site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   4190 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What's with the men-only part? I am sincerely asking for clarification because I am not sure of the rationale.

“Mainly consist” was the term I used. It’s a combination of a couple reasons:

  • Female heavy degrees are almost always fake subjects polluting scientific integrity and draining resources. I have witnessed many times in my university life that the worst and most pointless courses/degree specialisations in even the hardest science tracks were devised with the expectation to attract more females. Fields like sociology, psychology, art history etc speak for themselves. Closing down these faculties or only restricting them to rigorous academic work would immediately cut down female population in universities severely.
  • Keeping the intelligent female population of your nation in useless education until late 20s, wasting away the most fertile years of their life is just incredibly bad policy.
  • There are very few significant achievements in human history that doesn’t originate from a tight-knit group of competent men heavy on camaraderie and ambition. Adding females to the equation always erodes this spirit.
  • Endless education as a tool to escape “real life” is a problem afflicting both sexes but especially women fall very hard into this trap. Female brain is much more sensitive to approval from authority figures and the education system with its clear reward feedback loops seems to be almost addictive to a sort of high achieving woman.
  • Women typically makes a lot less use of their education even when they enroll in more sensible degrees. They are easily spooked by competitive environments, they are tricked by social validation that comes with many low value professions, and they take long maternity leaves and work part-time because they enjoy to be with their family more than at work.
  • Female style of office politics is absolutely poisonous to academia. When women takes over administrative positions at sufficient numbers, academic research just gives way to conformism and group-think.
  • The fact that almost every above-average women in the society spends their prime pair bonding years at university campuses, and afterwards develop a refusal to date anyone below their education status, makes university de-facto mandatory for any men with some ambition. There is no reason why someone needs to go through a 4-year degree to become a film director, computer programmer or sales manager. People historically didn’t go to uni for such jobs. But if you try this today you are very likely forfeiting your mate prospects. Even men who don’t want/need uni education to be very successful, have to enter a good one and drop out to gain enough social clout.

I can really just go on. All of these are obviously gross generalisations and often apply to many men in some degrees as well but in the end these effects add up in a big way.

I can't speak for OP, but for my part I assume the rationale is something akin to this.

To sum up the article in a paragraph, women are less pro-free speech and more pro-censorship. In academia, female academics are less likely than male academics to place importance on objectivity and dispassionate inquiry, and more likely to place importance on the ability of their work to be used as a vehicle to deliver views considered "socially good". They are also more supportive of dismissal campaigns and more inclined toward activism. This roughly correlates with the increasing politicisation of the academy as a vehicle for activism, and while the author admits that it is certainly not the only factor contributing to the trend, it is also what you would expect to see when a group with a preference for emotional safety over academic freedom enters a space.

In other words, I don't think it's necessarily a prima facie ridiculous position if OP values academic freedom over censorship and thinks it carries more value for society than having women in academia does. Forcing a state of affairs where the academic environment is mostly comprised of men would be conducive to this goal, and in similar fashion forcing an academic environment that's uncompromising in terms of freedom of speech would disproportionately cause women to self-select out of the academy. Whichever way this goal is reached, greater academic freedom likely entails less women in academia.

This kind of generalization-based quantitative thinking is I think the undoing of the Motte in some ways. I don't disagree with the idea of academic freedom over censorship, but this bean counting assumption-driven basis of policy is to me patently bad policy.

I was trying to provide a steelman, not necessarily forward sets of policy preferences of my own (for my part, I don't think a policy proposal that enforces a mostly-male academic environment is doable in the first place, not because I think it would be bad for society but because it's effectively useless as it's too far out of the Overton Window - the second % female drops below a certain threshold, regardless of the reasons for it people will start taking umbrage at it). I also don't think there would have been an explanation I could've given that would have been satisfactory to your specific set of moral preferences.

In any case, I don't think there's anything wrong with applying quantitative thinking to social issues. Different groups of people are different on aggregate, and they shape societies in distinct ways aligned with their preferences. Trying to ignore that when policy-making is folly, in my opinion.

There is actually another reason to take a series of actions that just happens to make university mostly male, as opposed to doing it explicitly (unfair, gauche, and impossiible).

Actions are roughly as follows:

  • Get rid of mostly female degrees, getting rid of degrees that are academically useless will solve this problem anyways.
  • Make school and college in general less hostile to boys.

Reasons:

  • Stops giving women undeserved status of being "college educated" despite not being any smarter or more useful. It's just status laundering. Will do a lot of work to fix the dating markets.

What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats