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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24178 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Do you believe false things?

You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?

Not ordinary mistaken trivia knowledge, for example when you are unsure whether US has 50 or 51 states, or on what continent is New Guinea, but when facts about the world that serve as bedrock of your beliefs that happen to be totally delusionary, at catastrophical odds to reality. Can it happen to you?

It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.

For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.

"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"

Well, it can happen not only to "brainwashed libtards" or "dumb Ayrabs".

It happened to credentialed rationalist and one of Yud's disciples.

The short xeet that went viral:

Until I was 38 I thought Men's World Cup team vs Women's World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn't figure out why they didn't just play each other

And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened:

How To Believe False Things - by request, this is an explanation of how I got 38 years old believing a match of World Cup men's team vs World Cup women's would be fair.

TL;DR: EB learned about relative strength of men and women as we all learn all things we know. From his own experience, from media, from experts. EB trusted them all, without considering that his experiences could be extremely unrepresentative, media could be completely fictional and experts could just plain lie to his face.

He's still coping in that essay. If he was truly thinking rationally (which doesn't have any special meaning beyond thinking well, really), differences in height and muscle mass alone should've been enough to make him deeply question that hypothesis, and then a single search in google scholar or about men and women playing sports against each other would put the question to bed. He wasn't really being isolated from evidence by his environment, or making reasonable conclusions from evidence, he was believing it because it'd be sexist and rude not to.

(The same is true, although less obviously so, about "intelligence" being a real thing that varies a lot between individuals. It's still amazing to me how many very smart people deny it.)

Yeah. Trying to figure out why the classic Rationalist maxim "I notice I am confused" didn't kick in.

Just, y'know, LOOK at the athletes, up close if you can. Notice the size difference. Consider other animal species that show such size differences. And extrapolate a bit and say "why are males generally larger than females if their physical abilities are roughly the same? That's confusing."

Interestingly, racing greyhounds display similar size differences to humans but race together.

Maybe just interesting to me.

He could reason. Sports mean prizes. Winning means cash. If women were equally good at football you could make a stronger team by replacing the second best men with the best women and winning more cash.

The same principle is more stark in warfare. If women were equally strong then societies would have an advantage if they encouraged women to be warriors to better protect and defend those societies, and women would be similarly self-interested in doing so.

Why are men and women all leaving these gains on the table to be monopolised by men? Because men are oppressing women? How is that possible if men and women are equally matched? They should be able to overpower men the same way they have been overpowered by men, or at least fight to a draw.

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

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

I'm not sure I buy into the idea of autism creating these blindspots. Are there two types of autism? It seems like there's one type that says "You utter utter moron, how could you mistake the northern lesser spotted arctic giullemot for its close cousin the lesser spotted arctic northern guillemot! Can't you see the distinctive circle around the eye doesn't fully extend to the beak? What?! Of course it matters!" And then there's this other type that says, I don't know, something like "The television must be true because only the best people are on television, and lying is bad, and the best people don't lie. That's just basic logic".

Can anyone explain this for me?

Why are men and women all leaving these gains on the table to be monopolised by men?

Basically this. I presume Randall would be a bit uncomfortable about his argument being used in the context of gender politics, but it's exactly as applicable (likewise certain varieties of the "female underrepresentation in STEM is caused by misogyny" argument, as I noted here).

Because men are oppressing women? How is that possible if men and women are equally matched? They should be able to overpower men the same way they have been overpowered by men, or at least fight to a draw.

Not only is there nothing remotely feminist about the preposterous idea that women are just as strong as men, if such an idea were true, it would obviate feminism as a political movement. After all, the only reason feminism exists is in recognition of the fact that women, by virtue of their relative physical weakness, need protection from violent and rapacious men. But if women were just as strong as men, an appropriate response to women complaining about male violence and oppression would be "sounds like a you problem. Git gud."

But if women were just as strong as men, an appropriate response to women complaining about male violence and oppression would be "sounds like a you problem. Git gud."

I don't think that would be an appropriate response. If that's an appropriate response, then it's also appropriate to tell a man who gets punched by another man in the street that he should just git gud. But part of the whole point of society is that we are supposed to have a dedicated force that prevents people from physically assaulting each other, instead of every single man having to be a martial artist or having to find some kind of mafia to defend him.

If that's an appropriate response, then it's also appropriate to tell a man who gets punched by another man in the street that he should just git gud.

I'm not talking about individual men and women. I'm talking about how society is organised. Much of our modern society only makes sense when you understand that there is a broad societal-wide recognition of the fact that women, as a class, are systematically weaker and more fragile than men, and as a result extra resources must be invested into protecting them. There are hundreds if not thousands of NGOs dedicated to combatting "violence against women"; the idea of founding an NGO dedicated to combatting "violence against men" (without qualification) would have caused people to look at you like you'd two heads until maybe five minutes ago. (This is not me making an MRA argument.)

Not only is there nothing remotely feminist about the preposterous idea that women are just as strong as men

If you believe women are as strong as men, that means that any treatment of men and women that differs based on strength really differs based on discrimination. Belief in widespread discrimination is a feminist position.

Because men are oppressing women? How is that possible if men and women are equally matched? They should be able to overpower men the same way they have been overpowered by men, or at least fight to a draw.

Not only is there nothing remotely feminist about the preposterous idea that women are just as strong as men, if such an idea were true, it would obviate feminism as a political movement. After all, the only reason feminism exists is in recognition of the fact that women, by virtue of their relative physical weakness, need protection from violent and rapacious men. But if women were just as strong as men, an appropriate response to women complaining about male violence and oppression would be "sounds like a you problem. Git gud."

This is easily resolved by feminists tacking on an epicycle or two.

  1. Women are just as strong and capable as men, but men with their shittiness, toxicity, and misogyny are more wont to oppress women than vice versa, and old boys’ clubs entrench and insitutionalize this oppression.
  2. Women are just as strong and capable as men, but if they aren’t it’s only due to socialization and internalized misogyny from the oppessive effects of the patriarchy.

If women were equally strong then societies would have an advantage if they encouraged women to be warriors to better protect and defend those societies, and women would be similarly self-interested in doing so.

Not necessarily. Even if women were better fighters than men, a nation would still be better off losing 90% of its men than half its women just for the purposes of replacement for future wars. Or similar -- I'm sure someone has done the math on the numbers for a world building scenario if nothing else.

Not necessarily. Even if women were better fighters than men, a nation would still be better off losing 90% of its men than half its women just for the purposes of replacement for future wars. Or similar -- I'm sure someone has done the math on the numbers for a world building scenario if nothing else.

This doesn't apply if you have a strong monogamy norm, which the Christian West does. Even the post-Christian West has a strong norm of monogamy for babymaking relationships. The surplus women in western Europe after WW1 killed off so many young men ended up as childless spinsters, not as fertile sister-wives.

You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?

Uh.. Yes? I mean, is this a question worth asking really?

I mean, I wasn't born believing in HBD, I was won over. I used to think that terraforming Mars was a great idea, and now I think it's a rather suboptimal choice when it comes to establishing robust space colonies. I used to think that AI would more inhuman, and very much didn't expect them to speak like us before they thought as well as they do.

I'm sure there are plenty of cases where I've been wrong and thus changed my mind. I don't think I've had any drastic collapses of my cognitive framework that forced me to re-evaluate everything.

And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened

This gentleman is autistic. I'm sure we have more than our fair share, but that's a condition that predisposes a tendency to take things at face value without considering how much of it is virtue-signalling or social fiction.

"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"

I think you're engaging in the hobby of making up people to be mad at. There are worse hobbies, I'm sure. I'm quite certain that there isn't anyone here who will claim identification with this, unless someone spins up an alt. If there are, I offer my psychiatric services, first interview free.

At any rate, I find singling out Rats and rat-adjacents like the Motte's users as examples of bad epistemics or miscalibration is somewhere between laughable and preaching to the choir. Name a group more obsessed with evaluating the rigor of their beliefs about the world. If someone listened to Yud or Scott and came away with the belief that they themselves were therefore unimpeachable, then they can read an IKEA manual and assemble a mouse-trap that takes their finger off.

If you think we're bad, have you seen the rest of the internet?

This gentleman is autistic. I'm sure we have more than our fair share, but that's a condition that predisposes a tendency to take things at face value without considering how much of it is virtue-signalling or social fiction.

I'm skeptical of this as an explanation in this instance, if only because of the fact that if he was predisposed to believe in such nonsensical ideas (whether due to autism or anything else) I don't see how he'd ever have gotten to the state of being taken seriously as a rationalist in the first place. After all, the topic of men vs women in sports won't be only contentious issue he's come across where there's a strong social incentive to take one side over the other.

Also, I know you're the psychiatrist, but wouldn't being autistic make it less likely you'd have the requisite cognitive machinery in place necessary to delude yourself about the state of the world for the purposes of social signalling?

I'm skeptical of this as an explanation in this instance, if only because of the fact that if he was predisposed to believe in such nonsensical ideas (whether due to autism or anything else) I don't see how he'd ever have gotten to the state of being taken seriously as a rationalist in the first place. After all, the topic of men vs women in sports won't be only contentious issue he's come across where there's a strong social incentive to take one side over the other.

I was not familiar with this gentleman, and I'd call myself unusually steeped in rat culture, at least as close as you can get without knowing any in person. He's written a few minor SF anthologies, and has an unremarkable number of Twitter followers.

He's not a rationalist big name, nor even a major one. It's not like we hand out ID cards, anyone can call themselves a rationalist.

Despite being called a "disciple of Yud", the only evidence for that claim are is a blurb in his blog:

Recently, his biggest influences have been Paolo Bacigalupi, Peter Watts, and Eliezer Yudkowsky. They all produce rather “thinky” fiction, and the first two are very grim. He has a soft spot for the darker, grimmer side of science fiction.

Is he a disciple of Watts? Am I, because I've read both him and Yudkowsky?

He's nobody. Not even on LessWrong. At best, he "promoted" a popular Medium post there, which I don't think he wrote.

Read the article Memetic Tribes and Culture War 2.0 which Eneasz promoted on LessWrong. Read the Diary of an Aspiring Writer, by N J Magas. So this non-story is that some autistic random person has a silly belief. What of it?

That and running a HPMOR podcast that probably has like 10 listeners is all the real influence he has in the rationalist community.

I know no end of non-autistic people who have ridiculous beliefs. I have an uncle who's a fan of homeopathy despite being an acclaimed microbiologist. He's perfectly capable of switching off Science Mode when he leaves the lab and takes his sugar pills.

One swallow doesn't a summer make, and this is more of a chicken painted blue.

Also, I know you're the psychiatrist, but wouldn't being autistic make it less likely you'd have the requisite cognitive machinery in place necessary to delude yourself about the state of the world for the purposes of social signalling?

In general, yes. That doesn't mean that autistic people are infallible arbiters of truth. Especially social truths/lies, where they're perpetually perplexed by how people just seem to make shit up, when they realize the discrepancy.

At the very least, he wasn't deluding himself for social signaling. He's a victim of those who do, guilty of taking them at face value and lacking enough contact with the physical world to overcome that. He's not getting any status from this disclosure, quite the opposite, everyone is coming to laugh and sneer at him.

wouldn't being autistic make it less likely you'd have the requisite cognitive machinery in place necessary to delude yourself about the state of the world for the purposes of social signalling?

