But a while ago I wrote Beware The Man Of One Study, in which I wrote that there is such a variety of studies finding such a variety of contradictory things that anybody can isolate one of them, hold it up as the answer, and then claim that their side is right and the other side are ‘science denialists’. The only way to be sure you’re getting anything close to the truth is to examine the literature of an entire field as a gestalt.

And here’s something no one ever said: “Man, I’m so glad I examined the literature of that entire field as a gestalt, things make much more sense now.”

Two years ago Moss-Racusin et al released Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students, showing a strong bias in favor of men in STEM hiring. The methodology was almost identical to this current study, but it returned the opposite result.

Now everyone gets to cite whichever study accords with their pre-existing beliefs. So Scientific American writes Study Shows Gender Bias In Science Is Real, and any doubt has been deemed unacceptable by blog posts like Breaking: Some Dudes On The Internet Refuse To Believe Sexism Is A Thing. But the new study, for its part, is already producing headlines like The Myth About Women In Science and blog posts saying that it is “enough for everyone who is reasonable to agree that the feminists are spectacular liars and/or unhinged cranks”.

So probably we’re going to have to do that @#$%ing gestalt thing.

Why did these two similar studies get such different results? Williams and Ceci do something wonderful that I’ve never seen anyone else do before – they include in their study a supplement admitting that past research has contradicted theirs and speculating about why that might be:

1. W&C investigate hiring tenure-track faculty; MR&a investigate hiring a “lab manager”. This is a big difference, but as far as I can tell, W&C don’t give a good explanation for why there should be a pro-male bias for lab managers but a pro-female bias for faculty. The best explanation I can think of is that there have been a lot of recent anti-discrimination campaigns focusing on the shortage of female faculty, so that particular decision might activate a cultural script where people think “Oh, this is one of those things that those feminists are always going on about, I should make sure to be nice to women here,” in a way that just hiring a lab manager doesn’t.

Likewise, hiring a professor is an important and symbolic step that…probably doesn’t matter super-much to other professors. Hiring a lab manager is a step without any symbolism at all, but professors often work with them on a daily basis and depend on their competency. That might make the first decision Far Mode and the second Near Mode. Think of the Obama Effect – mildly prejudiced people who might be wary at the thought of having a black roommate were very happy to elect a black President and bask in a symbolic dispay of tolerance that made no difference whatsoever to their everyday lives.

Or it could be something simpler. Maybe lab work, which is very dirty and hands-on, feels more “male” to people, and professorial work, which is about interacting with people and being well-educated, feels more “female”. In any case, W&C say their study is more relevant, because almost nobody in academic science gets their start as a lab manager (they polled 83 scientists and found only one who had).

2. Both W&C and MR&a ensured that the male and female resumes in their study were equally good. But W&C made them all excellent, and MR&a made them all so-so. Once again, it’s not really clear why this should change the direction of bias. But here’s a hare-brained theory: suppose you hire using the following algorithm: it’s very important that you hire someone at least marginally competent. And it’s somewhat important that you hire a woman so you look virtuous. But you secretly believe that men are more competent than women. So given two so-so resumes, you’ll hire the man to make sure you get someone competent enough to work with. But given two excellent resumes, you know neither candidate will accidentally program the cyclotron to explode, so you pick the woman and feel good about yourself.

And here are some other possibilities that they didn’t include in their supplement, but which might also have made a difference.

3. W&C asked “which candidate would you hire?”. MR&a said “rate each candidate on the following metrics” (including hireability). Does this make a difference? I could sort of see someone who believed in affirmative action saying something like “the man is more hireable, but I would prefer to hire the woman”. Other contexts prove that even small differences in the phrasing of a question can lead to major incongruities. For example, as of 2010, only 34% of people polled strongly supported letting homosexuals serve in the military, but half again as many – a full 51% – expressed that level of support for letting “gays and lesbians” serve in the military. Ever since reading that I’ve worried about how many important decisions are being made by the 17% of people who support gays and lesbians but not homosexuals.

For all we know maybe this is the guy in charge of hiring for STEM faculty positions

4. Williams and Ceci asked participants to choose between “Dr. X” (who was described using the pronouns “he” and “him”) and “Dr. Y” (who was described using the pronouns “she” and “her”). Moss-Racusin et al asked participants to choose between “John” and “Jennifer”. They said they checked to make sure that the names were rated equal for “likeability” (whatever that means), but what if there are other important characteristics that likeability doesn’t capture? We know that names have big effects on our preconceptions of people. For example, people with short first names earn more money – an average of $3600 less per letter. If we trust this study (which may not be wise), John already has a $14,400 advantage on Jennifer, which goes a lot of the way to explaining why the participants offered John higher pay without bringing gender into it at all!

Likewise, independently of a person’s gender they are more likely to succeed in a traditionally male field if they have a male-sounding name. That means that one of the…call it a “prime” that activates sexism…might have been missed by comparing Dr. X to Dr. Y, but captured by pitting the masculine-sounding John against the feminine-sounding Jennifer. We can’t claim that W&C’s subjects were rendered gender-blind by the lack of gender-coded names – they noticed the female candidates enough to pick them twice as often as the men – but it might be that not getting the name activated the idea of gender from a different direction than hearing the candidates’ names would have.

5. Commenter Lee points out that MR&a tried to make their hokey hypothetical hiring seem a little more real than W&C did. MR&a suggest that these are real candidates being hired…somewhere…and the respondents have to help decide whom to hire (although they still use the word “imagine”). W&C clearly say that this is a hypothetical situation and ask the respondents to imagine that it is true. Some people in the comments are arguing that this makes W&C a better signaling opportunity whereas MR&a stays in near mode. But why would people not signal on a hiring question being put to them by people they don’t know about a carefully-obscured situation in some far-off university? Are sexists, out of the goodness of their hearts, urging MR&a to hire the man out of some compassionate desire to ensure they get a qualified candidate, but when W&C send them a hypothetical situation, they switch back into signaling mode?

6. Commenter Will points out that MR&a send actual resumes to their reviewers, but W&C send only a narrative that sums up some aspects of the candidates’ achievements and personalities (this is also the concern of Feminist Philosophers). This is somewhat necessitated by the complexities of tenure-track hiring – it’s hard to make up an entire fake academic when you can find every published paper in Google Scholar – but it does take them a step away from realism. They claim that they validated this methodology against real resumes, but it was a comparatively small validation – only 35 people. On the other hand, even this small validation was highly significant for pro-female bias. Maybe for some reason getting summaries instead of resumes heavily biases people in favor of women?

Or maybe none of those things mattered at all. Maybe all of this is missing the forest for the trees.

I love stories about how scientists set out to prove some position they consider obvious, but unexpectedly end up changing their minds when the results come in. But this isn’t one of those stories. Williams and Ceci have been vocal proponents of the position that science isn’t sexist for years now – for example, their article in the New York Times last year, Academic Science Isn’t Sexist. In 2010 they wrote Understanding Current Causes Of Women’s Underrepresentation In Science, which states:

The ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women’s participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today’s causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes.

So they can hardly claim to be going into this with perfect neutrality.

But the lead author of the study that did find strong evidence of sexism, Corinne Moss-Racusin (whose name is an anagram of “accuser on minor sins”) also has a long history of pushing the position she coincidentally later found to be the correct one. A look at her resume shows that she has a bunch of papers with titles like “Defending the gender hierarchy motivates prejudice against female leaders”, “‘But that doesn’t apply to me:’ teaching college students to think about gender”, and “Engaging white men in workplace diversity: can training be effective?”. Her symposia have titles like “Taking a stand: the predictors and importance of confronting discrimination”. This does not sound like the resume of a woman whose studies ever find that oh, cool, it looks like sexism isn’t a big problem here after all.

So what conclusion should we draw from the people who obviously wanted to find a lack of sexism finding a lack of sexism, but the people who obviously wanted to find lots of sexism finding lots of sexism?

This is a hard question. It doesn’t necessarily imply the sinister type of bias – it may be that Drs. Williams and Ceci are passionate believers in a scientific meritocracy simply because that’s what all their studies always show, and Dr. Moss-Racusin is a passionate believer in discrimination because that’s what her studies find. On the other hand, it’s still suspicious that two teams spend lots of time doing lots of experiments, and one always gets one result, and the other always gets the other. What are they doing differently?

Problem is, I don’t know. Neither study here has any egregious howlers. In my own field of psychiatry, when a drug company rigs a study to put their drug on top, usually before long someone figures out how they did it. In these two studies I’m not seeing anything.

And this casts doubt upon those four possible sources of differences listed above. None of them look like the telltale sign of an experimenter effect. If MR&a were trying to fix their study to show lots of sexism, it would have taken exceptional brilliance to do it by using the names “John” versus “Jennifer”. If W&C were trying to fix their study to disguise sexism, it would have taken equal genius to realize they could do it by asking people “who would you hire?” rather than “who is most hireable?”.

(the only exception here is the lab manager. It’s just within the realm of probability that MR&a might have somehow realized they’d get a stronger signal asking about lab managers instead of faculty. The choice to ask about lab managers instead of faculty is surprising and does demand an explanation. And it’s probably the best candidate for the big difference between their results. But for them to realize that they needed to pull this deception suggests an impressive ability to avoid drinking their own Kool-Aid.)

Other than that, the differences I’ve been considering in these studies are the sort that would be very hard to purposefully bias. But the fact that both groups got the result they wanted suggests that the studies were purposefully biased somehow. This reinforces my belief that experimenter effects are best modeled as some sort of mystical curse incomprehensible to human understanding.

(now would be an excellent time to re-read the the horror stories in Part IV of “The Control Group Is Out Of Control”)

Speaking of horror stories. Sexism in STEM is, to put it mildly, a hot topic right now. Huge fortunes in grant money are being doled out to investigate it (Dr. Moss-Racusin alone received nearly a million dollars in grants to study STEM gender bias) and thousands of pages are written about it every year. And yet somehow the entire assembled armies of Science, when directed toward the problem, can’t figure out whether college professors are more or less likely to hire women than men.

This is not like studying the atmosphere of Neptune, where we need to send hundred-million dollar spacecraft on a perilous mission before we can even begin to look into the problem. This is not like studying dangerous medications, where ethical problems prevent us from doing the experiments we really need. This is not like studying genetics, where you have to gather large samples of identical twins separated at birth, or like climatology, where you hang out at the North Pole and might get eaten by bears. This is a survey of college professors. You know who it is studying this? College professors. The people they want to study are in the same building as them. The climatologists are getting eaten by bears, and the social psychologists can’t even settle a question that requires them to walk down the hallway.

It’s not even like we’re trying to detect a subtle effect here. Both sides agree that the signal is very large. They just disagree what direction it’s very large in!

A recent theme of this blog has been that Pyramid Of Scientific Evidence be damned, our randomized controlled trials suck so hard that a lot of the time we’ll get more trustworthy information from just looking at the ecological picture. Williams and Ceci have done this (see Part V, Section b of their supplement, “Do These Results Differ From Actual Hiring Data”) and report that studies of real-world hiring data confirm women have an advantage over men in STEM faculty hiring (although far fewer of them apply). It also matches the anecdotal evidence I hear from people in the field. I’m not necessarily saying I’m ambivalent between the two studies’ conclusions. Just that it bothers me that we have to go to tiebreakers after doing two good randomized controlled trials.

At this point, I think the most responsible thing would be to have a joint study by both teams, where they all agree on a fair protocol beforehand and see what happens. Outside of parapsychology I’ve never heard of people taking such a drastic step – who would get to be first author?! – but at this point it’s hard to deny that it’s necessary.

In conclusion, I believe the Moss-Racusin et al study more, but I think the Williams and Ceci study is more believable. And the best way to fight sexism in science is to remind people that it would be hard for women to make things any more screwed up than they already are.

I.

The best reporting on social science statistics, like the best reporting in most areas, comes from The Onion:

CAMBRIDGE, MA—A Harvard University study of more than 2,500 middle-income African-American families found that, when compared to other ethnic groups in the same income bracket, blacks were up to 23 percent more likely. “Our data would seem to discredit the notion that black Americans are less likely,” said head researcher Russell Waterstone, noting the study also found that women of African descent were no more or less prone than Latinas. “In fact, over the past several decades, we’ve seen the African-American community nearly triple in probability.” The study noted that, furthermore, Asian-Americans.

I thought of this today because a bunch of people have accosted me about the article There’s A Big Problem With Polyamory That Nobody’s Talking About. “Scott, you’re polyamorous! What do you think of this?”

As per the article, the big problem with polyamorous people is:

…their whiteness. And that standard of whiteness not only erases the experience of people of color; it reflects the actual exclusion of these people in poly life and communities. […]

A white, affluent image that reflects a troubling reality: A 2013 survey of polyamorous people from online groups, mailing lists and forums found that almost 90% of the participants identified as Caucasian. People of color, especially black polyamorists, report feeling “othered” and excluded in poly environments such as meet-ups, with women feeling especially at risk of being objectified and fetishized as an exotic sexual plaything.

“I interviewed a black couple who went to a poly group, and they were definitely preyed upon, in a sense,” said Marla Renee Stewart, Atlanta-based founder of Velvet Lips, a sex education venue.

The article constantly equivocates between “the problem is that polyamory is too white” and “the problem is that the media portrays polyamory as too white”, which is kind of a weird combination of problems to be discussing in a media portrayal. But it seems to eventually settle on a thesis that black people really are strongly underrepresented.

For the record, here is a small sample of other communities where black people are strongly underrepresented:

Runners (3%). Bikers (6%). Furries (2%). Wall Street senior management (2%). Occupy Wall Street protesters (unknown but low, one source says 1.6% but likely an underestimate). BDSM (unknown but low) Tea Party members (1%). American Buddhists (~2%). Bird watchers (4%). Environmentalists (various but universally low). Wikipedia contributors (unknown but low). Atheists (2%). Vegetarian activists (maybe 1-5%). Yoga enthusiasts (unknown but low). College baseball players (5%). Swimmers (2%). Fanfiction readers (2%). Unitarian Universalists (1%).

Can you see what all of these groups have in common?

No. No you can’t. If there’s some hidden factor uniting Wall Street senior management and furries, it is way beyond any of our pay grades.

But what I noticed when I looked up those numbers was that in every case, the people involved have come up with a pat explanation that sounds perfectly plausible right up until you compare it to any other group, at which point it bursts into flames.

For example, Some people explain try to explain declining black interest in baseball by appeal to how some baseball personality made some horribly racist remark. But Donald Sterling continues to be racist as heck, and black people continue to be more than three-quarters of basketball players.

Some people try to explain black people’s underrepresentation on fanfiction websites by saying that many of them have limited access to the Internet. Okay. Except that black people are heavily overrepresented on Twitter, making up double the expected proportion of that site’s population.

Some people try to explain the underrepresentation of blacks in libertarianism and the Tea Party by arguing that these groups’ political beliefs are contrary to black people’s life experiences. But blacks are also underrepresented in groups with precisely the opposite politics. That they make up only 1.6% of visitors to the Occupy Wall Street website is no doubt confounded by who visits websites, but even people who looked at the protests agree that there was a stunning shortage of black faces. I would have liked to get current membership statistics for the US Communist Party, but they weren’t available, so I fudged by looking at the photos of people who “liked” the US Communist Party’s Facebook page. 3% of them were black. Blacks are more likely to endorse environmentalism than whites, but less likely to be involved in the environmentalist movement.

Some people try to explain black people’s underrepresentation on Wall Street by saying Wall Street is racist and intolerant. But Unitarian Universalists are just about the most tolerant people in the world – nobody even knows what they do, just that they’re extremely tolerant when they do it – and black people are in Unitarianism at lower rates than they’re on Wall Street.

And the article on polyamory suggested that maybe polyamorists’ high-flying lifestyle and expensive play parties price out black people. Forget for a moment that I’ve been poly for three years and had no idea this high-flying lifestyle existed and kind of feel like I am missing out. Forget for a moment that as far as I can tell “play parties” are a BDSM term with no relationship to polyamory. In my experience polyamory draws from the same sort of people as atheism, and atheism is very white even though not believing in God doesn’t cost a cent.

This entire genre seems to be a bunch of really silly ad hoc arguments by people who aren’t talking to each other. I would guess most of the underrepresentation of black people in all of these things are for the same couple of reasons.

First, some of these things require some level of affluence – I know I just said that didn’t explain polyamory, but I think it explains some others. For example, bird-watching requires you live somewhere suburban or rural where there are interesting birds, want to waste money on binoculars, and have some free time. Swimming requires you live in an area where the schools or at least the neighborhoods have pools.

Second, Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs says you’re not going to do weird things to self-actualize until you feel materially safe and secure. A lot of black people don’t feel like they’re in a position where they can start worrying about where the best bird-watching is at.

Third, the thrive-survive dichotomy says materially insecure people are going to value community and conformity more. Polyamory is still pretty transgressive, and unless you feel very safe or feel sufficiently mobile and atomized that you don’t care what your community thinks about you, you’re not going to feel comfortable making that transgression. Many of these things require leaving the general community to participate in a weird insular subculture, and that requires a sort of lack of preexisting community bonds that I think only comes with the upper middle class.

Fourth, black people might avoid weird nonconformist groups because they’re already on thin enough ice in terms of social acceptance. Being a black person probably already exposes you to enough stigma, without becoming a furry as well.

Fifth, we already know that neighborhoods and churches tend to end up mostly monoracial through a complicated process of aggregating small acts of self-segregation based on slight preferences not to be completely surrounded by people of a different race. It doesn’t seem too unlikely to me that a similar process could act on hobbies and interest groups.

Sixth, even when black people are involved in weird subcultures, they may do them separately from white people, leading white people to think their hobby is almost all white – and leading mostly white academics to miss them in their studies. I once heard about a professor who accused Alcoholics Anonymous of being racist, on the grounds that its membership was almost entirely white. The (white) professor had surveyed AA groups in his (white) neighborhood and asked his (white) friends and (white) grad students to do the same. Meanwhile, when more sober minds (no pun intended) investigated, they found black areas had thriving majority-black AA communities.

Seventh, a lot of groups are stratified by education level. Black people are only about half as likely to have a bachelor’s degree. This matters a lot in areas like atheism that are disproportionately limited to the most educated individuals. Polyamory also falls into this category – the most recent survey found 85% of poly people had a college education, compared to 30% of the general population (!). 30% of poly people had a graduate degree compared to only about 10% of the general population and only about 3% of blacks. There has to be a strong education filter on polyamory to produce those kinds of numbers, and I think that alone is big enough to explain most of the black underrepresentation.

Eighth, people of the same social class tend to cluster, and black people are disproportionately underrepresented among the upper middle class. Most of these fields are dominated by upper middle class people. The nickname for weird self-actualizing upper middle class things is “Stuff White People Like”, and this is not a coincidence. [EDIT: Commenter John Schilling says this better than I – a lot of these groups are about differentiating yourself from a presumedly boring low-status middle class existence, but black people fought hard to get into the middle class, or are still fighting, and are less excited about differentiating themselves from it.]

So I think positing that black people feel “fetishized as an exotic sexual plaything” in the poly community is unnecessary. Black people are underrepresented in the poly community for the same reason they’re underrepresented in everything in the same vague circle as poly. Heck, black people are even underrepresented in the activity of complaining about black people being fetishized as exotic sexual playthings – check out Tumblr’s racial demographics if you don’t believe me.

II.

The eight points above add up to a likelihood that black people will probably be underrepresented in a lot of weird subculturey nonconformist things. This is not a firm law – black people will be overrepresented in a few weird subculturey nonconformist things that are an especially good fit for their culture – but overall I think the rule holds. And that’s a big problem.

A few paragraphs back I mentioned that Occupy Wall Street was had disproportionately few minorities. Here are some other people who like to mention this: Michelle Malkin. The Daily Caller. American Thinker. View From The Right. New York Post. American Renaissance.

All of these sources have something in common, and it’s not a heartfelt concern for equal minority representation.

Likewise, you know who’s got an obsessively large collection of resources on the underrepresentation of minorities in atheism? Conservapedia (Western Atheism And Race, Racial Demographics Of The Richard Dawkins Audience, Richard Dawkins’ Lack Of Appeal To The Asian Woman Audience, etc, etc, not to mention the very classy Richard Dawkins’ Family Fortune And The Slave Trade.)

Here it is easy to see that “you have low minority representation” serves as a stand-in for “you’re racist” serves as a stand-in for “you suck”. So here’s the problem:

In theocracies ruled by the will of God, people will find that God hates weird people who refuse to conform.

In philosopher-kingdoms ruled by pure reason, people will find that pure reason condemns weird people who refuse to conform.

And in enlightened liberal democracies where we “tolerate anything except intolerance”, people will find that weird people who refuse to conform are intolerant.

And if blacks are underrepresented in weird nonconformist groups, and nobody mentions that this is a general principle, that’s making their job way too easy.

So here’s why this article annoys me. In the midst of black underrepresentation in everything in the same ontological category as polyamory, people bring up black underrepresentation in polyamory and suggest it’s because poly people are “objectifying” and “preying on” them, positing that “there’s a problem” with “a standard of whiteness that erases people of color” in the polyamory community.

We know from OKCupid statistics that (mostly monogamous) white men are very reluctant to date black women, but monogamous people don’t have to listen to well-meaning friends going up to them and saying “So, you’re mono, I hear the monogamous community has a racism problem.”

But now I and other polyamorous people are going to have to answer one more round of annoying questions about “You’re polyamorous? Isn’t that a bunch of racist nerdy white dudes?”

I briefly snarked about Leslie et al (2015) last week, but I should probably snark at it more rigorously and at greater length.

This is the paper that concludes that “women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success because women are stereotyped as not possessing that talent.” They find that some survey questions intended to capture whether people believe a field requires innate talent correlate with percent women in that field at a fairly impressive level of r = -0.60.

The media, science blogosphere, et cetera has taken this result and run with it. A very small sample includes: National Science Foundation: Belief In Raw Brilliance May Decrease Diversity. Science Mag: the “misguided” belief that certain scientific fields require brilliance helps explain the underrepresentation of women in those fields. Reuters: Fields That Cherish Genius Shun Women. LearnU: Study Findings Point To Source Of Gender Gap In STEM. Scientific American: Hidden Hurdle Looms For Women In Science. Chronicle Of Higher Education: Disciplines That Expect Brilliance Tend To Punish Women. News Works: Academic Gender Gaps Tied To Stereotypes About Genius. Mathbabe: “The genius myth” keeps women out of science. Vocativ: Women Avoid Fields Full Of Self-Appointed Geniuses. And so on in that vein.

Okay. Imagine a study with the following methodology. You survey a bunch of people to get their perceptions of who is a smoker (“97% of his close friends agree Bob smokes”). Then you correlate those numbers with who gets lung cancer. Your statistics program lights up like a Christmas tree with a bunch of super-strong correlations. You conclude “Perception of being a smoker causes lung cancer”, and make up a theory about how negative stereotypes of smokers cause stress which depresses the immune system. The media reports that as “Smoking Doesn’t Cause Cancer, Stereotypes Do”.

This is the basic principle behind Leslie et al (2015).

The obvious counterargument is that people’s perceptions may be accurate, so your perception measure might be a proxy for a real thing. In the smoking study, we expect that people’s perception of smoking only correlates with lung cancer because it correlates with actual smoking which itself correlates with lung cancer. You would expect to find that perceived smoking correlates with lung cancer less than actual smoking, because the perceived smoking correlation is just the actual smoking correlation plus some noise resulting from misperceptions.

So I expected the paper to investigate whether or not perceived required ability correlated more, the same as, or less than actual required ability. Instead, they simply write:

Are women and African-Americans less likely to have the natural brilliance that some fields believe is required for top-level success? Although some have argued that this is so, our assessment of the literature is that the case has not been made that either group is less likely to possess innate intellectual talent¹.

So we will have to do this ourselves. The researchers helpfully include in their supplement a list of the fields they studied and GRE scores for each, as part of some sub-analysis to check for selectivity. GRE scores correlate closely with IQ and with a bunch of measures of success in graduate school, so this sounds like it would be a good test of the actual required ability hypothesis. Let’s use this to figure out whether actual innate ability explains the discrepancies better or worse than perceived innate ability does.

When I use these data I find no effect of GRE scores on female representation.

But these data are surprising – for example, Computer Science had by far the lowest GRE score (and hence projected IQ?) of any field, which matches neither other sources nor my intuition. I looked more closely and found their measure combines Verbal, Quantitative, and Writing GREs. These are to some degree anti-correlated with each other across disciplines²; ie those disciplines whose students have higher Quantitative tend to have lower Writing scores (not surprising; consider a Physics department versus an English department).

Since the study’s analysis included two measures of verbal intelligence and only one measure of mathematical intelligence, it makes more mathematical departments appear to have lower scores and lower innate ability. Certainly a measure set up such that computer scientists get the lowest intelligence of everyone in the academy isn’t going to find innate ability related to STEM!

Since the gender gap tends to favor men in more mathematical subjects, if we’re checking for a basis in innate ability we should probably disentangle these tests and focus on the GRE Quantitative. I took GRE Quantitative numbers by department from the 2014 edition of the ETS report. The results looked like this:

There is a correlation of r = -0.82 (p = 0.0003) between average GRE Quantitative score and percent women in a discipline. This is among the strongest correlations I have ever seen in social science data. It is much larger than Leslie et al’s correlation with perceived innate ability³.

Despite its surprising size this is not a fluke. It’s very similar to what other people have found when attempting the same project. There’s a paper from 2002, Templer and Tomeo, that tries the same thing and finds r = 0.76, p < 0.001. Randal Olson tried a very similar project on his blog a while back and got r = 0.86. My finding is right in the middle.

A friendly statistician went beyond my pay grade and did a sequential ANOVA on these results⁴ and Leslie et al’s perceived-innate-ability results. They found that they could reject the hypothesis that the effect of actual innate ability was entirely mediated by perceived innate ability (p = 0.002), but could not reject the hypothesis that the effect of perceived-innate-ability was entirely mediated by actual-innate ability (p = 0.36).

In other words, we find no evidence for a continuing effect of people’s perceptions of innate ability after we adjust for what those perceptions say about actual innate ability, in much the same way we would expect to see no evidence for a continuing effect of people’s perceptions of smoking on lung cancer after we adjust for what those perceptions say about actual smoking.

II.

Correlation is not causation, but a potential causal mechanism can be sketched out.

I’m going to use terms like “ability” and “innate ability” and “genius” and “brilliance” because those are the terms Leslie et al use, but I should clarify. I’m using them the way Leslie et al seem to, as a contrast to hard work, the internal factors that give different people different payoffs per unit effort. So a genius is someone who can solve difficult problems with little effort; a dullard is one who can solve them only with great effort or not at all.

This use of “innate ability” is not the same thing as “genetically determined ability”. Genetically determined ability will be part of it, but there will also be many other factors. Environmental determinants of intelligence, like good nutrition and low lead levels. Exposure to intellectual stimulation during crucial developmental windows. The effect of steretoypes, insofar as those stereotypes globally decrease performance. Even previous training in a field might represent “innate ability” under this definition, although later we’ll try to close that loophole.

Academic programs presumably want people with high ability. The GRE bills itself as an ability test, and under our expanded definition of ability this is a reasonable claim. So let’s talk about what would happen if programs selected based solely on ability as measured by GREs.

This is, of course, not the whole story. Programs also use a lot of other things like grades, interviews, and publications. But these are all correlated with GRE scores, and anyway it’s nice to have a single number to work with. So for now let’s suppose colleges accept applicants based entirely on GRE scores and see what happens. The STEM subjects we’re looking at here are presumably most interested in GRE Quantitative, so once again we’ll focus on that.

Mathematics unsurprisingly has the highest required GRE Quantitative score. Suppose that the GRE score of the average Mathematics student – 162.0 – represents the average level that Mathematics departments are aiming for – ie you must be this smart to enter.

The average man gets 154.3 ± 8.6 on GRE Quantitative. The average woman gets 149.4 ± 8.1. So the threshold for Mathematics admission is 7.7 points ahead of the average male test-taker, or 0.9 male standard deviation units. This same threshold is 12.6 points ahead of the average female test-taker, or 1.55 female standard deviation units.

GRE scores are designed to follow a normal distribution, so we can plug all of this into our handy-dandy normal distribution calculator and find that 19% of men and 6% of women taking the GRE meet the score threshold to get into graduate level Mathematics. 191,394 men and 244,712 women took the GRE last year, so there will be about 36,400 men and 14,700 women who pass the score bar and qualify for graduate level mathematics. That means the pool of people who can do graduate Mathematics is 29% female. And when we look at the actual gender balance in graduate Mathematics, it’s also 29% female.

Vast rivers of ink have been spilled upon the question of why so few women are in graduate Mathematics programs. Are interviewers misogynist? Are graduate students denied work-life balance? Do stereotypes cause professors to “punish” women who don’t live up to their sexist expectations? Is there a culture of sexual harassment among mathematicians?

But if you assume that Mathematics departments are selecting applicants based on the thing they double-dog swear they are selecting applicants based on, there is literally nothing left to be explained⁵.

I am sort of cheating here. The exact perfect prediction in Mathematics is a coincidence. And I can’t extend this methodology rigorously to any other subject because I would need a much more complicated model where people of a given score level are taken out of the pool as they choose the highest-score-requiring discipline, leaving fewer high-score people available for the low-score-requiring ones. Without this more complicated task, at best I can set a maximum expected gender imbalance, then eyeball whether the observed deviation from that maximum is more or less than expected. Doing such eyeballing, there are slightly fewer women in graduate Physics and Computer Science than expected and slightly more women in graduate Economics than expected.

But on the whole, the prediction is very good. That it is not perfect means there is still some room to talk about differences in stereotypes and work-life balance and so on creating moderate deviations from the predicted ratio in a few areas like computer science. But this is arguing over the scraps of variance left over, after differences in mathematical ability have devoured their share.

III.

There are a couple of potentially very strong objections to this hypothesis. Let me see if I can answer them.

First, maybe this is a binary STEM vs. non-STEM thing. That is, STEM fields require more mathematical aptitude (obviously) and they sound like the sort to have more stereotypes about women. So is it possible that my supposedly large sample size is actually just showing an artifact of division into these two categories?

No. I divided the fields into STEM and non-STEM and ran an analysis within each subgroup. Within the non-STEM subgroup, there was a correlation between GRE Quantitative and percent female in a major of -0.64, p = 0.02. It is completely irresponsible to do this within the STEM subgroup, because it has n = 7 which is too small a sample size to get real results. But if we are bad people and do it anyway, we find a very similar correlation of -0.63. p is only 0.12, but with n=7 what did you expect?

Both of these correlations are higher than Leslie et al were able to get from their entire sample.

Second, suppose that it’s something else driving gender-based patterns in academia. Maybe stereotypes or long hours or whatever. Presumably, these could operate perfectly well in undergrad. So stereotypes cause lots of men to go into undergraduate math and lots of women to go into undergraduate humanities. The men in math classes successfully learn math and the women in humanities classes successfully learn humanities. Then at the end of their time in college they all take the GRE, and unsurprisingly the men who have been taking all the math classes do better in math. In this case, the high predictive power of mathematical ability would be a result of stereotypes, not an alternative to them.

In order to investigate this possibility we could look at SAT Math instead of GRE Quantitative scores, since these would show pre-college ability. SAT scores show a gap much like that in GRE scores; in both, the percentile of the average woman is in the low 40s.

Here is a graph of SAT Math scores against percent women in undergraduate majors:

SAT Math had a correlation of -0.65, p = 0.01⁶.

This correlation is still very strong. It is still stronger than Leslie et al’s correlation with perceived required ability. But it is slightly weaker than the extremely strong correlation we find with GRE scores. Why?

I can’t answer that for sure, but here is a theory. The “undergraduate major” data is grabbed from what SAT test-takers put down as their preferred undergraduate major when they take the test in (usually) 11th grade. The “percent female” data is grabbed from records of degrees awarded in each field. So these are not exactly the same people on each side. One side shows the people who thought they wanted to do Physics in 11th grade. The other side shows the people who ended up completing a Physics degree.

The people who intend to pursue Physics but don’t end up getting a degree will be those who dropped out for some reason. While there are many reasons to drop out, one no doubt very common one is that the course was too hard. Therefore, the people who drop out will be disproportionately those with lower mathematical ability. Therefore, the average SAT Math score of 11th grade intended Physics majors will be lower than the average SAT Math score of Physics degree earners. So the analysis above likely underestimates the average SAT Math score of people in mathematical fields. This could certainly explain the lower correlation, and I predict that if we could replace our unrepresentative measure of SAT scores with a more representative one, much of the gap between this correlation and the previous one would close.

These data do not rule out simply pushing everything back a level and saying that these stereotypes affect what classes girls take in middle school and high school. Remember, we using “ability” as a designation for a type of excellence, not an explanatory theory of it. This simply confirms that by eleventh grade, the gap has already formed.⁷.

Third, perhaps SAT and GRE math tests are not reflective of women’s true mathematical ability. This is the argument from stereotype threat, frequently brought up as reasons why tests should not be used to judge aptitude.

But this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of stereotype threat found in the popular media, which actual researchers in the field keep trying to correct (to no avail). See for example Sackett, Hardison, and Cullen (2004), who point out that no research has ever claimed stereotype threat accounts for gender gaps on mathematics tests. What the research found was that, by adding an extra stereotype threat condition, you could widen those gaps further. The existing gaps on tests like the SAT and GRE correspond to the “no stereotype threat” control condition in stereotype threat experiments, and “absent stereotype threat, the two groups differ to the degree that would be expected based on differences in prior SAT scores”. Aronson and Steele, who did the original stereotype threat research and invented the field, have confirmed that this is accurate and endorsed the warning.

Anyway, even if the pop sci version of stereotype threat were entirely true and explained everything, it still wouldn’t rescue claims of bias or sexism in the sciences. It would merely mean that the sciences’ reasonable and completely non-sexism-motivated policy of trusting test scores was ill-advised.⁸

Fourth, might there be reverse causation? That is, suppose that there are stereotypes and sexism restricting women’s entry into STEM fields, and unrelatedly men have higher test scores. Then the fields with the stereotypes would end up with the people with higher test scores, and it would look like they require more ability. Might that be all that’s happening here?

No. I used gender differences in the GRE scores to predict what scores we would expect each major to have if score differences came solely from differences in gender balance. This predicted less than a fifth of the variation. For example, the GRE Quantitative score difference between the average test-taker and the average Physics graduate student was 9 points, but if this were solely because of differential gender balance plus the male test advantage we would predict a difference of only 1.5 points. The effect on SAT scores is similarly underwhelming.

But I think the most important thing I want to say about objections to Part II is that, whether they’re correct or not, Part I still stands. Even if the correlation between innate ability and gender balance turns out to be an artifact, Leslie et al’s correlation between perceived innate ability and gender balance is still an artifact of an artifact.

IV.

A reader of an early draft of this post pointed out the imposingly-named Nonlinear Psychometric Thresholds In Physics And Mathematics. This paper uses SAT Math scores and GPA to create a model in which innate ability and hard work combine to predict the probability that a student will be successful in a certain discipline. It finds that in disciplines “such as Sociology, History, English, and Biology” these are fungible – greater work ethic can compensate for lesser innate ability and vice versa. But in disciplines such as Physics and Mathematics, this doesn’t happen. People below a certain threshold mathematical ability will be very unlikely to succeed in undergraduate Physics and Mathematics coursework no matter how hard-working they are.

And that brought into relief part of why this study bothers me. It ignores the pre-existing literature on the importance of innate ability versus hard work. It ignores the rigorous mathematical techniques developed to separate innate ability from hard work. Not only that, but it ignores pre-existing literature on predicting gender balance in different fields, and the pre-existing literature on GRE results and what they mean and how to use them, and all the techniques developed by people in those areas.

Having committed itself to flying blind, it takes the thing we already know how use to predict gender balance, shoves it aside in favor of a weird proxy for that thing, and finds a result mediated by that thing being a proxy for the thing they are inexplicably ignoring. Even though it just used a proxy for aptitude to predict gender balance, everyone congratulates it for having proven that aptitude does not affect gender balance.

Science journalism declares that the myth that ability matters has been vanquished forever. The media take the opportunity to remind us that scientists are sexist self-appointed geniuses who use stereotypes to punish women. And our view of an important issue becomes just a little muddier.

I encourage everyone to reanalyze this data and see if I’m missing something. You can find the GRE data I used here and the SAT data here (both in .xlsx format).

Footnotes

1. They cite for this claim, among other things, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure Of Man

8. I can’t help adding that I continue to believe that the stereotype threat literature looks like a null field which continues to exist only through publication bias and experimenter effects. The funnel plot shows a clear peak at “zero effect” and an asymmetry indicating a publication bias for positive results (for some discussion of why I like funnel plots, see here.) And a closer look at the individual research shows this really disturbing pattern of experiments by true believers finding positive effects, experiments by neutral parties and skeptics not finding them, replication attempts failing, and large real-world quasi-experiments turning up nothing – in a way very reminiscent of parapsychology. Although I am far from 100% sure, I would tentatively place my money on the entire idea of stereotype threat vanishing into the swamp of social psychology’s crisis of replication.

I.

In my heart, there is a little counter that reads “XXX days without a ten-thousand word rant about feministm.” And I had just broken three digits when they had to go after Scott Aaronson.

For those of you who don’t know, Scott Aaronson is one of the nicest, smartest, and most decent people there are. A few days ago, in response to a discussion of sexual harassment at MIT, Aaronson reluctantly opened up about his experience as a young man:

I check Feministing, and even radfem blogs like “I Blame the Patriarchy.” And yes, I’ve read many studies and task force reports about gender bias, and about the “privilege” and “entitlement” of the nerdy males that’s keeping women away from science. Alas, as much as I try to understand other people’s perspectives, the first reference to my “male privilege”—my privilege!—is approximately where I get off the train, because it’s so alien to my actual lived experience.

But I suspect the thought that being a nerdy male might not make me “privileged”—that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes—is completely alien to your way of seeing things. To have any hope of bridging the gargantuan chasm between us, I’m going to have to reveal something about my life, and it’s going to be embarrassing.

(sigh) Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.

Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.

Because of my fears—my fears of being “outed” as a nerdy heterosexual male, and therefore as a potential creep or sex criminal—I had constant suicidal thoughts. As Bertrand Russell wrote of his own adolescence: “I was put off from suicide only by the desire to learn more mathematics.”

At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate me (I had researched which ones), because a life of mathematical asceticism was the only future that I could imagine for myself. The psychiatrist refused to prescribe them, but he also couldn’t suggest any alternative: my case genuinely stumped him. As well it might—for in some sense, there was nothing “wrong” with me. In a different social context—for example, that of my great-grandparents in the shtetl—I would have gotten married at an early age and been completely fine. (And after a decade of being coy about it, I suppose I’ve finally revealed the meaning of this blog’s title.) […]

Now, the whole time I was struggling with this, I was also fighting a second battle: to maintain the liberal, enlightened, feminist ideals that I had held since childhood, against a powerful current pulling me away from them. I reminded myself, every day, that no, there’s no conspiracy to make the world a hell for shy male nerds. There are only individual women and men trying to play the cards they’re dealt, and the confluence of their interests sometimes leads to crappy outcomes. No woman “owes” male nerds anything; no woman deserves blame if she prefers the Neanderthals; everyone’s free choice demands respect.

That I managed to climb out of the pit with my feminist beliefs mostly intact, you might call a triumph of abstract reason over experience. But I hope you now understand why I might feel “only” 97% on board with the program of feminism.

All right. Guy opens up for the first time about how he was so terrified of accidentally hurting women that he became suicidal and tried to get himself castrated. Eventually he got over it and is now 97% on board with feminism, but wants people to understand that when done wrong it can be really scary.

The feminist blogosphere, as always, responded completely proportionally. Amanda Marcotte, want to give us a representative sample?

[Aaronson’s post] is the whole “how can men be oppressed when I don’t get to have sex with all the hot women that I want without having to work for it?” whine, one that, amongst other things, starts on the assumption that women do not suffer things like social anxiety or rejection…It was just a yalp of entitlement combined with an aggressive unwillingness to accept that women are human beings just like men. [He is saying that] “having to explain my suffering to women when they should already be there, mopping my brow and offering me beers and blow jobs, is so tiresome…I was too busy JAQ-ing off, throwing tantrums, and making sure the chip on my shoulder was felt by everyone in the room to be bothered to do something like listen.” Women are failing him by not showing up naked in his bed, unbidden. Because bitches, yo.

The eternal struggle of the sexist: Objective reality suggests that women are people, but the heart wants to believe they are a robot army put here for sexual service and housework.

This would usually be the point where I state for the record that I believe very strongly that all women are human beings. Problem is, I’ve just conceived a sudden suspicion that one of them is actually a Vogon spy in a skin suit.

Anyway, Marcotte was bad enough, given that she runs one of the most-read feminist blogs on the Internet. But much of the rest of the feminist “discussion” on Tumblr, Twitter, and the like was if anything even worse.

But there was one small ray of hope. A bunch of people sent me an article on the issue by Laurie Penny in New Statesman, called “On Nerd Entitlement: White Male Nerds Need To Recognize That Other People Had Traumatic Upbringings Too And That’s Different From Structural Oppression.” The article was always linked with commentary like “This is so compassionate!” or “Finally a decent human being is addressing this issue with kindness!”

Well, I read the article, and ended up having the following Facebook conversation:

On further reflection, Other Friend has a point. I disliked Penny’s article, but compared to everything else it was a ray of light, a breath of fresh air, an unexpected incursion from a utopia of universal love and understanding. I didn’t feel like it treated Aaronson fairly. But I did feel like it treated him like a human being, which is rare and wonderful.

From the article:

I do not intend for a moment to minimise Aaronson’s suffering. Having been a lonely, anxious, horny young person who hated herself and was bullied I can categorically say that it is an awful place to be. I have seen responses to nerd anti-feminism along the lines of “being bullied at school doesn’t make you oppressed”. Maybe it’s not a vector of oppression in the same way, but it’s not nothing. It burns. It takes a long time to heal.

That this article keeps being praised effusively for admitting that someone else’s suicidal suffering “isn’t nothing”, is a sign. It’s a sign of how low our standards are. But it’s also a sign people are ready for change.

It’s hard for me express simultaneously both how genuinely grateful and impressed I am that the article managed to avoid being awful, and how far I still think it has to go. I can only offer Ms. Penny and the entire staff of the New Statesman the recognition appropriate for their achievement:

I’ve already written some thoughts on this general issue in Radicalizing The Romanceless. But by bringing nerd-dom into the picture, Penny has made that basic picture exponentially more complicated.

Luckily, this is a post about Scott Aaronson, so things that become exponentially more complicated fit the theme perfectly.

II.

Ms. Penny writes:

Feminism is not to blame for making life hell for “shy, nerdy men”. It is a real shame that Aaronson picked up Andrea Dworkin rather than any of the many feminist theorists and writers who manage to combine raw rage with refusal to resort to sexual shame as an instructive tool. Weaponised shame – male, female or other – has no place in any feminism I subscribe to.

I live in a world where feminists throwing weaponized shame at nerds is an obvious and inescapable part of daily life. Whether we’re “mouth-breathers”, “pimpled”, “scrawny”, “blubbery”, “sperglord”, “neckbeard”, “virgins”, “living in our parents’ basements”, “man-children” or whatever the insult du jour is, it’s always, always, ALWAYS a self-identified feminist saying it. Sometimes they say it obliquely, referring to a subgroup like “bronies” or “atheists” or “fedoras” while making sure everyone else in nerddom knows it’s about them too.

There continue to be a constant stream of feminist cartoons going around Tumblr featuring blubberous neckbearded fedora-wearing monsters threatening the virtue of innocent ladies.

Oops, I accidentally included three neo-Nazi caricatures of Jews in there. You did notice, right?

Read any article from the appropriate subfield of feminism, and you may well run into the part with the girl walking into a comic book store only to be accosted by a mouth-breathing troglodyte, followed by a “lesson” on nerd male privilege.

But it’s not just that. Try to look up something on Iron Man, and you get an article on Iron Man-Child and how “the white maleness of geek culture” proves they are “the most useless and deficient individuals in society, precisely because they have such a delusional sense of their own importance and entitlements.” Go to Jezebel and people are talking about how jocks are so much better than nerds because nerds hate women.

It has reached the point where articles published in major journals talk about the the fedora phenomenon in the context of “the growing trend in feminists and other activists online that use shaming as an activist strategy”.

Let’s not mince words. There is a growing trend in Internet feminism that works exactly by conflating the ideas of nerd, misogynist, virgin, person who disagrees with feminist tactics or politics, and unlovable freak.

Ms. Penny may be right that her ideal feminism doesn’t do that. Then again, my ideal masculinity doesn’t involve rape or sexual harassment. Ideals are always pretty awesome. But women still have the right to complain when actual men rape them, and I’m pretty sure nerds deserve the right to complain that actual feminists are, a lot of the time, focused way more on nerd-baiting than actual feminism, and that much the same people who called us “gross” and “fat” and “loser” in high school are calling us “gross” and “misogynist” and “entitled” now, and for much the same reasons.

