I’m not sure if the problem is connotation v. denotation here or possibly a motte/bailey fallacy, but I’m fairly confident that something like that is happening, or some massive failure of communication.
You wrote:
Welcome to the brave new world. Blood and games, keeps us busy from dealing with the issues that matter.
At minimum, the connotation of these phrases is a deliberate attempt to distract from the “serious” issues, which is an extremely different claim than the one you are apparently making above that this simply should be an extremely low priority issue. I’m also confused if you think this should be such a low priority why you persist in discussing it.
I’m also highly uncovninced that this should be such a low priority issue. Sexual harrassment and associated problems contribute to fewer women in the STEM fields, which means in general fewer people going in to STEM fields than would be otherwise. All of the issues you describe as serious problems are issues where solutions, if they arise or exist, will arise out of technology and research.
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.
I’m deeply confused by this. Who are these powers-that-be and how is this in any way shape or form to their advantage? You mention the 99%, a specific idea that is in most contexts refers to a 1% income v. 99%. I’m not sure how that would be relevant to many of the serious issues that currently are issues (such as the enviromental ones you note) or others you didn’t note such as existential risk. So be more explicit, who do you think benefits from this “happy coincidence” and what specific issues do you think it is distracting from that should be a higher priority?
I’m not aware of any studies specifically. The basic argument isn’t that complicated though: A) there are women who attribute their lack of involvement in the STEM fields to extremely bad experiences at an early age and B) there’s an obvious way this would be causally related. Note also that some other fields such as medicine have taken more active steps to deal with sexual harrassment issues and they do have more women going into those fields.
The basic argument isn’t that complicated though: A) there are women who attribute their lack of involvement in the STEM fields to extremely bad experiences at an early age and B) there’s an obvious way this would be causally related.
There are several problems with that theory.
1) A lot of people who deice not to go into STEM had bad experiences. (In fact bad experience may very well mean wasn’t good at it).
2) The kind of things they wind up pointing to as “sexual harassment”, e.g., wearing a bad 50′s sci-fi shirt with ‘ray-gun-babes’ or happening to overhear a not-quite g-rated conversation between two men, don’t seem like the kind of things people should be too bothered about.
3) Women have less variance on IQ scores then men and thus we would expect fewer of them to show up in at high levels in IQ-intensive fields.
(Feminists dispute the last point, but they’re arguments tend to boil down to “you’re sexist for even suggesting this”).
As for 2, sure there’s a range of behaviors and it is worth discussing that which ones do or don’t matter. At the same time, the mild behavior is the one set of behavior that we actually do have studies showing it has an impact. In particular, women who have been stared at by men then perform more poorly on math tests(PDF).
3) Women have less variance on IQ scores then men and thus we would expect fewer of them to show up in at high levels in IQ-intensive fields.
Yes, up to a point. No one here is asserting that this is the only cause or the primary cause of differences in gender ratious. That’s not the same thing as asserting that it isn’t a cause. And IQ variance is clearly insufficient: different disciplines requiring similar needs have radically different gender ratios. And there’s real evidence that in at least some cases, cultural issues are having much more of an impact than IQ- look at how the percentage of women in IT and computer related fields was steadily going up and then started dropping when personal computers appeared. See discussion here.
(Feminists dispute the last point, but they’re arguments tend to boil down to “you’re sexist for even suggesting this”).
This is now the second time you’ve made a comment like this- bringing up an argument that hasn’t been made so you can knock it down. That might be rhetorically fun but it isn’t helpful. Bad arguments are made for pretty much any position possible. The fact that such arguments are being made somewhere isn’t relevant for fairly obvious reasons.
In particular, women who have been stared at by men then perform more poorly on math tests(PDF).
That’s a paywall, so I assume you have not read it. Here’s a jailbroken copy: “When What You See Is What You Get: The Consequences of the Objectifying Gaze for Women and Men
”, Gervais et al 2011 (Libgen; PDF.yt; Dropbox).
This paper inherits the usual defects of the ‘stereotype threat’ literature. It takes place in no-stakes situations, while stereotype threats have failed to generalize to any situations that actually matter, and blinding is questionable (they bring the subjects in, then “They also learned that they may be asked to report their feelings about themselves and others and to complete word problems”, and do math problems? Gee, I’m sure none of these undergrads recruited from psychology classes figured out what the real experiment was!) The results are also a little bizarre on their face: ”...the objectifying gaze also increased women’s, but not men’s, motivation to engage in subsequent interactions with their partner...the objectifying gaze did not influence body surveillance, body shame, or body dissatisfaction for women or men”. Huh?
And IQ variance is clearly insufficient: different disciplines requiring similar needs have radically different gender ratios.
That does not follow. If different disciplines have non-identical needs, then depending on the exact differences in distribution shape, the correlation between IQ, and the cutoff for success (see for example the table of r vs cutoff in “What does it mean to have a low R-squared ? A warning about misleading interpretation”) - not to mention the other variables which also vary between gender (Conscientiousness; degree of winner-take-all dynamics; expected work hours) - may well be sufficient to explain it. You’ll need to do more work than that.
And there’s real evidence that in at least some cases, cultural issues are having much more of an impact than IQ- look at how the percentage of women in IT and computer related fields was steadily going up and then started dropping when personal computers appeared. See discussion here.
This paper inherits the usual defects of the ‘stereotype threat’ literature. It takes place in no-stakes situations
Sure. It is extremely difficult to test these situations in high-stakes situations for obvious reasons.
Gee, I’m sure none of these undergrads recruited from psychology classes figured out what the real experiment was!
This is an intrinsic problem in almost all psychology studies. Is there anything specific here that’s worse than in other cases?
The results are also a little bizarre on their face: ”...the objectifying gaze also increased women’s, but not men’s, motivation to engage in subsequent interactions with their partner...the objectifying gaze did not influence body surveillance, body shame, or body dissatisfaction for women or men”. Huh?
I don’t see what your point is. What do you find is bizaare about this and how do you think that undermines the study?
And finally, this is social psychology.
That’s a reason to be skeptical of the results, not a reason to a priori throw them out.
That does not follow. If different disciplines have non-identical needs, then depending on the exact differences in distribution shape, the correlation between IQ, and the cutoff for success (see for example the table of r vs cutoff in “What does it mean to have a low R-squared ? A warning about misleading interpretation”) - not to mention the other variables which also vary between gender (Conscientiousness; degree of winner-take-all dynamics; expected work hours) - may well be sufficient to explain it. You’ll need to do more work than that.
You are correct. The word clearly is doing too much work in my comment. At minimum though, the fact that other similar disciplines don’t have that situation even though they historically did is evidence that IQ variance is not all that is going on here. And that’s especially the case when many of those disciplines are ones like medicine that have taken many active steps to try to encourage women to be interested in them.
And there’s real evidence that in at least some cases, cultural issues are having much more of an impact than IQ- look at how the percentage of women in IT and computer related fields was steadily going up and then started dropping when personal computers appeared. See discussion here.
See discussion here.
Now seen. Having read that discussion, I agree with Kaj there. Do you have any additional point beyond which you said to Kaj there?
It is extremely difficult to test these situations in high-stakes situations for obvious reasons.
It is not so difficult as all that: high-stakes tests are conducted all the time and gender is routinely recorded. I refer you to the WP article for how stereotype threat evaporates the moment it would ever matter.
This is an intrinsic problem in almost all psychology studies. Is there anything specific here that’s worse than in other cases?
It is not that bad a problem in most studies, and stereotype threat studies are particularly bad.
What do you find is bizaare about this and how do you think that undermines the study?
Their results make no sense in almost any causal model of how stereotype threat would work. What sort of stereotype threat has no effect on attitudes and body images and increases interest in co-workers, and how would you expect this to support the argument you made with regard to co-workers in the real world?
That’s a reason to be skeptical of the results, not a reason to a priori throw them out.
Indeed. So why did you cling to a weak reed?
Do you have any additional point beyond which you said to Kaj there?
No. I stand by the sum of my comments: that it is blatant post hoc rationalizations which contradict any theory a feminist would have made before seeing the actual data, which clearly supports an economic rather than pure bias account, and makes false claims about new CS students as well.
It is not so difficult as all that: high-stakes tests are conducted all the time and gender is routinely recorded. I refer you to the WP article for how stereotype threat evaporates the moment it would ever matter.