In my unprofessional opinion: Autists accept the signal at face value and then boost it because the original signal comes from a trusted source. No delusion required; it's genuine belief.

IMO (which is also unprofessional!) it's the opposite. It's the autistic person who shouts out that the emperor has no clothes, after all.

Yeah, if nobody they had no reason to mistrust previously informed them that the emperor wore invisible clothes.

Possibly - but then would a person susceptible to such explanations be likely to become a somewhat esteemed rationalist?

somewhat esteemed rationalist?

Eh? Who is esteeming him? Man's getting like 10 likes on average for his Twitter posts.

This controversy is his most popular post by a country mile.

If "somewhat esteemed rationalist" is a term that can be handed out this generously, I'm going to start calling myself that.

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I don't know anything about the specific rationalist in question here, I speak in abstracts, but rationalists have huge blind spots, preferably near their own sacred cows. A rationalist can gain esteem enough by writing on topics other than those.

He clearly didn't play high school sports or you would realize very quickly the men's team would steamroll the women's team in any sport.

Yes, I think he admits this. He is basically describing a very extreme and uncommon version of Gell-Mann, except without the part where you read about something you know. Or at least that is omitted, because he doesn't talk about knowing the media lies sometimes.

Or watch any high school sports. I’ve watched high school boys play basketball, soccer, and volleyball, and I’ve watched the same from college girls. There’s never been any doubt in my mind that the high school boys would smash the college girls almost every time.

I think honestly that for the median person, outside of their own area of expertise, you’re very likely to be wrong on most things. You might get around it somewhat by doing research, but most people, unless truly interested in a subject won’t learn more than could be covered in the first three weeks of an “introduction to [topic] course. It’s shallow.

The best way to prove this to yourself is to try to predict outcomes. If the people were rounding up and sending to El Salvador are gang members, crime should go down, right. So then go and look at what actually happens. If you’re correct about whatever you think about deportees, the crime statistics will show it. If Trump is really taking Canada, you can predict that he’ll have to eventually move assets into place to actually do that. If your understanding of the world is true, you’ll be able to get things right before they’re reported. If not, you’ll be wrong and if you’re doing motivated reasoning, probably wrong in a similar direction. I consider it basically conducting an experiment on your beliefs.

The next step would be test your model of the world on the stock market. Which can be humbling.

Short term the stock market isn't modeling what happens, it is modeling what people think is happening, or what people think people think is happening.

Long term you are dead.

Better to stick to sports gambling if you actually have some sort of prediction advantage. Shorter ROIs, actually clear outcomes.

In a related discussion I was having with two sports betting enthusiasts at work today, women's sports are actually fairly popular amoung dedicated sports gamblers as there is a belief that the bookmakers aren't as good at protecting the house advantage in women's sports for whatever reason and an informed, savvy better has a better chance of getting an edge. They also seem to think that more extreme outcomes (one team absolutely demolishing the other) are more likely in women's sports. They were specificaly discussing the WNBA and MMA.

Live betting is also a space where the books are behind the advanced modelers.

The required advantage to get ahead in sports gambling is pretty small, right? Just slightly above flipping a coin?

Most people say you need to be between 55% and 58% to turn a profit.

Its a very complicated balancing act. The bookmakers have to offer attractive bets to bring in the action, but at the same time making sure the "coin flip" lands they way they want it to ~51% of the time.

Depends on how big your bank roll is

do you believe false things

Yeah, probably. The important thing is to admit when you’re wrong and change your mind. Easier said than done, especially when any such admission attracts douchebags who want to score Internet points.

bedrock of your beliefs

Don’t worry, I make sure to ground my beliefs on surveys. How else am I supposed to generalize from “very liberal people”?

“No, it cannot happen to me…Ayrabs.”

If you have to resort to scare quotes, consider whether you’re fighting a strawman.

viral

Is that viral agreement or viral outrage? Downsides of a unified measure of engagement. Twitter delenda est.

trusted them all

It sure is a shame. Maybe someone should start a community, try to find people who want to overcome those biases. They might end up wrong less often.

I think it is safe to say this person had a blindspot preventing him from seeing the truth. Rationalists are often criticized for being arrogant over normie blue-tribe beliefs.

So Brodski held this belief deep in his Soul (metaphorically) which prevented him from seeing reality. What if, on this same topic, I'm limited the same way? My beliefs about sex-differences might be correct, or more correct at least, but maybe entirely by accident? What if the deeply felt hatred for women in my Soul is the reason I believe in sex-differences?

I am not giving the skeptical claim that nobody can see reality. I just mean, how can I tell reality is the thing that is influencing my beliefs, personally?

Of course on different topics I am just as blind to reality in embarrassing ways. Obviously I can't know what those topics are.

It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.

For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.

I'm not sure this is so much 'believing false things' as 'being unable to intuit the scale of numbers'. In both these cases these numbers are nothing more than shorthand for 'lots'. They haven't deliberately discarded lower or higher numbers, just plumped for something that seems like lots. It's like when there was that poll suggesting that the average American thought 10% of the country was trans and 20% Asian or whatever it was. People aren't 'believing' that figure is true in the sense that they actively don't believe in possible lower figures, they just know it's more than zero and grasp at some likely sounding round number.

I donno man. Maybe it's all perspective. It's more forgivable to be off in degrees (Lots when it's actually almost everybody, or a small minority versus a tiny minority), it seems less forgivable to be wildly innumerate and off by several orders of magnitude. Like when a cable news host claimed Bloomberg could have made everyone in the US a millionaire with the amount he spent on his failed presidential campaign.

You can choose not to forgive people for being wildly innumerate but you will, in doing so, condemn a substantial fraction of adults who function adequately on a day-to-day basis.

Maybe I've been watching too much Financial Audit, but I severely question how many people who are wildly innumerate function adequately in practice, versus in appearance thanks to endless financing.

Lots of people who don’t mathematically understand scale can manage their finances well enough- they’re used to buying x amount of groceries and y amount of gas. It’s really not difficult.

Another example of 'rationalism' and related isms, just being conflict aversion.

If you hide your preferences behind an 'is' you've rhetorically/aesthetically removed yourself as a motivated actor. You're simply a 'rational' being doing 'what makes sense'.

It would be permissible to excuse certain actions and beliefs on the basis of objective reality. And we certainly shouldn't believe things that are false. But the inexplicable predicament many 'rationalists' have to contend with is that their view of objective reality somehow manages to conform itself precisely within the lines of the mainstream Overton Window. Often rubbing shoulders with the more left leaning parts of it. It betrays their alleged pursuit of truth and reason as little other than social conformity. Furthermore, their seeming inability to notice this and question in an endless ocean of articles and blogs paints them and their social networks as, at best, childishly ignorant of their own motivations.

But the inexplicable predicament many 'rationalists' have to contend with is that their view of objective reality somehow manages to conform itself precisely within the lines of the mainstream Overton Window.

Yuuuuuuuuuup great point here. How are you Berkeley rationalists so perfectly left leaning and in alignment on all the thorny issues of our time? Crazy coincidence!

As I like to say, Rationalists are thus named because they are excellent at rationalizing their biases.

One of my favorite examples: Americans trying to estimate the size of minority groups.

Americans routinely think that 20% of Americans are making $1mm a year, are transgender, are Jewish, are Muslim, are East Asian, live in NYC, are Bisexual, live in Texas. The proportions they attribute to tiny minorities are literally impossible to square with each other, unless you assume some huge number of trans millionaire bisexual Chinese Jews splitting their time between Dallas and Manhattan.

While they routinely think that only two thirds of Americans own a car, have flown on a plane, or received a high school diploma

true proportion close to 90%

Whites, homeowners, Christians all also lose significant percentage points in estimation.

What's most fascinating to me is that Conservative Republicans, who can broadly speaking be assumed to be more pro-white and anti-gay and anti-Muslim, are more likely to vastly overestimate the number of gay people and Black people and Muslims in the country, while actual Black people gay people and Muslims tend to underestimate it.

People are innumerate.

This study has a problem that it takes average instead of median. If 80% of people give correct answer (i'm not saying they do, but consider if for a moment) and 15% people answer 50% and 5% people troll and answer the furthest of truth, you get results like this. Yes, people are innumerate but if we take median instead of mean it's much less shocking.

Do you have any evidence that is the case, or just speculative? I have to discount the trolling hypothesis, it's kind of evidence free.

At any rate I'm not sure it would really make me feel much better to say 15% of people are super duper innumerate."

Conservative republicans know they live in a bubble and that proportions of various minorities are higher elsewhere, but usually don’t understand how the proportions shake out. Conservatives in the south usually don’t grasp that blacks are overrepresented in their surrounds but gays are underrepresented, they think gay numbers must be similar to black numbers from the way the media keeps talking about it.

It is worth noting that the consistent pattern here is that people push percentages towards 50% - suggesting that it is pure innumeracy and not some kind of politically or socially driven bias.

I think the most simple answer is that it is pure innumeracy, and numbers like 20%, 50%, 80%, etc. are just proxies for "a few", "some", "a lot" etc and there's only a tenuous grasp as to whether or how this translates to material reality

Or it's both innumeracy and political bias, otherwise we wouldn't see significant differences in estimations between racial or political groups.

For example, people are liberal are more likely to overestimate police killings compared to people that lean conservative:

https://research.skeptic.com/content/files/2025/02/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf

It's important to note that those estimations are numbers on aggregate, and if you dissect the data you may see additional patterns. Of course, the pattern could also just be noise.

Maybe it speaks to negativity bias. If white conservatives feel negative about gays or blacks they may be more likely to exaggerate their numbers, and if you’re black you may underestimate your numbers because you feel negative about being a small minority. People just pay more attention to the features of the world that are of negative emotional valence. You see this on every end of the political spectrum, and it feeds extremism especially. This may be why political radicals are more likely to be highly neurotic individuals.

Maybe it speaks to negativity bias. If white conservatives feel negative about gays or blacks they may be more likely to exaggerate their numbers

No. I asked the question about of percent of gays to people in Russia and they do not give horribly inflated estimates. I asked this question to some Americans in Russia, and they give inflated estimates.

To me, this speaks to the size of each group's mainstream influence (or the percent at which they are represented in media) rather than their actual size. Factoring that in makes this sort of mistake far more understandable. They don't know the raw numbers, but they see the representation distribution throughout the mainstream, which is an inaccurate depiction of the country's true demographic. On the other hand, minorities may recognize the representation they get in media, but then they walk outside, or go to the grocery store, or church, or anywhere else in public and see that they, in fact, are still a minority.

Minorities tend to live in bubbles, though, where their own kind are overrepresented.

Indeed. The list looks like the distribution of features in Hollywood movies and Netflix shows. NYC and California over represented. Rich people over represented. Similarly for veterans. And then car owners underrepresented. All are typical show tropes.

Right. Woke people in the UK are constantly appealing to the BBC, Channel 4, Netflix and the British film industry to improve "representation" for BAME (black, Asian and Middle Eastern) actors in British TV and film productions (see the perennial demands for the next James Bond to be played by Idris Elba). Then someone ran the numbers and found that BAME actors and LGBT actors are dramatically overrepresented in British TV compared to their respective shares of the population - nearly double, in fact.

If you watch a lot of TV and notice that about a quarter of characters are portrayed by BAME actors, you routinely read editorials about how the BBC and Netflix aren't doing enough to improve representation for BAME actors (the implication being that the current rate of representation isn't commensurate with UK demographics), it's perfectly reasonable to assume that more than 25% of the UK population is BAME, if you haven't yet learned that people sometimes go on the internet and tell lies.