III.

Penny goes on to deny that this is a gendered issue at all:

Like Aaronson, I was terrified of making my desires known- to anyone. I was not aware of any of my (substantial) privilege for one second – I was in hell, for goodness’ sake, and 14 to boot…Scott, imagine what it’s like to have all the problems you had and then putting up with structural misogyny on top of that. Or how about a triple whammy: you have to go through your entire school years again but this time you’re a lonely nerd who also faces sexism and racism.

This comes across so strongly as “my suffering is worse than your suffering” spiel, so much so that I’m tempted to argue it and review a bunch of experiments like how even the least attractive women on dating sites get far more interest than men. Or how women asking random people for sex on the street get accepted more than two-thirds of the time, but men trying the same get zero percent. Or how the same study shows that the women who get declined get declined politely, while the men are treated with disgust and contempt. Or I could hunt down all of the stories of trans men who start taking testosterone, switch to a more male sex drive, and are suddenly like “OH MY GOD I SUDDENLY REALIZE WHAT MALE HORNINESS IS LIKE I THOUGHT I KNEW SEXUAL FRUSTRATION BEFORE BUT I REALLY REALLY DIDN’T HOW DO YOU PEOPLE LIVE WITH THIS?”

But my commenters have convinced me that taking this further would be joining in the pissing contest I’m condemning, so let’s put it a little differently.

A couple of studies show that average-attractiveness people who ask random opposite-gender strangers on dates are accepted 50% of the time, regardless of their gender.

Grant that everyone involved in this conversation has admitted they consider themselves below average attractiveness (except maybe Marcotte, whose daily tune-ups keep her skin-suit in excellent condition). Fine. Maybe we have a success rate of 10%?

That’s still astounding. It would be pretty easy to mock teenage-me for not asking for dates when ten percent of people would have said yes. Asking ten people something takes what, five minutes? And would have saved how many years of misery?

This is a pretty impressive market failure – in sheer utility cost, probably bigger than any of the market failures actual economists talk about.

Some people say the female version of the problem is men’s fault, and call the behavior involve slut-shaming. I take this very seriously and try not to slut-shame or tolerate those who do.

But the male version of the problem is nerd-shaming or creep-shaming or whatever, and I don’t feel like most women, especially most feminist women, take it nearly as seriously as I try to take their problems. If anything, many actively make it worse. This is exactly those cartoons above and the feminists spreading them. Nerds are told that if they want to date girls, that makes them disgusting toxic blubberous monsters who are a walking offense to womankind.

This is maybe not the most reasonable interpretation of modern sexual mores, but neither is “any women who has sex before marriage is a slut and no one will ever value her.” Feminists are eagle-eyed at spotting the way seemingly innocuous messages in culture can accidentally reinforce the latter, but continue to insist that there’s no possible way that shouting the former from the rooftops could possibly lead to anyone believing or internalizing it.

Talking about “entitled nerds” is the Hot New Internet Feminism thing these days. Here’s The Entitlement And Misogyny Of Nerd Culture. Here’s Sex, Nerds, Entitlement, and Rape. Here’s Is Nerd Culture Filled With Entitled Crybabies? There’s On Male Entitlement: Geeks, Creeps, and Sex.

And now, apparently, the New Statesman, realizing that it’s almost 2015 and it has yet to claim a share of the exciting nerd entitlement action, has On Nerd Entitlement by Laurie Penny

And this is more than a little weird, because the actual nerds I know in real life tend to be more like Scott Aaronson, who is spending less time feeling entitled to sex, and more time asking his doctor if there’s any way to get him castrated because his sexual desire might possibly offend a woman. Or more like me, who got asked out by a very pretty girl in middle school and ran away terrified because he knew nobody could actually like him and it was obviously some kind of nasty trick.

So given that real-life nerds are like this, and given that they’re sitting around being terrified that they’re disgusting toxic monsters whose wish to have sex is an offense against womenkind, what do you think happens when they hear from every news source in the world that they are entitled?

What happens is they think “Oh God! There was that one time when I looked at a woman and almost thought about asking her out! That means I must be feeling entitled to sex! I had temporarily forgotten that as a toxic monster I must never show any sexuality to anybody! Oh God oh God I’m even worse than I thought!”

Again, this is not the most rational thing in the world. But I maintain it’s no less rational than, say, women who won’t leave their abusive husband because he’s convinced them they don’t deserve anything better than what they get. Gender is weird. Self-loathing is easy to inculcate and encourage, even unintentionally. Heck, we’ve already identified this market failure of people preferring to castrate themselves rather than ask ten people on a date, something weird has got to explain it.

When feminists say that the market failure for young women is caused by slut-shaming, I stop slut-shaming, and so do most other decent people.

When men say that the market failure for young men is caused by nerd-shaming, feminists write dozens of very popular articles called things like “On Nerd Entitlement”.

The reason that my better nature thinks that it’s irrelevant whether or not Penny’s experience growing up was better or worse than Aaronson’s: when someone tells you that something you are doing is making their life miserable, you don’t lecture them about how your life is worse, even if it’s true. You STOP DOING IT.

IV.

This also serves to illuminate what I think is the last and most important difference between Penny’s experience and Aaronson’s experience.

When Penny bares her suffering to the world for all to hear about, she gets sympathy, she gets praised as compassionate, she gets published in important magazines whose readers feel sorry for her and acknowledge that her experience sucks.

When Aaronson talks about his suffering on his own blog, he gets Amanda Marcotte. He gets half the internet telling him he is now the worst person in the world.

This was my experience as well. When I complained that I felt miserable and alone, it was like throwing blood in the water. A feeding frenzy of feminists showed up to tell me I was a terrible person and deserved to die, sometimes in terms that made Marcotte look like grandmotherly kindness. This is part of the experience I write about in this post, and it’s such a universal part of the shy awkward male experience that we are constantly flabbergasted that women refuse to accept it exists.

When feminists write about this issue, they nearly always assume that the men involved are bitter about all the women who won’t sleep with them. In my experience and the experience of everyone I’ve ever talked to, we’re bitter about all the women who told us we were disgusting rapists when we opened up about our near-suicidal depression.

And when that happens, again and again and again, of course we learn to shut up about it. I bottled my feelings inside and never let them out and spent years feeling like I was a monster for even having them.

As a mental health professional, I can assure you this is the best coping strategy.

V.

Laurie Penny has an easy answer to any claims that any of this is feminists’ fault:

Feminism, however, is not to blame for making life hell for “shy, nerdy men”. Patriarchy is to blame for that.

I say: why can’t it be both?

Patriarchy is yet another motte and bailey trick.

The motte is that patriarchy is the existence of different gender roles in our society and the ways in which they are treated differently.

The bailey is that patriarchy is men having power over women.

If you allow people to switch between these and their connotations willy-nilly, then you enable all sorts of mischief.

Whenever men complain about anything, you say “Oh, things are bad for men? Well, that sounds like a gender role. Patriarchy’s fault!”

And then the next day you say “Well, since we already agreed yesterday your problem is patriarchy, the solution is take away power from men and give it to women. It’s right there in the word, patri-archy. So what we need is more feminism.”

Even if in this particular case the feminism is making the problem worse.

So, for example, we are told that the patriarchy causes male rape. We are told that if we want to fight male rape, the best way to do so is to work hard to promote feminist principles. But once feminism has been promoted, the particular feminists benefitting from that extra social capital may well be the ones to successfully lobbying national governments to keep male rape legal on the ground that if raping men was illegal, they might make false accusations which could hurt women.

If patriarchy is “any problem with gender roles”, it’s entirely possible, even predictable, that feminists can be the ones propping it up in any given situation.

I mean, we live in a world where the Chinese Communist Party is the group that enforces Chinese capitalism and oppresses any workers who complain about it. We live in a world where the guy who spoke out against ritualized purity-obsessed organized religion ended up as the founder of the largest ritualized purity-obsessed organized religion of all time. We live in a world where the police force, which is there to prevent theft and violence, is confiscating property and shooting people right and left. It seems neither uncommon nor unexpected that if you charge a group with eliminating an evil that’s really hard to eliminate, they usually end up mildly tweaking the evil into a form that benefits them, then devoting most of their energy to punishing people who complain.

Pick any attempt to shame people into conforming with gender roles, and you’ll find self-identified feminists leading the way. Transgender people? Feminists led the effort to stigmatize them and often still do. Discrimination against sex workers? Led by feminists. Against kinky people? Feminists again. People who have too much sex, or the wrong kind of sex? Feminists are among the jeering crowd, telling them they’re self-objectifying or reinforcing the patriarchy or whatever else they want to say. Male victims of domestic violence? It’s feminists fighting against acknowledging and helping them.

Yes, many feminists have been on both sides of these issues, and there have been good feminists tirelessly working against the bad feminists. Indeed, right now there are feminists who are telling the other feminists to lay off the nerd-shaming. My girlfriend is one of them. But that’s kind of my point. There are feminists on both sides of a lot of issues, including the important ones.

(“But nowadays in 2015 most feminists are on the right side of every gender issue, right?” Insofar as your definition of ‘the right side of a gender issue’ is heavily influenced by ‘the side most feminists are on’, I’m going to have a really hard time answering that question in a non-tautologous way. Come back in 2065 and we can have a really interesting discussion about whether the feminists of 2015 screwed up as massively as the feminists of 1970 and 1990 did.)

So feminists can be either against or in favor of “patriarchy” broadly defined. Whether or not a form of cruelty is decreed to be patriarchy doesn’t tell us how many feminists are among the people twisting the knife.

The preferred method of figuring this out is asking the people involved.

I’ve been saying for years that getting exposed to feminist shaming was part of what made my adolescence miserable. Every time I say this, I get a stream of grateful emails thanking me for saying something so true to their experience.

Scott Aaronson has now said that getting exposed to feminist shaming was part of what made his adolescence miserable. According to his most recent blog post, he’s also getting the stream of grateful emails:

Throughout the past two weeks, I’ve been getting regular emails from shy nerds who thanked me profusely for sharing as I did, for giving them hope for their own lives, and for articulating a life-crushing problem that anyone who’s spent a day among STEM nerds knows perfectly well, but that no one acknowledges in polite company. I owe the writers of those emails more than they owe me, since they’re the ones who convinced me that on balance, I did the right thing.

I hang out a lot with shy awkward nerdy men of all ages, and I very often hear from them that feminist shaming is part of what’s making their adolescence (and often current life) miserable.

And it’s not just men. Here’s what a lesbian friend of mine had to say about Penny’s article:

There are a hell of a lot of people attracted to women who seem to have internalized the message that their attraction makes them sick and wrong and evil and creepy, that basically any interaction they have with a woman is coercive or harmful on their part, and that initiating a romantic interaction makes them a sexual predator.

I know this because I’m one of them.

I’m a woman. I’m gay. By the time I realized that second thing, I’d internalized that all attraction to women was objectifying and therefore evil. I spent years of my life convinced that it was coercive to make it clear to girls that I wanted to date them, lest they feel pressured. So I could only ask them out with a clear conscience if I was in fact totally indifferent to their answer. I still decide I’m abusive pretty frequently, on the basis of things like ‘i want to kiss her, which is what an abuser would want’ and ‘i want to be special to her, which is what an abuser would want’.

I internalized these messages from exposure to feminist memes, norms, and communities. It was feminist messages, not homophobic ones, that made it hardest for me to come to terms with my sexuality. It wasn’t intentional. But it happened. And it has happened by now to enough people that ‘well obviously you’re misinterpreting it’ is starting to wear thin as an excuse. Lots and lots of people are misinterpreting the way I did. By and large, we’re vulnerable people. Very often we’re mentally ill or disabled people.

Even if it’s broadly good for feminism to emphasize narratives about objectification and entitlement, this seems like a negative consequence of the way contemporary feminist activism does that. Activism shouldn’t make vulnerable people suicidally guilty. If there was a way to do activism that didn’t have this consequence, it’d be better than the current setup.

The infuriating thing is that I think there might be. We could write articles acknowledging that certain conversations can exacerbate crippling guilt and self-loathing, particularly for people with anxiety, depression, or other mental illnesses that make them fixate on their own perceived worthlessness. We could really, truly, not-just-lip-service integrate concern for those people into our activism. We could acknowledge how common this experience is and have resources to help people. We could stop misidentifying anguish as entitlement, and stop acting like anguish that does have entitlement at its root is deserved or desirable or hilarious.

We could really just start by extending to men who share this experience with me the sympathy that I’m extended when I talk about it.

The responses on Tumblr from men and women all over the sexuality spectrum who have had any personal experience with this all say it’s how they feel as well.

I usually avoid the term “privilege” because it tends to start World War III when used. So let’s avoid the term and simply keep in mind the concept that people have private information about their own experience that it’s difficult for other people to get second-hand.

Ms. Penny, as an (I think?) heterosexual woman, has no idea what having to deal with our culture’s giant minefield around romance toward women is like.

Scott Aaronson is a straight guy, and he’s saying feminist shaming tactics have made it worse. I’m an asexual heteroromantic guy, and I’m telling her feminist shaming tactics have made it worse. Unitofcaring is a lesbian woman, and she’s saying feminist shaming tactics have made it worse. HughRistik, who is some sort of weird metrosexual something (I mock him because I love him), is telling her feminist shaming tactics have made it worse. A giant cry has arisen from shy awkward men, lesbians, bisexuals, whatever of the world is saying “NO, SERIOUSLY, FEMINIST SHAMING TACTICS ARE MAKING THIS WORSE”

When Ms. Penny protests that feminism can’t possibly be involved and all these other people’s s personal experience is wrong, this is coming from a place of startling arrogance. If patriarchy means everything in the world, then yes, it is the fault of patriarchy. But it’s the kind of patriarchy that feminism as a movement is working day in and day out to reinforce.

VI.

The subtitle of the article is “White male nerds need to recognise that other people had traumatic upbringings, too – and that’s different from structural oppression.”

This doesn’t really describe the argument very well. The closest it really comes is to say that:

Aaronson makes a sudden leap, and it’s a leap that comes right from the gut, from an honest place of trauma and post-rationalisation, from that teenage misery to a universal story of why nerdy men are in fact among the least privileged men out there, and why holding those men to account for the lack of representation of women in STEM areas – in the most important fields both of human development and social mobility right now, the places where power is being created and cemented right now – is somehow unfair […]

This is why Silicon Valley is fucked up. Because it’s built and run by some of the most privileged people in the world who are convinced that they are among the least.

I really fucking hope that it got better, or at least is getting better, At the same time, I want you to understand that that very real suffering does not cancel out male privilege, or make it somehow alright. Privilege doesn’t mean you don’t suffer, which, I know, totally blows.

The impression I’m getting is that yes, nerds think they have problems, but actually they’re really privileged. So their problems aren’t structural oppression in the same sense that women’s problems are. So. Quick hypothetical.

I’ve postulated before that “privilege” is a classic motte-and-bailey term. The motte, the uncontroversial and attractive definition, is “some people have built-in advantages over other people, and it might be hard for them to realize these advantages even exist”. Under this definition, it’s easy to agree that, let’s say, Aaronson has the privilege of not having to deal with slut-shaming, and Penny has the privilege of not having to deal with the kind of creep-shaming that focuses on male nerds.

The bailey, the sneaky definition used to push a political point once people have agreed to the motte, is that privilege is a one-dimensional axis such that for any two people, one has privilege over the other, and that first person has it better in every single way, and that second person has it worse in every single way.

This is of course the thing everyone swears they don’t mean when they use the word privilege, which is of course how the motte-and-bailey fallacy works. But as soon as they are not being explicitly challenged about the definition, this is the way they revert back to using the word.

Go back to the original Amanda Marcotte article. Check the title. “MIT Professor Explains The Real Oppression Is Having To Talk To Women”.

That phrasing, “the real oppression is…”, carries a pretty loaded assumption. I’d say “hides a pretty loaded assumption”, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much work to hide it.

If you look through Marcotte’s work, you find this same phrasing quite often. “Some antifeminist guy is ranting at me about how men are the ones who are really oppressed because of the draft” (source). And she’s not the only one. If you Google the term “are the ones who are really oppressed”, you can find an nice collection of people using this exact phraseology, including a few examples from a charming site called “Nerds Fucking Suck”.

But Aaronson is admitting about a hundred times that he recognizes the importance of the ways women are oppressed. He’s not saying his suffering is worse than women’s in every way, just that it’s really bad and maybe this is not the place where “male privilege” should be invoked. The “is really oppressed” isn’t taken from him, it’s assumed by Marcotte. Her obvious worldview is – since privilege and oppression are a completely one dimensional axis, for Aaronson to claim that there is anything whatsoever that has ever been bad for men must be interpreted as a claim that they are the ones who are really oppressed and therefore women are not the ones who are really oppressed and therefore nothing whatsoever has ever been bad for women. By Insane Moon Logic, it sort of makes sense.

As a result, Marcotte is incapable of acknowledging that Aaronson feels pain or has feelings more complicated than “all women exist solely to be my slaves”. She has to be a jerk to him, otherwise it would be a tacit admission that he has problems, which means only he has problems, which means no woman has ever had problems, which means all women are oppressors. Or whatever.

Marcotte is angry that Aaronson doesn’t cite any feminist writer besides Andrea Dworkin, so let’s go with Julia Serano here:

What if you’re trying to hold the same weird one-dimensional system in a way consistent with basic human decency? That is, you don’t want to do the Vogon thing and say Scott Aaronson’s misery is totally hilarious, but you also don’t want to acknowledge that it counts – because if it counted you’d have to admit that men have it bad in some ways, which means that the One Group That Can Ever Have Things Bad spot is taken by men, which means women don’t have it bad?

As best I can tell, the way with the fewest epicycles is to say “Yes, your pain technically exists, but it’s not structural oppression“, where structural oppression is the type of pain that fits neatly onto the one-dimensional line.

Laurie Penny is an extremely decent person, but like a shaman warding off misfortune with a ritual, she must dub Aaronson’s pain “not structural oppression” or else risk her own pain not counting, being somehow diminished.

I mean, I don’t think she thinks that’s what she’s doing. But I’m not sure why else it’s necessary to get so competitive about it.

Absent the one-dimensional view, it would be perfectly reasonable to say something like “You feel pain? I have felt pain before too. I’m sorry about your pain. It would be incredibly crass to try to quantify exactly how your pain compares to my pain and lord it over you if mine was worse. Instead I will try to help you with your pain, just as I hope that you will help me with mine.”

Given the one-dimensional view, any admission that other people suffer is a threat to the legitimacy of one’s own suffering. Horrible people will deny and actively mock the pain of others, but even decent people will only be able to accept the pain if they also mention in an aside that it doesn’t count as the correct sort of pain to matter in the moral calculus and certainly isn’t even in the same ballpark as their own.

But the one-dimensional view sucks. It is the culmination and perfection of the phenomenon I described in my post on social justice terminology, the abandonment of discourse about the world in favor of endless debate about who qualifies for certain highly loaded terms like “structural oppression”. And those terms end up as a sort of Orwellian Newspeak that makes it possible to dismiss entire categories of experience and decree by fiat who does and doesn’t matter.

The suspect famously says “I didn’t kill him, officer! Also, he had it coming!”

In that spirit, I would like to propose that we shouldn’t make this debate about structural oppression, but even if we do this kind of minimization of male nerd suffering doesn’t stand.

I know there are a couple different definitions of what exactly structural oppression is, but however you define it, I feel like people who are at much higher risk of being bullied throughout school, are portrayed by the media as disgusting and ridiculous, have a much higher risk of mental disorders, and are constantly told by mainstream society that they’re ugly and defective kind of counts.

If nerdiness is defined as intelligence plus poor social skills, then it is at least as heritable as other things people are willing to count as structural oppression like homosexuality (heritability of social skills, heritability of IQ, heritability of homosexuality) If all nerds were born with blue dots on their heads, and the blue-dotters were bullied in school, cast negatively in the media, assumed to be as ravenous beasts hungry for innocent women, and denounced as “entitled” any time they overcame all this to become successful – would anybody deny that blue-dotters suffered from structural oppression? Wouldn’t the people who talked about how clearly blue-dotters are entitled dudebros in the tech industry be thought of the same way as someone who said Jews were greedy parasites in the banking industry?

Actually, let’s take this Jew thing and run with it. I am not the first person to notice that there are a lot of Jews in Silicon Valley. By maternal descent, at least Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Michael Dell, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, and Sheryl Sandberg. (list previously included Jimmy Wales and Jeff Bezos, but I’ve been told that’s wrong. I regret the error)

Imagine how an anti-Semite might think about this. “Jews say they’re oppressed. But actually they’re all rich. Oppression disproved!”

In fact, he might he add exactly the same comment we see in the Statesman article: “This is why Silicon Valley is fucked up. Because it’s built and run by some of the most privileged people in the world who are convinced that they are among the least.”

But once again this only works when you have the dumb one-dimensional model of privilege. Some Jews are rich, therefore all Jews are rich, therefore all Jews are privileged, therefore no Jew could be oppressed in any way, therefore Jews are the oppressors.

And much the same is true of nerds. In fact, have you noticed actual nerds and actual Jews tend to be the same people? I’m Jewish. Scott Aaronson is Jewish. Laurie Penny, who declares her nerd-girl credentials, is Jewish. We’re discussing a blog called, of all things, Shtetl-Optimized. A minority that makes up 1% of the Anglosphere also makes up three of the three nerds in this conversation. Probability of this happening by chance is (*calculates*) exactly one in a million. Aside from Zuckerberg, Page, Brin, Bezos, Wales, Ellison, and all the other famous people, about 40% of top programmers are Jewish.

Judaism and nerdity are not exactly the same, but they sure live pretty close together.

And this is why it’s distressing to see the same things people have always said about Jews get applied to nerds. They’re this weird separate group with their own culture who don’t join in the reindeer games of normal society. They dress weird and talk weird. They’re conventionally unattractive and have too much facial hair. But worst of all, they have the chutzpah to do all that and also be successful. Having been excluded from all of the popular jobs, they end up in the unpopular but lucrative jobs, for which they get called greedy parasites in the Jews’ case, and “the most useless and deficient individuals in society” in the case of the feminist article on nerds I referenced earlier.

Propaganda against the Jews is described as follows:

Since Jews were ugly, they depended on reprehensible methods of sexual conquest. Non-violent means such as money were common, but also violence. Streicher specialized in stories and images alleging Jewish sexual violence. In a typical example, a girl cowers under the huge claw-like hand of a Jew, his evil silhouette in the background. The caption at the bottom of the page: “German girls! Keep away from Jews!” These images were particularly striking and consistent with the larger theme. Although Jews were too cowardly to engage in manly combat and too disgusting to be physically attractive to German women, they were eager to overpower and rape German women, thereby corrupting the Aryan racial stock.

