Google versus the MPAA, etc.), but all of them profit from the public spotlight being on something more inconsequential to their interests, not their privileged position specifically.
Is this where my opinion is only valid if I have the right gender and am a rape survivor or something? Because you probably haven’t been exterminated by an unfriendly AI to date, yet you presumably care about that risk.
Ahem, would you read the grandparent comment again? These were general recommendations on how to increase STEM enrollment. The “The first step (to get people in the STEM fields)” should have clued you in on that. It was not meant to refer to someone “in the actual situation”, least of all the student in question.
Is this so you can go off saying “that guy called people who were harassed or who engaged with the situation ‘fragile flowers’”, because in that case this discussion would be worthless?
It would be preposterous to put someone who received online harassment from an old MIT professor, probably in a different state, in the same category as e.g. victims of traumatic physical rape and then discuss the topic ‘as a whole’. Again, Worst Argument In The World if there ever was one. Have you ever seen TwitchChat? So many future PTSD victims!
My problem is that the topic dominates public discourse to an unwarranted degree. As Time Magazine and RAINN succinctly put it: “It’s time to end rape culture hysteria”, see also Myth 4 in this Time article. The degree to which public perception is overemphasizing the topic is actively harmful, including to prospective female STEM students. Men at playgrounds being reported to the police for being potential pedophiles is a new phenomenon, arising out of the general hysteria about the “sexual harassment/violence”-boogeyman.
MIT taking down the videos was a reaction to get ahead of the inevitable media attention and head off any potential reputational shitstorm. In absence of such societal hysteria, the videos would not have been taken down. This is nothing but a cover-your-ass kneejerk reaction, which isn’t even unreasonable given that MIT is reacting to the toxic public discourse on the topic, which is the root problem for the video removal.
That’s relevant when you have other studies that show something in the other direction and one is picking one study exactly. Do you have any similar studies to mention? Since you’ve mentioned exactly zero studies about behavior or any links to any stats in this conversation, my guess no.
Really? This seems pretty clear. If weak examples of A cause some amount of X, then one should expect that more extreme amounts of A cause more of X, and in this case we have an easy causal model that supports that.
You’re right. Poor rephrasing on my part.
But no one here is claiming they are the same as “violent sexual assaults”. Did you see anywhere I or anyone else in this subthread tried to make that claim?
That’s not what I said. Please reread what I said without trying to make it the stupidest argument you can.
I’m confused. Do you see the celebrities and movies as in the same category or not? And if you don’t why don’t you spend time telling people to stop focusing on them?
In general, politically involved topics lead to toxic climate. There’s nothing special about the topic in question.
And in your view they coordinate that how? Google and Exxon have wildly different goals as do the MPAA and Google and any other two major powers you can name.
No. A thousands times no. As should pretty obvious since I made zero comment about your gender. But here’s the thing: it is really easy to label people as “fragile flowers” or the like when they’ve had bad experiences you have not.
What this reminds me of is an old English teacher I knew in highschool who used to complain that it was no longer acceptable for students who had a disagreement to just leave the class-room and settle things “out doors”- he thought that this was making a weak generation of students. I believe he actually used the word “sissies” and said that the solution was for nerdy students to “man-up”. But we’ve decided that that’s not acceptable, and I suspect that you agree there. And we’ve all benefited. Let me suggest that maybe you should ask yourself if your comments about sexual harassment fall into the same category.
So who are you talking about? Be specific. Are you claiming that the solution is to make students more willing to put up with sexual harassment and act less like “fragile flowers”? Because it certainly sounds like that, and having reread your statement it still sounds like that.
The pedophile hysteria is a distinct problem which is not in general related to issues of sexual harassment. You won’t even see the same people talking about it in general.
Since at this point we probably regard each other as fully mindkilled on the subject (at least I can vouch for one half of that statement), we should probably stop. I shall leave you the last word.
My reply would be along the lines of
Pedophile hysteria is part of the problem in the same vein as rape hysteria and sexual harassment hysteria in general.
Ok then: why would you even question my personal experiences if not to discount my opinion on that basis, since if you’re not facetious you know I’m male and probably haven’t received unwanted sexual chat messages from female professors. It’s an obvious set-up to an ad hom. Otherwise explain the question.
Entitlement culture and a loss of the ability to concentrate and exhibit mental discipline have become endemic (take obesity as one marker), my ‘fragile flower’ comment was meant to apply stochastically across the board, not to the student in question specifically obviously. You must think me to be some crazy misanthrope or somesuch. It seems like the familiar “enemy detected”-pattern of political discourse.
It seems like we’re regressing … didn’t we already cover that? But since you ask … again … let me quote … a comment like 5 ancestors up:
It’s easy to paint people who disagree as conspiracy nuts. Don’t fall into that temptation.
I did. I have no idea what you were trying to say there, if it apparently was neither “if it is a significant causal link on its own, it is a significant causal link on its own” nor “even if the difference was minor, combined with other factors the overall impact can be large”. Both are apparently the stupidest argument I can make up? Which is why I asked if I understood you correctly?
