Comments on: Links 12/14: Auld Link Syne

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 14:24:21 +0000

The thing about all of this is how advantages men had in surviving maritime disasters were biological in nature or the consequence of social norms only indirectly linked to survival, while women were given an explicit advantage in at least some cases. I doubt anyone would argue someone decided one gender should wear dresses so the other gender will be more likely to survive. That was pretty much the intention with “women and children first”.

I’ve seen this arguments from feminists before, actually. Essentially, in cases where both cases suffer from something, women are assumed to suffer due to sexism, even if men suffered equally in numbers or even more. Which would be fine and dandy if they actually showed how this works, which they don’t, and if they wouldn’t ignore observable sexism against men in those instances, which they do.

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By: Links 12/14: Auld Link Syne | Neoreactive

Links 12/14: Auld Link Syne | Neoreactive — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 05:07:47 +0000

[…] Links 12/14: Auld Link Syne […]

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By: Nita

Nita — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 09:03:29 +0000

Sure, Marcotte is a professional outrage factory and not a participant in civil discourse. But, that email she quotes was pretty terrible… right?

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By: Nita

Nita — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 08:58:31 +0000

That’s a little overpessimistic. If you interpret Scott’s Moloch hypothesis to mean that all human effort is futile, we might as well give up and go home right now.

Besides, I think Veronica’s diagnosis of “rounding to the nearest cliche” is correct, and the cause of this ailment is a lack of familiarity with the actual point presented. That’s just how the human brain works – before creating a brand-new basket for a previously unseen thing, it will try to fit the new experience into one of the old baskets.

Personally, I became convinced that this crippling fear of creepiness is an actual (even if uncommon) social phenomenon after reading multiple similar accounts on the Feminist Critics blog. Before that, I had no idea something like that was possible, and I have social anxiety myself!

So, some misreading is inevitable while this hasn’t reached public awareness. And at this stage, I don’t blame Amy et al. for perceiving it as Aaronson’s individual problem — if he was literally the only person to interpret feminism this way, therapy would be the solution. (I also think Aaronson is wrong to ascribe this issue to all shy male nerds, but that’s just good old Typical Mind bias.)

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By: Susebron

Susebron — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 01:13:51 +0000

I can’t tell if you’re saying that he should be more or less racist.

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By: Nita

Nita — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 19:27:40 +0000

I’ve heard low T makes men feel tired and depressed. Is this news to you, or do you consider it an acceptable sacrifice?

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By: llamathatducks

llamathatducks — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 23:12:11 +0000

Argh! That was me.

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By: George X

George X — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 22:44:54 +0000

I don’t think your proposal would eafect as much improvement as you think.

We probably should just throw in the towel on “homogeneous” and “homogenous”, though.

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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 20:26:42 +0000

Hmm. To me “entitled to” means “Society should provide X for people who don’t have it”. I think people are entitled to food and housing, but not sex.

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By: George X

George X — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 16:48:53 +0000

We need a technical term for the common phenomenon in which observations of the real physical world “make modellers look bad”.

(We also need a technical term for the paradoxically-even-more-common phenomenon in which the first phenomenon occurs, yet confidence in the model remains unchanged.)

Any rationalists around want to take a stab at it?

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