Which studies there are you referring to as being relevant? Note by the way that the study in question isn’t quite the same as stereotype threat in the classical sense anyways.
What do you find is bizaare about this and how do you think that undermines the study?
Their results make no sense in almost any causal model of how stereotype threat would work. What sort of stereotype threat has no effect on attitudes and body images and increases interest in co-workers, and how would you expect this to support the argument you made with regard to co-workers in the real world?
I’m not completely sure what model would actually do this but it could be something that causes them to think of themselves less as people doing math and more as people who are socially or sexually interested in others. But the fact that it didn’t have an impact on body image is strange, and needs further investigation. In the short version though, that should suggest that this study actually is more reliable: one of the most common criticism of psychology as a discipline is that the studies have way too high a confirmation of hypotheses rate. That’s been discussed on Less Wrong before. In this case, the fact that part of the study went against the intuitve hypothesis and went against what the authors explicitly hypothesized is a reason to pay more attention to it.
That’s a reason to be skeptical of the results, not a reason to a priori throw them out.
Indeed. So why did you cling to a weak reed?
Because this is one of the very few studies that have looked at how sexualization impacts performance. There are a lot of stereotype threat studies (as you noted) but they don’t generally look at this. I’d be happy to rely on something else or change my opinion here if there were that many more studies.
Do you have any additional point beyond which you said to Kaj there?
No. I stand by the sum of my comments: that it is blatant post hoc rationalizations which contradict any theory a feminist would have made before seeing the actual data, which clearly supports an economic rather than pure bias account, and makes false claims about new CS students as well.
So in your view, what precisely is the reason for the fact that the percentage of female CS students was consistently rising and then took a sharp drop-off? Also, why do you think Kaj disagreed with your position?
Which studies there are you referring to as being relevant?
...So in your view, what precisely is the reason for the fact that the percentage of female CS students was consistently rising and then took a sharp drop-off?
If you aren’t going to read the links I provided*, I’m not going to bother continuing. Both of those questions were answered.
* please note I have already gone above and beyond in not just reading your source material while you have not, but jailbreaking & critiquing that study, and also excerpting & linking contrary opinions & surveys
If you aren’t going to read the links I provided*, I’m not going to bother continuing. Both of those questions were answered.
I read the conversation with Kaj and I read the links thank you very much. In that conversation you brought up a variety of different issues, focusing on the “practicality” issue but you give multiple different versions of that claim and I’m not completely sure what your primary hypothesis is. The primary claim there seems to be that the ups and downs on the graph mirror ups and downs in the market, but the primary link justifying that claim is this one you gave which doesn’t make any claim other than the simple claim that the graphs match without even showing that they do. The only bit there is there that is genuinely interesting evidence is the survey showing that women pay more attention to job prospects when considering fields which is not at all sufficient to explain the size of the drop there, nor the fact that law didn’t show a similar drop in the last few years when there’s been a glut of lawyers.
please note I have already gone above and beyond in not just reading your source material while you have not
I don’t know where you are getting the second part of that claim from. But it is true I didn’t read every single link in the Kaj conversation, and I’m not sure why you think reading a single study is on the same scale as reading an additional long conversation and every single link there. So if you want to point to which of those links matter there, I’d be happy to look at them.
Bad arguments are made for pretty much any position possible. The fact that such arguments are being made somewhere isn’t relevant for fairly obvious reasons.
On the other hand, the fact that such arguments are used to intimidate anyone who dares question a certain position is relevant (possibly successfully remember what happened to Summers). In particular it affects what arguments we expect to have been exposed to.
Furthermore in Lewin’s case we have no idea what he actually did, thus the only evidence we have is that a committee at MIT decided what he did was bad. Thus to evaluation how much we should trust their conclusion it is necessary to look at the typical level of argument.
On the other hand, the fact that such arguments are used to intimidate anyone who dares question a certain position is relevant (possibly successfully remember what happened to Summers). In particular it affects what arguments we expect to have been exposed to.
It isn’t at all relevant. To use a different example (coming from the other side of the poltiical spectrum)- one argument made against releasing the recent torture report was that anyone wanting it released was “anti-American” which is essentially the same sort of thing. The presence of such arguments is in no way relevant to any actual attempt to have a discussion about whether releasing the report was the right thing. No matter what position you discuss someone will be using bad arguments to intimidate people into silence. Rise above it.