I think the disconnect is that representation advocates don't want proportional representation of the general population demographics — what they want is aspirational representation for every minority. The hope is for every black (etc. etc.) child to have just as many black characters in fiction to daydream about being when they grow up that a white child has. From that framing, no single demographic can be "over"-represented until each slice has exactly as many performers as every other.

(The above is an explanation, not an endorsement. Mind you, I would actually quite like to see Idris Elba as James Bond, but more in a race-blind-casting this-guy-is-really-good kind of way. Besides he's probably too old now.)

I would excuse innumeracy to some degree. Knowing specific percentages or numbers has very little value outside of being a factoid to recite. There is value in having an idea of what category of the following something goes in: None, almost none, few, some, about half, a majority, a vast majority, almost everyone, everyone. But even then, off-by-one category in some circumstances I don't think is a major failure.

But there's some examples where I have a hard time making that excuse, like in the OP the examples they mention of unarmed blacks killed by police and population size of Israel, you would presume that if something is a huge crusade for these people they would at least have an idea of the order of magnitude of their problem. Eneasz Brodski probably only had this opinion about men and women in sports in passing, if it had been a big issue for him I would assume he would have ended up on the correct opinion faster.

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

This seems to be pretty much the universal experience of people that advocate for trans participation in women's sports. They have no idea how large the gaps are between men and women because they have somehow managed to take pride in avoiding anything to do with physical fitness. I guess I can kind of, sort of squint and see how that happens, but the part I don't understand is their willingness to jump into arguments about a topic that they just don't care about at all.

They care because trans, not because sports.

because they have somehow managed to take pride in avoiding anything to do with physical fitness

The more charitable explanation is that women and men never compete in sports directly past puberty . In the sports with comparable outcomes, it’s not clear if women do worse because there are so few of them or they are less competitive generally. Basically, anyone who grew up without a brother has no way of naturally disabusing themself of the notion that women are just as strong as men.

That isn't just more charitable, it is maximally charitable. In the post the OP is talking about the author describes the almost insane and pathological amount of avoidance he had for physical activity throughout much of his life, particularly post puberty. This is a guy who not only didn't participate or watch high school sports; in PE he sat out or walked the track; he had basically no friends, no brothers with girlfriends, and no sisters that he actually interacts with; and certainly no friends of the opposite sex willing to touch him in a playful manner. I dont know if it is a real story, but it is a literal one in a 100 million story sort of thing.

Not sure if 1:1M. I buy it, really. It's not too far off from my own teenage experiences. All it takes is the right brain wiring to accept statements by authority at face value. "Men and women can be equally physically capable? Sure thing, I trust you mom/teacher/book.". Add a few examples of exceptionally physically capable girls/women (as were present around me at the time, though of course they were given extra spotlight and never put into direct competition against equally ambitious boys/men.) and it can seem quite credible. Especially when you yourself are a bookworm for whom taking a walk is peak physical activity, and those guys/girls running marathons seem like aliens and you have no interest in observing their activities at all, nevermind gender disparities.

I'm glad I grew out of it, but I suppose there's ways enough for similar teenagers to instead double down and become physically illiterate adults instad.

I don't understand your incredulity. "Not participating in or watching high school sports" describes half my high school - every once in a while the principal would beg people to come to games, but few showed up. While you're going to have to do some sports in PE, you can basically brush it off and half-heartedly sort of participate. Even the fitness exams aren't really pushed any more, they'll do them but no one is even mildly criticized for a poor score.

The "picking up your sister" thing is itself complicated by the fact that women are on average heavier than before. Sure, even a fairly weak man could pick up a thin woman, but you try and pick up someone who weighs 250lbs while also having weak arms. This is complicated by the fact that people assortively interact and date, so a boy who doesn't exercise is likely to spend time with girls who don't exercise. Does it only count as an "interaction" if you're wrestling, or something?

Playful roughhousing is also much less common, especially cross-gender. I had female friends in school, but there was never any sort of "playful touching" of the sort you apparently imagine would uncover physical strength differences like a revelation from Mount Sinai. There might be a playful poke or a shove, but never from the male side; the "men are stronger than women" truth has decayed, but the "men don't hit women" truth abides, even though large numbers of people couldn't explain why - maybe something to do with the patriarchy or domestic violence statistics?

As for the sex part... well, we've already litigated that a thousand times. Personally I think a huge portion of the romance crisis is due to men and women being much less fit than in the past, and therefore not finding each other particularly attractive. You can notice that in how men seem to recoil as from a snake when you suggest dating a fat chick. We even had one user with a pathological complex about ending up with a wildly obese woman: it was literally the worst thing he could imagine. If we're all being honest with each other, I think we've located the male ick.

You describe this as insane and pathological, but this describes a large set of younger generations. However little you might think the zoomers are working out and roughhousing, I assure you they're doing less. There's obviously a prescriptive angle you can take on this, but as a description of experience it rings completely true to me.

Eh. This is just the "but how does it affect you PERSONALLY" meme seen from the other side. Trans advocates argue about it because letting people say 'there is a physical difference between trans women and women-women and we're justified in treating trans people differently' goes against the heart of the project; they care about it because of trans, not because of sports.

All this person is describing is remaining forever a child. It's actually kind of amazing. He blames that on being neurodivergent? I can't really assess whether that's a valid defense of his willful ignorance or not.

Even in his own post, he repeatedly points out all the places he recoiled from any exposure to base reality.

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

I mean, on the one hand, I can't recall the last time I actually watched the Olympics either. On the other hand, you are rarely comparing similar numbers here either. If it's some track event, all the men's times will be clustered, and then all the women's times will be clustered say, 30% slower. You aren't comparing decimal places here. Even casual observers should notice.

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

I mean, did his school never do the Presidential fitness tests? He never noticed how different the standards were for even barely pubescent boys and girls?

Nothing about this entrenched ignorance seems accidental. Some seed was planted that caused him to recoil from any confounding evidence. And it's like after he got through childhood carefully selecting the reality he was exposed to so as to not challenge his pre existing views that were passed onto him, he just never gave it another thought ever again. Nor spent any time being physical with women, as even relatively sedentary man strength is often greater than female gym bunny strength.

Judo class in college was quite awkward. The men were all bigger than me and surprised by my strength, while the women were feathers and twigs and it felt like doing the moves right might break them. Also judo-pinning women feels rapy and uncomfortable.

Aikido might be a BS martial art, but the women there were athletic lesbians with some sturdiness, and there was no need to throw anyone to the ground and lay on top of them.

Nothing about this entrenched ignorance seems accidental. Some seed was planted that caused him to recoil from any confounding evidence.

It baffles me too. It’s like a chronic aversion to even entry-level Noticing.

Nor spent any time being physical with women, as even relatively sedentary man strength is often greater than female gym bunny strength.

Funnily enough, theoretically there’s a redpill belief that can help non-virgin men maintain the bluepill illusion that men and women are equally physically capable.

If you have the redpill understanding that women are usually only attracted to men who can easily physicially dominate them, then you can chalk up you-being-stronger-than-every-chick-you’ve-banged as mere selection bias, and thus retain the null hypothesis that women in general are just as strong as men.

In practice, though, I imagine this happens a Lizardman’s Constant amount.

All this person is describing is remaining forever a child. It's actually kind of amazing. He blames that on being neurodivergent? I can't really assess whether that's a valid defense of his willful ignorance or not.

It's probably an extreme way to describe it, but "remaining forever a child" seems to describe pretty accurately the kind of behavior that's encouraged in the type of nerdy/blue tribe/white collar culture this person likely grew up in. There's a reason why the term "adulting" was invented (or at least popularized) by and for people in such a culture, after all. A major part of the culture is trusting authority figures as experts who are able to guide you to the truth in a way that's superior and counterintuitive to the rubes who use their intuition and personal anecdotes to jump to conclusions. This, of course, makes sense as a child; you aren't yet equipped with the maturity with which to make judgment calls on most important things, and that's why most important decisions about your life are made by adults who theoretically have your best interests in mind. But children don't become mature adults with good judgment merely through time; it requires practice and training, which are highly constrained in these environments.

So when they're taught about the inaccuracies of stereotypes as a child and how all of society was sexist and misogynistic against women for entirely arbitrary reasons because men and women are same in every way that matters, many of them believe it and many of them refuse to believe their lying eyes. After all, their own judgment is inherently suspect for having been raised in this oppressive patriarchy which has forever sullied it with bias that they will never escape from even if they dedicate their entire lives to doing so, which is nonetheless the duty of any human being who wants to be a Decent Person.

Now, someone still holding onto this belief by the age of 38... this means that this person grew up in the 90s-00s at the latest, during which time this stuff wasn't nearly as extreme as it was in the 00s-10s, so this person is an extreme case. I'd wager the neurodivergence played a significant factor. I grew up in the 90s-00s in some of the more extreme areas of the country where this culture was dominant, and most people understood that there were significant sex differences in athletic ability (though it was nowhere near universal, especially among younger people!), so either this person was raised in one of the few even more extreme areas, or was particularly extreme in his way of thinking or both.

Edit: As an anecdote, one of my major hobbies is ultimate Frisbee, which is one of the bluest of blue sports due in large part to how it's primarily introduced to people in college. Right now in our local leagues, it's just taken for granted that transwomen should compete with women in single-gender leagues and as women when they want to in mixed-gender leagues (teams of 7 with either 4m-3f or 3m-4f at a time, usually). (We also don't use terms like male or female because that's offensive, but rather Defender of Men and Defender of Women and Defender of Choice for transwomen who want to choose depending on the point - the fact that this means we call men DOMs has been a source of amusement). Playing pickup, I've heard people seriously argue that a particularly good female player there, who outplays most of the males in pickup, could make it to the local elite-level men's team (has won the national championship recently and has gotten to the top 8 regularly) if she chose to try out.

I'm not sure how similar frisbee is to disc golf, but men have a massive competitive advantage in the latter: https://quillette.com/2022/09/28/is-this-the-lia-thomas-of-disc-golf/

Ultimate is a team field sport with a lot of running and jumping, so I'd guess the male advantage in ultimate is even more pronounced. In mixed leagues, person-to-person defense is almost 100% on a same-sex basis, with very few exceptions when there's a woman who's particularly tall and/or athletic (this never happens in the top levels of the sport, but at the levels that I play, it's been known to happen).

I imagine the sex differences in disc golf have primarily to do with distance in throwing, which is very easily observed in ultimate as well. Each point begins with a "pull," which is like a kickoff in American football, where one player on the defensive team throws the disc from behind their own end zone line (running start allowed, but disc must be released before they cross the line). At even medium levels, men regularly throw the full 70 yards of the field, and at top levels, they regularly throw the full 90 yards that includes the 20 yard end zone. At the top levels, it's the rare woman who's able to cover the full 70 yards of the field. This difference is present and quite noticeable in long throws during the point as well, where, at the top levels, men's games tend to be more huck-heavy, since they can score with one throw from anywhere on the field, while women's games tend to be more based around shorter throws. This isn't universal, though.

Also his argument is silly. You can look at women top tier athletes. You can look at top tier male athletes. They don’t look the same. The men look bigger and stronger.

