site banner
PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   26710 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/

It's hard to trust Scientific American when they mix communicating real, good science with blatant contradictory nonsense. Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances. But then it also has a this paragraph about gender vs sex.

Before getting into the evidence, we need to first talk about sex and gender. "Sex" typically refers to biological sex, which can be defined by myriad characteristics such as chromosomes, hormone levels, gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The terms "female" and "male" are often used in relation to biological sex. "Gender" refers to how an individual identifies—woman, man, nonbinary, and so forth. Much of the scientific literature confuses and conflates female/male and woman/man terminology without providing definitions to clarify what it is referring to and why those terms were chosen. For the purpose of describing anatomical and physiological evidence, most of the literature uses "female" and "male," so we use those words here when discussing the results of such studies. For ethnographic and archaeological evidence, we are attempting to reconstruct social roles, for which the terms "woman" and "man" are usually used. Unfortunately, both these word sets assume a binary, which does not exist biologically, psychologically or socially. Sex and gender both exist as a spectrum, but it is difficult to add that nuance when citing the work of others.

How many pre-historic humans would actually have any seperation between the concept of a "female" and a "woman"? Not to mention they way they actually bring up "women in social roles" doesn't acknowledge their own distinction- you're never going to get a pregnant trans women, but you could get a pregnant trans men. We don't know anything about "gender" as progressives view it in pre-historic societies- we only know about sex, what we observe through things like skeletal remains and inferences from behaviour of human-like animals. The article would've done better to solely use female and male the whole way through and not try to seperate sex and gender.

Later, there's a paragraph about how athletic studies don't do enough research on females that wasn't relevant to anything else in the article. A non-sequitor that wasn't relevant to the article since we do know enough about female biology to determine their relative advantages and weaknesses at physical activities compared to men.

The article does have some good informative material in it.

Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles—marbling if you will—which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males.

Correspondingly, the muscle fibers of females differ from those of males. Females have more type I, or "slow-twitch," muscle fibers than males do. These fibers generate energy slowly by using fat. They are not all that powerful, but they take a long time to become fatigued. They are the endurance muscle fibers. Males, in contrast, typically have more type II ("fast-twitch") fibers, which use carbohydrates to provide quick energy and a great deal of power but tire rapidly.

Females also tend to have a greater number of estrogen receptors on their skeletal muscles compared with males. This arrangement makes these muscles more sensitive to estrogen, including to its protective effect after physical activity. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues.

But then later it had this infamous paragraph:

Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves."

I had never seen that paragraph in context before. Knowing the context, that they just explained the inherent biological differences, then denied them right after, makes it worse! Right after they broke down in detail how females have hormones and muscles built for stamina over power! The reason why male pacesetters aren't allowed for women's endurance running is because the male pacesetter would be setting the pace too fast for the women, who are built for going a longer distance at a slower pace than men, as they had literally just explained earlier in the article.

They also downplay the evidence that "Man the Hunter" was accurate, but at least they include it.

Males living in the Upper Paleolithic—the cultural period between roughly 45,000 and 10,000 years ago, when early modern humans entered Europe—do show higher rates of a set of injuries to the right elbow region known as thrower's elbow, which could mean they were more likely than females to throw spears. But it does not mean women were not hunting, because this period is also when people invented the bow and arrow, hunting nets and fishing hooks. These more sophisticated tools enabled humans to catch a wider variety of animals; they were also easier on hunters' bodies. Women may have favored hunting tactics that took advantage of these new technologies.

In conclusion, their own conclusion perfectly demonstrates their own double think:

Female physiology is optimized for exactly the kinds of endurance activities involved in procuring game animals for food. And ancient women and men appear to have engaged in the same foraging activities rather than upholding a sex-based division of labor. It was the arrival some 10,000 years ago of agriculture, with its intensive investment in land, population growth and resultant clumped resources, that led to rigid gendered roles and economic inequality.

They claim at the same time that females are biologically optimized to perform certain activities better than males, but also that females and males performed the exact same activities in an egalitarian society.

A lot of old anthropology like the original "Man the Hunter" article this article is a response to, is flawed. But at the same time, modern anthropology is just as if not more biased than the anthropology of the 60s. Their intro has a line saying,

Bystanders might be left wondering whether portrayals of women hunters are trying to make the past more inclusive than it really was—or whether Man the Hunter-style assumptions about the past are attempts to project sexism backward in time.

The reason why bystanders are so confused is because that's exactly what organizations like Scientific American are trying to do. If they really were just trying to correct a mistaken historical record, bystanders who don't do deep dives into human pre-history could safely trust pop sci and wouldn't be so skeptical. But when Scientific American blatantly tries to push an agenda, bystanders rightly grow skeptical.

You can see check ultra marathoner times, they aren't even close. My sister and her husband are ultra marathoners, it's so insulting to woman runners to insinuate that they're just not trying hard enough. The idea that women are choosing to use slower pace setters acts as if these really competitive athletes who spend dozens to hundreds of hours a week practicing their sport just decide they don't care enough to optimize something that's supposed to explain like 20-30% differences in times? Really?

I am feeling second-hand shame right now. How did Scientific American stoop down to the level of "Black people in medieval Bohemia"?

It's literally the same quality of discourse: your game has zero Africans in it, but here's a couple references that show that medieval Bohemians have been exposed to the concept of dark-skinned people, therefore showing rural Bohemia as having zero Africans is wrong. Except it's of course 99.99% correct to have exactly zero Africans in a story that doesn't involve an Ethiopian mission or an Ottoman sultan's harem.

Not this again, this whole furore over man the hunter is so fucked. Here is my recreation of a conversation I had with my SIL on the subject:

"Why does anyone give a shit if men hunted more than women or vice versa?"

"Well because hunting implies agency and strength and therefore prestige! Which is more admirable - keeping the village fed and safe by killing dangerous creatures or keeping the village fed and safe by gathering crops and keeping people clothed and healthy?"

"You already know my answer."

"Both are valuable, but you only value hunting more because of your patriarchal ideals! Gathering is just as valuable!"

"No, I value truth and if gathering was just as valuable as hunting it would have been deemed just as valuable as hunting in matriarchal societies, which doesn't seem to be the case. And it seems by your own admission that hunting is more valuable than gathering, if it wasn't you wouldn't care who did what except out of curiosity and you would feel as confused about all of this as I do."

"But how much of that is our own internalisation of patriarchal concepts? Besides if you think about it, hunting isn't just stabbing tigers with spears, it also includes trapping rabbits and sharpshooting quail and fishing and if you include that kind of hunting women did plenty of it, so women were hunters too!"

"Ok yeah, I guess women did lots of hunting if you redefine hunting. Wouldn't it be easier to just not value hunting more?"

"That's easy for you to say, you're a man."

thinking "If I were luckier a meteor would drop from the sky right now and wipe life off the planet."

Damn, that’s obnoxious.

Perhaps I should add to the list of things I’m grateful for—that I generally don’t have such female biological or in-law family members who shit-talk as such. Much less male members.

My female in-laws (wives of my male biological family members) are generally quite respectful.

Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances.

I believe that this claim relies on cherry-picking a few individual races. If you look at records for various distances and times, the male record in every event is better than the female record.

A related article (that I've unfortunately lost) found that women are faster at Ultramarathons based on selection effects: the women who enter those races without professional sponsorship are faster than the men who enter those races without professional sponsorship. You should expect to see the median female racer finishing before the median male racer, and the slowest racers (whether they finish or not) will likely be men.

It's an important finding for race organizers who want to know how long to keep the finish line staffed, but that's not how it was discussed on social media.

I think the whole thing stinks of presentism. The thing I observe about history is that the farther back you go, the more literal people seem to take things. In ancient texts, probably up until really Islam, the idea of Gos was pretty physical. Any God you care to read about has a body. They eat and drink, they occasionally come down to earth and walk around, even in descriptions of the afterlife, it’s physical, a garden or a city, or people eating good food and having drinks and so on.

And even in other forms of thought. It just doesn’t seem like up until Plato or Socrates that there was any sort of meta analysis going on. No real thought about categories or how to think about the world. It was all very much rooted in practical, realistic, and everyday sort of concerns. I can’t say that any ancient human in the Bronze Age ever thought about whether or not animals thought, or what makes a woman a woman.

As such, I don’t think modern ideas like sexuality or sex/gender descriptions are even possible n the remote past. The ideas are simply too abstract and complicated for a mind that deals mostly in the here, now, and the physical. It’s a product of our time, something we do because we are used to meta thinking and abstractions and symbolic thinking. We are no longer bound to what we can see and touch. In fact I suspect that AI is starting the next level of abstraction for human minds. Not just dealing in logical and symbolic abstract reasoning, but thinking about how we think, and thinking about what kinds of thinking will do the most good.

In ancient texts, probably up until really Islam, the idea of Gos was pretty physical. Any God you care to read about has a body. They eat and drink, they occasionally come down to earth and walk around, even in descriptions of the afterlife, it’s physical, a garden or a city, or people eating good food and having drinks and so on.

Are you sure about this? I've been doing a bunch of research on Plato for personal reasons recently, and this really doesn't match up with what he seemed to believe. From my reading of ancient religions, I get the impression that a lot of ancient people understood religious myths as metaphorical, and they most definitely understood the importance of symbols and symbolic meanings - just look at the Eleusinian mysteries.

I can’t say that any ancient human in the Bronze Age ever thought about whether or not animals thought

They don't quite date back to the Bronze Age, but the Pythagoreans came before Plato and were famous for their belief in the transmigration of souls, and advocated vegetarianism on the basis that inflicting suffering on a living being unnecessarily diminished the human soul. Those concepts also showed up in the early Orphic religions as well, to the point that several authors said that Pythagoras was just repeating what he'd learned from them.

, or what makes a woman a woman.

The story of Tiresias directly presents an example of someone changing sex but retaining their identity as a man (despite giving birth to a daughter) and then returning to masculinity. Just to be clear I'm not saying that they would endorse modern gender ideology, but they most definitely understood the idea that you could have an inner self whose gender/sex didn't match up with your body.

Are you sure about this? I've been doing a bunch of research on Plato for personal reasons recently, and this really doesn't match up with what he seemed to believe. From my reading of ancient religions, I get the impression that a lot of ancient people understood religious myths as metaphorical, and they most definitely understood the importance of symbols and symbolic meanings - just look at the Eleusinian mysteries.

The people and faith clearly could think metaphorically or as God as a transcendent being before Islam.

@MaiqTheTrue is probably right in the sense that if you wanted to pick up the canonical texts and not run into an embodied God you'd fail with the OT and NT (assuming Jesus is God). They have a lot of language about an embodied God - just as they have more transcendent visions - because the books were written over a long time and don't agree with each other or even themselves.

Islam as a late redaction that emphasizes strict monotheism can cut out a lot of the embarrassing references (when the author even knows about them). It polemicizes against the other religions because of this too. Qur'an 5:75 rejects the deification of Jesus and Mary (why Mary is added is a question for another day) by pointing out that they can't be deities because they "both ate food".

This isn't going to phase any Christian that believes in the Trinity and Jesus' nature as both man and God and you'd think the divine author of the Qur'an would know that but w/e.

Well, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that re: the Christian texts.

Jesus is treated as a taking on of flesh by a God who is not material. And the old testament has things like Jeremiah's, "Do I not fill heaven and earth?" among others. I'd be inclined to argue the deliberate lack of depiction in the design of the ark etc. is gesturing towards God's immateriality as well, which would make it hard to argue that it's some late development. The New Testament, at least, you can't pass off as a contradiction between different authors. It's just a more complex position.