This is where I expected some sort of troll face following the quote. We seem to live in different slices of society, I can’t explain why our perception would differ so fundamentally otherwise. Except the very first line of this comment, that is. Even Robin Hanson, of all people, became a target of part of the roving mob!
Look, you really need to read up on the noncentral fallacy. I really mean it. Grouping it all as “shades of A” is precisely the trap when putting disparate things into a common artificial bracket (“sexual harassment”). Violent rape is not “a more extreme amount of A on some scale where on the lower end there’s ‘men staring at you’, ergo we can surmise that the effects can be extrapolated up”. That would be the most ridiculous statement I’ve read this week, sorry to say. And I frequent Reddit. A study on men staring, then women doing worse at math test has near-precisely 0 bearing, and that’s not because I don’t look for a study showing that “men staring at women, women doing the same at the math test”. It is because it’s irrelevant to the topic. Wouldn’t that be some bizarre slippery sloping from “men staring leads to worse math tests” to the topic of sexual harassment in toto, a bracket including rape as a central component?
I assume you’ve read the abstract. Shall I link it and ask you to show, precisely, how it translates to either the specific case, or “sexual harassment and STEM enrollment” in general? Is it that “women fail at math tests because men stared at them, ergo there are less women in STEM”?
I have an idea: We need some policy about “things that start with the letter A”. It should be: contain all those things, since there’s an atom bomb in there!
And on a final note: It would have been nice if you addressed my sources (the two Time articles), which I used as evidence that the public attention devoted to the topic doesn’t fit the severity of the problem (or the lack thereof). Maybe you could choose to do so in your closing remarks?
ETA: Typos, tone.
That’s a fascinatingly passive-aggressive way of saying “I think you’re hopelessly mindkilled”. To be blunt, while I do certainly have suspicions in that direction, the outside view suggests that neither of us is mind-killed as much as we think the other person to be since both of us have taken positions with some degree of nuance.
Not really. They aren’t raised by the same people and they don’t even always occur in the same places. For example, much of the UK has massive pedophile hysteria but in many ways much less of a focus on sexual harassment issues than the US does.
I did explain it. Please reread what I wrote right after that sentence where I said ” it is really easy to label people as “fragile flowers” or the like when they’ve had bad experiences you have not.” The point is that it may be worth considering whether the labels and descriptions you are attaching are based on you not having been on the receicing end.
And didn’t you just reference the idea that politics is the mind-killer? Sure, different political subjects will lead to different degrees of toxicity in different contexts but this is very much not the only one which can do so. Try to have a conversation with a random bunch of Americans about abortion or gun control.
I don’t see why you see that as such an extreme thing. Robin is a borderline professional troll who trolled his way to tenure. He first became welll known for his fairly tone-deaf pushing for terrorism futures markets(pdf).
I’m familiar with it, and you need to reread what I wrote since that’s not what is going on here and the fact that you brought up rape (which is genuinely distinct) if anything shows how that’s not what is going on. The point here is that actitivies which in an academic context can sexualize women make them perform more poorly. That’s the common connection between the staring and sexual harassment situations. It has nothing to do with rape at all—I agree that if one were trying to make such a connection that would be stupid.
I’m not going to responde to your “letter A” paragraph accept to note that it may be fun to write but has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
There are real problems with aspects of how these issues are handled, and I’d point to Radicalizing the romanceless and Scott Aaaronson’s comments here (especially comment 171) as genuine examples of the problems that the current system causes. The Time piece is to some extent correct about what they are talking about. But as you observed, what we’re talking about is different. The issue at hand is not rape, and that’s running into an important value which is the need for a lack of censorship in a university setting. I was actually at BU when the Robin Thicke controversy occurred, and there were people advocating for “let him come, and we’ll protest outside the concert” which is a much more nuanced position than that which got essentially lost in the shuffle. But the primary problem here isn’t that these problems don’t exist on college campuses: they unquestionably do: the primary problem is that the current focus doesn’t do much to actually impact the people who really are likely to create problems. But it is worth noting that there’s also an inconsistency here in the Time piece- they note RAINN’s emphasis on promoting clearer education on what constitutes consent, which is exactly a major part of what the people who advocate dealing with “rape culture” are trying to do. And again, the fact that a handful of universities have gone overboard on specific issues really isn’t great evidence of a general problem, for reasons we’ve discussed earlier I think.
The second piece referring to what they say is a myth, I’ll refer to Scott Alexander’s piece here.
But neither of these pieces are terribly relevant to what we’re talking about. If we’re talking about sex harassment then we’re talking about that. If we’re talking about rape then we’re talking about that. But it is not helpful (and indeed quite strange) to a paragraph earlier accuse someone else of the non-central fallacy while you yourself are bringing up the matter of rape which wasn’t even what was being discussed.