hooser
1mo ago
How about:
Among men, men get status through demonstrating situational-appropriate competence. When the group already has a clearly established hierarchy of competence, men defer along the hierarchical lines. If hierarchy is not yet established, or new evidence suggests that the established hierarchy is no longer deserved, men jostle for status primarily in confrontational style that calls into question the level of competence of the one who slipped up as compared to the challenger.
Do you agree with this generalization? If not, what part would you change?
hooser
1mo ago
When status is gained from being right in this hierarchy, and the main method of jockeying is attacking their position for being wrong, then naturally this will align towards truth-seeking over time.
I am trying to parse your argument, since it's in the "if A then B" form and you didn't explicitly claim that A is true (here: A = "male status is gained from being right").
If you were asserting that male status is gained from being right, then your entire argument would imply that no male-dominated society will have top-down beliefs that were contrary to reality. How I wish that were true, but history proves otherwise. (see most religions, or North Korea)
(case in point: every geek that got bullied by the popular jocks)
Rather, I assert that men as well as women gain status not from being right but by being convincing. Many men tend to do it in a more straightforward argumentative way, many women tend to do it by building coalitions and seeking consensus, I will give you that. (Always exceptions, I know enough agreeable men and disagreeable women to know that the generalization doesn't always hold.)
hooser
1mo ago
Yes, you are right. I agree that, because a field's goal is memetic potency, women are more likely to be drawn to it. Thanks for pointing that out.
On the other hand, there is a reinforcing factor at play, too. If someone falls ass-backwards into mathematics, one will still learn how to question assertions and demand proof. If someone gets steered into social studies, one will still learn how to test the waters with some friendlies--and to do it subtly, in I-came-across-this-thought kind of way--before publicizing it more broadly.
The reinforcing factor is more like a loop: E.g., because most mathematicians are disagreeable, the confrontational style of argumentation gets more highly prized in the field. E.g., because most social studies teachers are agreeable, consensus-building styles get more highly prized in the field.
hooser
1mo ago
Male decision making often tries to figure out what he thinks is true whereas female decision making tries to figure out what belief is most popular.
[citation needed]
Flippant quip aside, I partly agree with your assertion. In my experience, women are more likely to seek consensus. That probably generalizes, since women are about half a standard deviation higher on the agreeableness scale than men, on average.
I disagree that the gender analogy (women : popular ideas) is (men : true ideas). Quite frankly, I see as much popular bullshit spewing from men as I do from women. What I agree to, however, is that (in general) when women discuss a subject they are likely to converge towards a consensus opinion without much overt argument, whereas (again, in general), men will overtly argue for their takes, and use the arguments as opportunity to jockey for position among their group.
Here's the thing: I am a mathematician, and I worked and argued with plenty of other women in math, tech and engineering, who tend to be more disagreeable (in terms of Big-5 personality traits) then women in general. The disagreeable women are no more likely to gently gravitate to consensus then the equally disagreeable men.
Meanwhile, when I worked with teachers (who tend to be more agreeable), I had employ extreme teaching techniques to encourage them to push back on another's asinine assertions, men as well as women.
On truth-seeking versus popular-ideas-seeking: engineers and techs are just as motivated to determine the truth, be they men or women, because in those fields, you test your ideas against reality, and reality doesn't care about the provenance of your ideas. Writers and philosophers are just as motivated to determine what will be popular (or better yet, viral), be they men or women, because in those fields, the test for your ideas is the potency of them as memes--how well your ideas compete for memetic space within your society (more importantly, the part of that society that determines your social status).
So I assert that the pattern you observe--that women tend to gravitate to popular opinions while men appear to seek the truth--is best explained by two factors:
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Women are more agreeable then men, in general;
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Men are more concentrated in fields where ideas are tested against reality, and women are more concentrated in fields where the value of ideas are in their memetic potency.
PS. This is also a response to @monoamine and @falling-star, giving an N = 1 sample for how a female Mottizen replies to the post.
hooser
1mo ago
That's a reasonable hypothesis. These three in particular were very well-adjusted young people with plenty of in-person friends, but maybe in general there is that feedback loop.
hooser
1mo ago
Let me generalize:
Suppose that it's costly and disadvantageous to be X. But there is a benefit to being X, in certain circumstances; in particular, there is the benefit of in-group support from other X-ers if one is a recognized X. If that's the sole benefit, then only the criteria set by these other X-ers matters. Either there is a way to for a non-X-er to join (restricted or now), or there isn't.