Yeah, Jesus' eating food isn't a problem; the contrary position would be worse, in light of Hebrews 2:14 and 17.

This isn't going to phase any Christian that believes in the Trinity and Jesus' nature as both man and God and you'd think the divine author of the Qur'an would know that but w/e

Interestingly, Islamic doctrine contains quite a bit of self-contradictory falsehood about what Christians believe. In Mohammed’s time there were definitely Christians in Arabia, so it’s unclear why.

Not just Christians. There's the claim that Jews think Ezra is the son of God that people have puzzled over since.

The likely reason is that the author didn't have the Bible in front of him but was going off oral tradition (which explains the stew of both canonical sources and apocryphal ones, and straight up legendary elements or how the Qur'an could conflate two Marys). Reynolds also suggests that the author is weighing in on theological debates nearby churches had, things could have become extra garbled by disagreement by the time they got to the author.

Mohammed’s time is too late for massive theological disagreement- my main point was ‘the Quran is definitely not dictated by the angel Gabriel, and probably not double checked either(like the kind of book an illiterate man makes up)’.

There are a lot of Christians in America today, but there are a ton of false beliefs (both by non Christians and even sometimes by other Christians) about what they believe. I'm not too surprised that sort of thing happened in Mohammed's time as well.

Wikipedia tells me that Scientific American is published by Springer Nature, a German British publishing house.

Which means that, like the Holy Roman Empire, Scientific American is neither Scientific, nor American.

Or perhaps I should say was, because the magazine's slide into political propaganda hasn't gone unnoticed, and perhaps the editor resigning last month for calling Trump voters fascists was the woke wave cresting. I can't imagine many of the actual contributors to the magazine are happy to have their bylines on a publication that thinks men and women are equally good at sports.

I can't imagine many of the actual contributors to the magazine are happy to have their bylines on a publication that thinks men and women are equally good at sports.

Funnily enough, I was rereading this Hanania post yesterday, and he touches on the curious observation that many academics working in hard, rigorous disciplines don't seem to be that embarrassed to be working in the same profession (or even in the same university) as the woo peddlers in the assorted _____ Studies departments. Of course people who are visibly, publicly embarrassed about this phenomenon exist, but they seem far from the majority of people working in these fields. Hanania has an interesting theory as to why.

Not commenting on the political aspects, but it seems like they covered way more benefits of estrogen than they did benefits of testosterone. This irks me because it reminds me of all those nutrition articles that praise one food's benefits, like how uniquely special quinoa is because it has magnesium, this, that, etc. When you could write the same exact article replacing "quinoa" for some other food, because there's tons of foods with identical or better nutrient profiles. Anyway:

You can't just list the cellular and global benefits of estrogen and not list the same benefits of testosterone. Testosterone has to be just as if not more muscle-sparing than estrogen. It is interesting and probably true that estrogen would shift fuel source more to fat, which does sound useful for very long-distance events, but just like women have more estrogen receptors and all the benefits that come with it, men have more testosterone receptors and all the benefits that come along with it, benefits that I could imagine would be relevant to hunting as well. The article doesn't seem to be doing a fair comparison.

For one, male-levels of testosterone uniquely allow tendon and ligament CSA to increase from exercise, which is injury-protective. Bone and muscle CSA will be larger, and fast-twitch muscles and power will be useful for certain game. I think it depends on what kind of game you are chasing, and whether you're going to run 100+ miles or maybe just a marathon or maybe just a short distance, idk.

It is interesting and probably true that estrogen would shift fuel source more to fat, which does sound useful for very long-distance events

My understanding (and it might be bro-science) is that for very long distance events, you're not using either stored fat or glycogen for most of it; you're using what you take in, so your limit is how much you can eat and absorb.

This is correct. Running a marathon is essentially incompatible with doing a keto diet. Throughout the marathon, all the runners will be doing their damnedest to guzzle as much glucose and isotonic drinks as they can stomach without puking and/or shitting themselves. Hitting the wall is the point in the marathon at which you've exhausted your supply of carbs and must burn fat instead, at which keeping to any kind of reasonable pace is effectively impossible.

This irks me because it reminds me of all those nutrition articles that praise one food's benefits, like how uniquely special quinoa is because it has magnesium, this, that, etc. When you could write the same exact article replacing "quinoa" for some other food, because there's tons of foods with identical or better nutrient profiles.

The good news is that LLMs exist now, and you can write those articles about other, non-trendy foods too! Just imagine, "6 Reasons Why Rutabagas Are An Underrated Superfood". Be the change you fear to see in the world.

Just for fun I asked: https://chatgpt.com/share/6773255e-8f74-8004-915d-56088ff34dc2

I'm not going to include the whole thing here so as not to fall afoul of the rules.

Now I want to get me some rutabagas...

Please list 6 Reasons Why Rutabagas Are An Underrated Superfood

Result (Copilot):

Rutabagas are indeed an underrated superfood, packed with a variety of nutrients and health benefits. Here are six reasons why you should consider adding them to your diet:

  1. Rich in Nutrients: Rutabagas are a great source of vitamins and minerals, including vitamin C, vitamin E, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. These nutrients support immune function, bone health, and overall well-being.
  2. High in Fiber: Rutabagas are high in dietary fiber, which helps promote healthy digestion, prevent constipation, and maintain a healthy weight by keeping you feeling full for longer.
  3. Low in Calories: Despite being rich in nutrients, rutabagas are low in calories. This makes them an excellent choice for those looking to maintain or lose weight without sacrificing essential nutrients.
  4. Antioxidant Properties: Rutabagas contain antioxidants, such as vitamin C and beta-carotene, which help protect your cells from damage caused by free radicals and reduce the risk of chronic diseases.
  5. Supports Heart Health: The potassium in rutabagas can help regulate blood pressure and reduce the risk of heart disease. Additionally, their high fiber content supports healthy cholesterol levels.
  6. Versatile in the Kitchen: Rutabagas can be used in a variety of dishes, from soups and stews to roasted vegetables and mashed sides. Their slightly sweet and earthy flavor adds depth and nutrition to many recipes.