In all fairness, there's a very long history of underdog sports and fighting stories where it's also presumed that tiny, willowy men can totally beat the brawny jocks through sheer pluck or clever moves or ancient Asian secrets, or whatever. Likewise films and books where humans defeat obviously larger and stronger animals in physical fights.

Cope-oriented David-vs-Goliath media tropes were being served up to insecure men long before they got cross-applied to women.

I guess — never found those stories reasonable but then again I played sports.

Main characters in media and games are depicted as unrealistically powerful across virtually all material domains, including physical contests and bodily feats of skill but also depictions of physical handicrafts, animal interactions, vehicles and projectiles, etc. That's because almost nobody in the audience has any actual experience making, building or doing anything with their bodies in the real world, so they have zero gauge of what's plausible and no reason to care.

So yeah, a woman can't beat a guy at arm-wrestling, and also mining doesn't mean swinging a weightless pickaxe until big nuggets of gold drop out of the rock face, and also IRL that pudgy gamer could barely even lift that longsword, and also a roadrunner mostly can't outsmart a coyote. But audiences like cartoon logic because it's nice to imagine that we are powerful and other people's skills are easy.

David used a ranged weapon.

In that specific story, yes, but the emotional thrust of the trope is that a little guy can beat a much larger opponent through his superior bravery, skill or virtue. And underdog physical conflict stories are all over 60s-90s boys' media, from Tom & Jerry through The Karate Kid. TvTropes helpfully points out that this is the convention for final boss levels in videogames, as well.

So Muscles are Meaningless is not one-sided in its gender appeal.

But isn’t the trope accepting that the smaller guy can’t physically compete so he has to figure out another way (eg out smart his opponent)?

Even so, who said pure brute strength is the only legitimate way to fight? If you win, you win. Even outside complete changes of frame or dirty tricks, there's plenty of space for "superior speed" or "technique"-style workarounds.

Sure but the idea is in the context of “men and women are equally strong” which even those tropes suggest is not true (because of course it isn’t true)

"Headshot your enemy. Doesn't matter how strong he is if his head is broken open."

Timeless wisdom.

A person who is not interested in sports will not spend time (1) looking at top-tier athletes and (2) comparing their musculature in detail.

Or at least they won't be looking at top-tier athletes of both sexes in order to make the comparison.

I seem to remember at least one issue of Sports Illustrated each year being widely purchased by men who were not particularly interested in sports, although I agree not everyone depicted therein (whose musculature would, indeed, be looked at in detail) was a top-tier athlete.

It doesn’t require detail. Pick any NFL WR. They don’t look like any women. It’s obvious.

Even if literally all you watched was blue-coded, scripted media where they used the same camera tricks used to make people like RDJ and Tom Cruise look taller, you can't avoid noticing the difference in stature/physical expectations for people who are cast to look like the top physical specimens for their sex.

Yeah I just don’t know how people can look at men and women and think “physically pretty similar.”

Nothing about this entrenched ignorance seems accidental. Some seed was planted that caused him to recoil from any confounding evidence.

Yeah, I suppose it's more noble to blame your neurodivergence and a hermetically sealed bubble but, speaking from personal experience, it really is just this. People treat disconfirming evidence on certain subjects like touching the proverbial poo. There's really no profit in doing so and plenty of social risk.

There was nothing magically convincing about new atheists or biblical scholars when I was 18 rather than 15. In one case, I simply counted myself amongst the religious and didn't approach the fence or ask myself obvious questions (like why the sports were sex-segregated in the first place) and, in the other, I was more independent and chose to do so.

Now, I may be wrong now but I can't blame my past position on ignorance just happening to me. I knew what I was doing when I simply refused to read certain things.

I don't think it is a huge problem for the idea that society can put us in a place to believe false things since people will do this semi-reliably with a little prompting. Though I suppose it may be embarrassing for a rationalist.

I mean, on the one hand, I can't recall the last time I actually watched the Olympics either. On the other hand, you are rarely comparing similar numbers here either. If it's some track event, all the men's times will be clustered, and then all the women's times will be clustered say, 30% slower. You aren't comparing decimal places here. Even casual observers should notice.

It's only ~10-12% for running events and once you get to anything other than 100 meters the numbers aren't things that are going to be intuitive to the average person. There aren't very many people that know how long a 1500m race takes to run off the top of their heads.

This isn't to defend the author's studied obliviousness to easily observed realities, just saying that I bet most people would have no idea if a 10K time was fast or slow from a quick look at the corner of the screen.

if a 10K time was fast or slow

Where would you put the threshold for "fast" or "slow"? I run a fair amount, and while I'm definitely not "fast" by my own definition, I have won a race or two when it's a low-key park run or such. I suppose compared to the average American I'm "fast", but my personal mark is "the Boston qualifying time" which continues to be slightly out of reach.

I mean, in the context of the Olympics, it's a high bar. I guess these days it's sub-27 for men and sub-30 for women for it to be considered a fast race.

In general conversation, I would probably call someone "fast" if they could go sub-35. I suspect that my definition works pretty much the same as yours though - that's "fast" because it's faster than me rather than it being relative to a given percentage of the population. For reference, I haven't run a 10K in a couple years, but split the first 10K of my last half marathon at 38 minutes and continued at the same pace for the rest of the race (on a fairly hill course). Other recent race results suggest that I'd run 36-low on a good day on a fast course or track. I'd probably agree that the most common spot for people in the hobby running community to start calling someone "fast" is BQ or equivalent speeds at shorter distances - sub-18 5K, sub-38 10K, sub-3 marathon are probably pretty common numbers.

To be a bit corny, I don't like to call people slow as long as they're trying. It's all so relative, we're all working towards goals, and I'm behind too many people by too much to feel good about calling other people slow. That said, if someone demanded that I tell them whether I think they're slow, I'd probably say that a healthy young male that can't crack 50 minutes is slow.

For all numbers adjust by ~11-12% for women.

Good luck on getting a BQ!

I think his account is perfectly reasonable. I personally was not aware of the huge strength differences between men and women until around age 25, when I stumbled across this transcript of a Senate hearing on the topic of adding women to combat units in the US armed forces. I watched exactly zero sports on television.

Did his school never do the Presidential fitness tests?

I don't think my high school did.

I mean... I hate to out you but...

Nor spent any time being physical with women

So like, age 25, you found out about physical strength differences between men and women from a senate transcript before you got any hands on experience?

I'll be out with it. It's really difficult for me to square total ignorance of the sex differences between men and women with first hand carnal knowledge of the opposite sex. So when I hear "I honestly had no idea and zero exposure to any physical reality that could possibly contradict that men and women are equally as physically capable" I just think "So.... you're a virgin?"

Although I suppose the bottom quintile and the top quintile could shack up from time to time. Just odd to think of that being someone's sole experience from which they extrapolate out to the entire human population. I mean, everyone has a type I suppose, but then again, if it's your type, you'd have to be aware of that fact, right? Which means there are lots of people out there outside your "type"?

Like others have said, I'm confused what physical strength differences have to do with having sex. I have sex [citation needed], and it's never been relevant. My wife and I are having fun jamming our genitals together, not wrestling.

I mean, forget all the euphemisms I've seen like "struggle snuggles" or whatever. Who carries who? Who picks up who? Who holds who up against a wall? There are ample non-violent opportunities during sex to notice a strength difference.

I donno, maybe I'm opening the kimono too much. If you put on smooth jazz and languidly do whatever you do with your genitals that makes it happen for you, more power to you.

In our case... nobody, nobody and nobody. I think that like you said, this comes down to personal style differences.

Plenty of people aren't having/into the sort of struggle snuggles at volume that would make the strength difference apparent

Most people also just don't really think about things

Consider that the gap between “me and a woman I have had sex with” may not generalize to World Cup men vs. women, logically speaking. Yes, it actually does (assuming me and the woman are average) but we know that [male] athletes in strength sports are basically superhumans, they are incomparably stronger and more fit than the general population. If you do not pay any attention to sports and aren't very observant, it's easy to believe that there exist outliers, massive 250 lb Amasons with six-packs and 20 inch biceps, somewhere out there. They exist in fiction, after all…

The biggest reason that the strongest women are much weaker than the strongest men is not the average gap. It's that they have a much lower ceiling.

Nor spent any time being physical with women

If you are playfighting with a woman you are on the way to having sex with (which is the main time you might legally get into a battle of strength with a woman), you modulate your effort in order to win slowly. I always knew that there is a large strength gap, and correctly intuited that she was going all-out and still losing, but I can imagine a guy who had been told that the strength gap is smaller thinking that she is half-assing it just like he is.

If you are playfighting with a woman you are on the way to having sex with

I’d like to add a modification to that to say: if you’re playfighting with a woman, you’re on the way to having sex with her.

Whenever a chick initiates a playfight or playfight-adjacent physical contest, I know a trip to pound town is imminent. It’s high key hilarious how chicks are turned on by getting dominated.

I can’t imagine any scenario in which an adult woman would play fight with an unrelated man she wasn’t attracted to, sure. I can’t even really imagining it happening in the context of something that wasn’t already a relationship or a date, except in the “best friends who are not-so-secretly in love with each other” way.

It’s not merely a product of selection, but a causative effect—the odds are that dominating a chick through interactions such as playfighting increases her attraction toward you and/or turns her on much more than the marginal replacement typical date interaction.

I will willingly out myself here to give some perspective. No, I have not had carnal knowledge of a woman. Yes, throughout high school, I thought the difference between me and the average woman was probably not much. I knew women who could do more pull-ups than me (I could do one-and-a-half unassisted, and I didn't know they needed assistance, but even once I did know, it still hadn't really sunk in for me), I knew women who had better mile times than me, and I thought the difference in push-up requirements weren't much different. I think it wasn't until I did co-ed softball in college that I realized "wow, all the women are really slow and horrible at the game, and all the dudes are superstars who we bank the entire game's performance on".

Kickball in high school probably could have given me this realization as well, if I had cared to notice, but it's not as stark because you've also got unathletic girls and boys who weren't choosing to be there and don't want to put in much effort. I guess I thought even the athletic girls playing just weren't as serious about it as the boys.

Admittedly, there may be a bit of an inferiority complex that played into my not realizing that I am actually stronger than most women. I always thought I was sort of weak. Also, you generally don't get into armwrestling matches with women who are not lesbians, and there were almost no lesbians at my school. Sad, isn't it?

The thing is, the bottom quintile of men (edit: or even third quintile of men) and the top quintile of women very rarely get together, so a man who has noticed women he has had sex with are weaker than he is, but who has also noticed there are much bigger and stronger women around may not realize the general situation.

If you do participate in sports where both genders participate (though not formally competing), you will probably find yourself in situations where high-tier women and similar or lower-tier men get compared, and the women are sometimes surprised and upset at how badly they come off.

Yes, lots of smart, shy men who spend time on the internet are virgins. I don't think anyone should find this surprising.

Do they also not have sisters and female cousins or friends or moms? Aunts? Grandmas?

Or dads to tell them to be gentle with women?

The levels of ignorance get really deep really fast. As a male, there is some gigantic certainty that you will at some point become much much stronger than the females you are close to. Maybe its your mom who you can pick up with ease at 13 even though she's heavier than you. Maybe its your sister. Older or younger doesn't matter, there are common feats of strength easily observable. Maybe its a cousin. Or an aunt. Maybe all those people and your dad or grandpa told you the importance of "never hitting a woman". Any normal individual understands this, it is because they are fragile. Which is statistically true.