Furthermore in Lewin’s case we have no idea what he actually did, thus the only evidence we have is that a committee at MIT decided what he did was bad. Thus to evaluation how much we should trust their conclusion it is necessary to look at the typical level of argument.
The typical level of argument isn’t that when it comes to sexual harassment though. The typical level is a massive mix with some universities overreacting, and other’s underreacting. For every example of a university overreacting there’s an example of it underreacting. For example here.
But this also isn’t relevant for another reason: this entire subthread isnt even discussing the specifics of the Lewin case but a more general question of whehether such issues matter and are worth discussing. It is a red herring to go back to the original situation. But if you really do care about that situation, it might be worth looking at what Scott Aaronson has said on it, I’m curious if this adjusts your estimate at all that this is a minor situation being overblown?
The typical level of argument isn’t that when it comes to sexual harassment though.
I’ve been somewhat following the situation, and yes it is. The fact that you would claim otherwise cause me to update away from trusting other claims or judgements you make on the subject.
But if you really do care about that situation, it might be worth looking at what Scott Aaronson has said on it, I’m curious if this adjusts your estimate at all that this is a minor situation being overblown?
I didn’t see anything in the article that would adjust my estimate. The only thing there is that some who know told Aaronson that “this isn’t a borderline case”, given the kinds of things feminists consider “not borderline cases” these days that isn’t strong evidence.
The typical level of argument isn’t that when it comes to sexual harassment though.
I’ve been somewhat following the situation, and yes it is. The fact that you would claim otherwise cause me to update away from trusting other claims or judgements you make on the subject.
I’m not sure a polite response to that, so let me just ask, given that I just pointed to an example that went in the other direction, maybe it is worth considering, just maybe, possibly, that you are vulnerable here to a combination of confirmation bias and what media sources you are using? Let’s as a start focus on a simple example: were you aware of the example I linked to above before I linked to it?
I didn’t see anything in the article that would adjust my estimate. The only thing there is that some who know told Aaronson that “this isn’t a borderline case”, given the kinds of things feminists consider “not borderline cases” these days that isn’t strong evidence.
At this point, I think we may be having problems with radically different priors, part of which is that I give Aaronson enough credit that I don’t think he’s going to go the most radical end of the women’s studies department and ask for their analysis to get some idea of what happened.
At this point, I think we may be having problems with radically different priors
Aaronson’s post also states that the incidents occurred online, and for that matter on the MITx platform, which caters to MOOC users, not actual MIT students. Given these factors, I just can’t see how MIT’s Damnatio memoriae towards Walter Lewin could be anything but an outrageous overreaction.
I’m not sure at all the relevance of your comment in the context of what we are quoting. The fact that this was not the regular MIT students has been known for a while. I’m also not sure what that has to do with my comment, since everyone here is in agreement that the removal of the videos was an overreaction. (However, I’m not at all sure how the fact that it was with MOOC users rather than regular students makes any difference whatsoever unless you are talking about a very marginal difference in legal liability.) What is the connection between your comment and the part of my comment that you are quoting?
At this point, I think we may be having problems with radically different priors, part of which is that I give Aaronson enough credit that I don’t think he’s going to go the most radical end of the women’s studies department and ask for their analysis to get some idea of what happened.
He can only get information from the people who handled the case, who are likely to be SJW-types.
He can only get information from the people who handled the case, who are likely to be SJW-types.
These issues are handled in general by university committees. Does your lack of knowledge on this fact cause you to update at all about how good your judgment is for such issues?
Also it is worth noting that “SJW-types” in most contexts is a group which is by and large restricted to certain parts of the internet or some parts of certaind departments on campuses.
I’m also highly uncovninced that this should be such a low priority issue.
Yes, we evidently disagree on that. Let’s identify that as “area of contention #1”, before we dive into the specifics.
I do disagree with your chain of reasoning of “(sexual harrassment) leads to (fewer women in STEM fields) leads to (fewer/worse technological solutions to the ‘all the issues I described’)” playing a role commensurate with the hubbub we spend on the topic.