Next time you're grocery shopping, don't forget to give rutabagas a try! Your body will thank you.

Recently, I was linked to an anti-Cybertruck viral song clip. I fed a related prompt to an AI and got better lyrics that referenced specific issues I had heard about (rust, frame strength, windows, angular appearance) in one attempt:

There once was a truck that sailed the streets,
The Cybertruck, with angles neat,
But oh, the folks, they did not cheer,
For the truck was quite a sight to fear.

Oh, the Cybertruck, it came to town,
With a body made of steel so brown,
But the people said, "It's just too strange,
We'd rather have a truck that's plain."

The windows cracked, the body bent,
The Cybertruck, it made a dent,
In the hopes of those who dreamed,
Of a truck that wasn't so extreme.

[Chorus]

The design was bold, the look was new,
But the Cybertruck, it split the view,
Some folks loved, but many frowned,
As the truck rolled through the town.

[Chorus]

So here's a tale of a truck so grand,
That tried to change the auto land,
But in the end, it couldn't sway,
The hearts of those who walked away.

[Chorus]

Others have already discussed the merits of this article as a piece of science communication (or rather, lack thereof). If anything, it is proof positive of how little time progressive science writers spend around pregnant women. I will point out that the article provides receipts that are useful to counter another kind of propaganda.

TERFs like to engage in a particular kind of revisionist history that claims that men in women's sports are yet another insidious ploy by the patriarchy to keep women down. When confronted with the argument that men in women's sports are simply the natural outcome of decades of feminist propaganda claiming that any and all biological differences that disfavour women are the product of a misogynistic culture and nothing else, they employ the usual gaslighting: Nobody thinks that, you are delusional, it didn't happen and if it did that's a good thing.

To have the Scientific American authoritatively state that "Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports." is quite the trump in that discussion. It will be countered by No-True-Scotsmanning of course, but that's the way of things.

TERFs like to engage in a particular kind of revisionist history that claims that men in women's sports are yet another insidious ploy by the patriarchy to keep women down. When confronted with the argument that men in women's sports are simply the natural outcome of decades of feminist propaganda claiming that any and all biological differences that disfavour women are the product of a misogynistic culture and nothing else, they employ the usual gaslighting: Nobody thinks that, you are delusional, it didn't happen and if it did that's a good thing.

I don't necessarily think this is a good characterization of TERFs.

There is not just one "feminism" - it is a bunch of different ideologies with different starting premises, and different conclusions about what is to be done. While there's variety within so-called "TERFs", many of the people who get called TERFs that I'm familiar with online tend to be of the opinion that "the thing that makes you a woman is the combination of being a biological female in a world run by biological men, with all that entails." (AKA difference feminism as opposed to equality feminism.)

Now, I do acknowledge that TERFs themselves are a diverse group, and if I had to break down the TERF pie based on what I've read and seen, I would imagine that the grouping consists of some combination of the following:

  • "Old school" difference feminists who were fighting for feminism in the 1960's through 1980's, and whose beliefs just haven't moved on since then. (Think Janice Raymond and her book The Transsexual Empire.) Some of these are the only actual "radical feminists" in the TERF camp.
  • Modern difference feminists who often started as postmodern feminists or equality feminists, and who were "burned" in some way by those movements. (Either they had a string of blackpilling relationships with men that soured them on mainstream liberal feminism, or they were cancelled or ostracized and then ended up in a bubble that made their views more "radical" over time.)
  • A small handful of social conservatives LARPing as feminists. Could be grifters, could be an example of horseshoe theory.
  • A small handful of postmodern feminists, who, as /u/RococoBasilica suggests, believe almost everything progressive gender-focused feminism believes, but who arrive at the conclusion that transwomen are another form of patriarchal male oppression.

Maybe this is a subset of your first group, but also transhumanist weirdos like Shulamith Firestone. That's what radical feminist used to mean, but like almost any term that gets politicized, it's been mangled so often so many different ways that nowadays it basically means whatever the speaker wants it to, like Carrol's Humpty Dumpty.

I mean, sure. But that distinction is about as meaningful as the difference between a groyper and a Christian Nationalist is to a California progressive.

A movement is what it does. And what feminism does, despite all protestations to the contrary, is to decrease the cost of women's actions and expand the extent of female privileges (almost always at the expense of men). What those privileges are varies depending on which feminists do the feministing and may range from unearned professorships to higher salaries for professional soccer players. Thus, "difference" becomes important when circumstances particular to the female condition demand special attention (and resources), while "equality" is the rallying cry when it comes to "equalizing" the spoils men and women are entitled to (without ever equalizing the corresponding duties). That another kind of woman, namely that of the Y-chromosome variety, has hacked that system is somewhat amusing. It is also the reason wokeness seems to have peaked for now. It is still legacy women who call the shots and you cannot go against their interests for all too long.

Doing a quick perusal of atleast one of the authors of the article in question makes it pretty clear this is just political axe-grinding in the form on a scientific article.

Either that, or she's completely and utterly delusional.

(I'm trying to be nice here, but if you claim to be an amateur powerlifter and then turn around and say that physical differences in men and women are simply due to culture, I'm going to question your sanity.)

Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves."

This right here tells me all I need to know about these two authors. I immediately knew they were women and what their political beliefs are. The fact that this Twitter clap back SJW style writing made it into a publication like this is infuriating.

Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.

There's no way they can actually believe this. Like this is so obviously not true. But if they did, this is literally Alex Jones tier thinking because if veers off into insane conspiracies. It doesn't map onto reality.