Being a virgin isn't an excuse. You have to be the level of the the guy who wrote the original article to get close to having an excuse. He was all of that plus more.

Sure, he’s autistic and probably was quite self-righteous about being ‘one of the good ones’.

I think though that a lot of people here are Red-Tribe-ish enough that they’re used to having largeish families.

If you don’t have children until mid-late 30s that means…

  • Your children are unlikely to have more than one sibling, if that (so 50% chance no sisters).
  • Their aunts and grandparents will be quite old and weak by the time they’re physically mature.
  • Their parents are unlikely to have many siblings either, so few aunts/cousins. Both sides are likely to move regularly for work, so you don’t see them often.

It’s sad but having relatively little familial contact is quite normal for a big section of society at this point, especially upper-middle class.

Well, as long as we're on the topic of innumeracy and poor estimation skills, I actually do still feel a moment of surprise when I realize I'm interacting with someone that's missing such a basic and core experience. It's one of those things that I know intellectually is some relevant percentage of the populace, but it's still surprising to encounter. This is a similar sort of thing to realizing that you might have been arguing with a 13-year-old about something.

Shrug. Despite being a virgin, I've always taken it as a given that women are just overall weaker than men. Training in martial arts just confirms it even further, to the point I almost feel bad about it.

Alot of it may just come down to living in radically different bubbles, some bordering on active, almost delusional isolation.

What does having had sex have to do with having physically struggle against a woman anyway?

The mere fact of your interaction with a woman at that level of intimacy will reveal to you that she is comparatively incredibly weak in the vast majority of such intimate interactions.

This need not be intentional for you, you will simply be stronger. It wont be close. People dont have sex, as a general rule, where the only interaction is the penis penetrating the vagina. Other, non-essential (from a reproductive POV) things happen. They are going to involve legs and arms. If you are the man, your legs and arms will be stronger in almost every instance.

The world records do indicate that women stronger than me do exist. I have never met such a woman. Honestly, I would speculate they likely have what my HS coach called "air muscles". This is a derogatory term for lifters for both sexes and is true. Being strong at weightlifts is only useful if it translates to combat or hay baling. Obviously the best at both are men.

I have to say that carrying 50 lbs sacks of dirt for my mom's gardening projects when I was a teenager did infinitely more to drive that home than any sex I had a couple of years later. Not that I needed any of that given that "men are stronger than women" was and still is a universally accepted fact here the same way as "men are taller than women" is.

I still don't see how bringing having sex into it is anything other than a way to make fun of nerdy guys for not being lucky with girls.

Yes, at age 31 I have fucked exactly zero hawt gurls. Unfortunately, the rumors of magical wizard powers are greatly exaggerated. (I may spend five kilodollars on a trip to the brothels of Australia after I retire two years from now, but I probably will not be able to justify that expense.)

Surely there must be a cheaper way for you to pay to get laid, wherever you are? If you're traveling to Australia at significant expense, there's likely a whole bunch of cheap Asian countries along the way.

Flying to the brothels of Nevada would cost me next to nothing. But it's my understanding that the extremely low supply of (legal) prostitutes in Nevada results in high prices and low quality. If this is the only sex I will ever have, why not go to a proper free market in order to buy it at low prices and high quality, rather than rewarding the Nevada government for its stupid policies?

Wikipedia indicates that, other than the US, Australia is the only English-speaking country where brothels are legal. (In Britain, prostitution is legal, but brothels and advertising prostitution are not.)

Why the only time? First you can always go back. Second, maybe getting laid will inspire you to get laid without paying for it

Sounds expensive either way.

Hiring prostitutes is a fun thought, but thinking about the price at all dispels the notion. The cheapest escorts on the forward thinking hippie sex work site are like, $500. Imagine... you could buy a Glock 19 for that and it wouldn't be gone in an hour of passion. You could buy a bike. You could upgrade a bunch of your old computer parts. You could fix your air conditioner during a heat wave in June. You could put it in an investment fund. I'll be the first to say it: for $500, investment funds are better than sex.

Back when I was an adult virgin, I would have easily paid 500$, or up to four times that, if it could permanently dispel the feeling of shame I would sometimes feel being virgin. The point would not have been to enjoy myself, but to break a psychological barrier that I saw as a blocker for all my attempts at dating. The reason I didn't is not because of the opportunity cost, but because I didn't believe it would dispel that feeling, and perhaps pile on a whole new shame on to it.

Australian brothels advertise prices around 200 Australian dollars (130 US dollars) for 45 minutes of time. The majority of the cost would be the plane tickets, which I agree probably are not worth it.

I'd rather advice a trip to Southeast Asia, in that case. If you want to retire anyway, it's a great place to stay for indefinite time as well.

They don't speak much English in Southeast Asia.

Trust me that's the very last of you worries. Two of my best school friends, then college age, went backpacking there for several months with very mediocre english and no knowledge of any local language.

One of them, a very shy but super nice, hardworking and competent guy who never had to my knowledge even kissed a girl - zero game as the kids say -, came back with a girlfriend. And not a bad one, some kind of banking business work, very easygoing, down-to-earth and admittedly quite attractive. They're now living together for a few years.

Of course sex tourism is also an option there, but imo getting a serious gf is a much more sensible option and very realistic for a well-earning westerner now matter how much you struggle with western women.

Also living expenses are quite low, so even apart from any dating a great place for young retirees to stay or travel indefinitely.

Trust me that's the very last of your worries. Two of my best school friends, then college age, went backpacking there for several months with very mediocre English and no knowledge of any local language.

That doesn't sound very enjoyable to me.

IMO getting a serious gf is a much more sensible option and very realistic for a well-earning westerner now matter how much you struggle with western women

I am not seeking a romantic partner. After around a half-dozen attempted friendships in college, I concluded that friendship was not worth the effort—and romance is just deeper friendship, so it would be even worse.

Also living expenses are quite low, so even apart from any dating a great place for young retirees to stay or travel indefinitely.

My calculations indicate that I will have enough money to retire in the US two years from now, so I have no need to move to the jungle.

My 5 star hotel that I was staying at with my family (!) overlooked the red light district in that part of Thailand. Trust me, not speaking the local language was the last thing dissuading the gents who came by, and they seemed to be having a great time.

It appears that brothels are illegal in Thailand (1 2). Randomly walking the streets of a country where I don't speak the language in order to look for women of widely-varying hotness at opaque prices (and, if this is the only sex that I will ever have, why not go for the hottest ones?) does not sound very enjoyable, in comparison to being able to pick from a lineup of brothel-curated employees at transparent prices that are posted on an English-language website.

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Bangkok is kinda known for this sort of thing, so I imagine their are plenty of polyglots in the industry. Also nominative determinism, but I'm sure that's been done to death.

Can you think of some examples of people you like believing false things that would support your political beliefs if they were true, or is this purely an outgroup affliction in your eyes?

People vastly overestimate the percentage of government expenditures are on various things that I would personally prefer to zero out. If they were right, the benefits of zeroing those things out would be much, much larger than what I hope for.

Substituting "like" for "feel more affiliated with":

Rightists tend to wildly overestimate the number of minorities in their countries, be in gender, sexual, religious, or ethnic.

I'm sure we all believe false things but tbh, to have reached this conclusion, this guy must be quite underdeveloped in certain aspects of intelligence, curiosity, and yes, even rationality. I think he comes across as blaming the world for giving him a false impression and thinks the world should change to fit his neurotype, whereas he might consider holding all his beliefs more lightly and questioning his assumptions a lot more. His argument might go a bit better if he gave examples of 'experts lying to his face'; rather, all his examples are Marvel-type movies and video games, which he should never have expected to map the real world in the first place.

I’m inclined to give him a little more slack than that. Just the other day I had the experience of reminiscing about a friend I had 10+ years ago who I knew for a fact was an incurable bullshitter. He lied about the most inane things and I knew this at the time.

He ran a store when I met him and it closed after a year or so and it only occurred to me now, more than a decade later, that he probably lied to me about why he had to close.

I think there are two pieces here that I’ve experienced firsthand: one is it’s very difficult to retro-actively scrub for lies. I also experienced this after leaving Mormonism in college. For years after I was uncovering random new things I’d been taught that were easily seen to not be true.

The second is it’s difficult to spot a lie if it is about something it would never occur to you to lie about. It’s like if someone always lies to you about what he had for lunch that day. Then over time lies get built on that. It can be very hard when a major lie is uncovered to realize it goes back to what was for lunch.

I think he comes across as blaming the world for giving him a false impression and thinks the world should change to fit his neurotype

More that he has built his life in a way where the maximum required level of strength for any task he performs is within the range of a reasonably athletic woman. My wife is in great shape, we can move furniture together in most Craigslist pickup cases. If "moving a couch" was the most strength I ever expected to display in life, I wouldn't really have much of a test to prove one way or the other how strong my wife is relative to me. I don't know that I would even call this author to help me move, so he might be below that level of maximum displayed strength. Jean ValJean never reveals himself if he never sees that cart in the street.

Certainly if this man is as wildly unathletic as he purports himself to be, he would experience hearing from PMC women in his circle about athletic feats they've performed that he would be unable to perform, with very little context for what he might be capable of. Hell, I know a half dozen women who have qualified for the NYC Marathon which in my age range is a 3:13 Marathon, and I sure can't do that. If I never looked up the qualifying times for men, I'd just hear that they ran a marathon in three hours and change, which would also be a pretty good time for a hobbyist man, and assume that if women tried they are just as good. Similarly in rock climbing, I know lots of women who could smash everyone in this forum by grade.

Your point about marathons supports a belief I have about womens' sport leagues. I am not sure how many others share it.

Competitions are mainly about status and the purpose of sex-segregated sports is not to keep the league fair per se. It is really because society intuitively understands that regardless of the differences between men and women, female athletes should not be penalized in status. The same is true for disabled athletes, which is why we have the special olympics and other sporting events like that.

That we don't have a competitive league for unathletic men like Brodski reveals that league segregation is not really about fair play. Arguments about "not putting in the same amount of effort" are essentially my point -- Brodski's weakness is low-status but an athletic woman's weakness is high-status. It is even difficult to say it in English. We still call them "athletic women" because all the words we will use for this concept (like "weak" and "athletic") are status-laden and graded-on-a-curve.

Because the way we talk about athletes (of all sexes) uses fuzzy terms instead of objective ranks, someone like Brodski can hear about women qualifying for marathons and being strong and he will continue to be blind to physical reality.

Contrast in Chess, where the definition of Grandmaster is actually the same for men and women. However, there is a different title called Woman Grandmaster which has fewer requirements. Presumably, being a woman is also a requirement to hold the title, but I am not sure. Maybe a man who can't quite make GM can call himself a WGM. It would be an unconventional for sure. But, nobody can deny that the purpose of the WGM title is the same as any other title, which is to assign status.

The same is true for disabled athletes, which is why we have the special olympics and other sporting events like that.

Which is why we have the Paralympics. The Special Olympics is a different model which confers less status on the winners. See this post where I discuss further, but the short answer is that the Special Olympics is intended to be less competitive than the Olympics in a way the Paralympics is not.

Competitions are mainly about status and the purpose of sex-segregated sports is not to keep the league fair per se. It is really because society intuitively understands that regardless of the differences between men and women, female athletes should not be penalized in status. The same is true for disabled athletes, which is why we have the special olympics and other sporting events like that.

