This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So why is everyone in this subthread ignoring that there's an easy way to guarantee this that could almost never harm meritocracy at all?
It's simple: Women don't work. Women are never in academia. (The distribution of high IQ men vs. high IQ women, particularly in STEM subjects, proves that this won't cause much if any disruption to the technological and intellectual progress of society.) Women follow their men, who make enough to support their entire families by default.
Thus, any occupation is free to pick the best man for the job at any time, with the man secure in the knowledge that his wife can be firmly supported in her natural, biologically ordained role as his homemaker, mother of his children, and supporter.
And how do you propose to ensure that a woman can leave an abusive husband while still keeping herself fed and housed?
If a competent council of men determines that another man's treatment of his wife is really beyond conscionability, then custody of her could fall back to her previous steward (most likely her father). If he or any other reasonable steward (uncle, brother, etc.) is unavailable, then the state would take responsibility. Such cases would be uncommon and unlikely, as only extremes could justify severing a man's feminine property interests.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Wouldn't a lot of high IQ men have to shift into less intellectually loaded but still necessary work? It's just the law of comparative advantage, more menial but unavoidable jobs being done by a bigger labour force frees up time for the cutting edge stuff.
That seems unlikely to me. How many women do blue collar "less intellectually loaded but still necessary work"? How many women are garbage collectors, miners, plumbers, etc.?
It seems to me like a significant portion of the jobs women do are either "make work" or a consequence of their own presence in the workforce and would significantly disappear without them in it. For example, without women to make discrimination claims about "sexism" or otherwise cause drama, you'll need a lot less staff in HR, DEI, and so on... who conveniently enough mostly tend to be women themselves.
(To be clear maybe my initial proclamation was a bit too broad and we can still have feminine nurses, babysitters, hairdressers, etc., leaving a few occupations open to them (though strictly under the supervision, guidance, and control of their husband and thus ideally operated on a small scale from their houses). Nothing too important though, not that this would change much from present circumstances in the vast majority of cases other than an end to counterproductive, socially destructive LARPing.)
It reminds me of how so many companies rushed to replace their indigenous programming workforce with third-worlders from countries like India for example. It seems like a great deal superficially. You get ten guys for the price of one!... until you realize that your new ten guys are only capable of producing Stack Overflow salad and aren't even a 100th as productive as the original guy.
Adding women to the workforce seems like a similar "deal" to me. You get twice as many workers! That really oughta boost your economy, right? Except due to the basic nature of IQ distribution by gender they overwhelmingly won't be high IQ enough to make big impacts where it matters, and overwhelmingly due to their natural predispositions they will simply refuse to do the hard manual labor that has generally been how those lesser in IQ have earned their keep. What's left? HR ladies, twerking on OnlyFans, LARPing in office jobs flirting with men to get them to do their work for them (obviously not all women do this, but it's almost certainly a heck of a lot more common than the reverse which is probably mostly non-existent), the occasional nice but expendable dental hygienist, and so on. (Women working also increases consumption, which women naturally do far more of than men, which requires more production but quite arguably mostly of the generally wasteful and frivolous sort. Imagine all of the resources we could free up without women with the disposable income to buy their 50th "Live, Laugh, Love"-esque sign. My point is that while women generate economic activity, a lot of what they generate is completely irrelevant without them.)
It's obvious that the deal is phony, because it's obvious that in basically almost any area of the economy affected by women there has hardly been a doubling of real, tangible value since women started entering the workforce. (Almost all of the additional economic value/productivity since then has been generated by information technology which was almost exclusively invented/developed by and is almost exclusively maintained by men.) Rather, the most important long-term capital of society, things like social bonds, healthy gender relations, families, and romantic partnerships/romantic relationship formation, the people, is pretty obviously worse off in most ways than ever before at least partially because of women's "liberation". The fact that anybody even has to discuss whether it's a good idea to hire women to pretend to be as smart as their husbands (or "sexist" to oppose it) just to secure the use of those husbands' intellectual gifts is proof of that. Only largely fake numbers are occasionally doing well, and even they're having trouble nowadays being massaged enough to avoid showing the true underlying cracks in society.