It was the arrival some 10,000 years ago of agriculture, with its intensive investment in land, population growth and resultant clumped resources, that led to rigid gendered roles and economic inequality.

You can really see Marx's influence in academia here. This is just basically saying the superstructure arises from and is shaped by the economic base. There is some truth to this, but they take it way too far. One of the worst examples of this is with the Atlantic Slave Trade. There is this meme that Europeans didn't see race until the economics of the New World and the Age of Discovery demanded it. This is obviously not true though because when Europeans first encountered sub-Saharan Africans, we have some of their writings and they already considered them inferior pagans before the discovery of the New World. It wasn't economics that drove this belief. Or when they try to tie the modern day conception of race to economics here. It's basically tautological. Europeans didn't have a conception of race because they didn't really interact with other races. Or if they did, it was Arabs and Berbers who look very similar to them anyway. Despite what you see in movies and video games today, Europeans had very little contact with black people so of course they didn't have an opinion on them

A recent study of ethnographic data spanning the past 100 years—much of which was ignored by Man the Hunter contributors—found that women from a wide range of cultures hunt animals for food. Abigail Anderson and Cara Wall-Scheffler, both then at Seattle Pacific University, and their colleagues reported that 79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters.

An article from 2020 about that:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/early-women-were-hunters-not-just-gatherers-study-suggests-180982459/

Their analysis revealed that regardless of maternal status, women hunted in 50 of these societies—or about 79 percent. And more than 70 percent of female hunting appeared to be intentional—rather than opportunistically killing animals while doing other activities, per the study. In societies where hunting was the most important activity for subsistence, women participated in hunting 100 percent of the time.

“The hunting was purposeful,” Wall-Scheffler tells NPR. “Women had their own tool kit. They had favorite weapons. Grandmas were the best hunters of the village.”

The researchers also found that women played an active role in teaching hunting, and they used a wider variety of weapons and hunting strategies than men did. For example, while men tended to hunt alone or in pairs, women hunted alone, with a man or with groups of women, children or dogs. Women hunted small game in 46 percent of the studied societies and took down medium or large game in 48 percent of them. In 4 percent of societies, they hunted game of all sizes.

I mean, Artemis is after all a female goddess: (2nd century statue copied from a Greek original dating to 330 BCE). And as Thomas Carlyle meant to say, the real use of bow & arrow is to make all humans tall.
https://www.worldhistory.org/uploads/images/10157.jpg

Plus the easiest way of hunting animals is trapping. You don't need to be strong or athletic endurance to catch squirrels and rabbits with snares. Look at this boy trapping birds, which is so stupidly easy probably even a girl could do it as long as she isn't vegan and doesn't mind being cruel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapping#/media/File:34-caccia_tortore,Taccuino_Sanitatis,_Casanatense_4182..jpg

I don't know how to interpret the statement "Grandmas were the best hunters in the village", but I imagine their hunting looks less like battling a grizzly and more like these Aborigines finding a lizard (from 2:50), Also an example for opportunistically killing animals:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iP7Nn3whUTo&t=160

That said:
I wonder about the math here. If in 46% of foraging societies women hunt small game and in 48% larger game and then 4% all sizes how does that result in 79% of societies with women hunting? And I wonder what the total calories provided are. Was it more a novelty thing women did when they were bored or out of necessity or was hunting their sole profession? I read the book about the Pirahã in the Amazon (who have this strange language without recursion which refutes Noam Chomskys central thesis) and the role of the man was mainly to fish on canoes in the river (protein, every day staple meal) and going into the jungle to hunt was done less often because it was more dangerous and also you could come home empty handed to your disappointed wife and hungry children (but if you brought meat you were the king of the village and shared with everyone) and the women digged for vegetables/tubers (carbohydrates, also everyday staple food).

You Americans have more stories about Native/Indian American tribes, how and what did Native/Indian women hunt?

You Americans have more stories about Native/Indian American tribes, how and what did Native/Indian women hunt?

I was taught in school that Indian men would catch up with and shoot the buffaloes on horseback, then the women would follow along behind and pitch camp wherever the buffaloes died(because they’re too heavy to drag back to camp), including butchering them onsite. This idea is sufficiently widespread in American culture that mass media about Indians features masculine hunters refusing to clean their own game even when it’s completely different tribes, eg those in the northeast, hunting different game.

Artemis is after all a female goddess

So is Athena. Yet there are remarkably few women among Greek strategoi.

Sure, but doesn't Aeneas encounter a young Carthaginian huntress (who is actually his mom Aphrodite in disguise)?

His mother met him herself, among the trees, with the face

and appearance of a virgin, and a virgin’s weapons,

a Spartan girl, or such as Harpalyce of Thrace,

who wearies horses, and outdoes winged Hebrus in flight.

For she’d slung her bow from her shoulders, at the ready,

like a huntress, and loosed her hair for the wind to scatter,

her knees bare, and her flowing tunic gathered up in a knot.

And she cried first: ‘Hello, you young men, tell me,

if you’ve seen my sister wandering here by any chance,

wearing a quiver, and the hide of a dappled lynx,

or shouting, hot on the track of a slavering boar?’

And later

Then Venus said: ‘I don’t think myself worthy of such honours:

it’s the custom of Tyrian girls to carry a quiver,

and lace our calves high up, over red hunting boots.

While this could be a fantastical detail imagined by Virgil, I don't find it hard to believe at all that some places around the Mediterranean might have had a tradition of women hunting, and this potentially contributing to Artemis being a huntress.

Hunting wasn’t particularly gendered in medieval Europe, either. But Greco-Roman depictions of hunting invariably show men doing it, and it’s gendered at least a bit in modern cultures.