I already know the same machine that turned Aaronson’s “I am 97% on board with feminism” into “I think all women should be my slaves” is focusing its baleful gaze on me. So let me specify what I am obviously not saying. I am not saying nerds have it “just as bad as Jews in WWII Germany” or any nonsense like that. I am not saying that prejudice against nerds is literally motivated by occult anti-Semitism, or accusing anyone of being anti-Semitic.

I am saying that whatever structural oppression means, it should be about structure. And the structure society uses to marginalize and belittle nerds is very similar to a multi-purpose structure society has used to belittle weird groups in the past with catastrophic results.

There is a well-known, dangerous form of oppression that works just fine when the group involved have the same skin color as the rest of society, the same sex as the rest of society, and in many cases are totally indistinguishable from the rest of society except to themselves. It works by taking a group of unattractive, socially excluded people, mocking them, accusing them of being out to violate women, then denying that there could possibly be any problem with these attacks because they include rich people who dominate a specific industry.

[EDIT 1/3: Penny’s same article was reprinted at New Republic, which I guess also realized it gotten a piece of the Hot New Nerd Entitlement Trend yet. Their title was “Nerd Entitlement Lets Men Ignore Racism And Sexism”, which is kind of weird, since Penny’s article doesn’t do anything close to argue for that. Also since surveys show nerd men are more likely to be concerned about racism and sexism than other men – see for example this survey where nerds are far more feminist than average, so much so that nerd men are more feminist than non-nerd women, and since Penny’s article makes nothing even resembling an argument for this position. Once again, this only makes sense if you assume a one-dimensional zero-sum model of privilege, where the fact that miserable male nerds are concentrating on their own desire for the release of death, instead of what women think they should be concentrating on, means they must be universally denying women can have problems.]

[EDIT 1/3, Part 2: New Republic has changed their title. You can still see it in the URL, though]

VII.

It gets worse.

What can I say? This is a strange and difficult age, one of fast-paced change and misunderstandings. Nerd culture is changing, technology is changing, and our frameworks for gender and power are changing – for the better. And the backlash to that change is painful as good, smart people try to rationalise their own failure to be better, to be cleverer, to see the other side for the human beings they are. Finding out that you’re not the Rebel Alliance, you’re actually part of the Empire and have been all along, is painful.

She links this last sentence to an article called Why Nerd Culture Must Die, which, I don’t know, kind of makes me a little more skeptical of all of her protestations that she’s exactly as much of a nerd as anyone else and likes nerds and is really working for nerds’ best interests. The article repeats that nerds think they’re “the Rebel Alliance” but actually are “the Empire”. Ha ha! Burn!

You may be wondering whether you missed the part of Star Wars where Darth Vader is so terrified of hurting or offending other people that he stops interacting with anybody and becomes suicidally depressed for years. Finally, Vader mentions this fact in the comments section of a blog about obscure Sith rituals. The brave Rebel Alliance springs into action and gets all of the Coruscant newspapers to publish articles on how Vader is entitled and needs to check his privilege.

I don’t know. Maybe this was one of those things that got taken out in the Special Edition?

(Han shot first!)

But there’s actually something even creepier going on here which may or may not be intentional.

The Transsexual Empire is a very famous book from the late 1970s subtitled “The Making Of The She-Male” in which feminist activist Janice Raymond argues that transsexuals, despite claiming to be persecuted, form an evil empire dedicated to the reinforcing of patriarchy. It contains delightful passages such as “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves”. The Transgender Studies Reader says that the book “did not invent anti-transsexual prejudice, but it did more to justify and perpetuate it than perhaps any other book ever written.” The response, written by a prominent transgender activist, was titled The Empire Strikes Back – an obvious reference to the Star Wars film published around that time.

So the question is – how come various feminists keep independently choosing the Empire as a metaphor for their enemies?

Once again the one-dimensional model of privilege rears its ugly head.

Transsexuals claimed to be suffering. This was a problem, because some of them were transwomen who had started with the male gender role. They had privilege! And they claimed to be suffering! The one-dimensional model of privilege lifts its eyebrows quizzically and emits a “…wha?”

The solution is to deny their suffering. Not only deny their suffering, but accuse them of being out to “rape women’s bodies”. Not only deny their suffering and accuse them of being rapists, but to insist that they are privileged – no, super-privileged – no, the most privileged – no, a giant all-powerful all-encompassing mass of privilege that controls everything in the world,.

So they became an Empire. How better to drive home the fact that they’re definitely powerful and oppressive and definitely definitely not suffering? Because if they were suffering, it would mean we weren’t.

There’s another word the radical feminists like to use about transsexuals. “It’s aggrieved entitlement,” Lierre Keith tells the New Yorker. “They are so angry that we will not see them as women.” The article continues to explain how “When trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement.”

And sigh, now here come the male nerds and say they’re suffering too, not as much as the transpeople but still a nonzero amount of pain! Is there no end to people who are not us, suffering in inconvenient ways? They say that when they feel haunted by scrupulosity, that shaming them all the time actually makes the problem worse! We need to establish that they’re privileged right away! So how better to rub in the concept of very privileged people than to draw in the old Empire analogy, right? Maybe try the “entitlement” claim again as well? Second time’s the charm!

But let’s be clear. There is a Star Wars metaphor to be made here.

Chancellor Palpatine is, by universal agreement, a great guy. According to Count Dooku, he “speaks honestly and champions the underprivileged” (direct quote from source). But sometimes people get in the way of his mission of helping the underprivileged, and then he has to, you know, tell it like it is.

Like the Senate. When the Senate is not sure they want to hand over power to the Chancellor, he declares that they are corrupt and oppose democracy.

Or the Jedi. When the Jedi resist his rule, he declares that they are obsessed with “gain[ing] power” and “if they are not all destroyed, it will be civil war without end.”

Whenever he wants to steamroll over someone, Palpatine’s modus operandi is to convince everyone that they are scary oppressors. This isn’t just my personal interpretation. Indeed, in Order 66, Palpatine says straight out:

“Beings believe what you tell them. They never check, they never ask, they never think…Tell them you can save them, and they will never ask—from what, from whom? Just say tyranny, oppression, vague bogeymen.”

If we’ve learned anything from the Star Wars prequels, it’s that Anakin Skywalker is unbearably annoying. But if we’ve learned two things from the Star Wars prequels, it’s that the easiest way to marginalize the legitimate concerns of anyone who stands in your way is to declare them oppressors loud enough to scare everyone who listens.

And if the people in the Star Wars universe had seen the Star Wars movies, I have no doubt whatsoever that Chancellor Palpatine would have discredited his opponents by saying they were the Empire.

(seriously, you wanted to throw the gauntlet down to lonely male nerds, and the turf you chose was Star Wars metaphors? HOW COULD THAT POSSIBLY SEEM LIKE A GOOD IDEA?)

VIII.

Unlike Aaronson, I was also female, so when I tried to pull myself out of that hell into a life of the mind, I found sexism standing in my way. I am still punished every day by men who believe that I do not deserve my work as a writer and scholar. Some escape it’s turned out to be.

Science is a way that shy, nerdy men pull themselves out of the horror of their teenage years. That is true. That is so. But shy, nerdy women have to try to pull themselves out of that same horror into a world that hates, fears and resents them because they are women

Scott, imagine what it’s like to have all the problems you had and then putting up with structural misogyny on top of that.

Ms. Penny believes that, as a woman, she’s been unfairly excluded from the life of the mind and, indeed, from every pursuit she might enjoy or use as an escape.

There is something to be discussed here, but I am having trouble isolating Ms. Penny’s exact claim.

“Unfairly excluded from the life of the mind” might suggest she didn’t have the same opportunities as men to participate in higher education, but in fact women are now 33% more likely than men to earn college degrees and women get higher grades in college than men do. They also get well above half of all master’s degrees, and just a slice over half of all Ph.Ds (and rising). Their likelihood of becoming professors is nicely predicted by the percent of degrees they earn at a couple decade interval. The articles about the world of higher education now all have titles like Missing Men or Why Are Men Falling Behind.

Industry isn’t a good example here either. Women in her demographic group – twenty-something and childless – out-earn their male counterparts by almost ten cents on the dollar.

And she’s probably not talking about science, since women earn 55% of science degrees nowadays. They are somewhat overrepresented even in some “hard” sciences like biology, but overwhelmingly so in the social sciences. Over seventy five percent of psychology majors are female – a disproportionate which blows out of the water the comparatively miniscule 60-40 disproportion favoring men in mathematics.

(Hi! Male psychology major here, can confirm!)

When Penny says she as a woman is being pushed down and excluded from every opportunity in academic life, she means that women in a very small subset of subjects centered around computer science and engineering face a gender imbalance about as bad as men do in another collection of subjects such as psychology and education.

Penny attacks nerds for believing that “holding men to account for the lack of representation of women in STEM areas…is somehow unfair.” Fine. I hold her to account for the even higher imbalance in favor of women in psychology and education. Once she accepts responsibility for that, I’ll accept responsibility for hers. That sounds extremely fair.

(“But that’s because of patriarchy!” READ SECTION V.)

I propose an alternate explanation to both dilemmas.

By late high school, the gap between men and women in math and programming is already as large as it will ever be. Yes, it’s true that only 20 – 23% of tech workers are women. But less than twenty percent of high school students who choose to the AP Computer Science test are women.

Nothing that happens between twelfth grade and death decreases the percent of women interested in computer science one whit.

I have no hard numbers on anything before high school, but from anecdotal evidence I know very very many young men who were programming BASIC on their dad’s old computer in elementary school, and only a tiny handful of young women who were doing the same.

I don’t want to get into a drawn out inborn-ability versus acculutration fight here. I want to say that I want to say that whether we attribute this to inborn ability or to acculturation, the entire gender gap has been determined in high school if not before. If anything, women actually gain a few percentage points as they enter Silicon Valley.

What the heck do high schoolers know about whether Silicon Valley culture is sexist or not? Even if you admit that all the online articles talking about this are being read by fourteen year olds in between Harry Potter and Twilight, these articles are a very new phenomenon and my stats are older than they are. Are you saying the is because of a high level of penetration of rumors about “toxic brogrammers” into the world of the average 11th grader?

The entire case for Silicon Valley misogyny driving women out of tech is a giant post hoc ergo propter hoc.

What’s worse, I have never heard any feminist give this case in anything like a principled way. The explanation is usually just something like of course men would use their privilege to guard a well-paying and socially prestigious field like programming from women, men have always guarded their privileges, they’ve never given anything up to women without a fight, etc.

My own field is medicine. More than half of medical students are female. In two years, more than half of doctors in the UK will be female, and the US is close behind.

Medicine is better-paying and more prestigious than programming. It’s also terrible. Medicine is full of extremely abrasive personalities. Medicine has long work hours. Medicine will laugh at you hysterically if you say you want to balance work and family life.

But women can’t get into medicine fast enough. Every so often medical journals and the popular news run scare stories about how there are so many women in medicine now that if they take off time to raise kids at their accustomed rates we’re suddenly going to find ourselves pretty much doctorless.

So any explanation of the low number of women in Silicon Valley has to equally well explain their comparatively high numbers in medicine.

Given all this, it’s really easy for me to see why it’s tempting to blame nerds. Look at these low-status people. It’s their fault. We already dislike them, now we have an even better reason to dislike them that nicely wraps up an otherwise embarassing mystery. They’re clearly repelling women with their rapey creepishness. It doesn’t hurt that occasional high profile stories of sexual harassment come out of Silicon Valley aren’t hard to find and bring viral.

(no one ever asks whether there are an equally high number of stories of sexual harassment in medicine – or law, or any other field – that no one had a reason to publicize. When I was in medical school, there was an extremely creepy incident of sexual harassment/borderline attempted rape involving a female medical student and male doctor at an outlying hospital where I worked. Nobody put it on the front page of Gawker, because the doctor involved wasn’t a nerd and no one feels any particular need to tar all doctors as sexist.)

But again, you really can’t blame this one on Silicon Valley nerds, unless they are breaking into high schools and harassing the women there. And possibly breaking into grade schools, demanding the young boys start tinkering with BASIC. Time for a better theory.

A look at percent female physicians by subspecialty is instructive. The specialty with the most women is pediatrics, followed by child psychiatry, followed by obstetrics, followed by – you get the picture. The specialties with the least women are the various surgeries – the ones where your patient is immobilized, anaesthetized, opened up, and turned into a not-quite-color-coded collection of tubes and wires to poke and prod at – the ones that bear more than a passing resemblance to engineering.

(surgeons are the jockiest jocks ever to jock, so you can’t blame us for this one)

It seems really obvious to me that women – in high schools and everywhere else – have a statistical predilection to like working with people (especially children) and to dislike working with abstract technical poking and prodding. This is a bias clearly inculcated well before SATs and AP exams, one that affects medics and programmers alike.

It’s a bias that probably has both cultural and biological origins. The cultural origins are far too varied to enumerate. Many people very justly bring up the issue of how our society genders toys, with parents getting very angry when girls play with stereotypically male toys and vice versa. The classic example is of course the talking Barbie who would famously say “Math is hard! Let’s go shopping!”

On the other hand, I also think people who neglect biological causes are doing the issue a disservice. Did you know that young monkeys express pretty much exactly the same gendered toy preferences as human children? Rhesus monkeys, vervet monkeys, pretty much whatever species of monkeys you try it on, the male monkeys enjoy wheeled toys more and the female monkeys plush toys more. The word reviewers use to describe the magnitude of the result is “overwhelming”. When intersex children are raised as other than their biological gender, their toy preference and behavior are consistently that associated with their biological gender and not the gender they are being raised as, even when they themselves are unaware their biological gender is different. This occurs even when parents reinforce them more for playing with their gender-being-raised-as toys. You can even successfully correlate the degree of this with the precise amount of androgen they get in the womb, and if you experimentally manipulate the amount of hormones monkeys receive in the womb, their gendered play will change accordingly. 2D:4D ratio, a level of how much testosterone is released during a crucial developmental period, accurately predicts scores both on a UK test of mathematical ability at age seven and the SATs in high school.

The end result of all this is probably our old friend gene-culture interaction, where certain small innate differences become ossified into social roles that then magnify the differences immensely. As a result, high school girls are only a fifth as likely to be interested in computer science as high school boys, and sure enough women are only a fifth as well represented in Silicon Valley as men.

All of this information is accessible for free to anyone who spends ten minutes doing a basic Google search. But instead we have to keep hearing how nerds are gross and disgusting and entitled and should feel constant shame for how they bully and harass the poor female programmers out of every industry they participate in. Penny blames nerds for not “holding men to account for the lack of representation of women in STEM areas” but SERIOUSLY WE DIDN’T DO IT.

(except insofar as we helped acculturate kids. But that’s hardly a uniquely male pasttime.)

(before you bring up that one paper that showed research leaders advantaged male over female researchers, keep in mind that first of all it explains only a small portion of the discrepancy, and second of all the female research leaders showed the bias even worse than the male ones. Yet Penny frames her question as “holding men to account”. This is that motte-and-bailey thing with patriarchy again.)

Do you realize how unpleasant it is to be constantly blamed all the time for something we didn’t do, and have that be used to justify every form of insult and discrimination and accusation against us? The oldest pattern in human history is “Here’s a problem. And here’s a bunch of people who are different than us. Let’s blame it on them!”

There’s enough information out there to prove that creepy nerds are not the problem with female representation in STEM. Then again, there’s also enough information out there to prove that gay people don’t cause earthquakes. People will believe what they want to believe.

On the other hand, I’ve said above that I don’t like completely ignoring the accounts of thousands of people who say there’s a problem. Although my female friends in computer science keep insisting they’ve never encountered sexism there, many many others say they have.

But let’s keep our causal arrows pointing the right direction. Any space with a four-to-one male:female ratio is going to end up with some pretty desperate people and a whole lot of unwanted attention. Add into this mix the fact that nerds usually have poor social skills (explaining exactly why would take a literature review to put that last one to shame, but hopefully everyone can agree this is true), and you get people who are pretty sure they are supposed to do something but have no idea what. Err to one side and you get the overly-chivalrous people saying m’lady because it pattern matches to the most courtly and least sexual way of presenting themselves they can think of. Err to the other, and you get people hollowly imitating the behavior they see in famous seducers and playboys, which when done without the very finely-tuned social graces and body-language-reading-ability of famous seducers and playboys is pretty much just “being extremely creepy”.

But once you accept this model, it starts to look like feminists and I are trying to solve the same problem.

The problem is that nerds are scared and confused and feel lonely and have no idea how to approach women. From this root problem blossoms both Aaronson’s problem – that sometimes all you can do is go to a psychiatrist and ask to be castrated – and Penny’s problem – that other times people go read pickup artistry books that promise to tell them how the secret is “negging” people.

But Aaronson’s solution to the problem is to talk about it. And feminism’s solution to the problem is to swarm anyone who talks about it, beat them into submission, and tell them, in the words of Marcotte, that they are “yalping entitlement combined with an aggressive unwillingness to accept that women are human beings just like men”

IX.

Every article about male nerds calls us “entitled”.

I’m pretty sure they don’t mean financially, since nerds for example give disproportionately more to charity than other groups (see: Bill Gates, the joke in the effective altruist movement that it contains “all kinds of people – mathematicians, economists, philosophers, and computer scientists”).

And I’m pretty sure they don’t mean politically, since nerds are far more likely to support wealth redistribution than the general population (compare political alignment here to your choice of nationwide poll).

And I’m pretty sure they don’t mean psychologically. In psychology, entitlement as a construct is usually blended with narcissism. Predictors of narcissism include high emotional intelligence, high social skills but (uniquely among Dark Triad traits) not high nonverbal (ie mathematical) intelligence, and high extraversion. Another interesting fact about narcissists is that they tend to have more sexual partners than non-narcissists. Jonason describes the research on narcissism and sex by saying that “Narcissists find it easy to start new relationships but are less committed to and interested in staying in existing relationships.” I feel like even feminists should be able to agree that “extraverted people with excellent social skills but no particular mathematical aptitude who find it easy to start new relationships” is not a perfect match for nerds here.

So I don’t think these articles are talking about entitlement full stop. I guess they’re using this to point solely at sexual entitlement. But even this seems to require further clarification.

Do they mean nerds hold sexist attitudes? The research (1, 2, 3, 4) shows that sexist attitudes are best predicted by low levels of education, high levels of religious belief, and (whites only) low neuroticism. Once again, I don’t feel it should be controversial to say that “very religious people who drop out of school early and are psychologically completely healthy” is not how most people would describe nerds. Besides, in a survey I did of 1500 people on an incredibly nerdy forum last year, the average was extremely feminist, so much so that the average nerdy man was more feminist than the average non-nerdy woman.

Do they mean nerds are more likely to rape people? There is an appropriate caveat here that it is difficult-to-impossible to profile rapists – but if people took that caveat seriously then you couldn’t profile nerds as rapists either. Since we’re already talking about profiling, let’s go all the way and find that the best research about rapists (source: David Lisak) does find various characteristics of undetected campus rapists (ie primarily date rapists who get away with it, we’re not just talking about scary felons with knives here as a red herring). Some of these are purely psychological (“they’re sexist and don’t like women”). But the rest include: rapists are more sexually active and “engage in consensual and coercive sex far more often than is typical for men of their age group”. They are members of “sexually violent subcultures” including “fraternities and gangs”. They are “hypermasculine” and “strive always to behave in rigidly and stereotypically masculine ways” They are heavy drinkers, often using alcohol to release either their own inhibitions or those of their victims.

Once again, I feel like “hypermasculine frat boys and gangsters who party too hard and have a large number of partners” is a really poor description of nerds.

When people talk about nerds feeling “sexually entitled”, it’s never about any of these things. It’s always the same: A male nerd has dared to express that he is sad about being alone and miserable. Then they round this off to “therefore he believes everyone else owes him sex because he is so great” in precisely the way Amanda Marcotte does explicitly and Penny allows to lie beneath the surface.

Once again, Scott Aaronson’s entire problem was that he was so unwilling to hurt women even unintentionally, and so unclear about what the rules were for hurting women, that he erred on the side of super-ultra-caution and tried to force himself never to have any sexual interest in women at all even to the point of trying to get himself castrated. If entitlement means “I don’t care about women’s feelings, I just care about my own need for sex”, Aaronson is the perfect one hundred eighty degree opposite of entitlement. He is just about the most unentitled (untitled?) person imaginable.

Yet Aaronson is the example upon which these columnists have decided their case for “nerd entitlement” must rise and fall. You have better examples? Then why didn’t you use them?

I’ve already admitted that when a girl asked me out in middle school, I ran away terrified because I figured nobody could actually like me and it was obviously some kind of nasty trick. If entitlement means “believing you deserve all the sex”, then teenage-me also sounds pretty untitled.

Yet I, too, get to forever read articles about how entitled I am.

I’m not making some kind of #NotAllNerds statement here, any more than someone who disagrees with the claim “elephants are tiny” is claiming #NotAllElephants

A better word for this untitlement is, perhaps, scrupulosity, where you believe you are uniquely terrible and deserve nothing. Scrupulosity is often linked to obsessive compulsive disorder, which the recent survey suggests nerds have at higher rates than the general population and which is known to be more common in high-IQ people. When I hear my utilitarian friends say things like “I have money and people starving in Africa don’t have money, therefore I am morally obligated to give half of my money to people starving in Africa or else their starvation is my fault” and then actually go and do that – and trust me, these people are always nerds – then as often as not it’s scrupulosity at work.

When you tell a highly-untitled, high-scrupulosity person that they are entitled, it goes about as well as telling an anorexic person that they are fat.

If your excuse is going to be “okay, some nerds are overly scrupulous, but others are entitled”, how come that wasn’t your argument before? And how come, with laser-like focus, you only pick on the scrupulous ones? How come it’s 2015 and we still can’t agree that it’s not okay to take a group who’s already being bullied and harassed, stereotype it based on the characteristics of its worst members, and then write sweeping articles declaring that the entire group is like that?

X.

When Laurie Penny writes to women, she says:

What I most wanted to say, to all the messed-up teenagers and angry adults out there, is that the fight for your survival is political. The fight to own your emotions, your rage and pain and lust and fear, all those unspeakable secrets that we do not share because we worry that we will be hurt or shunned, is deeply political.

When Laurie Penny writes to men, she says:

Most of all, we’re going to have to make like Princess Elsa and let it go – all that resentment. All that rage and entitlement and hurt.

Clearly this second suggestion contains a non-standard use of the word “we”.

When women feel like they’re not allowed to “own their emotions” like “lust”, or have “secrets that they do not share because they worry that they will be hurt or shunned”, then it is “deeply political” and they have to “fight about it.”