This reminds me of a serious argument I've seen someone make in the ultimate Frisbee community, for why transwomen ought to play with women despite admitting that transwomen, especially ones who haven't done any sort of medical transitioning, have a physical advantage: that transwomen suffer so much bigotry in their everyday lives that we just ought to accommodate them in this one thing. It doesn't make sense from a fair sports play perspective, but from the perspective of just seeing this as a question of status, it kinda does.

Someone on the anti-trans side -- who wants trans women to play in mens leagues -- is still thinking in terms of status when it comes to competitions. For them, it's stolen valor for a trans woman to play with real women.

I admit I have trouble understanding the pro-trans mind on this issue. If I had to guess, they are biting a bullet, and sacrificing womens sports on the altar of the greater good of tolerance. The womens sports issue is just one piece of a mass-deception designed to convince society that a transwomen share the same characteristics as ciswomen. This is the only way to effect the desired change, which is to make society treat transwomen as-if they are ciswomen.

Yes, this is more or less right. I've certainly encountered endorsement of something like this in left spaces. "It kinda sucks, but the right decided to make women's sports a battlefield of the greater societal conflict about What A Woman Is. Making sure they don't win that fight is of existential importance and takes precedence over concerns about the short-tem fairness of competitive sports". Personally I wish we'd settled on advocating for "let's rename them XX League and XY League". It seems more principled. Harder to turn into a slogan, though.

Do you have the same feeling about weight classes? Would you say that the flyweight UFC Champion is athletic? Would it be accurate to call him tough, despite weighing 125# (fighting weight) at 5'5"? Or is it inaccurate in the same way "athletic woman" is inaccurate because he would be toast against any higher weight class fighter? What about Ilia at featherweight, 145# fighting weight and 5'7", but reportedly closer to 180# walking around, who probably stunts on most average men but would be similarly stomped by a LHW or HW UFC fighter? Or do we consider p4p for men, but not women?

This kind of discussion confuses me sometimes, because a lot of men who aren't running 3hr marathons and can't climb 5.13b and can't sink a three pointer on an open basketball court love to shitpost about how stupid the idea of an athletic woman is. The existence of someone better doesn't seem to preclude the use of the word athletic in my mind.

Do you have the same feeling about weight classes?

I mean, does an announcer belting out "In the red corner, the Heavy Weight Champion of the Wooooooorld" have the same gravitas as Feather Weight Champion? I mean, I'm not gonna fuck with a featherweight champion just because I weigh more. But all the same, which weight class sells more tickets on average? Heavyweight is where the big bucks are. There is a perception that the Heavyweight is the champion of champions.

@PutAHelmetOn ((Because I'll cite back to this in my reply to you))

This is less true than you think it is in modern fight sports.

Average Purse for Boxing By Weight Class:

🔹Heavyweight: $20M
🔹Bridgerweight: $1M
🔹Cruiserweight: $3M
🔹Light Heavyweight: $5M
🔹Super Middleweight: $25M
🔹Middleweight: $2M
🔹Jr Middleweight: $3M
🔹Welterweight: $10M
🔹Super Lightweight $5M
🔹Lightweight $15M
🔹Super Featherweight $1M
🔹Featherweight $1M
🔹Super Bantamweight $4M
🔹Bantamweight $1.5M
🔹Super Flyweight $2M
🔹Flyweight $500K
🔹Jr Flyweight $1M
🔹Minimumweight $200k

You clearly see that Super Middleweight (168#) tops the charts, and that lightweight and welterweight are both vastly higher than any of the weights between Super Mid and Heavy.

For the UFC, the top ten highest paid fighters of all time includes four heavyweights, but also two lightweights top the list and it also features middleweights and welterweights. In the UFC in particular, among fight fans HW is often seen as a bit of a sideshow, with a shallow talent pool and sloppy fights; the biggest stars and best fights have normally been between 155# and 205#, where the fighters tend to land at "normal male" heights of between 5'9" and 6'2".

That's what more fans are tuning in for, rather than the Universal Championship at HW.

Historically in Boxing the Heavyweight Championship was the ne plus ultra of sports, but back then your heavyweight champions were Rocky Marciano at 5'10" 190#, and Mohammed Ali at 6'3" 226#, a big fella but not a mass monster by any means. I'm on the bigger side for my BJJ gym, and I'm a few pounds bigger than Marciano; the biggest couple guys in the gym are significantly larger than Ali.

The problem might be talent pools: basketball and the NFL soak up too many of the really athletic big fellas. Jalen Carter or Micah Parsons might be HW contenders if they had trained for it, but they make twice that fight purse a season in the NFL; and forget what guys like Lebron and Luka make in the NBA without getting hit in the head too often.

The correlation between weight and purse is 48%, which seems high enough to confirm the theory that heavier is more prestigious. There is also a mild bias in favour of the "classic" weight classes over the more recently added fine-grained ones, although the difference ($7.1M vs $5.6M) may not be statistically significant depending on the number of fights making up the averages.

That's not really a useful way to examine weight classes relative to @WhiningCoil 's assertion that HW is the prestige weight class. HW is the "open" class that any fighter could enter if they were better, they're the "real" champion, any other weight class whether at 200# or 125# is a "fake" champion by comparison. The assertion made wasn't "people like watching bigger fellas" it is "people like watching the 'real' champion, not a 'fake' champion protected by weight class regulations."

The real pattern you see is that fans like watching fights with great champions and great challengers, they like seeing great athletes compete against other great athletes, regardless of weight. This holds throughout boxing history: HW was big when you had multiple challengers passing the belt around in the Ali-Frazier-Foreman era, and decayed when the Klitschko's dominated it; Leonard, Duran, Hagler, and Hearns made middleweight great and their fights are still legendary today. Mayweather has the biggest three purses of all time. It's how it works.

Lower weight classes offer different opportunities to view excellence - supreme speed, reaction time, endurance, doggedness. Big Man Smash Good certainly looks more attractive and brings eyeballs, but the other stuff is entertaining and a showcase in its own way, and in a way that women's classes aren't.

I was not giving opinion on if "athletic" should be graded on a curve.

Brodski's weakness is low-status but an athletic woman's weakness is high-status.

In case this sentence wasn't clear, I can annotate it:

Brodski's objective!weakness is low-status but an subjective!athletic woman's objective!weakness is high-status.

There, I used "athletic" in the curve-grading sense, the same as you seemed to use it.

This kind of discussion confuses me sometimes, because a lot of men who aren't running 3hr marathons and can't climb 5.13b and can't sink a three pointer on an open basketball court love to shitpost about how stupid the idea of an athletic woman is.

Yes, you are dunking on average men because female athletes outperform them. The sting of your dunk is precisely because the idea of an objective!athletic woman is silly. It wouldn't take much for the average man to outperform her. The disrespect we show female athletes is precisely because a man at that level is also not praised or respected for it. The respect and praise is allocated based on status (and society's intuitions for who should be given it), not based on who can do what.

The existence of weight classes proves that the featherweight's objective!weakness is high-status.

That there is no league for short basketball players seems to prove that short king's objective!weakness is low-status. I suppose one could try to argue that short players are not outmatched in basketball to the same degree that light players are outmatched in fighting. Probably the team-based aspect of basketball makes it harder to analyze individual players. In some sense it is the team that is the player in basketball, and there is no such thing as a short team.

I do not think it is a coincidence that short stature in men is one of the classic incel status resentments. Furthermore, I've heard it (but have not looked into it) that the male height-income gap replicates better than the gender income gap. In other words, a man's height is a classic status marker.

The existence of weight classes proves that the featherweight's objective!weakness is high-status.

That's why I brought up Topuria specifically, because he is in a smaller weightclass on a UFC scale, but at his walking around weight he is essentially an average American male. In my view, that makes him objectively athletic, because he's outperforming the majority of men. And the market agrees! The most famous UFC fighters of all time are Connor Macgregor and GSP, who fought primarily at 155 and 170 respectively. The highest earning divisions have historically been between 155 and 205, rarely above or below. There's a deeper and more interesting talent pool that puts on good fights.

The assertion regarding lower-weightclass athletes or female athletes that:

It wouldn't take much for the average man to outperform her.

Is the purest fentanyl-strength copium. I know a few dozens of women that climb 5.13b, that's not a trivial achievement for a man. Neither is a 3:13 marathon, or sinking three pointers, or playing scratch golf even from the women's tees, or any number of other female athletic achievements we see.

Really, I agree with you that athletics is about status, but I don't think the adverb "objective" belongs anywhere near the adjective athletic. Because there is no being "athletic" in some platonic ideal sense, there is only being more athletic than and less athletic than. And the question as to calling someone athletic when we get into weight classes, women's divisions, "master's" age classes, is probably whether such people are either "more athletic than the average person" or "more athletic than the expectation."

So I guess the status I'm interested in conferring on others when I call them athletic is that they are more athletic than you'd expect.

You know, it's funny you point that out, because I never thought of it like that, but it really crystallized something for me from reading so much pre-current year literature lately. At no point in any novel I've read pre 1980 is any woman ever described as physically strong. Not in Dickens, not in Howard, not in Homer, Tolkien, Niven & Pournelle, Lovecraft, Ellison, Twain, or Burroughs. Women are not described as strong, even graded on a curve, there are no feats of female strength (though cunning is fair game). Though perhaps Gibbon occasionally describes the women of certain barbarian tribes as possessing manly or warlike virtues. I don't have quotes on hand.

Point being, there was a before time, when there wasn't the constant cultural obsession with giving equal time to flattering women as being "strong".

This reflects more on the particular kinds of stories they were telling than it does on history as a whole. Having a (relatively, for a woman) strong wife who can do farm labor and bear strong sons was valued. A female relative of mine who still lives off the same farm her grandparents did is visibly pretty strong.

At no point in any novel I've read pre 1980 is any woman ever described as physically strong. Not in Dickens, not in Howard,

Certainly in Howard. Valeria is described as being strong (while still being feminine). Maybe the original Red Sonja (who inspired the later Red Sonja in Conan comics) might count.

"She was tall, full-bosomed, and large-limbed, with compact shoulders. Her whole figure reflected an unusual strength, without detracting from the femininity of her appearance." - This is the start of the description of Valeria. He does say she is unusual in her strength though.

"Then with a yell and a rush someone was at his side and he heard the quick splintering of mail beneath the madly flailing strokes of a saber that flashed like silver lightning before his clearing sight. It was Red Sonya who had come to his aid, and her onslaught was no less terrible than that of a she-panther. Her strokes followed each other too quickly for the eye to follow; her blade was a blur of white fire, and men went down like ripe grain before the reaper." - She is splintering mail with sword strokes and reaping men like grain, which takes some level of strength.

"With a croaking cry Tshoruk ran at her, scimitar lifted. Before he could strike, she crashed down the barrel of the empty pistol on his head, felling him like an ox. From the other side Rhupen slashed at her with a curved Turkish dagger. Dropping the pistol, she closed with the young Oriental. Moving like someone in a dream, she bore him irresistibly backward, one hand gripping his wrist, the other his throat. Throttling him slowly, she inexorably crashed his head again and again against the stones of the wall, until his eyes rolled up and set. Then she threw him from her like a sack of loose salt." - Red Sonja again rescuing the main character - overpowered a man, throttled him, then throws his body away, like a sack.