Now suppose that a powerful entity wants to benevolently help out the disadvantaged community of X. Then those who are not-recognized-X now have two different incentives for becoming recognized-X: in-group support, and/or a slice of the entity's largesse. If the form of that largesse is finite, then it incentivizes the already-recognized-X-ers to vigorously insist on the X-community criteria for recognition of X-ness. But the tighter those criteria are, and the higher the benefits flowing from the entity, the more likely someone not-recognized-X will insist that they're really X--to the entity or the larger community that entity is trying to impress with its benevolence--even if that gains them nothing from other X-ers but hostility.
So, I predict:
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If top Chinese universities institute affirmative action quotas for Uygurs, there will be applicants claiming to be Uygur without any documented Uygur ancestry but whose grandma traveled to Xinjiang that one time.
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If Medicaid becomes available to any recovering alcoholic, there will be applicants who insist they fit the bill because they used to make fools of themselves while tipsy at parties and are still embarrassed by that.
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If UCLA decides to give scholarships to furries, there will be applicants who say they qualify because they once dressed up as a sexy fox for Halloween.
hooser
1mo ago
Yes, most youths watch videos that are already viral. What I observed is that, even then, a lot of the time the youth's motivation for watching those videos is social. Either someone they know shared the video with them, or it's the video that other kids are talking about. "Fear of missing out" is a key driver here. Yes, a lot of it is just that stuff on their phones is much more interesting than the boring class, like videos and games. But a lot of it is social, and specifically social with the kids they know in-person rather than randos on the internet.
Once I was at this social gathering; my acquaintances brought their teens, the latter also friends. So the adults are all talking to each other, and these three teens are sitting quietly off in a corner, side-by-side, absorbed in their phones. So I watch them, and I see that occasionally one of them giggles, like out of the blue. I casually drift to their corner, peek at their phones. Sure 'nuf, they are texting each other, and sharing links. "Really?", I said, "y'all sitting next to each other, and still texting?" They just gave me this look, like, how-can-you-boomer-possibly-understand?
Kids these days.
hooser
1mo ago
The traditional music scenes where young people made up stuff themselves and performed live in front of other youth with no rules seems to be disappearing.
Wait, isn't that TikTok right now?
The middle school I volunteered at had to implement strict restrictions on cell phone use because the students were engrossed in social media, in particularly TikTok. From what I saw, the kids weren't merely passively consuming it. Quite a few posted their own videos, and a lot of the classroom distraction / disruption resulted from these locally-made posts rather than from viral videos. (Those happened too, of course.) That's youth communicating with one another and jockeying for status and recognition among themselves. Way more interesting than the official school curriculum. (Relevant Far Side cartoon.)
Thirty years ago, a way to impress other youths was to get start a band, or to know some good local bands, or to know a local spot where some good local bands would be playing. Now, a way to impress other youths is to post a video that goes viral (at least among your group), or to know someone whose video went viral, or to be plugged in to some less-known sites that share videos that may go viral and be the first to share those among your friends.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
hooser
1mo ago
My husband and I headed off a lot of potential conflict by writing our own marriage contract (nothing legal, more like a "memorandum of understanding" of what's important to us). One of the most useful agreements is that besides a shared bank account, we'd each have our own separate accounts. That saved a lot of problems: I can go into a used book store and come out with a stack, and he can order whatever esoteric electronic gadgets as he wants for his latest bike-improvement project, and no discussion need occur.
The biggest though didn't make it into the memo, but fortunately happened anyway: we have separate toilet rooms. Separate toilet rooms save marriages.
hooser
1mo ago
“I just had so many friends who were roofied by guys that they trusted,” Emie said. It never happened to her. But other girls told her about experiences where they blacked out on a night when they didn't drink much or woke up somewhere with no memory of getting there.
Let's talk about alcohol-induced blackouts, because I don't think people realize how widespread those experiences have become:
Blackouts tend to begin at blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) of about 0.16 percent (nearly twice the legal driving limit)
So, how quickly does a typical young woman reach such level of BAC? Well, the Department of Motor Vehicles puts out a helpful rule-of-thumb for half of that BAC (0.08):
4 drinks for women and 5 drinks for men—in about 2 hours.