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?), and I doubt a few paragraphs will suffice to cause either of us to update. I don’t mind delving into #1 by any means, but let’s divide and conquer, since #1 could keep a serious discussion going for months.
I’m also confused if you think this should be such a low priority why you persist in discussing it.
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?
This is just an edge case to illustrate the principle; concerning sexual harassment, which is a serious issue overall (though less so when we’re talking about chat messages), the message would be “This isn’t what we should spend such a huge amount of our attention on” (versus “no attention at all on”).
I’m deeply confused by this. Who are these powers-that-be and how is this in any way shape or form to their advantage?
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, nor from … you get the picture. Those who bought and paid for government initiatives (or the lack thereof) via myriad lobby groups. This isn’t some conspiracy theory; there are many different groups with many different aims. But they have plenty of game theoretic reasons not to see the boat rocked. So all the better if the plebs keeps itself busy with lynching professors over lewd online messages.
Cui bono, you ask? Again, everyone who profits from the status quo. Everyone who’d rather not see the electorate be galvanized by issues such as Citizens United (lobby groups and the industry behind them), effective Wall Street oversight (banks), Carbon Taxes (energy giants), single payer healthcare (health care industry), gerrymandering (basically most of the elected members of The House) etc. If you are the king, you (general you) wouldn’t want to roll the dice either, since you’d have nowhere to go but down, relative to the rest of society.
Not all comparisons translate well from a small scope to the big leagues, but this one does: just as your attention is a finite resource, so is society’s as a whole. When your whole home is a mess, you can’t clean up all the rooms at the same time. Though, of course, some amount of parallelisation is possible, you can’t do all at once. For example, Obama political capital in his first term was mostly spent on the ACA (and that kind of worked against all odds). So it goes for the sexual harrassment hysteria. Which doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. It’s just not first in line, not by a long shot (goes back to our disagreement about #1).
Then again, if humanity doesn’t survive the various Malthusian (and related) disasters coming our way, there’d be no more lewd text messages, so we got that going for us, which is nice.
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.
Everyone who’d rather not see the electorate be galvanized by issues such as Citizens United (lobby groups and the industry behind them), effective Wall Street oversight (banks), Carbon Taxes (energy giants), single payer healthcare (health care industry), gerrymandering (basically most of the elected members of The House) etc.
As it happens half the issues you raise there are also distractions, but best. A number of them are also ways for the elite to con the populace into giving them more power. Keep in mind that just because you’ve seen through one smoke screen doesn’t mean there aren’t others.
To take the example of Citizens United, the question there is whether a group of average individual citizens can pool their resources to create lobbying groups that have a chance to compete with individual wealthy and/or well-connected citizens.
I’m not sure if the problem is connotation v. denotation here or possibly a motte/bailey fallacy, but I’m fairly confident that something like that is happening, or some massive failure of communication.
You wrote:
At minimum, the connotation of these phrases is a deliberate attempt to distract from the “serious” issues, which is an extremely different claim than the one you are apparently making above that this simply should be an extremely low priority issue. I’m also confused if you think this should be such a low priority why you persist in discussing it.
I’m also highly uncovninced that this should be such a low priority issue. Sexual harrassment and associated problems contribute to fewer women in the STEM fields, which means in general fewer people going in to STEM fields than would be otherwise. All of the issues you describe as serious problems are issues where solutions, if they arise or exist, will arise out of technology and research.
I’m deeply confused by this. Who are these powers-that-be and how is this in any way shape or form to their advantage? You mention the 99%, a specific idea that is in most contexts refers to a 1% income v. 99%. I’m not sure how that would be relevant to many of the serious issues that currently are issues (such as the enviromental ones you note) or others you didn’t note such as existential risk. So be more explicit, who do you think benefits from this “happy coincidence” and what specific issues do you think it is distracting from that should be a higher priority?
Evidence? Because, the typical argument I’ve seen for this claim tends to boil down to “If you even have to ask you’re an evil misogynistic sexist”.
I’m not aware of any studies specifically. The basic argument isn’t that complicated though: A) there are women who attribute their lack of involvement in the STEM fields to extremely bad experiences at an early age and B) there’s an obvious way this would be causally related. Note also that some other fields such as medicine have taken more active steps to deal with sexual harrassment issues and they do have more women going into those fields.
