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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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"Me Too" may have had its overreaches, but it's bad when women are sexually coerced in the workplace. It's bad when false accusations destroy an innocent man's life, but it's also bad when a woman is genuinely taken advantage of. The balance of type 1 errors to type 2 errors has shifted - and while I'm not sure it's worse to be a female victim than a falsely accused man, I would expect that the deterred male misconduct is much greater in frequency than the corresponding rise in female misconduct. Similarly, many jurisdictions have consciously made it easier to convict men for rape - and again, while this is a double edged sword, the fact that more bad guys are getting punished and others are being deterred from doing bad things is good. Additionally, the type of conduct that is not rape but may result in an increased likelihood of being accused of rape is conduct that I think is bad - so even if it sometimes gets punished unfairly harshly, I don't mind men being disincentivized from e.g. getting women drunk to make them more pliable.

I think there's been a lot of pro-social behavior that's been thrown out with the bathwater, though. The proportion of people meeting their partners at work has dived off a cliff, and like that's generally good sort of assortative mating that produces solid outcomes for everybody. I don't think you can just purely say it's 'falsely accused men versus molested women' when there's a ton of social behavior that has been modified.

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