The sex difference matters: women are smaller and have less muscle mass, which affects how quickly the body breaks down alcohol.
A typical sorority girl is probably smaller (lighter?) than an average US woman, and is more likely to not eat a heavy meal before going to a party, so I would guesstimate that 6 shots in 2 hours can easily bring the young lady over the 0.16 BAC limit. Six shots in two hours, that's just not that unusual. In fact, it's so not unusual that I would expect her friends to say "she didn't even drink all that much".
Do roofies exist and do men use them? I am willing to suppose so. But in my experience, blackouts are simply way, way more common.
hooser
1mo ago
The most obvious irony here is how she wrote an entire article to tell us about how the girl friendship is more meaningful than her old boyfriend and her's, but it's clear to anyone who read it that she had much more thought and feeling for Him than for Her.
Yeah, the article doesn't pass the Bechdel test. That's par for the course for Elle, if I correctly remember my brief interest in popular women's mags during my teenage years. The articles (such as they were, between pictures of simpering semi-nudes) alternated between how-to-get-your-man and you-don't-need-a-man-(but-you-do-need-these-shoes).
This isn't feminism in any meaningful sense of the word. Any decent feminist (or someone passing the ideological Turing test for one) would recognize this as an instance of internalized heteronormative cisgender patriarchy, and those more atuned to the zeitgeist would also spot the glaring colonialist paternalism.
(Weirdly enough, I think I can actually defend all those terms as they apply to the OP's summary of the article. I have no desire to read the article, because musings of a woman who realizes that an open relationship isn't so great lacks any element of surprise.)
hooser
1mo ago
US had something similar happen two decades ago: Ana Montes, the senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) responsible for Cuba (nicknamed "Queen of Cuba") turned out to spy for Cuba throughout her entire career at the DIA.
This situation isn't as ironic as it sounds. Cuba recruited Montes back when she was a college student, and persuaded her to go into the career that would be of most benefit. I am sure there were others, but this one happened to be the one that succeeded.
hooser
1mo ago
Because none of the trivialities of my day mean anything to anyone here I'll get to the point.
I love hearing the trivialities, you tell them well and they provide a humanizing dimension to the rest of your post. And this particular post is all about the challenges people have in humanizing their professional interactions, so very apropos.
I see that HR gets little love here, so I will defend them. The purpose of HR is to protect the company from the heat of human friction (metaphorically speaking). That means defusing interpersonal conflict when it may get out of hand, not escalating it.
For the most part, employees deal with normal interpersonal conflicts themselves, as people do. But occasionally someone can't, and it helps to have a clear process an employee can turn to. That's what a complaint to HR does, it starts this process. Someone from HR then hears that employee out, then thanks the employee for bringing the matter to HR's attention and assures her that the matter is handled. (The manner of that handling is confidential, but they'll assure her it's appropriate and in line with the company policy.)
HR does not burn a valuable manager over one temp worker's complaint for what she sees as a deviation from professional behavior.
hooser
1mo ago
The US movement to abolish the death penalty goes back to the 18th century, when multicultural considerations weren't a thing. I will leave this link to Perplexity's quick summary that has further links.
You are correct that currently people are concerned with the death penalty in part because it affects black men more than white men. (And that nobody cares that it affects white men more then Asian men or black women, etc.)
hooser
1mo ago
I'm going to disagree with Freddie on this one. Not about the two specific people he alludes to--for all I know his description is accurate there--but for his general observation of a trend in self-effacement among successful people.
Success is very, very relative, and the more successful you are in some way, the more keenly you are aware how much more successful some other people are in that same field. Unless you're literally the apex, and who knows even then. The inner view of being successful is very different from the outer view.
When I was studying math in grad school, I was keenly aware how much faster and more prepared some of my fellow grad students were. (I paid much less attention to the students who were slower and less prepared.) When I got my PhD, I was successful (in getting the PhD). And yay for me! But I also understood just how much of a near-miss that success was, and that among my cohort there were other newly-minted PhDs who had much more impressive accomplishments under their belts.