2024 study critiquing the many methodological errors in that study:

Female Foragers Sometimes Hunt, Yet Gendered Divisions of Labor Are Real: A Comment on Anderson et al. (2023), The Myth of Man the Hunter

We have outlined several conceptual and methodological concerns with the analysis of Anderson et al. (2023). Specifically, the Anderson et al. (2023) analysis is not reproducible because their sampling criteria are not clear and 35% of the societies in their sample do not come from D-PLACE, the database they claim was the source of all the societies in their sample. Moreover, these 35% were heavily biased toward societies that they coded as ones in which women hunt. Many other societies with extensive information on hunting are also not in D-PLACE yet were not included in their analysis, and authoritative sources on hunting in the societies in the Anderson et al. (2023) sample were not consulted. Additionally, there are at least 18 societies in D-PLACE with information on hunting that were inexplicably omitted from their analysis, none of which provide evidence for women hunters.

Finally, there were numerous coding errors. Of the 50/63 (79%) societies that Anderson et al. (2023) coded as ones in which women hunt, for example, our recoding found that women rarely or never hunted in 16/50 (32%); we also found 2 false negatives. Overall, we found evidence in the biased Anderson et al. (2023) data set that in 35/63 (56%) societies, women hunt “Sometimes” or “Frequently”. Moreover, compared to the 17/63 (27%) socie- ties in which women were claimed to hunt big game regularly, our recoding found that this was true for only 9/63 (14%). A precise estimate of women’s hunting in foraging societies must await a future thorough and unbiased analysis of the ethnographic record (see, e.g., Hoffman, Farquharson, & Venkataraman, 2024), but it is certainly far less than the Anderson et al. (2023) estimate and is very unlikely to overturn the current view that it is relatively uncommon.

The fundamental issue is that women’s hunting is not a binary phenomenon, and treating it as such, especially with a very low threshold for classifying a society as one in which women hunt, obfuscates gendered divisions of labor within groups.

Venkataraman also wrote this on his page:

http://www.vivekvenkataraman.com/blog/2023/7/5/debunking-a-debunking

we found that reports of women’s hunting were genuinely rare.

Most reported prey sizes are small- or medium-sized. Of the cases that do involve large-game hunting by women, some pertain to whale hunting; some involve firearms and/or dogs; some occur in the context of husband-wife pairs in which women contribute to hunting success indirectly; some involve cases of women hunting large game alone out after the death of their husbands; other instances of large-game hunting are explicitly stated by the ethnographer to be very rare. This is not to say that these are not cases of large-game hunting, but the broader context of their occurrence casts suspicion on them as cultural regularities. This provides a starkly different picture of women’s hunting in these societies compared to the analysis of Anderson et al (2023).

Shit like this is why I put 0 value on a very large number of humanities fields. They should be told to either clean up their rooms and get in good shape or else we will defund them completely.

The focus on amount of muscle fiber feels like pilpul. They are trying to get away with a distraction that ignores the elephant in the room, what about breasts? Breasts are undeniable evidence for sex (not gender) based division of labor. And unsurprisingly we generally find women doing the kinds of activities that are suited to performing with an infant on your hip occasionally nursing, slow moving activities in and around the home. I have to imagine in premodern times, before the advent of birth control that women were more or less either nursing or pregnant for most of their adult lives.

But it does not mean women were not hunting, because this period is also when people invented the bow and arrow, hunting nets and fishing hooks. These more sophisticated tools enabled humans to catch a wider variety of animals; they were also easier on hunters' bodies. Women may have favored hunting tactics that took advantage of these new technologies.

The fact that they seem to be counting fishing and setting nets as hunting seems like BS. While it is maybe technically true in a sense it obviously doesn't contradict the idea conjured up when one says "men were the hunters". I wonder if this is behind their uncited study of Agta people and they are counting insect gathering or fishing with a hook and line as hunting.

Are you sure the women are doing the nursing? This graphic in the article clearly shows that men have more muscle mass because they habe to carry infants around:

https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/2023/saw1123Ocob32_m.jpg

Men outperform women in short distance events. And endurance events. And ultra-endurance events. That women dominate the Montane Spine is a flat-out lie. Or that they dominate swimming the English Channel. Or the Trans-Am bike race.

They also seem to forget that the women would have been pregnant a large portion of the time.

Also performance enhancing drugs have made many of the female pro athletes barely female.

I believe men are innately vastly more competitive than women. A man who trains for 50 000 hours will probably beat a woman who's trained for 5 000, even if she has a biological advantage.

The fact that women show up in the top ranks of ultra-endurance competitions at all, where as for the vast majority of other competitive events the top ranked woman will often be ranked like #203 or somewhere thereabouts, I think is strong evidence they have a real biological advantage.

For these ultra-distance events (unlike, say, a local 5K), you're already selecting among the most competitive. No one's doing the Montane Spine (particularly the Winter Spine) without a lot of motivation.

Debiting men and crediting women for greater male competitiveness aside, how far can we take such an argument? Should the US women's national soccer team being sometimes competitive with regional 14-15 boys teams (but likely not so for say, the basketball equivalents) be taken as evidence that, given greater male competitiveness, patriarchal oppression, societal conditioning, stereotype threat, internalized misogyny, having to spend so much of their lives performing emotional labor, and other modifications to the dragon, women have a real biological advantage in soccer?

If the gap between the best women and the best men in soccer is smaller than the gap between the best women and best at basketball, that is evidence for the biological advantage men have over women in soccer is smaller than it is for at least one other sport. To see if women have an actual biological advantage and not just a smaller disadvantage, it'd have to be compared to competitions where you knew there was no phsyical biological gender differences, just mental biological differences.

Chess, soccer, and boxing are three very different competitions and the men’s division handily outclasses the women’s in all of them.

If it that competitiveness is innate, then it is a biological phenomenon and a biological advantage for men. Otherwise it could not be innate. So what you're arguing doesn't point to a biological advantage for women, it says the opposite.