There are several problems with that theory.
1) A lot of people who deice not to go into STEM had bad experiences. (In fact bad experience may very well mean wasn’t good at it).
2) The kind of things they wind up pointing to as “sexual harassment”, e.g., wearing a bad 50′s sci-fi shirt with ‘ray-gun-babes’ or happening to overhear a not-quite g-rated conversation between two men, don’t seem like the kind of things people should be too bothered about.
3) Women have less variance on IQ scores then men and thus we would expect fewer of them to show up in at high levels in IQ-intensive fields.
(Feminists dispute the last point, but they’re arguments tend to boil down to “you’re sexist for even suggesting this”).
I’m not sure what you mean by 1. Can you clarify?
As for 2, sure there’s a range of behaviors and it is worth discussing that which ones do or don’t matter. At the same time, the mild behavior is the one set of behavior that we actually do have studies showing it has an impact. In particular, women who have been stared at by men then perform more poorly on math tests(PDF).
Yes, up to a point. No one here is asserting that this is the only cause or the primary cause of differences in gender ratious. That’s not the same thing as asserting that it isn’t a cause. And IQ variance is clearly insufficient: different disciplines requiring similar needs have radically different gender ratios. And there’s real evidence that in at least some cases, cultural issues are having much more of an impact than IQ- look at how the percentage of women in IT and computer related fields was steadily going up and then started dropping when personal computers appeared. See discussion here.
This is now the second time you’ve made a comment like this- bringing up an argument that hasn’t been made so you can knock it down. That might be rhetorically fun but it isn’t helpful. Bad arguments are made for pretty much any position possible. The fact that such arguments are being made somewhere isn’t relevant for fairly obvious reasons.
That’s a paywall, so I assume you have not read it. Here’s a jailbroken copy: “When What You See Is What You Get: The Consequences of the Objectifying Gaze for Women and Men ”, Gervais et al 2011 (Libgen; PDF.yt; Dropbox).
This paper inherits the usual defects of the ‘stereotype threat’ literature. It takes place in no-stakes situations, while stereotype threats have failed to generalize to any situations that actually matter, and blinding is questionable (they bring the subjects in, then “They also learned that they may be asked to report their feelings about themselves and others and to complete word problems”, and do math problems? Gee, I’m sure none of these undergrads recruited from psychology classes figured out what the real experiment was!) The results are also a little bizarre on their face: ”...the objectifying gaze also increased women’s, but not men’s, motivation to engage in subsequent interactions with their partner...the objectifying gaze did not influence body surveillance, body shame, or body dissatisfaction for women or men”. Huh?
And finally, this is social psychology.
That does not follow. If different disciplines have non-identical needs, then depending on the exact differences in distribution shape, the correlation between IQ, and the cutoff for success (see for example the table of r vs cutoff in “What does it mean to have a low R-squared ? A warning about misleading interpretation”) - not to mention the other variables which also vary between gender (Conscientiousness; degree of winner-take-all dynamics; expected work hours) - may well be sufficient to explain it. You’ll need to do more work than that.
See discussion here.
Sure. It is extremely difficult to test these situations in high-stakes situations for obvious reasons.
This is an intrinsic problem in almost all psychology studies. Is there anything specific here that’s worse than in other cases?
I don’t see what your point is. What do you find is bizaare about this and how do you think that undermines the study?
That’s a reason to be skeptical of the results, not a reason to a priori throw them out.
You are correct. The word clearly is doing too much work in my comment. At minimum though, the fact that other similar disciplines don’t have that situation even though they historically did is evidence that IQ variance is not all that is going on here. And that’s especially the case when many of those disciplines are ones like medicine that have taken many active steps to try to encourage women to be interested in them.
Now seen. Having read that discussion, I agree with Kaj there. Do you have any additional point beyond which you said to Kaj there?
It is not so difficult as all that: high-stakes tests are conducted all the time and gender is routinely recorded. I refer you to the WP article for how stereotype threat evaporates the moment it would ever matter.
It is not that bad a problem in most studies, and stereotype threat studies are particularly bad.