So noted! I don't recall the exact description of the lady in Queen of the Black Coast either. But perhaps we can also admit that not every Conan story spent equal time fluffing the physical valor of a woman who was to be Conan's equal. Although I recall even in Red Nails, Valeria was disabused of any notions of superiority to Conan, and the people they fought were a fairly degenerate and sorcerous bunch.

I mean, yes, Amazons were a trope, and lost parts of the Greek Epic Cycle even had them. Maybe I over stated my case that "at no point" were the authors of those works describing women as strong. But it was rare, and far short of the almost compulsive behavior of modern creators of culture trying to give equal, or even superior time, to the ability of 90 lb totally normal women to overpower hulking 6'4" 300 lb manly men.

  • But perhaps we can also admit that not every Conan story spent equal time fluffing the physical valor of a woman who was to be Conan's equal.

Absolutely. Belit throws herself at his feet, Valeria is certainly not his equal, this version of Red Sonja does save a European warrior giant who is fighting the Ottomans, but while she can overpower the "average" male warrior with strength she isn't shown to be a strength match to Gottfried directly and can't lift him out of a moat in his full armor on her own, she can only half lift him, though that is probably still reasonably impressive as he is in full armor, soaking wet and fully armed.

Celtic history and myths do have some warrior women as well:

From a Roman soldier:

“A Celtic woman is often the equal of any Roman man in hand-to-hand combat. She is as beautiful as she is strong. Her body is comely but fierce. The physiques of our Roman women pale in comparison.”

You can find others in Celtic myth cycles like:

"Aife also known as Aoife in modern Irish, was Scáthach's rival and by most accounts, her sister, or even twin. She was reportedly fierce in battle, shattering Cú Chulainn’s sword with one of her blows when the two went head to head in an epic fight. The mighty Cú Chulainn had to resort to trickery to defeat her"

But usually they are portrayed as being unusual examples of womanhood in and of themselves.

As for modern media it's certainly more common I'd agree, but as long as they do the work I don't mind it. i.e. Buffy being explicitly powered by magic, Black Widow being augmented by a shadowy Red Room especially in a world where a man with apparently only peak human strength can hold down a helicopter. They are our modern version of the mythologies of the past (or as with Wonder Woman, the actual past mythologies), reinvented.

It's a little more jarring in more grounded pieces I agree but even there they have a tendency to show one man being able to beat 5 men at the same time or what have you, so they are obviously juicing everybody up for the sake of looking bad-ass. I imagine having to show a guy just about win a fight with an equal but be exhausted then sit around healing for a month from his cracked ribs, concussion and shattered knuckles isn't exactly conducive to a fast based entertainment product. So almost every character in an action series or movie is effectively superhuman for unspecified reasons.

I have met a single woman who was as strong as I was but she was a fit 6'2 black ex D1 basketball player. And I am a 5'11 schlubby gamer, and a decade older than she was. So I don't have any illusions about average strength comparisons. A woman needs very very significant size and fitness advantages in order to match male strength. My first wife was 5' even and 90lbs and there was no possible way she could overpower me hand to hand, even if she were trained by ninjas.

“A Celtic woman is often the equal of any Roman man in hand-to-hand combat. She is as beautiful as she is strong. Her body is comely but fierce. The physiques of our Roman women pale in comparison.”

Where is this from? All I could find was unattributed copypasta with a Google search.

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Does your wife not seek you out for opening too-tight lids on jars?

Sure, but I'd imagine she does so more rarely than most women. Men she meets frequently comment on her shockingly strong handshake.

But the margin between my wife and I is obvious, because we lift together. I'm aware that her max is my warmup weight, and that her forgetting to rerack her weights is just annoying to me, while if I forget to rerack my weights she's basically helpless to clean up my deadlift.

the margin between my wife and I is obvious, because we lift together. I'm aware that her max is my warmup weight

My wife might have been, shall we say, less aware of the real physical differences between men/women... before she started lifting with me. At this point, she is basically dreaming of getting her maxes up to my warmup weight. (I've been lifting a lot longer.) It didn't take that long for her to become keenly aware and realize that we have significantly different ceilings.

Lots of jokes have been made about the lifting->right wing pipeline, but there really may be something to the idea that if you do get into lifting, it is completely unavoidable, looking at concrete numbers, to realize that one particular cultural soft lie is, indeed, a lie. It's not surprising that it leads to people questioning other parts of the edifice.

Sports are contact with reality. Just as Jackie Robinson and Mohammed Ali were the the most important figures in the Civil Rights movement; Nikola Jokic and Cooper Flagg are going to cause a crisis in American culture within a few years.

The most important myth that lifting destroys is learned helplessness: starting lifting is the experience of putting in effort and seeing results. There's a strong debate about privilege hidden under there, in that for some people it will be easier than me and that for some people it will be harder than me, but for everyone there is effort put in and there are results.

Most women I know can't move a couch or other large furniture (yes some of this is driven by social class and racial dynamics and so on) but if she can you are doing good! I suspect in upper-middle class and upper class groups the women are less athletic, less practical, and when athletic lean more towards running builds.

And perhaps the person in OP's link also cannot so he assumes that is normal.

Uh, working class women are not good at moving heavy objects, and are generally worse at it than wealthier women. That fat is covering up less muscle, not more, than the yoga girl or the runner.

Most women I know can't move a couch or other large furniture (yes some of this is driven by social class and racial dynamics and so on) but if she can you are doing good!

Find yourself a strong beautiful Slavic woman.

....don't tell my partner how much this intrigues me lol

I remember some pop-sci Discovery Channel shows acting like "technique" rather that sheer size / strength is what gives you the advantage in combat sports, and that women's technique is just as good as men's.

Not exactly "experts" but it was advertised as an accurate portrayal of reality.

The relative important of strength and technique depends on the combat sport in question, which is why women's judo works as sport whereas women's boxing is a kinky sideshow.

I think they were doing it with boxing. At least what I vaguely remember is some setup where some ripped-as-fuck dude, and a pretty-ripped woman take turns throwing punches at a ripped-as-fuck-dude-wearing-a-blindfold, who then proclaims that ackshully the woman hit a little harder, or something like that.

You're wrong to dismiss cultural background as a purveyor of what one ought to believe. It is in fact more normal to take your cues from the celebrated myths of your culture than to evaluate them critically.

The conceit of the barbarism of reflection is that all men have it in them to construct their values from scratch, when in truth no or very few men have the ability.

It may be normal but if you are a truth-seeking type of person, taking fiction to reflect reality in this way feels like accepting that it should do. But should fiction accurately reflect the world? I would tentatively say no, though art is perhaps best if it's authentic to an earned worldview or moral sensibility of some kind.

The best fiction accurately reflects the world in most ways, in order to explore the implications of deliberately changing the fictional world in one or a few ways. If you don't want to make any changes, just write a history or a biography, and it'll be more useful. If you want to make an unlimited set of changes, that might be aesthetically evocative but it's not going to be interesting - at some point your attempts to create a world primarily from your own mind only tell me about your mind, not about any worlds.

Looking at "Aliens, Terminator 2, Buffy, Xena, ... the various Star Treks, The Matrix, ..." (I never watched Dark Angel, nor enough Farscape to comment), most of them actually came off pretty well in this sense? In rough order from best to worst (by this criterion; I still love DS9!):

Aliens had Vasquez get pretty buff, but it doesn't save her any more than it does the buff male marines who outnumber her. Newt is a survivor because she was the best at running and hiding; Ripley is buff enough (in part due to the Alien backstory) that it's important to the story, but the importance is "she can carry that huge gun/flamethrower", not "she could overpower a man". She's capable of as much courage as the men, but she doesn't let that drive her into extreme risks until maternal "must save Newt" instinct forces it on her.

Terminator 2 relies even more heavily on backstory here. Out of context, "the woman is the super tough super buff one" seems like pure proto-Woke, but the backstory is that this is the same woman who was a fragile damsel-in-distress who barely survived the previous movie, was turned into an utterly driven person for a decade and a half by her experiences there, and hasn't had anything to do during that time except plot and scheme and exercise in a mental hospital. That "experience creating strength" character arc isn't denied to the males; Miles Dyson and John Connor don't have time to get buff, but they both gain emotional fortitude very quickly.

In The Matrix, "the girl is one of the super tough super buff ones" is a natural consequence of the deliberate changes, no weirder than the same situation for Keanu, who at this point is closer to gangly "Bill and Ted" Keanu than to "training with Taran Butler for John Wick" Keanu. Their avatars have super powers when they're in the video game simulation.

In Buffy, "the girl is the super tough super buff one" is the deliberate change, specifically justified in-story by ancient magic. There's a wide variation in physical skill among the non-magically-powered girls and women, but they generally don't fare as well.

In Xena, "the woman is the super tough super buff one" is pretty much only justified by "she's exceptional", unless there was more to the story I've forgotten? But IIRC "exceptional women are physically competitive with exceptional men" was just played straight here.

In the 90s Star Treks, there wasn't a ton of physical combat, but when there was they generally played the gender differences straight too. Perhaps the most common example was Major Kira fighting, and while I can definitely believe that a trained and experienced guerrilla can disarm a random idiot with a hand weapon in close quarters, by the time they get to "mostly holding her own while surrounded by three Klingon warriors" it's clear that plot armor knows no gender.

Perhaps the most common example was Major Kira fighting, and while I can definitely believe that a trained and experienced guerrilla can disarm a random idiot with a hand weapon in close quarters, by the time they get to "mostly holding her own while surrounded by three Klingon warriors" it's clear that plot armor knows no gender.

Ah that is because she uses the most powerful technique known to any race. The double fist punch. She uses it like 15 times in that 1 minute clip.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Double-fist_punch

That's a fascinating rabbit hole to go down: How the ‘Star Trek’ Punch Became the Worst Fight Move on TV.

In hindsight I also love the fact that, out of all the unrealistic sci-fi show things that nerds loved to geek out about, I never saw Star Trek fight choreography come up. Do the fleet sizes in Star Wars make tactical and economic sense? Oh, we can rant and debate about that for hours. Is the apparent motion of stars while the Enterprise is at warp consistent with the canon speeds the ship is at? Of course not, but here's a fan theory explaining why. Now, is clasping your fists together to punch with both at once a great fight move? What, why would you even ask a question about fisticuffs instead of something we know more about like teleporters??

I also often favour movies where all the 'differences from reality' appear to flow from the concept of the movie itself. The more additional arbitrary tropes the movie includes the worse it can be. A schlocky Marvel movie has rules in addition to 'superheroes exist' such as 'there is no such thing as sex' and 'people banter a lot in dangerous situations' and indeed 'all women (and men) can fight really well'. There are reasons for these rules but they're mainly to do with appealing to a mass audience rather than artmaking. And genre movies basically are clusters of rules that are imposed in addition to a movie's guiding concept. (At least in good genre movies the makers understand the reason the rules have evolved, and use them for an overarching purpose however).

But all that said, this is about good art vs bad art, and if you try to do your learning about the world just based on bad art, it might not be too surprising if you don't learn too much.

Picasso said it most plainly as "Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth."

Insofar as we're talking of an actual exploration of the human condition and not mere propaganda, there are things art can teach you that no exhaustive study is able to touch.

I like to use the 1995 film Hackers as a good example of this. Widely panned by IT professionals as the epitome of "hollywood hacking", it nevertheless is a cult film among those same IT professionals because it managed to capture the essential experience of being part of a specific community at a specific time.