This isn't even getting into how much more productive high IQ men will be without modern adversarial gender relations weighing them down. With men being guaranteed secure domestic lives without having to fight for them in the Kafkaesque rumble pit of modern dating, their productivity will shoot up, and the productivity gains from the men who will be motivated to reenter the workforce (current NEETs, hikkis, "no pussy no work" guys, etc.) will likely eclipse all of the productivity that any amount of women ever added to the economy. (One high IQ man abstaining from present society due to his disgust with it could come up with a new invention or idea that could create more value for society than 500 million working women. And how many high IQ men from the past who revolutionized society or matters of the intellect otherwise would have their productivity vastly diminished by modern feminized/gynosupremacist society (were they made to live in it instead)? Would a "creepy incel chud" like Newton be able to readily innovate today as effectively as he did in his own time? Something to think about.)
Addressing this specific part of the post: I think that your model of the motivations of scientific thinkers is off. The way I see it is that this sort of person, throughout history, is motivated by a combination of non-sexual social status (e.g. the desire to just friggin’ win that manifested itself in the mathematical duels surrounding the discovery of the solution to cubic equations) combined with an intrinsic curiosity to know things and solve hard problems. You could say that the former corresponds to the urge to prove people wrong on the Internet or accrue fancy academic titles, and the latter corresponds to a propensity to get nerd-sniped.
Even if scientist-types would appreciate scoring some poon as a side-effect of their labor, I imagine that very few have the willpower to push back against those very strong urges in order to protest any gynocentric society. N=1 here, and I’m no Newton to be sure, but even if I find it unfair that my tax dollars are going to fund a single mother’s hedonistic lifestyle or whatever, I simply cannot fathom pulling myself away from my research in protest. I would bet that high-IQ scientists feel similarly.
Conversely, if a NEET who watches anime adaptations of Kirara CGDCT manga all day were the kind of person who would be making huge scientific advancements if he just had himself a wife, then he’d probably already be making those advancements. (In fact, some of those NEETs are, although Haruhi isn’t CGDCT.)
ETA: Where you might have a point is in the case of NEETs who spend a full-time job’s worth of time writing SNES emulators or making furry VR games or what have you, who would instead, if they had a family to rear and mouths to feed, be forced to engage in more productive endeavors (if helping Google write better spyware is considered productive). But this strikes me as not a situation in which the NEETs consciously decide to opt-out of society to protest gynocentrism. I’m inclined to think that the autistic furry group is largely disjoint from the /r9k/ group (for example, the former group is more likely to be gay or asexual).
Maybe "abstaining" is the wrong term, as it implies an entirely conscious endeavor. But being high IQ doesn't make you immune to social contagion. The intellectual achievements of the 20th century Soviet Union (which did admittedly exist in some cases) vs. 20th century China vs. the 20th century US prove that. You simply can't achieve as much in a fucked up society.
I think The Haruhi Problem proves my point. Sure, as you said, those with an innate intellectual curiosity can't have it entirely turned off, as the anonymous individual behind that proof demonstrates. But because of the present state of society, instead of working in a proper math department with his intellectual peers and delivering the value that he could have provided them and vice-versa, he ended up posting this reasonably significant mathematical advancement in response to a gag post on 4chan. (Sure there's a chance that he's an actual academic who posed and answered the question himself, thinking it would be funnier that way, but I doubt it. Very few people would sacrifice a genuine shot at career advancement and clout just to create some humorous Internet lore.)
How much more could this mind achieve or have achieved if not pushed to the fringes of society? (Keep in mind, his correct solution to the problem was posted in 2011 and widely acknowledged as correct not too long after that. It then took until 2019 for it to be published academically in a manner that allowed it to be formally acknowledged as a part of "the literature".)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link