Their results make no sense in almost any causal model of how stereotype threat would work. What sort of stereotype threat has no effect on attitudes and body images and increases interest in co-workers, and how would you expect this to support the argument you made with regard to co-workers in the real world?
Indeed. So why did you cling to a weak reed?
No. I stand by the sum of my comments: that it is blatant post hoc rationalizations which contradict any theory a feminist would have made before seeing the actual data, which clearly supports an economic rather than pure bias account, and makes false claims about new CS students as well.
Which studies there are you referring to as being relevant? Note by the way that the study in question isn’t quite the same as stereotype threat in the classical sense anyways.
I’m not completely sure what model would actually do this but it could be something that causes them to think of themselves less as people doing math and more as people who are socially or sexually interested in others. But the fact that it didn’t have an impact on body image is strange, and needs further investigation. In the short version though, that should suggest that this study actually is more reliable: one of the most common criticism of psychology as a discipline is that the studies have way too high a confirmation of hypotheses rate. That’s been discussed on Less Wrong before. In this case, the fact that part of the study went against the intuitve hypothesis and went against what the authors explicitly hypothesized is a reason to pay more attention to it.
Because this is one of the very few studies that have looked at how sexualization impacts performance. There are a lot of stereotype threat studies (as you noted) but they don’t generally look at this. I’d be happy to rely on something else or change my opinion here if there were that many more studies.
So in your view, what precisely is the reason for the fact that the percentage of female CS students was consistently rising and then took a sharp drop-off? Also, why do you think Kaj disagreed with your position?
If you aren’t going to read the links I provided*, I’m not going to bother continuing. Both of those questions were answered.
* please note I have already gone above and beyond in not just reading your source material while you have not, but jailbreaking & critiquing that study, and also excerpting & linking contrary opinions & surveys
I read the conversation with Kaj and I read the links thank you very much. In that conversation you brought up a variety of different issues, focusing on the “practicality” issue but you give multiple different versions of that claim and I’m not completely sure what your primary hypothesis is. The primary claim there seems to be that the ups and downs on the graph mirror ups and downs in the market, but the primary link justifying that claim is this one you gave which doesn’t make any claim other than the simple claim that the graphs match without even showing that they do. The only bit there is there that is genuinely interesting evidence is the survey showing that women pay more attention to job prospects when considering fields which is not at all sufficient to explain the size of the drop there, nor the fact that law didn’t show a similar drop in the last few years when there’s been a glut of lawyers.
I don’t know where you are getting the second part of that claim from. But it is true I didn’t read every single link in the Kaj conversation, and I’m not sure why you think reading a single study is on the same scale as reading an additional long conversation and every single link there. So if you want to point to which of those links matter there, I’d be happy to look at them.
On the other hand, the fact that such arguments are used to intimidate anyone who dares question a certain position is relevant (possibly successfully remember what happened to Summers). In particular it affects what arguments we expect to have been exposed to.
Furthermore in Lewin’s case we have no idea what he actually did, thus the only evidence we have is that a committee at MIT decided what he did was bad. Thus to evaluation how much we should trust their conclusion it is necessary to look at the typical level of argument.
It isn’t at all relevant. To use a different example (coming from the other side of the poltiical spectrum)- one argument made against releasing the recent torture report was that anyone wanting it released was “anti-American” which is essentially the same sort of thing. The presence of such arguments is in no way relevant to any actual attempt to have a discussion about whether releasing the report was the right thing. No matter what position you discuss someone will be using bad arguments to intimidate people into silence. Rise above it.
The typical level of argument isn’t that when it comes to sexual harassment though. The typical level is a massive mix with some universities overreacting, and other’s underreacting. For every example of a university overreacting there’s an example of it underreacting. For example here.
But this also isn’t relevant for another reason: this entire subthread isnt even discussing the specifics of the Lewin case but a more general question of whehether such issues matter and are worth discussing. It is a red herring to go back to the original situation. But if you really do care about that situation, it might be worth looking at what Scott Aaronson has said on it, I’m curious if this adjusts your estimate at all that this is a minor situation being overblown?
I’ve been somewhat following the situation, and yes it is. The fact that you would claim otherwise cause me to update away from trusting other claims or judgements you make on the subject.