Yes, I was talking about muscle biology advantage. The neurological biology advantage in my model would still be with men

Speaking anecdotally as a moderately serious running hobbyist that runs with pretty strong athletes in a club, I would say that there is no meaningful difference in training between men and women above some (fairly low) level of running. By the time you get to even low-level college running, the women are generally pretty serious. I'm sure there are noticeable filters in terms of how many people are interested in going into these things in the first place, but among elite athletes, the training regimens are just not dramatically different. Everyone that doesn't get injured from it is running 100+ mile weeks with some mixture of VO2max intervals, lactic threshold work, and long runs. Women aren't just casually competing at a surprisingly high level, the women at that level are putting in the same rigorous training that the men are.

From my experience in professional and semiprofessional basketball I'd say the differences are pretty big.

My amateur/semi-professional team where no-one had any illusions of truly going pro (I hope) took our exercise much more seriously than literally professional female basketball teams. It was ridiculous. The same thing seemed to be true for soccer, but I have less intimate personal experience there.

On the other hand, the women I've known that have engaged in high level solo sports like swimming, running and tennis seemed to have taken things very seriously, sometimes too seriously.

100+ mile weeks

Woot? That is something like 22 km per day or every day a half marathon. :-o

I did mean men are more competitive on average, I know there are lots of very competitive women out there. And I'd assume a lot of the athletic and most competitive women would go into fields they're at minimum roughly equal biologically to men in, like long distance running or gymnastics. But I expect at the very highest levels of competition, like Olympic-tier athletics, the best men are putting in more hours/more intensity than the best women. But I do know there are vast numbers of women who put in more hours and intensity than I do at anything.

I think its crazy to think at the olympic tier men and women are not putting in the same hours training. They are going to have same coaches and if a coach sees an edge they can push at this level they will force their athletes to do it. Possibly some of the prevalence of drugs is even due to pressure from coaches.

I might be way off base, it's just the general impression I get. Even Olympic athletes have lives and don't spend all their time training. I think the most elite men cut out more non-training time than the most elite women do though.

What evidence would convince you that you are wrong?

It's not a very strongly held belief of mine. A combination of experts and highly upvoted/liked posts in ultramarathon communities agreeing women are just worse would probably be most convincing.

And where women are competitive, it’s almost never against men, but against other women.

Not much to add, other than this is all just modern day lysenkoism, but did anyone else see Neil Degrasse Tyson defend all this on Maher? That was just jaw dropping. I got to wonder if NDT doesn’t have some MeToo skeletons in his closet that he is desperately trying to keep hidden with all this claptrap

It's not "in his closet," he's been publicly accused by multiple women and it led to his TV show being stopped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson#Sexual_misconduct_allegations

That said, those accusations don't seem very bad and I still kinda like the guy and wish him well.

Being a woke feminist does not seem, in practice, to protect men against me too claims.

True but I think in some mens minds it does

Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances.

This is not a great point! The claim is based on extremely thin evidence from a few races that don't include genuinely top-tier athletes. At all distances that have been optimized by deep fields of professionals, men run ~10-12% faster than women with no dramatic diminishment at long distances. There are bioplausible reasons for women to get more competitive at extreme distances (or at least requiring less aggressive fueling), but the evidence for it is scanty at best.

Perhaps more to the point, considered in the context of hunting, it really doesn't make much sense to be talking about 200 mile races. Men are faster at every distance that a human would plausibly have covered during a normal day and this difference widens if they're forced to carry any sort of kit with them.

Perhaps more to the point, considered in the context of hunting, it really doesn't make much sense to be talking about 200 mile races. Men are faster at every distance that a human would plausibly have covered during a normal day and this difference widens if they're forced to carry any sort of kit with them.

The way I've always heard it, endurance running is exactly what made human hunters OP, not speed. It's why we traded fur for excess sweat capacity.

endurance mostly in the ability to sweat to cool down while other less sweaty animals overheat, this is a process that might take hours on the absolute long end, not long enough to require this kind of distances. Gazelles can go something like 5 miles before needing to rest.

I'm always kind of skeptical of this story, for practical reasons -- a gazelle can do the five miles (at which point it is well beyond the horizon, even on the savanah!) in like 5-10 minutes. Which is like twenty minutes faster than even a very fast, unencumbered person.

So how long does it need to rest? How long can it go for if it only needs to average 15 mph to keep away from the humans, rather than top speed?

My suspicion based on personal interactions with furry animals (and documented hunting tactics of North American Indians) is that the way to hunt without great ranged weapons is either herding (see buffalo jumps) or hiding -- this is what lions mostly do, for instance, and they are way faster than people! (with built-in weapons, to boot)

Wolves are an animal that can sometimes run prey to exhaustion, but only in specific circumstances AFAIK (crusty snow that will hold them but not the deer), and again, they can run a lot faster than people.

I believe endurance hunting is mostly done by tracking, after the animal has already been wounded by the hunter- it’s blood trailing as is taught to hunters today, but over much longer distances. The limiting factor here is not so much the range of the weapons as their destructive impact; 30-.06 puts animals down better than broad heads better than flint tips better than pointy sticks. I can tell you from experience that when a wounded animal stops to rest, it will probably not get back up and won’t move very effectively if it does(and usually hits the densest thicket it can find which encumbers quadrupeds handily- a good thing if hiding from coyotes, but not from human hunters. AFAIK blood trailing dogs work by surrounding game in thickets until a hunter arrives to take advantage of the bipedal mobility advantage in heavy brush, but I’ve never used them).

Modern day hunting has a eccentric and hardcore subset who hunt by stalking, tracking a game animal and sneaking close enough to shoot it with a bow, pistol(30-50 foot effective range), or shotgun. If I ever manage to meet one I’ll certainly ask more questions along this line. But it’s definitely possible to sneak up on a deer or hog close enough to throw a spear into it, even if very difficult.