When men make the same complaint, they are encouraged to “let go” of their “resentment” and “entitlement”.

The same worries, deep and secret fears, that are the core and driving heat of Penny’s feminism when they happen to women get called “entitlement” when they happen in men and need to be “let go”. You’re not allowed to complain about them. You’re not even allowed to ask the people hurting you to stop – then you’re super entitled. You shut up and get on with your life.

But it’s actually much worse than that. If you remember only one thing from this entire post, remember that Anakin Skywalker is unbearably annoying remember this:

The past is over. I do not hold, and have never held, any ill will toward the women who rejected me. Some of them continue to be my close friends. Some of them I’ve talked to about this Scott Aaronson thing, and even they agree with me on it. Nor did Aaronson mention any ill will to anyone who rejected him. Talking about how nerds should let go of our past resentment to our crushes is a giant red herring.

What this entire discussion is about is our very present resentment toward the (some) feminists who continue to perpetuate the stereotypes that hurt us then, continue to attack us now whenever we talk about the experience or ask them to stop, and continue to come up with rationalizations for why they don’t have to stop. This isn’t about little Caitlin who wouldn’t return my eye contact in seventh grade, this is about Amanda Marcotte, Jezebel, Gawker, and an entire system that gets its jollies by mocking us and trying to twist the knife.

The only reason little Caitlin is being brought up is so that feminists who don’t want to stop twisting can sidestep any criticism by pretending our argument is entirely how a seventh-grader shouldn’t have control of her own romantic decisions.

@#!$ that. Little Caitlin can do what she wants with her life. But dehumanizing and perpetrating stereotypes about a whole group of people who already have it pretty bad is not okay.

XI.

I already know that there are people reading this planning to write responses with titles like “Entitled Blogger Says All Women Exist For His Personal Sexual Pleasure, Also Men Are More Oppressed Than Women, Also Nerds Are More Oppressed Than WWII Era Jews”. And this post is way too long for most people who read those responses to get their misconceptions corrected. So before I close, let me give a brief summary of what I am trying to say:

1. There are a lot of really nasty stereotypes perpetuated about nerds, especially regarding how they are monsters, nobody can love them, and they are too disgusting to have relationships the same way other people do.

2. Although both men and women suffer from these stereotypes, men really do have a harder time getting relationships, and the experience is not the same.

3. Many of the people suffering from these stereotypes are in agreement that it is often self-identified feminists who push them most ardently, and that a small but vocal contingent of feminists seem to take special delight in making nerds’ lives worse.

4. You cannot define this problem away with the word “patriarchy”.

5. You cannot define this problem away by saying that because Mark Zuckerberg is a billionnaire, nerds are privileged, so they already have it too good. The Jews are a classic example of a group that were both economically advantaged in a particular industry, but also faced unfair stereotypes.

6. Whether women also have problems, and whether their problems are even worse, is not the point under discussion and is not relevant. Women can have a bunch of problems, but that doesn’t mean it is okay for any feminists to shame and bully nerds.

7. Nerds are not uniquely evil, they are not especially engaged in oppressing women, and they are not driving women out of Silicon Valley. Even if they were, “whenever they choose to open up about their private suffering” is not the time to talk about these things.

8. “Entitlement” is a uniquely bizarre insult to level at nerds given that by most of the term’s usual definitions nerds are some of the most untitled people there are.

9. The feminist problem of nerds being desperate and not having any social skills (and therefore being creeps to women) is the same as the nerd problem of nerds being desperate and not having any social skills (and therefore having to live their life desperate and without social skills). Denying the problem and yelling at nerds who talk about it doesn’t help either group.

10. The nerd complaint on this issue is not “high school girls rejected us in the past when we were lonely and desperate,” it is “some feminists are shaming us about our loneliness and desperation in the past and present and openly discussing how they plan to do so in the future.” Nobody with principles is angry at the girls who rejected them in the past and this is a giant red herring. If you don’t believe any feminists are shaming anyone, then say so; don’t make it about little Caitlin in seventh-grade.

If you want to debate or fisk this article, I would recommend using these paragraphs as starting points instead of whatever bizarre perversions of my words the brain of the worst person reading this can dream up.

[EDIT 1/15: Okay, it looks like the talking point people chose to go with was “he made a 1984 joke, therefore the thesis of the essay is that all men are oppressed by all women exactly as badly as people are oppressed in 1984.” As usual, I was insufficiently pessimistic.]

XII.

Penny ends:

We bring our broken hearts and blue balls to the table when we talk gender politics, especially if we are straight folks. Consent and the boundaries of consent – desire and what we’re allowed to speak of desire – we’re going to have to get better, braver and more honest, we’re going to have to undo decades of toxic socialisation and learn to speak to each other as human beings in double quick time.

[…]

The road ahead will be long. I believe in you. I believe in all of us. Nerds are brilliant. We are great at learning stuff. We can do anything we put our minds to, although I suspect this thing, this refusing to let the trauma of nerdolescence create more violence, this will be hardest of all.

I see a vision here of everybody, nerdy men, nerdy women, feminists, the media, whoever – cooperating to solve our mutual problems and treat each other with respect. Of course I am on board with this vision. As Scott Aaronson would put it, I am 97% on board. What keeps me from being 100% on board right now is the feeling that the other side still doesn’t get it.

First of all, a whole lot of other side is not Laurie Penny. They are the people gleefully mocking our pain and telling us we deserve it. But even the good people are worrisome enough.

They admit that nerdy men, lesbians, bisexuals, etc may be in pain, but they deny categorically any possible role of feminist shaming culture in causing that pain and want to take any self-reflection on their part off of the table of potential compromise.

They admit that our pain technically exists, but they are unable to acknowledge it without adding “…but by the way, your pain can’t possibly ever be as bad as our pain” or “your pain doesn’t qualify for this ontologically distinct category of pain which is much more important.”

They continue to think it is appropriate to respond to any complaint or expression of suffering on our part with accusations of “entitlement”, comparisons to Darth Vader, and empirically-contradicted slanders about how our mere presence drives women away from everything we love.

Once I see anyone, anywhere, publish an article that not only recognizes our pain, but doesn’t derail it into an explanation of why we’re definitely still terrible and there is no need whatsoever for them to change, then I will be more optimistic that progress is at hand.

XIII.

Oh frick.

And on that note I shall return to what I was doing before I read this post, which was drinking sweet tea and weeping about how boys don’t seem to want to kiss short-haired lady nerds, and trying not to blame the whole world for my broken heart, which is becoming more complex and interesting in the healing but still stings like a boiling ball of papercuts. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Having so much fun picking this article apart, and then this

Look. I mean what I say about how I don’t believe in zero-sum games. The reality of Prof. Aaronson’s problem does not for one second diminish the reality of Ms. Penny’s sadness as well.

So here is my offer to Ms. Penny. If she accepts and is in some kind of heavily nerd-populated city (NYC? SF?) I will use my connections in the nerd community to get her ten dates within ten days with intelligent, kind, respectful nerdy men of whom she approves. If she is in some less populated place, I will get her some lesser but still non-zero number of dates (unless she’s in Greenland or somewhere, in which case she’s on her own).

If I can’t do that, she may feel welcome to publically mock me and tell me that I was overconfident about how many people are, in fact, extremely willing to kiss short-haired lady nerds.

The rest of this article was serious, but this is extra serious. Let me know.

[EDIT: Comments are now closed, because this got linked on Instapundit and I know from experience that bad things happen if you leave the comments open after that point. Also, my comment software starts acting weird after like a thousand. If you must comment on this further, go bother Ozy on their open thread]. If you’re named in this article and you want to rebut it or reply, email me and I’ll include it somewhere.

Ezra Klein uses my analysis of race and justice as a starting point to offer a thoughtful and intelligent discussion of what exactly it means to control for something in a study.

I’m not really going to call it a critique of my piece, because it only applies to two of the six areas I looked at, and in those two areas Klein’s thoughts were already carefully integrated into my conclusion – I described both as showing “ambiguity over the level of racial bias, depending on…how strictly you define racial bias.” The Vox article repeated and expanded on that conclusion rather than contradicting it.

But it’s still an important issue and I’m glad it’s come up since I didn’t have time to deal with at enough length in the original post.

The argument is: any study worth its salt is going to control for things like income level. Therefore, a study that concludes “blacks and whites get arrested at about the same rates” may only mean “blacks and whites of the same income level get arrested at about the same rates”. If blacks on average have lower incomes, then in the real world blacks might still be arrested much more. Blacks being poor and therefore getting uniquely poor treatment from the criminal justice system (Klein says) sounds like exactly the sort of thing we would call “racial discrimination” or “racial bias” or “racism”, but it would be totally missed by the standard methodology of controlling for income.

The solution is terminological rigor, which I foolishly forgot to have. What I should have said at the beginning of my post was “I want to know whether there is any direct bias against black people caused by racist attitudes among police and other officials.” By this definition, all of my conclusions stand.

Klein wants to know whether there is any factor at all that causes disproportionate impact of the criminal justice system on any race. By this definition, my conclusions are only a tiny part of the picture, although at the end I recommend the book Malign Neglect which provides much of the rest.

As long as we keep these two meanings of “racial bias” or “racism” or whatever separate, there’s no problem. Once we start conflating them, we’re going to become very confused in one direction or another.

Ezra Klein and I don’t disagree about any point of statistics. What I think we do disagree about is the terminology.

If we find that much of the overrepresentation of blacks in the criminal justice system is because black people are often poor and poor people often get sucked into the system, should we describe this as “the problem isn’t racism in the criminal justice system, it’s poverty” or as “the problem is racism in the criminal justice system, as manifested through poverty”?

II.

Consider a town with 1000 black people and 1000 white people. 750 black people are poor, and 250 are rich. 750 white people are rich, and 250 are poor. Everyone commits crimes at the same rate – let’s say 10% per year. Rich people have lots of connections and can bribe their way out of trouble in a pinch, so only 50% of rich criminals get arrested. Poor people don’t have any strings they can pull, so 100% of poor criminals get arrested.

We can do the calculations and determine that the black arrest rate will be 8.75% and the white arrest rate 6.25%, a pretty significant difference. The people in the town can do the calculations as well. They correctly observe that in their town, everyone commits crimes at the same rate, so there must be some bias in their system. Using Klein’s definition, they determine that since the system in their town disproportionately affects blacks, their criminal justice system is racist.

The problem is, upon learning that your criminal justice system is racist, what solutions come to mind? The ones I think of include things like increasing the diversity of the officer pool, sending police to diversity training, ferreting out racist attitudes and comments among members of the force, urging officers to consume media that is more positive towards black people, et cetera.

But all of these are unrelated to the problem and will accomplish nothing. We specified the decision algorithm these officers use, and we know it has nothing to do with race and everything to do with class. The townspeople should be attacking the culture of bribery, nepotism, and corruption, not throwing away resources on curing racist attitudes that don’t affect police behavior in the slightest.

Note that this is true even if the poverty is caused by racism. Suppose the town college unfairly admits whites and turns down blacks, which is why the white people in this town are so much richer. I have no problem with saying “the town college is racist”. This suggests the appropriate solutions – educating and/or punishing the people at the college. I have a lot of problems with saying “the town police are racist” as a shortcut for “the town police take bribes, and due to racism somewhere else the people with the cash are all white” because this obfuscates the correct solution.

You can’t just cut links out of a causal chain and preserve meaning. “Blacks are arrested disproportionately often because of gravity” is true, insofar as without the formation of the Earth from the gravitational coalescence of a primordial gas cloud humans and therefore racism wouldn’t exist. But if the natural reaction to hearing the phrase is to solve the problem by attaching hundreds of helium balloons to black people, then say something less misleading.

III.

Klein goes on to say:

An example is research around the gender wage gap, which tries to control for so many things that it ends up controlling for the thing it’s trying to measure. As my colleague Matt Yglesias wrote, the commonly cited statistic that American women suffer from a 23 percent wage gap through which they make just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns is much too simplistic. On the other hand, the frequently heard conservative counterargument that we should subject this raw wage gap to a massive list of statistical controls until it nearly vanishes is an enormous oversimplification in the opposite direction. After all, for many purposes gender is itself a standard demographic control to add to studies — and when you control for gender the wage gap disappears entirely!

The question to ask about the various statistical controls that can be applied to shrink the gender gap is what are they actually telling us,” he continued. “The answer, I think, is that it’s telling how the wage gap works.

Take hours worked, which is a standard control in some of the more sophisticated wage gap studies. Women tend to work fewer hours than men. If you control for hours worked, then some of the gender wage gap vanishes. As Yglesias wrote, it’s “silly to act like this is just some crazy coincidence. Women work shorter hours because as a society we hold women to a higher standard of housekeeping, and because they tend to be assigned the bulk of childcare responsibilities.”

Controlling for hours worked, in other words, is at least partly controlling for how gender works in our society. It’s controlling for the thing that you’re trying to isolate.

Once again, when someone says “women make seventy seven cents for each dollar a man earns”, the response is almost always “That’s outrageous!” and demands that companies stop being so sexist. I don’t even have to speculate here. Google “gender wage gap”, and just on the first page of results you find statements like:

“While some CEOs have been vocal in their commitment to paying workers fairly, American women can’t wait for trickle-down change. The American Association of University Women urges companies to conduct salary audits to proactively monitor and address gender-based pay differences.”

“Today marks Equal Pay Day, the date that symbolizes how far into the new year the average American woman would have to work to earn what the average American man did in the previous year. With a new executive order issued today, President Obama and Democrats are hoping to peg the gender wage gap as a major issue ahead of the 2014 elections. This week, Senate Democrats also plan to again bring forward the proposed “Paycheck Fairness Act,” a bill that aims to eliminate the pay gap between female and male employees. Both men and women see a need for moves such as this – 72% of women and 61% of men said “this country needs to continue making changes to give men and women equality in the workplace”

Given that the supposed gender pay gap is being used at this very moment to argue for salary audits, sexual harassment training, grievance procedures, and paycheck fairness acts, isn’t it really important to know that a lot of it is due to upstream factors like how men and women are socialized as children to have different values, which wouldn’t be affected by these things at all?

(Given that the entire issue is probably being used to load the term “feminism” with positive affect, isn’t it important to know that it’s mostly unrelated to what we expect feminists to do with their extra trust and power?)

It might be worthwhile to come at this from an ideologically opposite angle. Suppose I state “Professors who identify as feminist give twice as many As to female students as they do to male students.”

(This is true, by the way.)

It sounds like a big problem. So you dig through mountains of data, and you figure out that most feminist professors tend to be in subjects like the humanities, where twice as many students are female as male, and so naturally twice as many of the As go to women as men. If I just give you my best trollface and say “Yes, that’s certainly the mechanism by which the extra female As occur”, you have every reason to believe I’m deliberately causing trouble. Especially if colleges have already vowed to stop hiring feminist professors in response to the subsequent outrage. Especially especially if you know I am a cultural conservative activist whose goal has always been to make colleges stop hiring feminist professors, by hook or by crook.

If twice as many women as men take English literature classes, that’s compatible with something about gender socialization unfairly making men feel less able to study or less enthusiastic about studying literature. That could be considered biased or discriminatory, I guess. But phrasing it as “feminist professors give twice as many As to women” is calculated to produce maximal damage. It’s the sort of thing you would only do if you wanted to throw a match on a gunpowder keg for s**ts and giggles.

IV.

So I guess I’ve moved on from “poor choice of terminology” to “active misrepresentation”. Let’s stick with that.

This issue makes for the ultimate motte-and-bailey doctrine.

You go around saying “Gender gap! Women making less than men! Discrimination! Sexism!” Everyone puts on their Gricean implicature caps and concludes that they mean what these words mean in everyday speech. The appropriate remedies are trotted out – companies need to raise their female employees’ pay, companies need to hire more discrimination officers, feminists need to talk more about all the ways men talk over women in the workplace and mansplain to them, etc. This is the bailey.

Then someone says “Wait, according to our study, a lot of this is just that women prefer working shorter hours to have time with their families” – and so they retreat to their motte: “Yeah, that’s the mechanism for the gender gap. You mad, bro?”

But the thing about mottes is that nobody actually cares about them when there’s this awesome bailey they can fight over instead. By turning differential socialization into the motte for sexual harassment or something, we’re doing a disservice not only to sexual harassment, but to the principled study of differential socialization.

Anyway, the situation is actually even worse than this. If you hear “The problem with the criminal justice system is disproportionate impact on the poor,” then you’ll probably start coming up with ideas for how to deal with that, and other people will probably start listening. If you hear “the problem with the criminal justice system is racism,” then you will start sharpening your knives.

Racism is a uniquely divisive issue. Minorities hear it and think of Klansmen trying to kill them. White people hear it and think of witch-hunters trying to get them fired. A single death in a random Midwestern town has turned half the country into experts on ballistics because it involved race. Bring up race, and people will change their opinion in the opposite direction suggested by the evidence just to spite you for having a different opinion about it than they do.

Once you’ve said words like “racism” or “racial bias”, this dynamic is already in play and you have lost control of the conversation from then on. If you mention the word and then suggest that we should do something about the police bribery or whatever, then ten percent are going to yell “HOW DARE YOU IMPUGN OUR OFFICERS’ HONOR, YOU POLITICALLY CORRECT FASCIST”, another ten percent are going to yell “HOW DARE YOU DERAIL THE CONVERSATION ABOUT RACE, YOU WHITE SUPREMACIST ASSHOLE”, and the other eighty percent are going to be yelling so loud at each other they can’t even hear you. By the time all the fires have been put out and all the rubble cleared, it’s a pretty good bet that nobody is in the mood to hear about policy ideas for reducing the impact of police on lower-income individuals anymore.

Klein ends his piece by interviewing a professor who states that “Liberals sometimes overstate the extent of overt racism as a direct explanation of justice system disparities.” He acts like this is some sort of inexplicable quirk of the liberal mind. I wonder whether it might have more to do with liberals reading things like the recent Vox article, “America’s Criminal Justice System Is Racist”, which declares the thesis “There is no reason to be subtle on this point: the American criminal justice system is racist”, then goes on to repeat the phrase “America’s criminal justice system is racist” five times in the next five paragraphs. It never mentions that possibility that any of this racism is anything but overt.

If, like Robin Hanson, you believe in the metaphor of tugging policy ropes sideways, then I can’t think of any worse way to ensure that everyone will be tugging against you in every direction than trying to focus the discussion about race.

That’s why I limited my review to direct bias within the justice system itself, and why I think other ways of framing the issue are less productive.

(Comment screening is on again, I guess. Comments that will start flame wars or derail the conversation will vanish into the aether. Unrelated: the book review yesterday got popular and this blog might go down every so often because of too much traffic. It’ll be up again shortly.)

Does the criminal justice system treat African-Americans fairly?

I always assumed it obviously didn’t. Then a while ago I read this harshly polemical but research-filled article claiming to prove it did. Then I found a huge review paper on the subject, written by a Harvard professor of sociology, which concluded after analyzing sixty pages of exquisitely-researched studies that:

Recognizing that research on criminal justice processing in the United States is complex and fraught with methodological problems, the weight of the evidence reviewed suggests the following. When restricted to index crimes, dozens of individual-level studies have shown that a simple direct influence of race on pretrial release, plea bargaining, conviction, sentence length, and the death penalty among adults is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled. For these crimes, racial differentials in sanctioning appear to match the large racial differences in criminal offending. Findings on the processing of adult index crimes therefore generally support the non-discrimination thesis.

Clearly this was more complicated than I thought. I decided to waste my precious free time reading seven zillion contradictory studies to figure out what was going on. Some people on Tumblr have demanded I report back, so here goes:

A. Encounter Rate

There are a lot of tiers to the criminal justice system, each of which will have to be analyzed individual. The first tier is – who does or doesn’t get stopped by the police?

One common point of discussion is traffic stops, leading to the popular joke that you can be stopped for a “DWB” (driving while black). Engel and Calnon (2006) seem to have done the definitive review in this area. Based on a national survey of citizens’ interactions with police, they find that 5% of whites and 11% of blacks have had their cars searched by police, with relatively similar results for other kinds of officer interactions. Therefore, blacks are about twice as likely to be searched as whites. Once you do a multiple regression controlling for other factors, like previous record, income, area stopped, et cetera, half of that difference goes away, leaving an unexplained relative risk of 1.5x.

These data admit to multiple possible interpretations. First, racist police officers could be unfairly targeting blacks. Second, blacks could be acting more suspiciously and police officers correctly picking up on this fact. Third, police officers could be racially profiling based on their past experience of more successful searches of black drivers.

One common method of disentangling these possibilities is search “success rate”. That is, if searching whites usually turns up more real crimes than searching blacks, then innocent blacks are being searched disproportionately often and the police are not just correctly responding to indicators of suspiciousness or past experiences.

Engel and Calnon review sixteen studies investigating this question. If we limit claims of dissimilarity to studies where one race is at least five percentage points higher than the other, there are eight studies with racial parity, six studies with higher white hit rates, and two studies with higher black hit rates.

In other words, in 62% of studies, police are not searching blacks disproportionately to the amount of crimes committed or presumed “indicators of suspiciousness”. In 38% of studies, they are. The differences may reflect either methodological differences (some studies finding effects others missed) or jurisdictionial differences (some studies done in areas where the police were racially biased, others done in areas where they weren’t)

The authors did their own analysis based on a national survey about citizens’ contact with the police, and found that 16% of whites searched and 8% of minorities searched reported that police had discovered contraband, a statistically significant difference. This contradicts the studies above, most of which found no difference and the others of which found much smaller differences.

One possible explanation the authors bring up is that previous research has shown black drivers who have received traffic violations are less likely than whites who have received traffic violations to admit to having received them on anonymous research surveys. For example, among North Carolina drivers known to have received tickets, 75% of whites admitted it on a survey compared to 66% of blacks (Pfaff-Wright, Tomaskovic-Devey, 2000). Comparisons of several different surveys of drug use find that “nonreporting of drug use is twice as common among blacks and Hispanics as among whites” (Mensch and Kandel). Since much of the “contraband” these surveys were asking about was, in fact, drugs, this seems pretty relevant. Overall different studies find different black-white reporting gaps (from the very small one in the traffic ticket study to the very large one on the drug use surveys). Plausibly this is related to severity of offense. Also plausibly, it relates to differential levels of trust in the system and worry about being found out – for poor black people, the possibility of (probably white) researchers being stooges who are going to send their supposedly confidential surveys to the local police station and get them locked up might be much more salient.

There are of course many other forms of police stop. These tend to follow the same pattern as traffic stops – strong data that police more often stop black people, police making the claim that black people do more things that trigger their suspicion instinct (including live in higher-crime neighborhoods), and difficulty figuring out whether this is true or false.