Then I got a tenure-track position at my first choice (a small selective liberal arts college). Again, yay for me! But I understood how much that depended on the very generous bump I got being a woman (which was even more pronounced back then). I got that bump in getting the interview (I know the other candidate, also a woman, which was statistically unlikely). I got the bump when I got into my PhD program--that was right around the time when all the math departments started getting serious about recruiting women. I got the bump earlier when, as an undergrad, I went to an NSA-funded summer program literally for women considering mathematics as a career, which generously funded travel to reunions every January at the Joint Math Meetings. The networking opportunities were so good that I got a network even though I suck at networking.
I could go on through other milestones, but I hope that by now I made my point. Yes, I succeeded, but I have an internal view of what that success entails, and how it compares to others in that same field. So if someone is impressed that I was a tenured math professor, my natural inclination isn't to run a victory lap.
PS. I do not have an impostor's syndrome. I figured that if I got accepted / hired / tenured and I wasn't up to stuff, that's their problem. If it didn't work out, I can always go make money.
hooser
1mo ago
Interesting Guardian article, thanks for posting! However, I don't see how it's different from using popular songs in enhanced interrogation. (I am supposing that those rooms were used similarly, which may not be the case.)
The Nikken Sekkei gymnasium evokes the moon craters, for me. I rather like it, but my one beef is that it looks too much like a rock-climbing gym without actually being one. Are the kids allowed to scale up those cratered walls?
When I think of bomb shelters, I think of metro stations in Kyiv (e.g.) because of the grade-school drills of taking shelter there in case of a nuclear attack.
I hear that US kids stopped doing hide-under-your-desk drills back in the 50's, but back in USSR we still did drills in the 80's. Kids-these-days have live-shooter drills, though, which provide much more vivid fodder for imagination.
hooser
1mo ago
Hey, kudos for rephrasing the can-architecture-be-evil post with such cool discussion questions! I love it when we can focus on concrete examples and delve into them.
If I had to choose one of the prison cells for myself, I would avoid #1 or #6, because bunk beds imply roommates. If I had to choose between those two, though: #6 is in a dilapitated condition, so likely that prison is (as the kids say these days) under-served; #1 is brand-spanking-new, so maybe that prison has more resources, so that's a plus in its favor. However, for sheer architecture, I would prefer #6 to #1 because the beds are the same low height, meaning that my roommate and I will have less conflict when choosing the beds.
Out of your other examples, I would choose #5 because it seems to have the most potential for solo exercise. I understand the point you are making in your order, but the dark reminiscent-of-midieval-dungeon coloring doesn't bother me, I actually find it soothing. (The bright coloring for #1 reminds me of hospitals, though that would depend on the smell.)
If instead I were a prison warden choosing the architecture for the inmates I will oversee, I would prefer the designs of #1, #2, or #6 because the furniture is built-in and looks fairly violence-proof. For comparison, #3 has all that loose furniture that an inmate can pick up and wield as a weapon.
As for "hostile architecture": I got a puppy. She chews on everything. To discourage her from chewing on the furniture, I spray a sour/bitter liquid on it--like hostile architecture, though less permanent (which is a drawback since I need to re-spray it). My spraying is "hostile" to my puppy's desire to chew on the furniture, but it's actually friendly in the sense that it guides her away from a behavior that causes friction with me.
hooser
2mo ago
Pew Research Center did a comprehensive poll in 2023 on spirituality (aside from religion) in US, with intention to periodically repeat it. They say that there aren't any good longitudinal surveys on the subject.
Glancing through the breakdowns on spiritual beliefs, there are indeed some gender differences once we get past the stuff of organized religion, like:
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85% women / 77% men: "there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it"
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on the flip side, 12% women / 21% men: "the natural world is all there is"
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22% of Americans are "spiritual but not religious".Among those, 57% women / 42 % men.
Nowadays, whenever I meet a woman or gay man who's millennial or younger, I'm counting the seconds until they ask me "so, what's your sign?"
Could it be that you're being subtly hit on? Asking "what's your sign" is a low-stakes maybe-flirt, in my observation. It's asking something about you that you probably don't mind sharing, general time of year when you're born, and it's a starter to a conversation about you (or your interlocutor) that is mildly personal.
Unless the ladies are pulling out star charts. That would bust my hypothesis.
hooser
2mo ago
If transferring a male convict to a women's prison was made conditional on their having undergone a penectomy/vaginoplasty, I imagine the policy would be much less controversial than it currently is, as it completely negates the possibility of the male in question raping a female inmate (possibly leading to pregnancy).
I would support that. We already have various levels of security for male prisoners (minimum / maximum levels). We can adjust the women's prison to be the meek-and-weak prison. Women who demonstrate a history of attacking other inmates can be transferred to the minimum security prison.
hooser
2mo ago
And yes you have people malingering so hard they'll cut their dick off if given the option.
Maybe that's a win, in a sense. If a male with sufficient propensity for violence or anti-social behavior chooses to castrate himself, I'd be happy if that procedure was paid for with taxes. I would be OK with the additional tax burden there.
hooser
2mo ago
Is plastic surgery an essential medical procedure that a Department of Corrections must pay for, if a prisoner is sufficiently distressed about it? And if a M-to-F transwoman undergoes full reassignment surgery, will that prisoner be transferred to women's prison in due course?
A federal judge ruled the Indiana Department of Correction's ban on gender-affirming care is likely unconstitutional, and an inmate from Evansville is at the center of the lawsuit.
The prisoner (neé Jonathan Richardson, now Autumn Cordellioné) is serving a 55-year sentence for almost two decades for killing one's baby stepdaughter. The prisoner was diagnosed with gender dysphoria four years ago and put on testosterone blocker and female hormone.
While the medicine has helped, the lawsuit states Cordellioné continues to experience symptoms of gender dysphoria including depression and anxiety. [...] Cordellioné was on a wait list for evaluation for the surgery, but a new Indiana statute does not allow the DOC to provide or facilitate "sexual reassignment surgery." The ACLU [representing Cordellioné] argues in its suit that for some, the surgery is a medical necessity. In this case, Cordellioné is seeking a orchiectomy, which removes the testicles, and vaginoplasty, which is the construction of the vagina.
"By prohibiting the surgery, regardless of medical need, the statute mandates deliberate indifference to a serious medical need and therefore violates the Eighth Amendment," the suit states. "Additionally, the statute discriminates against Plaintiff and other transgender prisoners in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution."
The judge agreed, issued a preliminary injunction against the Indiana statute in question.
Here's a summary of the statute (HEA 1569, passed in 2023) that perplexity.ai provided:
It prohibits the Indiana Department of Corrections from performing certain surgical procedures for the purpose of altering the appearance or affirming an inmate's gender identity if it's inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth. Specifically, the law bans the following procedures [gives a list including castration and vaginoplasty, and in general removing healthy tissue or non-diseased body part].: The law does not define "gender" or "sex" but appears to use "sex" to refer to an individual's sex assigned at birth.
The law doesn't prohibit hormone therapy (which the prisoner got) or social transitioning:
The lawsuit states Cordellioné has lived as a woman to the "extent possible" while in a prison housing only men. She has been permitted gender-affirming items such as makeup and "form fitting clothing."
I will put aside for now how utterly annoying I find the assumption that, to be a woman, one wears makeup and form-fitting clothes. By all means fellas, go all 17th-century Versailles. My main question is this: if the Indiana Department of Corrections is required accommodate "gender-affirming" transitions, including the extreme surgeries of removing testicles and shaping the penis to look like a vagina, wouldn't the reasonable next step be to affirm the prisoner's womanhood by placing the prisoner in women's correctional facilities?
(My husband said that if he ever had to go to prison and there was an option to go to women's prison rather than men's, his only question is: what needs to be chopped off and how soon?)
Let me end on a controversial (for The Motte) note: maybe I simply shouldn't care. Cordellioné has been in prison since early 2000, which makes the person at least 40. So even if I don't see this person as a woman, this is a middle-aged male on testosterone blockers with some serious surgeries between his legs. How dangerous would he really be to the female prisoners, compared to other female prisoners already serving there?
hooser
2mo ago
some of the furries in the videos he watched were depicted as minors as young as age 16
How old were they in dog years?
(Asking for a friend...)
EDIT: This could be cougar porn
hooser
2mo ago
Soviet brutalist architecture can be very apt: consider in particular the Kyiv Crematorium (halfway down the list).
Looking forward to the post, and best of luck with building up that immune system!
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