Endurance hunts don’t take literal days, though.

Yeah, I wonder why people keep making this claim. It's so easy to look up record times by distance and see that men always outperform women and by nearly the same margin.

This is just basic level stuff, and yet people get it wrong all the time. Why?

My guess is availability bias. Distance running is more trainable than sprinting. So a trained woman can easily beat an untrained man at distance running. She can't necessarily do the same at sprinting.

I looked at this list of records for the Badwater Ultramarathon. The women are fairly competitive with the men. That would never happen in something like powerlifting, or intellectual sports like chess or esports, or sprinting.

https://www.badwater.com/results-history/

I Actually know someone who won badwater one year. It's a really swingy race with few participants. Much depends on who shows up for the year and who doesn't need to drop out. You train for it in a sauna and need a whole team and strategy to maintain hydration. It's a day long run at high elevation in extreme heat.

For normal races, men are about 10% faster, whether its 100 meters or 100 miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon

I took a look at the Badwater and it seems that, in recent years, the men's champion is about 10% faster than the women's champion, although with high variance. Sometimes, it's only a small difference. Sometimes it's a HUGE difference. In 2012, the best woman's time was 30.6% longer than the best men's time! That's about the same difference as between Usain Bolt and the world record 9 year old. In other words, a giant chasm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badwater_Ultramarathon

Early years of the race were weird and should be thrown out. Consider this:

During the early years of the race, no particular route between Badwater and Whitney was specified and runners attempted various "shortcuts" between the start and finish. Adrian Crane, one of the competitors in the inaugural race, even used cross-country skis to cross the salt-flats at Badwater.

The Badwater only provides more data that men dominate in long distance events just as they do in short distance ones. The only thing weird about the Badwater is that variance is much higher than normal.

Just find a casual enough pool. Ultras are still mostly amateurs, nice white college educated people.

Look! Here's race where you have to hop on one leg while saying the alphabet backwards for 7 miles. One year, a woman beat 5 male competitors to win the race.

From that we conclude that women have superior endurance.

Every once in a while we find yet another uncontacted tribe of people somewhere in the world. The most recent one I read about was in the Amazon.

Now, if these tribes were previously unconnected to the rest of the world, whatever "patriarchy" the rest of the world follows would not affect them. It's an unbiased sample. All of the published pictures I'm seeing are all men and no women.

The thing is that, in general, these tribes all seem to follow generally the same social schemes... the men seem to do the hunting, and the women tend to do the child-rearing and non-hunting activities. Now I'm sure there are some outliers where women are also doing hunting, but generally this isn't a thing.

From a purely physical perspective (and I'm assuming this isn't a controversial stand), being pregnant, giving birth, and the first year or so after giving birth to a child is hard and energy-intensive endeavor that would preclude many strenuous activities. Seeing as women are the only members of humanity that can do this, it would follow that societies would be set up around this. To be super specific, when I'm saying "women," I mean members of the human species who are adults and with a body form intended to produce the larger gametes we call "eggs" and gestate offspring internally and can produce nourishment for said offspring. The fact that I need to write this out, I find silly.

Men and women are different. Both men and women are needed and valuable. The progressive stance that men and women are entirely interchangeable and indistinguishable is laughable in my opinion. Men and women are different, and that's a good thing.

On the topic of SciAm, well, I dropped my subscription when they endorsed a candidate for the presidency last time around. To have science mix with politics takes away from the science aspect. Science is the search for truth -- not just "truth" that meshes with currently popular ideas.

This is true, however I’d just point out, uncontacted tribes in the Amazon usually do have contact with other tribes.

The word used in countries where these tribes are typically found is more accurate, people who are in “voluntary isolation”.

Not saying this to make any point one way or another, just because the subject interests me.

Point taken. Some of the pics from the linked article have cow skulls strung up on a stick, so there's some contact with the outside world. But that said it still says something that the only photos of the tribe only have men. However, I sincerely doubt that the interaction with outsiders caused a shift in gender roles for this (or other) tribe(s).

It all reeks of starting from a conclusion and working backward to make an article to support it.

Another thing I just thought of which is unrelated to this: insurance rates. I'm a guy in my early 50s, which means at some point in the past I was a teenager. I've also worked in insurance for quite a while -- not the actual underwriting, but I had plenty of interactions with the people who did. There's a vast disparity between the accident rates for young men compared to young women, which leads to the disparate amount charged by the companies. There's something pretty obviously different in the behavior, in the aggregate, between men and women from a purely behavioral standpoint concerning risk-taking.

Similarly, all one has to do is look at the prison population and note that the vast majority of inmates are men. Some of this is caused by women getting lighter sentences for the same crimes, but that doesn't explain the order of magnitude difference between the behavior of men and women.

Even discounting differences in physical strength, there's something fundamentally different in our wiring.

That reference to running is weird as well because pacesetters are actually doing part of the work that a runner would otherwise do (https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/drafting-runners-research/). Though, I'm not sure having access to faster male pacesetters is that useful. I'm sure you could always find some female pacesetters to run at the same speed as a male for part of the race. But I guess the problem is they wouldn't be able to run as far at that pace and you are not able to continuously swap them out. My theory of pacesetters for faster times is they run part of the race at a desired pace and they take the lead in order to take some of the work away from other runners then they fall off at some point because they are not able to maintain that pace while doing the extra work for the whole race.

When Roger Bannister ran a 4-minute mile he cheesed the rule against pacesetters by organising a special exhibition race where two other competitors functioned as pacesetters. One ran the first half-mile at 4-minute pace and then slowed down, the other jogged until he was almost lapped, and then ran the rest of the race a lap down at 4-minute pace.

Having a pacesetter run slightly ahead of you at the speed you need to maintain makes a huge psychological difference, even if you don't draft behind them.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats