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You mention a degree of incredulity at the homogeneity of this attitude, and I think that points to a specific insight. Other commenters have suggested that "2023" is indeed the right answer for everyone, men and women, because... there's more Marvel movies to consoom now, I guess, and only edgelords would disagree. And that may be true, but it misses the point that you always get some male edgelords who get autistic about DEUS VULTing with the Crusades or Smashing The Fash in 1917 Petrograd, and are willing to stick their neck out and say "Yes the spiritual interesting-ness of the times exceeds the appeal of being able to go see Ant Man: Quantumania". Even if it's poorly thought out; even if they're almost certainly, objectively wrong; they'll speak the words, publicly.
What I think you're seeing with women is probably not some deeper or more clear-sighted shared awareness of either the rising tide of technological progress nor the snowballing gynocentrism of society. What I think you're seeing with women is the greater conformism of their gender. They know that "Now" is the answer that all their friends will say, that you might get cancelled if you don't say... so that's what they say. They gain nothing from being an edgelord because (as has been rehashed on these pages and infinitum) women get points/mates/security just for existing. If you want anyone to notice you as a man, you must stand out from the crowd, and this is the biological basis for male edgelord-ism.
That the answer "2023" is plausibly correct in an objective sense is a coincidence. They say it because it's conformist, not because they have deeply considered the pros and cons of ACCELERATE
No need to cook up an "actually women don't think about things"-like explanation where "it's painfully obvious for anyone who is in college or would want to go there that you wouldn't be able to go to college if you were a 1800s peasant" suffices.
Frankly, I'm tempted to write off many mottizen politically incorrect posts as "they actually haven't evaluated those ideas, they just learned to rehash Wrongthink (and quote 1984isms while doing so) to feed their compulsive contrarianism". Do you believe that would be charitable? Or even falsifiable?
If one of the rules of charity is that you’re never allowed to psychoanalyze your opponents, then I suppose it’s uncharitable by definition. But I do think your hypothesis is a reasonable one, and it probably has some truth to it. A lot of us are compulsive contrarians.
As for falsifiability, it’s not really a reasonable criteria to aim for outside of the hard sciences. If we had to restrict ourselves to only discussing what was in practice falsifiable, we would close off vast swaths of human thought.
Certainly not everything has to be falsifiable, but factual statements about your opponents probably should be if there's a productive discussion to be had.
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Probably none. The point I'm trying to make is not that the homogeneous women or the heterogeneous men are either right or wrong, or sincere or insincere. These considerations go deeper than necessary to understand the phenomenon OP identified. We can explain the observation without ever having to consider the truth-value of the answers his colleagues gave. Considering "publicly stated opinions" through the lens of a high school popularity contest has a lot better predictive power than considering the relative merits of whatever that opinion purports to be about ex facie. Requires a lot less domain knowledge, too.
That being said, I'd really want to see the Fourth Crusade, just because I'm a Dandolo fanboi.
The one where they destroyed and looted a bunch of (Christian) cities, including Constantinople? A bizarre crusade and doge to be a fan of.
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I wish we could just make this a permanent sticky post. This explains the majority of questions that one might have about gender dynamics.
Only if we can pair it with this one.
Frankly, I expect the reasoning for “but women have it so easy” is pretty motivated. I don’t think the actual evidence for it is very strong, either, but it’s better than appeal to consensus.
This will sound totally audacious, but the concept of privilege, and all the work that leftists have done to defend its coherence over the years, is very useful here. It's just female privilege instead of male privilege. Obviously women have problems too, and no one has it so easy that they can just lay there and have things handed to them; but women will still have it easier in many ways as compared to men.
What do you think of this post? (And some of the surrounding ones where people discussed the same issue)
Absolutely, that's what I'm always trying to tell people. Sticky it. Once you understand that sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive then everything else follows in a very natural and rational manner.
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That would be consensus-building.
More deeply, one of the founding ideas of this place is that fundamental social ideas should be questioned, constantly. Social science is bad. We know it’s bad. I am not a huge fan of Popper’s “scientific theories can never be proven, only falsified,” idea, but that’s about as good as we’re going to get in social science with current levels of technology. I consider it immensely valuable to point out “this observation does/does not falsify theory X, Y or Z”, whenever novel social information is obtained.
It was a more elaborate way of saying “This!”. I wasn’t actually being serious.
I’m all for constant questioning. There comes a point where continued questioning is no longer that useful though, barring a major new discovery. Biologists have better things to spend their time on than questioning evolution; better to just teach it as truth and get on with other things.
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