I didn’t see anything in the article that would adjust my estimate. The only thing there is that some who know told Aaronson that “this isn’t a borderline case”, given the kinds of things feminists consider “not borderline cases” these days that isn’t strong evidence.
I’m not sure a polite response to that, so let me just ask, given that I just pointed to an example that went in the other direction, maybe it is worth considering, just maybe, possibly, that you are vulnerable here to a combination of confirmation bias and what media sources you are using? Let’s as a start focus on a simple example: were you aware of the example I linked to above before I linked to it?
At this point, I think we may be having problems with radically different priors, part of which is that I give Aaronson enough credit that I don’t think he’s going to go the most radical end of the women’s studies department and ask for their analysis to get some idea of what happened.
Aaronson’s post also states that the incidents occurred online, and for that matter on the MITx platform, which caters to MOOC users, not actual MIT students. Given these factors, I just can’t see how MIT’s Damnatio memoriae towards Walter Lewin could be anything but an outrageous overreaction.
I’m not sure at all the relevance of your comment in the context of what we are quoting. The fact that this was not the regular MIT students has been known for a while. I’m also not sure what that has to do with my comment, since everyone here is in agreement that the removal of the videos was an overreaction. (However, I’m not at all sure how the fact that it was with MOOC users rather than regular students makes any difference whatsoever unless you are talking about a very marginal difference in legal liability.) What is the connection between your comment and the part of my comment that you are quoting?
He can only get information from the people who handled the case, who are likely to be SJW-types.
These issues are handled in general by university committees. Does your lack of knowledge on this fact cause you to update at all about how good your judgment is for such issues?
Also it is worth noting that “SJW-types” in most contexts is a group which is by and large restricted to certain parts of the internet or some parts of certaind departments on campuses.
Yes, we evidently disagree on that. Let’s identify that as “area of contention #1”, before we dive into the specifics.
I do disagree with your chain of reasoning of “(sexual harrassment) leads to (fewer women in STEM fields) leads to (fewer/worse technological solutions to the ‘all the issues I described’)” playing a role commensurate with the hubbub we spend on the topic.
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?), and I doubt a few paragraphs will suffice to cause either of us to update. I don’t mind delving into #1 by any means, but let’s divide and conquer, since #1 could keep a serious discussion going for months.
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?
This is just an edge case to illustrate the principle; concerning sexual harassment, which is a serious issue overall (though less so when we’re talking about chat messages), the message would be “This isn’t what we should spend such a huge amount of our attention on” (versus “no attention at all on”).
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, nor from … you get the picture. Those who bought and paid for government initiatives (or the lack thereof) via myriad lobby groups. This isn’t some conspiracy theory; there are many different groups with many different aims. But they have plenty of game theoretic reasons not to see the boat rocked. So all the better if the plebs keeps itself busy with lynching professors over lewd online messages.
Cui bono, you ask? Again, everyone who profits from the status quo. Everyone who’d rather not see the electorate be galvanized by issues such as Citizens United (lobby groups and the industry behind them), effective Wall Street oversight (banks), Carbon Taxes (energy giants), single payer healthcare (health care industry), gerrymandering (basically most of the elected members of The House) etc. If you are the king, you (general you) wouldn’t want to roll the dice either, since you’d have nowhere to go but down, relative to the rest of society.
Not all comparisons translate well from a small scope to the big leagues, but this one does: just as your attention is a finite resource, so is society’s as a whole. When your whole home is a mess, you can’t clean up all the rooms at the same time. Though, of course, some amount of parallelisation is possible, you can’t do all at once. For example, Obama political capital in his first term was mostly spent on the ACA (and that kind of worked against all odds). So it goes for the sexual harrassment hysteria. Which doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. It’s just not first in line, not by a long shot (goes back to our disagreement about #1).
Then again, if humanity doesn’t survive the various Malthusian (and related) disasters coming our way, there’d be no more lewd text messages, so we got that going for us, which is nice.
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.
As it happens half the issues you raise there are also distractions, but best. A number of them are also ways for the elite to con the populace into giving them more power. Keep in mind that just because you’ve seen through one smoke screen doesn’t mean there aren’t others.
To take the example of Citizens United, the question there is whether a group of average individual citizens can pool their resources to create lobbying groups that have a chance to compete with individual wealthy and/or well-connected citizens.