Every CS grad worth his salt had made fun of the 3D Vitruvian Man viruses and associated iconography. But when ThePirateBay was fighting the Man, it's clips from this movie they would post on their website. Because despite their catastrophic failure to be specifically accurate Hollywood still got the human experience right. And that's what art is uniquely good at capturing anyways.

All this however is besides the point, because what I'm saying (and you seem to agree) is that being a truth seeking person is not normal. And perhaps ultimately not even possible in extremis.

Given history is rife with entire civilizations believing things we now consider mad, and given still that I don't consider this age as meaningfully wiser than any previous one, it seems almost certain that I take for granted things that are catastrophically erroneous.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that I believe such things since such a stance is contradictory with my metaphysical skepticism. But I certainly act as if some erroneous things are true.

The more interesting question is if it really matters that much outside of academic affairs or outside of a political regime that derives its legitimacy from public opinion.

I've made no secret in this forum of my attachment to truth as a terminal value, but experience has dispelled in me the conviction that this is a preoccupation of most people, or indeed something they ought to preoccupy themselves with in the first place.

People are prompt to delegate this kind of thinking, with no way to convince them to do otherwise, so the corruption of authoritative institutions seems a much more pressing problem than perennial biases.

I've made no secret in this forum of my attachment to truth as a terminal value, but experience has dispelled in me the conviction that this is a preoccupation of most people

Yesterday's news was, "NASA reveals astronauts’ return 'would not have happened' without Trump’s intervention"

By "NASA" here, we mean "Press Secretary Bethany Stevens, appointed a couple weeks ago", so hopefully I'm not indicting our top space-administration minds when I point out that this is a obvious bold-faced lie. The decision to bring back the Starliner astronauts in the Crew-9 capsule, as finally happened a week or so ago, was made last August, months before Trump was elected, much less took office. The Crew-9 launch was performed with two empty seats, reserved for their return as part of this plan, last September.

How can someone appointed to the job of "understand and explain what NASA is doing" be such an utter, unbelievable failure at understanding and explaining what NASA is doing? Well, that's probably why she was appointed.

or indeed something they ought to preoccupy themselves with in the first place.

Exactly! Imagine if, in Stevens' previous job as Ted Cruz's press secretary, she had been very assiduous about explaining that the Crew-9 return had been all planned out during Biden's term, and that the only change in plans during Trump's second term was that SpaceX took a little longer than planned to get the Crew-10 capsule ready and so the rotation was delayed a bit. Does she get praised for her commitment to truth and accuracy, and get her promotion more promptly? Or does NASA instead end up with a different press secretary who isn't such a killjoy?

The interesting thing about Brodski's story, that makes it not another case of "believing lies can be strategically useful", is that he is one of those few people who specifically and deliberately tries to avoid that, and yet one of the "useful" lies still bit him. When people like Stevens or the Boston Globe tell obvious falsehoods, it's good to wonder which of them fell for a dumb idea vs which of them are just being strategically deceptive, but Brodski would have to be playing the long game indeed to post a deep dive into how dumb he was. In his case, I'd like to hope that @pigeonburger had the right idea, that "if it had been a big issue for him I would assume he would have ended up on the correct opinion faster". Indeed the easiest way to fail to answer a question is to fail to truly ask the question, so you'd think Occam's Razor says we're done here. But maybe now I'm the one not paying attention to evidence? E.g. questions of politics and religion have no shortage of dedicated investigators, and yet many major questions don't see those investigators converge toward a single answer, or into a set of different-but-compatible-answers, or even to a state of humble explicit uncertainty.

Perhaps the key phrase there is "politics and religion"? Our ancestors may have all been through too many generations wherein anyone who announced "My epistemic credence is 90% on your side but still 10% on the other" had a good chance of ending up with their bodies 90% on one side of a blade and 10% on the other. The strategically deceptive thing to do in such cases is to keep your solid Bayesian reasoning private and just express false certainty publicly, but humans aren't as good at tricking each other unless we first trick ourselves, and either way why bother hanging on to good reasoning habits you can hardly ever use? Just be part of the tribe. You might get a promotion out of it, and if you were smart enough to ditch those good reasoning habits beforehand then you don't even have to feel ashamed afterwards.

You might get a promotion out of it, and if you were smart enough to ditch those good reasoning habits beforehand then you don't even have to feel ashamed afterwards.

I sense disapproval in your tone, but this is just how we are. And why we developed institutions to make sure that the sort of weirdo that hangs around these parts and cares about what is literally true to an unhealthy degree can be made socially useful.

We used to be more aware of the fact that the masses are rubes who lie all the time to everyone starting with themselves.

The corruption of those mitigating institutions has forced us to engage in a project of uplifting everybody into rationalism (this is what the Enlightenment is really about ultimately). But that was silly and hubristic. There is no way for society to work without useful lies.

You can say a lot of things about The Invention of Lying but the core proposition of the film it demonstrates quite aptly: without lies, society would be brutal and abject to everyone. And unlike the movie characters who get to be deadpan for comedic purposes, we'd be at each other's throats.

Now this is not to discard the merits of truth which are of immense value, but they alone can't order any society that would be human.

The more interesting question is if it really matters that much outside of academic affairs or outside of a political regime that derives its legitimacy from public opinion

Health seems like the big one. It makes a personal difference to your quality of life and lifespan whether you believe that lead paint is safe, whether you believe that vaccines are good for you, etc. I expect that the biggest thing our descendants are likely to shake their heads at is some benign part of everyday life in the developed world which will have been exposed as having dire long-term consequences on the human body. The "microscopic lithium contamination is causing obesity" people are probably wrong, but something like that.

Our descendants in 100 years seem unlikely to be more longevity maxing or scientifically minded than we are.

I'm not saying they'll be systematically better at taking care of their health, just that something big and loud akin to "yo, lead point is bad for you" might emerge and filter out into popular consciousness to the point they'd be horrified at the 2025 lifestyle for that alone.

Personal health advice matters up to a point.

I understand this is relevant vis à vis cigarettes or leaded gasoline and the like, but these are matters of public health and public policy. It's only in a democracy that every man must have an opinion on such matters, and we've done fine in the past with more primitive types of holy men declaring things they notice have problems to be unclean and pass down general wisdom like this.

In any case, having a truth seeking apparatus that really works is absolutely necessary, but I would couch that as academic affairs, actually.

In fact, the current state of affairs where no institution is trustworthy and everyone has to build their own opinion of basically anything is a catastrophic failure and a waste of everyone's time. Not some utopian epistemological anarchy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating we all stop thinking and defer to the closest available authority. But we have to live in a world where most people are going to do that, by necessity. So even if it's unwise, it ought to work.

It's only in a democracy that every man must have an opinion on such matters

Surely not? In any era, save some totalitarian hell-scape, I can still use my own judgement to determine if I, personally, am going to take up smoking/let a quack saw up my leg/give the wise-woman's herbal remedy a try. Renaissance, medieval, even ancient literature is full of jokes about doctors prescribing unpleasant/harmful treatments which clearly don't work just to look like they know what they're talking about, and characters rightly giving them a hard pass after the application of a bit of common sense.

You can, but you don't have to for most things.

Consider in the periods you bring up the role of the Church vis à vis morality (protestantism and all), because I think it's a lot more relevant to what I'm trying to illustrate than medicine which has indeed always been suspect of quackery.

There are places that still work like this today. I've lived in some. In some nations, the ruler just says whether something is acceptable or not (which usually really come from his advisors) and people fall in, because that's what you do.

People don't turn off their brain altogether so you can't make insane demands out of them, but they will generally be unconcerned with matters that are beyond their command, and really most dissident talk is about character rather than policy specifics.

This also happens in representative democracies mind you, but this tendency to stick to "is this a good man" rather than "are those good policies" is usually panned as populism because it's rightly recognized as subversive to the ideal of a democratic system.

In my local Slate Star Codex WhatsApp group, one guy recently advocated for technocracy over democracy, arguing that our society would function better if educated experts made all the decisions. I strongly disagreed, arguing that a) expertise in a given empirical field doesn't qualify you to make normative decisions - these are separate magisteria; and b) within their own narrow domain, educated experts may have a more accurate model of how the world works than the lay person, but educated experts are also disproportionately likely to endorse a range of deluded beliefs that most uneducated people do not suffer from. When pressed for examples of what deluded beliefs I was thinking of, the first I offered was "the idea that the delta in athletic performance between males and females is narrow enough that it can be fair for a trans woman to compete in a female sporting event".

Unsurprisingly, some people in the chat pushed back and insisted that there was no way this belief was a delusion, thereby proving my point.

They already do make all the decisions. Democracy just frequently changes which group of elites chooses the experts make the decisions.

The problem for your friend's question is, what's his better way to choose the elites who choose the experts? And how do you give that group power? The elites could just choose a next group of elites, but I don't really want mad king Elon. Probably there's a group of capable leaders who, if chosen to be absolute rulers, would do a lot better than democracy. Look at how advocating for monarchy has gone for Moldbug - he's been reduced to asking the Trump admin to do the coup. I don't want Trump, or Elon, or a coalition of right-wing power brokers including Trump Jr and Tucker, to choose the next king, personally.

What if the word "fair" is actually normative? It seems everyone in the groupchat attempted to defend it under (b) but if someone said it belonged to the separate magisterium of (a), wouldn't you need another example?

While obviously the word "fair" is a normative word, my intuitive understanding is that the answer to the question "is it fair to allow male athletes to compete in female sporting events?" is pretty much entirely determined by the size of the delta in athletic performance between males and females. No one argued that it was a category error to include "it is fair to allow male athletes to compete in female sporting events" under the heading of "factual delusion", they simply disputed that it was in fact a factual delusion. One person said that, rather than segregrating sports by sex, we should segregate sports according to the things for which sex is a proxy e.g. bone density, T-levels etc., which just sounds like a sex-segregated league with extra steps.

As I expected, your groupchat was treating it as a factual matter, which is a real shame. Even worse, the one person suggesting to autistically use proxies is either deluded about transwomen, or is just too cowardly to point out the obvious.

If your goal was to prove a point to them then maybe the use of a political example was unwise.

Well the entire point I was making was that Western educated people are systematically politically biased in ways which give them a predictably inaccurate model of the world, and that this model of the world is systematically inaccurate in ways quite different from the model used by the modal uneducated person. Pretty hard to make my point without using specific political examples - it's a fundamentally political assertion.

That's certainly a delusion, but a bad example because it's political, not one held by experts. If athletic coaches held this belief, it'd be a better example.

Many experts serving on governing bodies for their respective sports support trans women competing in the female divisions.

It's really just left-wing elites, "intellectuals" included, which isn't strange given the political bias of universities. What they have in common seems to be a very social kind of ambition, they seek social power, and at the same time they're vulnerable to conformity and group delusions (and all other unfortunate instances of social instincts, like bullying, thinking that the likelihood of a statement being correct is a function of how many people present agrees with it, and assuming that a statement is likely to be wrong if the speaker isn't liked by the community, etc)

In case it's not clear, I'm agreeing with you. The ivory tower intellectuals are completely unqualified in improving the world. I wouldn't even describe them as intelligent, but I will have to admit that they're generally knowledgeable. They vastly overvalue education. Experience is much more valuable

No true Scotsman! Or perhaps who watches the watchers (ie who gets to pick who is an expert)

where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.

The apparently widespread belief among Palestinians that Israel could ever be defeated militarily (or indeed completely exterminated) suddenly makes a lot more sense.

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