Sampson and Lauritsen review several studies on police stops of pedestrians. I’ll be coming back to and citing sources from this Sampson and Lauritsen article many times during this discussion as it is one of the most rigorous and trustworthy analyses around – Sampson is Professor of Sociology at Harvard and winner of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology and his review is the most cited one on this topic I could find, so I assume he represents something like a mainstream position. After reviewing a few studies, most notably Smith (1986), they conclude these sorts of police stops demonstrate no direct effect of race – in any given neighborhood, black people and white people are treated equally – but that there is an indirect effect from neighborhood – that is, the police are nastier to everybody in black neighborhoods. Although they don’t say so, the most logical explanation to me would be that black neighborhoods are poorer and therefore higher crime, and so the police are more watchful and/or paranoid.

Summary: There is good data that police stop blacks more often, both on the road and in neighborhoods. Studies conflict over whether the extra stops are justifiable; likely this varies by jurisdiction. Extra neighborhood stops are most likely neighborhood-related effects rather than race-related per se, but the neighborhood effects do disproportionately target black people.

B. Arrest Rates For Violent Crimes

Police records consistently show that black people are arrested at disproportionally high rates (compared to their presence in the population) for violent crimes. For example, blacks are arrested eight times more often for homicide and fourteen times more often for robbery. Even less flashy crimes show the same pattern: forgery, fraud, and embezzlement all hover around a relative risk of four.

(White people are arrested at disproportionally high rates for things like driving drunk, and Asians are arrested at disproportionally high rates for things like illegal gambling, but these carry lower sentences and are less likely to lead to incarceration.)

Once again, there are two possible hypotheses here: either police are biased, or black people actually commit these crimes at higher rates than other groups.

The second hypothesis has been strongly supported by crime victimization surveys, which show that the percent of arrestees who are black matches very closely matches the percent of victims who say their assailant was black. This has been constant throughout across thirty years of crime victmization surveys.

While everybody is totally on board with attributing this to structural factors like black people being poorer and living in worse neighborhoods, anyone who tries to analyze higher black arrest and incarceration rates without taking this into account is going to end up extremely confused.

There were some attempts to cross-check police data and victim data against self-reports of criminality among different races, with various weird and wonderful results. Once again, after a while someone had the bright idea to check whether people who said they hadn’t committed any crimes actually hadn’t committed any crimes, and found that a lot of them had well-verified criminal records longer than War And Peace.

Sociologists learned an important lesson that day, which is that criminals sometimes lie about being criminals.

No one has had any better ideas for how to corroborate the crime victimization survey data, so it looks like probably that’s the best we will do.

Summary: Arrests for violent crimes are probably not racially biased.

C. Arrest Rates For Minor Crimes

Usually when people talk about racial disparities in arrest rates for minor crimes, they’re talking about drugs. The basic argument is that black people and white people use drugs at “similar rates”, but black people are four times more likely to get arrested for drug crime. You can find this argument on pretty much every major media outlet: NYT, Slate, Vox, HuffPo, USA Today, et cetera.

The Bureau of Justice has done their own analysis of this issue and finds it’s more complicated. For example, all of these “equally likely to have used drugs” claims turn out to be that blacks and whites are equally likely to have “used drugs in the past year”, but blacks are far more likely to have used drugs in the past week – that is, more whites are only occasional users. That gives blacks many more opportunities to be caught by the cops. Likewise, whites are more likely to use low-penalty drugs like hallucinogens, and blacks are more likely to use high-penalty drugs like crack cocaine. Further, blacks are more likely to live in the cities, where there is a heavy police shadow, and whites in the suburbs or country, where there is a lower one.

When you do the math and control for all those things, you halve the size of the gap to “twice as likely”.

The Bureau of Justice and another source I found in the Washington Post aren’t too sure about the remaining half, either. For example, anecdotal evidence suggests white people typically do their drug deals in the dealer’s private home, and black people typically do them on street corners. My personal discussions with black and white drug users have turned up pretty much the same thing. One of those localities is much more likely to be watched by police than the other.

Finally, all of this is based on self-reported data about drug use. Remember from a couple paragraphs ago how studies showed that black people were twice as likely to fail to self-report their drug use? And you notice here that black people are twice as likely to be arrested for drug use as their self-reports suggest? That’s certainly an interesting coincidence.

The Bureau of Justice takes this possibility very seriously and adds:

Although arrested whites and arrested blacks were about equally likely to be drug use deniers, these results nevertheless have implications for the SAMHSA survey. A larger fraction of the black population than the white population consists of criminally active persons and, therefore, a larger fraction of the black population than the white population would consist of criminally active persons who use drugs but deny it. Consequently, the SAMHSA survey would probably understate the difference between whites and blacks in terms of drug use. Whether the effect of such drug use denial among criminally active persons is large enough to account for the unexplained 13% is not known, but research on the topic should pursue this possibility.

It should be noted that a study investigating this methodology gave random urine drug tests to some of the people who had filled out this survey, and found that half of the actual drug users had reported on the survey that they were squeaky clean. There were no racial data associated with this investigation, which is too bad.

Summary: Blacks appear to be arrested for drug use at a rate four times that of whites. Adjusting for known confounds reduces their rate to twice that of whites. However, other theorized confounders could mean that the real relative risk is anywhere between two and parity. Never trust the media to give you any number more complicated than today’s date..

D. Police Shootings

A topical issue these days. Once again, the same dynamic at play. We know black people are affected disproportionately to their representation in the population, but is a result of police racism or disproportionate criminality?

Mother Jones magazine has an unexpectedly beautiful presentation of the data for us:

The fourth bar seems like what we’re looking for. You could go with the fifth bar, but then you’re just adding noise of who did or didn’t duck out of the way fast enough.

As you can see, a person shot at by a police officer is more than twice as likely to be black as the average member of the general population. But, crucially, they are less likely to be black than the average violent shooter or the average person who shoots at the police.

We assume that the reason an officer shoots a suspect is because that officer believes the suspect is about to shoot or attack the officer. So if the officer were perfectly unbiased, then the racial distribution of people shot by officers would look exactly like the distribution of dangerous attackers. If it’s blacker than the distribution of dangerous attackers, the police are misidentifying blacks as dangerous attackers.

But In fact, the people shot by police are less black than the people shooting police or the violent shooters police are presumably worried about. This provides very strong evidence that, at least in New York, the police are not disproportionately shooting black people and appear to be making a special effort to avoid it.

For some reason most of the studies I could get here were pretty old, but with that caveat, this is also the conclusion of Milton (1977) looking at police departments in general, and Fyfe (1978), who analyzes older New York City data and comes to the same conclusion. However, the same researcher analyzes police shootings in Memphis and finds that these do show clear evidence of anti-minority bias, sometimes up to a 6x greater risk for blacks even after adjusting for likely confounders. The big difference seems to be that NYC officers are trained to fire only to protect their own lives from armed and dangerous suspects, but Memphis officers are (were? the study looks at data from 1970) allowed to shoot property crime suspects attempting to flee. The latter seems a lot more problematic and probably allows more room for officer bias to get through.

[EDIT: A commenter pointed out to me that Tennessee vs. Garner banned this practice in the late 1980s, meaning Memphis’ shooting rate should be lower and possibly less biased now]

The same guy looks at the race of officers involved and finds that “the data do not clearly support the contention that white [officers] had little regard for the lives of minorities”. In fact, most studies find white officers are disproportionately more likely to shoot white suspects, and black officers disproportionately more likely to shoot black suspects. This makes sense since officers are often assigned to race-congruent neighborhoods, but sure screws up the relevant narrative.

Summary: New York City data suggests no bias of officers towards shooting black suspects compared with their representation among dangerous police encounters, and if anything the reverse effect. Data from Memphis in 1970 suggests a strong bias towards shooting black suspects, probably because they shoot fleeing suspects in addition to potentially dangerous suspects, but this practice has since stopped. Older national data skews more toward the New York City side with little evidence of racial bias, but I don’t know of any recent studies which have compared the race of shooting victims to the race of dangerous attackers on a national level. There is no support for the contention that white officers are more likely than officers of other races to shoot black suspects.

E. Prosecution And Conviction Rates

Conviction rates of blacks have generally found to be less than than conviction rates of whites (Burke and Turk 1975, Petersilia 1983, Wilbanks 1987). I don’t know why so many of these studies are from the 70s and 80s, but a more recent Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that 66% of accused blacks get prosecuted compared to 69% of accused whites; 75% of prosecuted blacks get convicted compared to 78% of prosecuted whites.

The 1975 study suggested this was confounded by type of crime – for example, maybe blacks are charged more often with serious crimes for which the burden of proof is higher. The 1993 study isn’t so sure; it breaks crimes down by category and finds that if anything the pro-black bias becomes stronger. For example, 51% of blacks charged with rape are acquitted, compared to only 25% of whites. 24% of blacks charged with drug dealing are acquitted, compared to only 14% of whites. Of fourteen major crime categories, blacks have higher acquittal rates in twelve of them (whites win only in “felony traffic offenses” and “other”).

The optimistic interpretation is that there definitely isn’t any sign of bias against black people here. The pessimistic interpretation is that this would be consistent with more frivolous cases involving black people coming to the courts (ie police arrest blacks at the drop of a hat, and prosecutors and juries end up with a bunch of stupid cases without any evidence that they throw out).

There was a much talked-about study recently that found that “juries were equally likely to convict black and white offenders when there was at least one black in the jury pool, but more likely to convict blacks when there wasn’t.” This is consistent with previous studies. Jury pools contain twenty-seven members; the probability that there will be at least one black jury pool member in the trial of a black subject (who of course is most likely to live in a predominantly black area) is high. The study’s “equally likely to convict black and white offenders” was actually “2% more likely to convict white offenders than black offenders”, which was probably not statistically significant with its small sample size but is consistent with the small pro-black effects found elsewhere.

Summary: Prosecution and conviction rates favor blacks over whites, significance unclear.

F. Sentencing

Older studies of sentencing tend to find no or almost no discrepancies between blacks and whites. This was the conclusion of most of the papers reviewed in Sampson and Lauritsen. The gist here seems to be that there were “four waves” of studies in this area. The first wave, in the 1960s, was naive and poorly controlled and found that there was a lot of racial bias. The second wave, in the 1980s, controlled for more things (especially prior convictions) and found there wasn’t. The third wave was really complicated, and the writers sum it up as saying it represented:

…a shift away from the non-discrimination thesis to the idea that there is some discrimination, some of the time, in some places. These contingencies undermine the broad reach of the thesis, but the damage is not fatal to the basic argument that race discrimination is not pervasive or systemic in criminal justice processing.

The fourth wave expands on this and finds discrimination in some areas that hadn’t been studied before, such as plea bargaining. However, it continues to find that on the whole, and especially in the largest and best-designed studies there is very little evidence of discrimination. The article concludes:

Langan’s interpretation matches those of other scholars such as Petersilia (1985) and Wilbanks (1987) in suggesting that systemic discrimination does not exist. Zatz (1987) is more sympathetic to the thesis of discrimination in the form of indirect effects and subtle racism. But the proponents of this line of reasoning face a considerable burden. If the effects of race are so contingent, interactive, and indirect in a way that to date has not proved replicable, how can one allege that the “system” is discriminatory?

A more recent (fifth wave?) review adds some problems to this generally rosy picture, saying that “Of the [thirty-two studies containing ninety-five different] estimates of the direct effect of race on sentencing at the state level, 43.2% indicated harsher sentences for blacks…at the federal level 68.2% of the [eight studies containing twenty-two different] estimates of the direct effect of race on sentencing indicated harsher sentences for blacks”. The majority of estimates that did not find this were race-neutral, although six did show some bias against whites. They conclude:

Racial discrimination in sentencing in the United States today is neither invariable nor universal, nor is it as overt as it was even thirty years ago. As will be described below, while the situation has improved in some ways, racially discriminatory sentencing today is far more insidious than in the past, and treating a racial or ethnic group as a unitary body can mask the presence of discrimination.

I really like how you can make a large decrease in the level of a bad thing sound like a problem by saying it is becoming “more insidious”.

Even more recent studies have found even larger gaps. A study by the US Sentencing Commission investigating the effect of new guidelines found that blacks’ sentences were 20% longer than those of similar whites; a later methodological update reduced the gap to a still-large 14.5% and a a different recent study says just under 10%. Although the particular effect of these new guidelines is a matter of HORRIBLE SUPER-COMPLICATED DEBATE, neither side seems to deny the disparities themselves – only whether they are getting larger.

It’s not clear to me why there’s such a difference between the earlier studies (which found little evidence of disparity), the middle studies (which were about half-and-half), and these later studies (which show strong evidence of disparity). I guess one side of a HORRIBLE SUPER-COMPLICATED DEBATE would say it has to do with changes in sentencing during that time which replace mandatory sentences with “judicial discretion”. If you’re mandated to give a particular sentence for a particular crime, there’s a lot less opportunity to let bias slip in then if you can do whatever you want. There is some evidence that different judges treat different races differently, although the study has no way of proving whether this is anti-black bias, anti-white bias, or an equal mix of both in different people. Unfortunately, there is also concern that mandatory minimum sentencing is itself racist.

Capital punishment is in its own category, and pretty much all studies, old, new, anything agree it is racist as heck (Sampson and Lauritsen cite Bowers & Pierce 1980; Radelet 1981; Paternoster 1984; Keil and Vito 1989; Aguirre and Baker 1990; Baldus Woodward & Pulaski 1990 – there’s no way I’m reading through all of them so I will trust they say what the review says they say). This seems to consist not only in black suspects being more at risk, but in white victims’ deaths being more likely to get their offenders a death sentence.

Summary: Most recent studies suggest a racial sentencing disparity of about 15%, contradicting previous studies that showed lower or no disparity. Changes in sentencing guidelines are one possible explanation; poorly understood methodological differences are a second. Capital punishment still sucks.

Summary

There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.

There is ambiguity over the level of racial bias, depending on whose studies you want to believe and how strictly you define “racial bias”, in police stops, police shootings in certain jurisdictions, and arrests for minor drug offenses.

There seems to be little or no racial bias in arrests for serious violent crime, police shootings in most jurisdictions, prosecutions, or convictions.

Overall I disagree with the City Journal claim that there is no evidence of racial bias in the justice system.

But I also disagree with the people who say things like “Every part of America’s criminal justice is systemically racist by design” or “White people can get away with murder but black people are constantly persecuted for any minor infraction,” or “Every black person has to live in fear of the police all the time in a way no white person can possibly understand”. The actual level of bias is limited and detectable only through statistical aggregation of hundreds or thousands of cases, is only unambiguously present in sentencing, and there only at a level of 10-20%, and that only if you believe the most damning studies.

(except that you should probably stay out of Memphis)

It would be nice to say that this shows the criminal justice system is not disproportionately harming blacks, but unfortunately it doesn’t come anywhere close to showing anything of the sort. There are still many ways it can indirectly harm blacks without being explicitly racist. Anatole France famously said that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich as well as poor people from begging for bread and sleeping under bridges”, and in the same way that the laws France cites, be they enforced ever so fairly, would still disproportionately target poor people, so other laws can, even when fairly enforced, target black people. The classic example of this is crack cocaine – a predominantly black drug – carrying a higher sentence than other whiter drugs. Even if the police are scrupulously fair in giving the same sentence to black and white cokeheads, the law will still have a disproportionate effect.

There are also entire classes of laws that are much easier on rich people than poor people – for example, any you can get out of by having a good lawyer – and entire classes of police work that are harsher on poor neighborhoods than rich neighborhoods. If the average black is poorer than the average white, then these laws would have disproportionate racial effects.

For more information on this, I would recommend Tonry and Melewski’s Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America. They begin by saying everything above is true – the system mostly avoids direct racist bias against black people – and go on to say argue quite consistently that we still have a system where (their words) “recent punishment policies have replaced the urban ghetto, Jim Crow laws, and slavery as a mechanism for maintaining white dominance over blacks in the United States”. If you want something that makes the strongest case for the justice system harming blacks, written by real criminologists who know what they’re talking about, there’s your best bet.

(warning: I haven’t read the book. I did read a review article by the same people, which the book is partially based on)

Some police officers say the reason they are harsher in poor urban neighborhoods is that the expectation of high levels of unruly behavior necessitates unusually strong countermeasures. For the same reason, I am screening all comments for the next few days. If you post one, expect it to show up eventually or perhaps disappear into the aether.

“Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing out whales are not a type of fish.

(this is going to end up being a metaphor for something. Yup, we’re back to Whale Metaphor Blogging.)

The argument goes like this. Jonah got swallowed by a whale. But the Bible says Jonah got swallowed by a big fish. So the Bible seems to think whales are just big fish. Therefore the Bible is fallible. Therefore, the Bible was not written by God.

The first problem here is that “whale” is just our own modern interpretation of the Bible. For all we know, Jonah was swallowed by a really really really big herring.

The second problem is that if the ancient Hebrews want to call whales a kind of fish, let them call whales a kind of fish.

I’m not making the weak and boring claim that since they’d never discovered genetics they don’t know better. I am making the much stronger claim that, even if the ancient Hebrews had taken enough of a break from murdering Philistines and building tabernacles to sequence the genomes of all knownspecies of aquatic animals, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong, false, or incorrect with them calling a whale a fish.

Now, there’s something wrong with saying “whales are phylogenetically just as closely related to bass, herring, and salmon as these three are related to each other.” What’s wrong with the statement is that it’s false. But saying “whales are a kind of fish” isn’t.

Suppose you travel back in time to ancient Israel and try to explain to King Solomon that whales are a kind of mammal and not a kind of fish.

Your translator isn’t very good, so you pause to explain “fish” and “mammal” to Solomon. You tell him that fish is “the sort of thing herring, bass, and salmon are” and mammal is “the sort of thing cows, sheep, and pigs are”. Solomon tells you that your word “fish” is Hebrew dag and your word “mammal” is Hebrew behemah.

So you try again and say that a whale is a behemah, not a dag. Solomon laughs at you and says you’re an idiot.

You explain that you’re not an idiot, that in fact all kinds of animals have things called genes, and the genes of a whale are much closer to those of the other behemah than those of the dag.

Solomon says he’s never heard of these gene things before, and that maybe genetics is involved in your weird foreign words “fish” and “mammal”, but dag are just finned creatures that swim in the sea, and behemah are just legged creatures that walk on the Earth.

(like the kelev and the parah and the gavagai)

You try to explain that no, Solomon is wrong, dag are actually defined not by their swimming-in-sea-with-fins-ness, but by their genes.

Solomon says you didn’t even know the word dag ten minutes ago, and now suddenly you think you know what it means better than he does, who has been using it his entire life? Who died and made you an expert on Biblical Hebrew?

You try to explain that whales actually have tiny little hairs, too small to even see, just as cows and sheep and pigs have hair.

Solomon says oh God, you are so annoying, who the hell cares whether whales have tiny little hairs or not. In fact, the only thing Solomon cares about is whether responsibilities for his kingdom’s production of blubber and whale oil should go under his Ministry of Dag or Ministry of Behemah. The Ministry of Dag is based on the coast and has a lot of people who work on ships. The Ministry of Behemah has a strong presence inland and lots of of people who hunt on horseback. So please (he continues) keep going about how whales have little tiny hairs.

It’s easy to see that Solomon has a point, and that if he wants to define behemah as four-legged-land-dwellers that’s his right, and no better or worse than your definition of “creatures in a certain part of the phylogenetic tree”. Indeed, it might even be that if you spent ten years teaching Solomon all about the theory of genetics and evolution (which would be hilarious – think how annoyed the creationists would get) he might still say “That’s very interesting, and I can see why we need a word to describe creatures closely related along the phylogenetic tree, but make up your own word, because behemah already means ‘four-legged-land-dweller’.”

Now imagine that instead of talking to King Solomon, you’re talking to that guy from Duck Dynasty with the really crazy beard (I realize that may describe more than one person), who stands in for all uneducated rednecks in the same way King Solomon stands in for all Biblical Hebrews.

“Ah course a whale is a feesh, ya moron” he says in his heavy Southern accent.

“No it isn’t,” you say. “A fish is a creature phylogenetically related to various other fish, and with certain defining anatomical features. It says so right here in this biology textbook.”

“Well,” Crazy Beard Guy tells you, “Ah reckon that might be what a fish is, but a feesh is some’in that swims in the orshun.”

With a sinking feeling in your stomach, you spend ten years turning Crazy Beard Guy into a world expert on phylogenetics and evolutionary theory. Although the Duck Dynasty show becomes much more interesting, you fail to budge him a bit on the meaning of “feesh”.

It’s easy to see here that “fish” and “feesh” can be different just as “fish” and “dag” can be different.

You can point out how many important professors of icthyology in fancy suits use your definition, and how only a couple of people with really weird facial hair use his. But now you’re making a status argument, not a factual argument. Your argument is “conform to the way all the cool people use the word ‘fish'”, not “a whale is really and truly not a fish”.

There are facts of the matter on each individual point – whether a whale has fins, whether a whale lives in the ocean, whether a whale has tiny hairs, et cetera. But there is no fact of the matter on whether a whale is a fish. The argument is entirely semantic.

So this is the second reason why this particular objection to the Bible is silly. If God wants to call a whale a big fish, stop telling God what to do.

(also, bats)

II.

When terms are not defined directly by God, we need our own methods of dividing them into categories.

The essay “How An Algorithm Feels From The Inside” is a gift that keeps on giving. You can get a reputation as a daring and original thinker just by copy-pasting it at different arguments with a couple of appropriate words substituted for one another, mad-libs like. It is the solution to something like 25% of extent philosophical problems.

It starts with a discussion of whether or not Pluto is a planet. Planets tend to share many characteristics in common. For example, they are large, round, have normal shaped orbits lined up with the plane of the ecliptic, have cleared out a certain area of space, and are at least kind of close to the Sun as opposed to way out in the Oort Cloud.

One could imagine a brain that thought about these characteristics like this:

One could imagine this model telling you everything you need to know. If an object is larger, it’s more likely to be round and in cis-Neptunian space. If an object has failed to clear its orbit of debris, it’s more likely to have a skewed orbit relative to the plane of the ecliptic. We could give each of these relationships Bayesian weights and say things like large objects have a 32% chance of being in cis-Neptunian space and small objects an 86% chance. Or whatever.

But this model has some big problems. For one thing, if you inscribe it in blood, you accidentally summon the Devil. But second, it’s computationally very complicated. Each attribute affects each other attribute which affects it in turn and so on in an infinite cycle, so that its behavior tends to be chaotic and unpredictable.

What the human brain actually seems to do is to sweep all common correlations into one big category in the middle, thus dividing possibility-space into large round normal-orbit solitary inner objects, and small irregular skewed-orbit crowded outer objects. It calls the first category “planets” and the second category “planetoids”.

Obligatory Less Wrong picture

You can then sweep minor irregularities under the rug. Neptune is pretty far from the sun, but since it’s large, round, normal-orbit, and solitary, we know which way the evidence is leaning.

When an object satisfies about half the criteria for planet and half the criteria for planetoid, then it’s awkward. Pluto is the classic example. It’s relatively large, round, skewed orbit, solitary…ish? and outer-ish. What do you do?

The practical answer is you convene some very expensive meeting of prestigious astronomers and come to some official decision which everyone agrees to follow so they’re all on the same page.

But the ideal answer is you say “Huh, the assumption encoded in the word ‘planet’ that the five red criteria always went together and the five blue criteria always went together doesn’t hold. Whatever.”

Then you divide the solar system into three types of objects: planets, planetoids, and dammit-our-categorization-scheme-wasn’t-as-good-as-we-thought.

(psychiatry, whose philosophy of categorization is light years ahead of a lot of the rest of the world, conveniently abbreviates this latter category as “NOS”)

The situation with whales and fish is properly understood in the same context. Fish and mammals differ on a lot of axes. Fish generally live in the water, breathe through gills, have tails and fins, possess a certain hydrodynamic shape, lay eggs, and are in a certain part of the phylogenetic tree. Mammals generally live on land, breathe through lungs, have legs, give live birth, and are in another part of the phylogenetic tree. Most fish conform to all of the fish desiderata, and most mammals conform to all of the mammal desiderata, so there’s no question of how to categorize them. Occasionally you get something weird (a platypus, a lungfish, or a whale) and it’s a judgment call which you have to decide by fiat. In our case, that fiat is “use genetics and ignore all other characteristics” but some other language, culture, or scientific community might make a different fiat, and then the borders between their categories would look a little bit different.

III.

Since I shifted to a borders metaphor, let’s follow that and see where it goes.

Imagine that Israel and Palestine agree to a two-state solution with the final boundary to be drawn by the United Nations. You’re the head of the United Nations committee involved, so you get out a map and a pencil. Both sides have sworn by their respective gods to follow whatever you determine.

Your job is not to draw “the correct border”. There is no one correct border between Israel and Palestine. There are a couple of very strong candidates (for example, the pre-1967 line of control), but both countries have suggested deviations from that (most people think an actual solution would involve Palestine giving up some territory that has since been thoroughly settled by Israel in exchange for some territory within Israel proper, or perhaps for a continuous “land bridge” between the West Bank and Gaza). Even if you wanted to use the pre-1967 line as a starting point, there would still be a lot of work to do deciding what land swaps should and shouldn’t be made.

Instead you’d be making a series of trade-offs. Giving all of Jerusalem to the Israelis would make them very happy but anger Palestine. Creating a contiguous corridor between Gaza and the West Bank makes some sense, but then you’d be cutting off Eilat from the rest of Israel. Giving all of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank back to Palestine would satisfy a certain conception of property rights, but also leave a lot of Jews homeless.

There are also much stupider decisions you could make. You could give Tel Aviv to Palestine. You could make the Palestinian state a perfect circle five miles in radius centered on Rishon LeZion. You could just split the territory in half with a straight line, and give Israel the north and Palestine the south. All of these things would be really dumb.

But, crucially, they would not be false. They would not be factually incorrect. They would just be failing to achieve pretty much any of the goals that we would expect a person solving land disputes in the Middle East to have. You can think of alternative arrangements in which these wouldn’t be dumb. For example, if you’re a despot, and you want to make it very clear to both the Israelis and Palestinians that their opinions don’t matter and they should stop bothering you with annoying requests for arbitration, maybe splitting the country in half north-south is the way to go.

This is now unexpectedly a geography blog again.

The border between Turkey and Syria follows a mostly straight-ish line near-ish the 36th parallel, except that about twenty miles south of the border Turkey controls a couple of square meters in the middle of a Syrian village. This is the tomb of the ancestor of the Ottoman Turks, and Turkey’s border agreement with Syria stipulates that it will remain part of Turkey forever. And the Turks take this very seriously; they maintain a platoon of special forces there and have recently been threatening war against Syria if their “territory” gets “invaded” in the current conflict.

Pictured: Turkey (inside fence), Syria (outside)

The border between Bangladesh and India is complicated at the best of times, but it becomes absolutely ridiculous in a place called Cooch-Behar, which I guess is as good a name as any for a place full of ridiculous things. In at least one spot there is an ‘island’ of Indian territory within a larger island of Bangladeshi territory within a larger island of Indian territory within Bangladesh. According to mentalfloss.com:

So why’d the border get drawn like that? It can all be traced back to power struggles between local kings hundreds of years ago, who would try to claim pockets of land inside each other’s territories as a way to leverage political power. When Bangladesh became independent from India in 1947 (as East Pakistan until 1971), all those separate pockets of land were divvied up. Hence the polka-dotted mess.

Namibia is a very weird-looking country with a very thin three-hundred-mile-long panhandle (eg about twice as long as Oklahoma’s). Apparently during the Scramble For Africa, the Germans who colonized Namibia really wanted access to the Zambezi River so they could reach the Indian Ocean and trade their colonial resources. They kept pestering the British who colonized Botswana until the Brits finally agreed to give up a tiny but very long strip of territory ending at the riverbank. This turned out to be not so useful, as just after Namibia’s Zambezi access sits Victoria Falls, the largest waterfall in the world – meaning that any Germans who tried to traverse the Zambezi to reach the Indian Ocean would last a matter of minutes before suddenly encountering a four hundred foot drop and falling to pretty much certain death. The moral of the story is not to pester the British Empire too much, especially if they’ve explored Africa and you haven’t.

But the other moral of the story is that borders are weird. Although we think of borders as nice straight lines that separate people of different cultures, they can form giant panhandles, distant islands, and enclaves-within-enclaves-within-enclaves. They can depart from their usual course to pay honor to national founders, to preserve records of ancient conquests, or to connect to trade routes.

Hume’s ethics restrict “bad” to an instrumental criticism – you can condemn something as a bad way to achieve a certain goal, but not as morally bad independent of what the goal is. In the same way, borders can be bad at fulfilling your goals in drawing them, but not bad in an absolute sense or factually incorrect. Namibia’s border is bad from the perspective of Germans who want access to the Indian Ocean. But it’s excellent from the perspective of Englishmen who want to watch Germans plummet into the Lower Zambezi and get eaten by hippos.

Breaking out of the metaphor, the same is true of conceptual boundaries. You may draw the boundaries of the category “fish” any way you want. A category “fish” containing herring, dragonflies, and asteroids is going to be stupid, but only in the same sense that a Palestinian state centered around Tel Aviv would be stupid – it fails to fulfill any conceivable goals of the person designing it. Categories “fish” that do or don’t include whales may be appropriate for different people’s purposes, the same way Palestinians might argue about whether the borders of their state should be optimized for military defensibility or for religious/cultural significance.

Statements like “the Zambezi River is full of angry hippos” are brute facts. Statements like “the Zambezi River is the territory of Namibia” are negotiable.

In the same way, statements like “whales have little hairs” are brute facts. Statements like “whales are not a kind of fish” are negotiable.

So it’s important to keep these two sorts of statements separate, and remember that in no case can an agreed-upon set of borders or a category boundary be factually incorrect.

IV.

I usually avoid arguing LGBT issues on here, not because I don’t have strong opinions about them but because I assume so many of my readers already agree with me that it would be a waste of time. I’m pretty sure I’m right about this – on the recent survey, readers of this blog who were asked to rate their opinion of gay marriage from 1 (strongly against) to 5 (strongly in favor) gave an average rating of 4.32.

Nevertheless, I’ve seen enough anti-transgender comments recently that the issue might be worth a look.

In particular, I’ve seen one anti-transgender argument around that I take very seriously. The argument goes: we are rationalists. Our entire shtick is trying to believe what’s actually true, not on what we wish were true, or what our culture tells us is true, or what it’s popular to say is true. If a man thinks he’s a woman, then we might (empathetically) wish he were a woman, other people might demand we call him a woman, and we might be much more popular if we say he’s a woman. But if we’re going to be rationalists who focus on believing what’s actually true, then we’ve got to call him a man and take the consequences.

Thus Abraham Lincoln’s famous riddle: “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” And the answer: “Four – because a tail isn’t a leg regardless of what you call it.”

(if John Wilkes Booth had to suffer through that riddle, then I don’t blame him)

I take this argument very seriously, because sticking to the truth really is important. But having taken it seriously, I think it’s seriously wrong.

An alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false.

Just as we can come up with criteria for a definition of “planet”, we can come up with a definition of “man”. Absolutely typical men have Y chromosomes, have male genitalia, appreciate manly things like sports and lumberjackery, are romantically attracted to women, personally identify as male, wear male clothing like blue jeans, sing baritone in the opera, et cetera.

Some people satisfy some criteria of manhood and not others, in much the same way that Pluto satisfies only some criteria of planethood and whales satisfy only some criteria of mammalhood. For example, gay men might date other men and behave in effeminate ways. People with congenital androgen insensitivity syndrome might have female bodies, female external genitalia, and have been raised female their entire life, but when you look into their cells they have Y chromosomes.

Biologists defined by fiat that in cases of ambiguous animal grouping like whales, phylogenetics will be the tiebreaker. This was useful to resolve ambiguity, and it’s worth sticking to as a Schelling point so everyone’s using their words the same way, but it’s kind of arbitrary and mostly based on biologists caring a lot about phylogenetics. If we let King Solomon make the decision, he might decide by fiat that whether animals lived in land or water would be the tiebreaker, since he’s most interested in whether the animal is hunted on horseback or by boat.

Likewise, astronomers decided by fiat that something would be a planet if and only if meets the three criteria of orbiting, round, and orbit-clearing. But here we have a pretty neat window into how these kinds of decisions take place – you can read the history of the International Astronomical Union meeting where they settled on the definition and learn about all the alternative proposals that were floated and rejected and which particular politics resulted in the present criteria being selected among all the different possibilities. Here it is obvious that the decision was by fiat.

Without the input of any prestigious astronomers at all, most people seem to assume that the ultimate tiebreaker in man vs. woman questions is presence of a Y chromosome. I’m not sure this is a very principled decision, because I expect most people would classify congenital androgen insensitivity patients (XY people whose bodies are insensitive to the hormone that makes them look male, and so end up looking 100% female their entire lives and often not even knowing they have the condition) as women.

The project of the transgender movement is to propose a switch from using chromosomes as a tiebreaker to using self-identification as a tiebreaker.

(This isn’t actually the whole story – some of the more sophisticated people want to split “sex” and “gender”, so that people who want to talk about what chromosomes they’ve got have a categorization system to do that with, and a few people even want to split “chromosomal sex” and “anatomical sex” and “gender” and goodness knows what else – and I support all of these as very important examples of the virtue of precision – but to a first approximation, they want to define gender as self-identification)

This is not something that can be “true” or “false”. It’s a boundary-redrawing project. It can make for some boundaries that look a little bit weird – like a small percent of men being able to get pregnant – but as far as weird boundaries go that’s probably not as bad as having a tiny exclave of Turkish territory in the middle of a Syrian village.

(Ozy tells me this is sort of what queer theory is getting at, but in a horrible unreadable postmodernist way. They assure me you’re better off just reading the darned Sequences.)

You draw category boundaries in specific ways to capture tradeoffs you care about. If you care about the sanctity of the tomb of your country’s founder, sometimes it’s worth having a slightly weird-looking boundary in order to protect and honor it. And if you care about…

I’ve lived with a transgender person for six months, so I probably should have written this earlier. But I’m writing it now because I just finished accepting a transgender man to the mental hospital. He alternates between trying to kill himself and trying to cut off various parts of his body because he’s so distressed that he is biologically female. We’ve connected him with some endocrinologists who can hopefully get him started on male hormones, after which maybe he’ll stop doing that and hopefully be able to lead a normal life.

If I’m willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy – and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me – then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it’ll save someone’s life. There’s no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn’t, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.

V.

I’ve made this argument before and gotten a reply something like this:

“Transgender is a psychiatric disorder. When people have psychiatric disorders, certainly it’s right to sympathize and feel sorry for them and want to help them. But the way we try to help them is by treating their disorder, not by indulging them in their delusion.”

I think these people expect me to argue that transgender “isn’t really a psychiatric disorder” or something. But “psychiatric disorder” is just another category boundary dispute, and one that I’ve already written enough about elsewhere. At this point, I don’t care enough to say much more than “If it’s a psychiatric disorder, then attempts to help transgender people get covered by health insurance, and most of the ones I know seem to want that, so sure, gender dysphoria is a psychiatric disorder.”

And then I think of the Hair Dryer Incident.

The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.

Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.

It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.

So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”

And it worked.

She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.

And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?

I, on the other hand, thought it was the best fricking story I had ever heard and the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue.

Miyamoto Musashi is quoted as saying:

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.

Likewise, the primary thing in psychiatry is to help the patient, whatever the means. Someone can concern-troll that the hair dryer technique leaves something to be desired in that it might have prevented the patient from seeking a more thorough cure that would prevent her from having to bring the hair dryer with her. But compared to the alternative of “nothing else works” it seems clearly superior.

And that’s the position from which I think a psychiatrist should approach gender dysphoria, too.

Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium.

Really, are you sure you want your opposition to accepting transgender people to be “I think it’s a mental disorder”?

VI.

Some people can’t leave well enough alone, and continue to push the mental disorder angle. For example:

There are a lot of things I could say here.

I could point out that trans-Napoleonism seem to be mysteriously less common than transgender.

I could relate this mysterious difference to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender, including unusual variants of the androgen receptor, birth-sex-discordant sizes of various brain regions, birth-sex-discordant responses to various pheromones, high rates of something seemingly like body integrity identity disorder, and of course our old friend altered digit ratios. If our hypothetical trans-Napoleon came out of the womb wearing a French military uniform and clutching a list of 19th century Grand Armee positions in his cute little baby hands, I think I’d take him more seriously.

I could argue that questions about gender are questions about category boundaries, whereas questions about Napoleon – absent some kind of philosophical legwork that I would very much like to read – are questions of fact.

I could point out that if the extent of somebody’s trans-Napoleonness was wanting to wear a bicorne hat, and he was going to be suicidal his entire life if he couldn’t but pretty happy if I could, let him wear the damn hat.

I could just link people to other sites’ pretty good objections to the same argument.

But I think what I actually want to say is that there was once a time somebody tried pretty much exactly this, silly hat and all. Society shrugged and played along, he led a rich and fulfilling life, his grateful Imperial subjects came to love him, and it’s one of the most heartwarming episodes in the history of one of my favorite places in the world.

Sometimes when you make a little effort to be nice to people, even people you might think are weird, really good things happen.

I.

In Chesterton’s The Secret of Father Brown, a beloved nobleman who murdered his good-for-nothing brother in a duel thirty years ago returns to his hometown wracked by guilt. All the townspeople want to forgive him immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection. They lecture the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion.

Later, it comes out that the beloved nobleman did not in fact kill his good-for-nothing brother. The good-for-nothing brother killed the beloved nobleman (and stole his identity). Now the townspeople want to see him lynched or burned alive, and it is only the priest who – consistently – offers a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection.

The priest tells them:

It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.

He further notes that this is why the townspeople can self-righteously consider themselves more compassionate and forgiving than he is. Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard. The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it.

After some thought I agree with Chesterton’s point. There are a lot of people who say “I forgive you” when they mean “No harm done”, and a lot of people who say “That was unforgiveable” when they mean “That was genuinely really bad”. Whether or not forgiveness is right is a complicated topic I do not want to get in here. But since forgiveness is generally considered a virtue, and one that many want credit for having, I think it’s fair to say you only earn the right to call yourself ‘forgiving’ if you forgive things that genuinely hurt you.

To borrow Chesterton’s example, if you think divorce is a-ok, then you don’t get to “forgive” people their divorces, you merely ignore them. Someone who thinks divorce is abhorrent can “forgive” divorce. You can forgive theft, or murder, or tax evasion, or something you find abhorrent.

I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points.

(by way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points)

Tolerance is definitely considered a virtue, but it suffers the same sort of dimished expectations forgiveness does.

The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Tolerance Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”

Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.

The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why not.

Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”

The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”

And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”

II.

If I had to define “tolerance” it would be something like “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”.

And today we have an almost unprecedented situation.

We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.

And we have those same people absolutely ripping into their in-groups – straight, white, male, hetero, cis, American, whatever – talking day in and day out to anyone who will listen about how terrible their in-group is, how it is responsible for all evils, how something needs to be done about it, how they’re ashamed to be associated with it at all.

This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about human psychology up to this point. No one did any genetic engineering. No one passed out weird glowing pills in the public schools. And yet suddenly we get an entire group of people who conspicuously love their outgroups, the outer the better, and gain status by talking about how terrible their own groups are.

What is going on here?

III.

Let’s start by asking what exactly an outgroup is.

There’s a very boring sense in which, assuming the Emperor’s straight, gays are part of his “outgroup” ie a group that he is not a member of. But if the Emperor has curly hair, are straight-haired people part of his outgroup? If the Emperor’s name starts with the letter ‘A’, are people whose names start with the letter ‘B’ part of his outgroup?

Nah. I would differentiate between multiple different meanings of outgroup, where one is “a group you are not a part of” and the other is…something stronger.

I want to avoid a very easy trap, which is saying that outgroups are about how different you are, or how hostile you are. I don’t think that’s quite right.

Compare the Nazis to the German Jews and to the Japanese. The Nazis were very similar to the German Jews: they looked the same, spoke the same language, came from a similar culture. The Nazis were totally different from the Japanese: different race, different language, vast cultural gap. But although one could imagine certain situations in which the Nazis treated the Japanese as an outgroup, in practice they got along pretty well. Heck, the Nazis were actually moderately friendly with the Chinese, even when they were technically at war. Meanwhile, the conflict between the Nazis and the German Jews – some of whom didn’t even realize they were anything other than German until they checked their grandparents’ birth certificate – is the stuff of history and nightmares. Any theory of outgroupishness that naively assumes the Nazis’ natural outgroup is Japanese or Chinese people will be totally inadequate.

And this isn’t a weird exception. Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other”. Nazis and German Jews. Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. Hutus and Tutsis. South African whites and South African blacks. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Anyone in the former Yugoslavia and anyone else in the former Yugoslavia.

So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences. If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.

What makes an unexpected in-group? The answer with Germans and Japanese is obvious – a strategic alliance. In fact, the World Wars forged a lot of unexpected temporary pseudo-friendships. A recent article from War Nerd points out that the British, after spending centuries subjugating and despising the Irish and Sikhs, suddenly needed Irish and Sikh soldiers for World Wars I and II respectively. “Crush them beneath our boots” quickly changed to fawning songs about how “there never was a coward where the shamrock grows” and endless paeans to Sikh military prowess.

Sure, scratch the paeans even a little bit and you find condescension as strong as ever. But eight hundred years of the British committing genocide against the Irish and considering them literally subhuman turned into smiles and songs about shamrocks once the Irish started looking like useful cannon fodder for a larger fight. And the Sikhs, dark-skinned people with turbans and beards who pretty much exemplify the European stereotype of “scary foreigner”, were lauded by everyone from the news media all the way up to Winston Churchill.

In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient.

IV.

There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.

This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.

I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.

People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.

I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.

To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.

Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.

It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.

There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”

In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this…”

But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.

On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.

But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?

When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre local sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.

It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.

I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.

(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.)

V.

One day I realized that entirely by accident I was fulfilling all the Jewish stereotypes.

I’m nerdy, over-educated, good with words, good with money, weird sense of humor, don’t get outside much, I like deli sandwiches. And I’m a psychiatrist, which is about the most stereotypically Jewish profession short of maybe stand-up comedian or rabbi.

I’m not very religious. And I don’t go to synagogue. But that’s stereotypically Jewish too!

I bring this up because it would be a mistake to think “Well, a Jewish person is by definition someone who is born of a Jewish mother. Or I guess it sort of also means someone who follows the Mosaic Law and goes to synagogue. But I don’t care about Scott’s mother, and I know he doesn’t go to synagogue, so I can’t gain any useful information from knowing Scott is Jewish.”

The defining factors of Judaism – Torah-reading, synagogue-following, mother-having – are the tip of a giant iceberg. Jews sometimes identify as a “tribe”, and even if you don’t attend synagogue, you’re still a member of that tribe and people can still (in a statistical way) infer things about you by knowing your Jewish identity – like how likely they are to be psychiatrists.

The last section raised a question – if people rarely select their friends and associates and customers explicitly for politics, how do we end up with such intense political segregation?

Well, in the same way “going to synagogue” is merely the iceberg-tip of a Jewish tribe with many distinguishing characteristics, so “voting Republican” or “identifying as conservative” or “believing in creationism” is the iceberg-tip of a conservative tribe with many distinguishing characteristics.

A disproportionate number of my friends are Jewish, because I meet them at psychiatry conferences or something – we self-segregate not based on explicit religion but on implicit tribal characteristics. So in the same way, political tribes self-segregate to an impressive extent – a 1/10^45 extent, I will never tire of hammering in – based on their implicit tribal characteristics.

The people who are actually into this sort of thing sketch out a bunch of speculative tribes and subtribes, but to make it easier, let me stick with two and a half.

The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.

The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)

I think these “tribes” will turn out to be even stronger categories than politics. Harvard might skew 80-20 in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, 90-10 in terms of liberals vs. conservatives, but maybe 99-1 in terms of Blues vs. Reds.

It’s the many, many differences between these tribes that explain the strength of the filter bubble – which have I mentioned segregates people at a strength of 1/10^45? Even in something as seemingly politically uncharged as going to California Pizza Kitchen or Sushi House for dinner, I’m restricting myself to the set of people who like cute artisanal pizzas or sophsticated foreign foods, which are classically Blue Tribe characteristics.

Are these tribes based on geography? Are they based on race, ethnic origin, religion, IQ, what TV channels you watched as a kid? I don’t know.

Some of it is certainly genetic – estimates of the genetic contribution to political association range from 0.4 to 0.6. Heritability of one’s attitudes toward gay rights range from 0.3 to 0.5, which hilariously is a little more heritable than homosexuality itself.

(for an interesting attempt to break these down into more rigorous concepts like “traditionalism”, “authoritarianism”, and “in-group favoritism” and find the genetic loading for each see here. For an attempt to trace the specific genes involved, which mostly turn out to be NMDA receptors, see here)

But I don’t think it’s just genetics. There’s something else going on too. The word “class” seems like the closest analogue, but only if you use it in the sophisticated Paul Fussell Guide Through the American Status System way instead of the boring “another word for how much money you make” way.

For now we can just accept them as a brute fact – as multiple coexisting societies that might as well be made of dark matter for all of the interaction they have with one another – and move on.

VI.

The worst reaction I’ve ever gotten to a blog post was when I wrote about the death of Osama bin Laden. I’ve written all sorts of stuff about race and gender and politics and whatever, but that was the worst.

I didn’t come out and say I was happy he was dead. But some people interpreted it that way, and there followed a bunch of comments and emails and Facebook messages about how could I possibly be happy about the death of another human being, even if he was a bad person? Everyone, even Osama, is a human being, and we should never rejoice in the death of a fellow man. One commenter came out and said:

I’m surprised at your reaction. As far as people I casually stalk on the internet (ie, LJ and Facebook), you are the first out of the “intelligent, reasoned and thoughtful” group to be uncomplicatedly happy about this development and not to be, say, disgusted at the reactions of the other 90% or so.

This commenter was right. Of the “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful” people I knew, the overwhelming emotion was conspicuous disgust that other people could be happy about his death. I hastily backtracked and said I wasn’t happy per se, just surprised and relieved that all of this was finally behind us.

And I genuinely believed that day that I had found some unexpected good in people – that everyone I knew was so humane and compassionate that they were unable to rejoice even in the death of someone who hated them and everything they stood for.

Then a few years later, Margaret Thatcher died. And on my Facebook wall – made of these same “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful” people – the most common response was to quote some portion of the song “Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead”. Another popular response was to link the videos of British people spontaneously throwing parties in the street, with comments like “I wish I was there so I could join in”. From this exact same group of people, not a single expression of disgust or a “c’mon, guys, we’re all human beings here.”

I gently pointed this out at the time, and mostly got a bunch of “yeah, so what?”, combined with links to an article claiming that “the demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure’s death is not just misguided but dangerous”.

And that was when something clicked for me.

You can talk all you want about Islamophobia, but my friend’s “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful people” – her name for the Blue Tribe – can’t get together enough energy to really hate Osama, let alone Muslims in general. We understand that what he did was bad, but it didn’t anger us personally. When he died, we were able to very rationally apply our better nature and our Far Mode beliefs about how it’s never right to be happy about anyone else’s death.

On the other hand, that same group absolutely loathed Thatcher. Most of us (though not all) can agree, if the question is posed explicitly, that Osama was a worse person than Thatcher. But in terms of actual gut feeling? Osama provokes a snap judgment of “flawed human being”, Thatcher a snap judgment of “scum”.

I started this essay by pointing out that, despite what geographical and cultural distance would suggest, the Nazis’ outgroup was not the vastly different Japanese, but the almost-identical German Jews.

And my hypothesis, stated plainly, is that if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists – it’s the Red Tribe.

VII.

“But racism and sexism and cissexism and anti-Semitism are these giant all-encompassing social factors that verge upon being human universals! Surely you’re not arguing that mere political differences could ever come close to them!”

One of the ways we know that racism is a giant all-encompassing social factor is the Implicit Association Test. Psychologists ask subjects to quickly identify whether words or photos are members of certain gerrymandered categories, like “either a white person’s face or a positive emotion” or “either a black person’s face and a negative emotion”. Then they compare to a different set of gerrymandered categories, like “either a black person’s face or a positive emotion” or “either a white person’s face or a negative emotion.” If subjects have more trouble (as measured in latency time) connecting white people to negative things than they do white people to positive things, then they probably have subconscious positive associations with white people. You can try it yourself here.

Of course, what the test famously found was that even white people who claimed to have no racist attitudes at all usually had positive associations with white people and negative associations with black people on the test. There are very many claims and counterclaims about the precise meaning of this, but it ended up being a big part of the evidence in favor of the current consensus that all white people are at least a little racist.

Anyway, three months ago, someone finally had the bright idea of doing an Implicit Association Test with political parties, and they found that people’s unconscious partisan biases were half again as strong as their unconscious racial biases (h/t Bloomberg. For example, if you are a white Democrat, your unconscious bias against blacks (as measured by something called a d-score) is 0.16, but your unconscious bias against Republicans will be 0.23. The Cohen’s d for racial bias was 0.61, by the book a “moderate” effect size; for party it was 0.95, a “large” effect size.

Okay, fine, but we know race has real world consequences. Like, there have been several studies where people sent out a bunch of identical resumes except sometimes with a black person’s photo and other times with a white person’s photo, and it was noticed that employers were much more likely to invite the fictional white candidates for interviews. So just some stupid Implicit Association Test results can’t compare to that, right?

Iyengar and Westwood also decided to do the resume test for parties. They asked subjects to decide which of several candidates should get a scholarship (subjects were told this was a genuine decision for the university the researchers were affiliated with). Some resumes had photos of black people, others of white people. And some students listed their experience in Young Democrats of America, others in Young Republicans of America.

Once again, discrimination on the basis of party was much stronger than discrimination on the basis of race. The size of the race effect for white people was only 56-44 (and in the reverse of the expected direction); the size of the party effect was about 80-20 for Democrats and 69-31 for Republicans.

If you want to see their third experiment, which applied yet another classic methodology used to detect racism and once again found partyism to be much stronger, you can read the paper.

I & W did an unusually thorough job, but this sort of thing isn’t new or ground-breaking. People have been studying “belief congruence theory” – the idea that differences in beliefs are more important than demographic factors in forming in-groups and outgroups – for decades. As early as 1967, Smith et al were doing surveys all over the country and finding that people were more likely to accept friendships across racial lines than across beliefs; in the forty years since then, the observation has been replicated scores of times. Insko, Moe, and Nacoste’s 2006 review Belief Congruence And Racial Discrimination concludes that:

. The literature was judged supportive of a weak version of belief congruence theory which states that in those contexts in which social pressure is nonexistent or ineffective, belief is more important than race as a determinant of racial or ethnic discrimination. Evidence for a strong version of belief congruence theory (which states that in those contexts in which social pressure is nonexistent, or ineffective, belief is the only determinant of racial or ethnic discrimination) and was judged much more problematic.

One of the best-known examples of racism is the “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” scenario where parents are scandalized about their child marrying someone of a different race. Pew has done some good work on this and found that only 23% of conservatives and 1% (!) of liberals admit they would be upset in this situation. But Pew also asked how parents would feel about their child marrying someone of a different political party. Now 30% of conservatives and 23% of liberals would get upset. Average them out, and you go from 12% upsetness rate for race to 27% upsetness rate for party – more than double. Yeah, people do lie to pollsters, but a picture is starting to come together here.

(Harvard, by the way, is a tossup. There are more black students – 11.5% – than conservative students – 10% – but there are more conservative faculty than black faculty.)

Since people will delight in misinterpreting me here, let me overemphasize what I am not saying. I’m not saying people of either party have it “worse” than black people, or that partyism is more of a problem than racism, or any of a number of stupid things along those lines which I am sure I will nevertheless be accused of believing. Racism is worse than partyism because the two parties are at least kind of balanced in numbers and in resources, whereas the brunt of an entire country’s racism falls on a few underprivileged people. I am saying that the underlying attitudes that produce partyism are stronger than the underlying attitudes that produce racism, with no necessary implications on their social effects.

But if we want to look at people’s psychology and motivations, partyism and the particular variant of tribalism that it represents are going to be fertile ground.

VIII.

Every election cycle like clockwork, conservatives accuse liberals of not being sufficiently pro-America. And every election cycle like clockwork, liberals give extremely unconvincing denials of this.

“It’s not that we’re, like, against America per se. It’s just that…well, did you know Europe has much better health care than we do? And much lower crime rates? I mean, come on, how did they get so awesome? And we’re just sitting here, can’t even get the gay marriage thing sorted out, seriously, what’s wrong with a country that can’t…sorry, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, America. They’re okay. Cesar Chavez was really neat. So were some other people outside the mainstream who became famous precisely by criticizing majority society. That’s sort of like America being great, in that I think the parts of it that point out how bad the rest of it are often make excellent points. Vote for me!”

(sorry, I make fun of you because I love you)

There was a big brouhaha a couple of years ago when, as it first became apparent Obama had a good shot at the Presidency, Michelle Obama said that “for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”

Republicans pounced on the comment, asking why she hadn’t felt proud before, and she backtracked saying of course she was proud all the time and she loves America with the burning fury of a million suns and she was just saying that the Obama campaign was particularly inspiring.

As unconvincing denials go, this one was pretty far up there. But no one really held it against her. Probably most Obama voters felt vaguely the same way. I was an Obama voter, and I have proud memories of spending my Fourth of Julys as a kid debunking people’s heartfelt emotions of patriotism. Aaron Sorkin:

[What makes America the greatest country in the world?] It’s not the greatest country in the world! We’re seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, No. 4 in labor force, and No. 4 in exports. So when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the f*** you’re talking about.

(Another good retort is “We’re number one? Sure – number one in incarceration rates, drone strikes, and making new parents go back to work!”)

All of this is true, of course. But it’s weird that it’s such a classic interest of members of the Blue Tribe, and members of the Red Tribe never seem to bring it up.

(“We’re number one? Sure – number one in levels of sexual degeneracy! Well, I guess probably number two, after the Netherlands, but they’re really small and shouldn’t count.”)

My hunch – both the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe, for whatever reason, identify “America” with the Red Tribe. Ask people for typically “American” things, and you end up with a very Red list of characteristics – guns, religion, barbecues, American football, NASCAR, cowboys, SUVs, unrestrained capitalism.

That means the Red Tribe feels intensely patriotic about “their” country, and the Blue Tribe feels like they’re living in fortified enclaves deep in hostile territory.

Here is a popular piece published on a major media site called America: A Big, Fat, Stupid Nation. Another: America: A Bunch Of Spoiled, Whiny Brats. Americans are ignorant, scientifically illiterate religious fanatics whose “patriotism” is actually just narcissism. You Will Be Shocked At How Ignorant Americans Are, and we should Blame The Childish, Ignorant American People.

Needless to say, every single one of these articles was written by an American and read almost entirely by Americans. Those Americans very likely enjoyed the articles very much and did not feel the least bit insulted.

And look at the sources. HuffPo, Salon, Slate. Might those have anything in common?

On both sides, “American” can be either a normal demonym, or a code word for a member of the Red Tribe.

IX.

The other day, I logged into OKCupid and found someone who looked cool. I was reading over her profile and found the following sentence:

Don’t message me if you’re a sexist white guy

And my first thought was “Wait, so a sexist black person would be okay? Why?”

(The girl in question was white as snow)

Around the time the Ferguson riots were first starting, there were a host of articles with titles like Why White People Don’t Seem To Understand Ferguson, Why It’s So Hard For Whites To Understand Ferguson, and White Folks Listen Up And Let Me Tell You What Ferguson Is All About, this last of which says:

Social media is full of people on both sides making presumptions, and believing what they want to believe. But it’s the white folks that don’t understand what this is all about. Let me put it as simply as I can for you […]

No matter how wrong you think Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown were, I think we can all agree they didn’t deserve to die over it. I want you white folks to understand that this is where the anger is coming from. You focused on the looting….”

And on a hunch I checked the author photos, and every single one of these articles was written by a white person.

White People Are Ruining America? White. White People Are Still A Disgrace? White. White Guys: We Suck And We’re Sorry? White. Bye Bye, Whiny White Dudes? White. Dear Entitled Straight White Dudes, I’m Evicting You From My Life? White. White Dudes Need To Stop Whitesplaining? White. Reasons Why Americans Suck #1: White People? White.

We’ve all seen articles and comments and articles like this. Some unsavory people try to use them to prove that white people are the real victims or the media is biased against white people or something. Other people who are very nice and optimistic use them to show that some white people have developed some self-awareness and are willing to engage in self-criticism.

But I think the situation with “white” is much the same as the situation with “American” – it can either mean what it says, or be a code word for the Red Tribe.

(except on the blog Stuff White People Like, where it obviously serves as a code word for the Blue tribe. I don’t know, guys. I didn’t do it.)

I realize that’s making a strong claim, but it would hardly be without precedent. When people say things like “gamers are misogynist”, do they mean the 52% of gamers who are women? Do they mean every one of the 59% of Americans from every walk of life who are known to play video or computer games occasionally? No. “Gamer” is a coded reference to the Gray Tribe, the half-branched-off collection of libertarianish tech-savvy nerds, and everyone knows it. As well expect that when people talk about “fedoras”, they mean Indiana Jones. Or when they talk about “urban youth”, they mean freshmen at NYU. Everyone knows exactly who we mean when we say “urban youth”, and them being young people who live in a city has only the most tenuous of relations to the actual concept.

And I’m saying words like “American” and “white” work the same way. Bill Clinton was the “first black President”, but if Herman Cain had won in 2012 he’d have been the 43rd white president. And when an angry white person talks at great length about how much he hates “white dudes”, he is not being humble and self-critical.

X.

Imagine hearing that a liberal talk show host and comedian was so enraged by the actions of ISIS that he’d recorded and posted a video in which he shouts at them for ten minutes, cursing the “fanatical terrorists” and calling them “utter savages” with “savage values”.

If I heard that, I’d be kind of surprised. It doesn’t fit my model of what liberal talk show hosts do.

But the story I’m actually referring to is liberal talk show host / comedian Russell Brand making that same rant against Fox News for supporting war against the Islamic State, adding at the end that “Fox is worse than ISIS”.

That fits my model perfectly. You wouldn’t celebrate Osama’s death, only Thatcher’s. And you wouldn’t call ISIS savages, only Fox News. Fox is the outgroup, ISIS is just some random people off in a desert. You hate the outgroup, you don’t hate random desert people.

I would go further. Not only does Brand not feel much like hating ISIS, he has a strong incentive not to. That incentive is: the Red Tribe is known to hate ISIS loudly and conspicuously. Hating ISIS would signal Red Tribe membership, would be the equivalent of going into Crips territory with a big Bloods gang sign tattooed on your shoulder.

But this might be unfair. What would Russell Brand answer, if we asked him to justify his decision to be much angrier at Fox than ISIS?

He might say something like “Obviously Fox News is not literally worse than ISIS. But here I am, talking to my audience, who are mostly white British people and Americans. These people already know that ISIS is bad; they don’t need to be told that any further. In fact, at this point being angry about how bad ISIS is, is less likely to genuinely change someone’s mind about ISIS, and more likely to promote Islamophobia. The sort of people in my audience are at zero risk of becoming ISIS supporters, but at a very real risk of Islamophobia. So ranting against ISIS would be counterproductive and dangerous.

On the other hand, my audience of white British people and Americans is very likely to contain many Fox News viewers and supporters. And Fox, while not quite as evil as ISIS, is still pretty bad. So here’s somewhere I have a genuine chance to reach people at risk and change minds. Therefore, I think my decision to rant against Fox News, and maybe hyperbolically say they were ‘worse than ISIS’ is justified under the circumstances.”

I have a lot of sympathy to hypothetical-Brand, especially to the part about Islamophobia. It does seem really possible to denounce ISIS’ atrocities to a population that already hates them in order to weak-man a couple of already-marginalized Muslims. We need to fight terrorism and atrocities – therefore it’s okay to shout at a poor girl ten thousand miles from home for wearing a headscarf in public. Christians are being executed for their faith in Sudan, therefore let’s picket the people trying to build a mosque next door.

But my sympathy with Brand ends when he acts like his audience is likely to be fans of Fox News.

In a world where a negligible number of Redditors oppose gay marriage and 1% of Less Wrongers identify conservative and I know 0/150 creationists, how many of the people who visit the YouTube channel of a well-known liberal activist with a Che-inspired banner, a channel whose episode names are things like “War: What Is It Good For?” and “Sarah Silverman Talks Feminism” – how many of them do you think are big Fox News fans?

In a way, Russell Brand would have been braver taking a stand against ISIS than against Fox. If he attacked ISIS, his viewers would just be a little confused and uncomfortable. Whereas every moment he’s attacking Fox his viewers are like “HA HA! YEAH! GET ‘EM! SHOW THOSE IGNORANT BIGOTS IN THE outgroup WHO’S BOSS!”

Brand acts as if there are just these countries called “Britain” and “America” who are receiving his material. Wrong. There are two parallel universes, and he’s only broadcasting to one of them.

The result is exactly what we predicted would happen in the case of Islam. Bombard people with images of a far-off land they already hate and tell them to hate it more, and the result is ramping up the intolerance on the couple of dazed and marginalized representatives of that culture who have ended up stuck on your half of the divide. Sure enough, if industry or culture or community gets Blue enough, Red Tribe members start getting harassed, fired from their jobs (Brendan Eich being the obvious example) or otherwise shown the door.

Think of Brendan Eich as a member of a tiny religious minority surrounded by people who hate that minority. Suddenly firing him doesn’t seem very noble.

If you mix together Podunk, Texas and Mosul, Iraq, you can prove that Muslims are scary and very powerful people who are executing Christians all the time and have a great excuse for kicking the one remaining Muslim family, random people who never hurt anyone, out of town.

And if you mix together the open-source tech industry and the parallel universe where you can’t wear a FreeBSD t-shirt without risking someone trying to exorcise you, you can prove that Christians are scary and very powerful people who are persecuting everyone else all the time, and you have a great excuse for kicking one of the few people willing to affiliate with the Red Tribe, a guy who never hurt anyone, out of town.

When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said.

“Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white” and “American”.

“I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?

XI.

We started by asking: millions of people are conspicuously praising every outgroup they can think of, while conspicuously condemning their own in-group. This seems contrary to what we know about social psychology. What’s up?

We noted that outgroups are rarely literally “the group most different from you”, and in fact far more likely to be groups very similar to you sharing almost all your characteristics and living in the same area.

We then noted that although liberals and conservatives live in the same area, they might as well be two totally different countries or universe as far as level of interaction were concerned.

Contra the usual idea of them being marked only by voting behavior, we described them as very different tribes with totally different cultures. You can speak of “American culture” only in the same way you can speak of “Asian culture” – that is, with a lot of interior boundaries being pushed under the rug.

The outgroup of the Red Tribe is occasionally blacks and gays and Muslims, more often the Blue Tribe.

The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe.

This is not surprising. Ethnic differences have proven quite tractable in the face of shared strategic aims. Even the Nazis, not known for their ethnic tolerance, were able to get all buddy-buddy with the Japanese when they had a common cause.

Research suggests Blue Tribe / Red Tribe prejudice to be much stronger than better-known types of prejudice like racism. Once the Blue Tribe was able to enlist the blacks and gays and Muslims in their ranks, they became allies of convenience who deserve to be rehabilitated with mildly condescending paeans to their virtue. “There never was a coward where the shamrock grows.”

Spending your entire life insulting the other tribe and talking about how terrible they are makes you look, well, tribalistic. It is definitely not high class. So when members of the Blue Tribe decide to dedicate their entire life to yelling about how terrible the Red Tribe is, they make sure that instead of saying “the Red Tribe”, they say “America”, or “white people”, or “straight white men”. That way it’s humble self-criticism. They are so interested in justice that they are willing to critique their own beloved side, much as it pains them to do so. We know they are not exaggerating, because one might exaggerate the flaws of an enemy, but that anyone would exaggerate their own flaws fails the criterion of embarrassment.

The Blue Tribe always has an excuse at hand to persecute and crush any Red Tribers unfortunate enough to fall into its light-matter-universe by defining them as all-powerful domineering oppressors. They appeal to the fact that this is definitely the way it works in the Red Tribe’s dark-matter-universe, and that’s in the same country so it has to be the same community for all intents and purposes. As a result, every Blue Tribe institution is permanently licensed to take whatever emergency measures are necessary against the Red Tribe, however disturbing they might otherwise seem.

And so how virtuous, how noble the Blue Tribe! Perfectly tolerant of all of the different groups that just so happen to be allied with them, never intolerant unless it happen to be against intolerance itself. Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that awful Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing their own culture and striving to make it better!

Sorry. But I hope this is at least a little convincing. The weird dynamic of outgroup-philia and ingroup-phobia isn’t anything of the sort. It’s just good old-fashioned in-group-favoritism and outgroup bashing, a little more sophisticated and a little more sneaky.

XII.

This essay is bad and I should feel bad.

I should feel bad because I made exactly the mistake I am trying to warn everyone else about, and it wasn’t until I was almost done that I noticed.

How virtuous, how noble I must be! Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that silly Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing my own tribe and striving to make it better.

Yeah. Once I’ve written a ten thousand word essay savagely attacking the Blue Tribe, either I’m a very special person or they’re my outgroup. And I’m not that special.

Just as you can pull a fast one and look humbly self-critical if you make your audience assume there’s just one American culture, so maybe you can trick people by assuming there’s only one Blue Tribe.

I’m pretty sure I’m not Red, but I did talk about the Grey Tribe above, and I show all the risk factors for being one of them. That means that, although my critique of the Blue Tribe may be right or wrong, in terms of motivation it comes from the same place as a Red Tribe member talking about how much they hate al-Qaeda or a Blue Tribe member talking about how much they hate ignorant bigots. And when I boast of being able to tolerate Christians and Southerners whom the Blue Tribe is mean to, I’m not being tolerant at all, just noticing people so far away from me they wouldn’t make a good outgroup anyway.

My arguments might be correct feces, but they’re still feces.

I had fun writing this article. People do not have fun writing articles savagely criticizing their in-group. People can criticize their in-group, it’s not humanly impossible, but it takes nerves of steel, it makes your blood boil, you should sweat blood. It shouldn’t be fun.

You can bet some white guy on Gawker who week after week churns out “Why White People Are So Terrible” and “Here’s What Dumb White People Don’t Understand” is having fun and not sweating any blood at all. He’s not criticizing his in-group, he’s never even considered criticizing his in-group. I can’t blame him. Criticizing the in-group is a really difficult project I’ve barely begun to build the mental skills necessary to even consider.

I can think of criticisms of my own tribe. Important criticisms, true ones. But the thought of writing them makes my blood boil.

I imagine might I feel like some liberal US Muslim leader, when he goes on the O’Reilly Show, and O’Reilly ambushes him and demands to know why he and other American Muslims haven’t condemned beheadings by ISIS more, demands that he criticize them right there on live TV. And you can see the wheels in the Muslim leader’s head turning, thinking something like “Okay, obviously beheadings are terrible and I hate them as much as anyone. But you don’t care even the slightest bit about the victims of beheadings. You’re just looking for a way to score points against me so you can embarass all Muslims. And I would rather personally behead every single person in the world than give a smug bigot like you a single microgram more stupid self-satisfaction than you’ve already got.”

That is how I feel when asked to criticize my own tribe, even for correct reasons. If you think you’re criticizing your own tribe, and your blood is not at that temperature, consider the possibility that you aren’t.

But if I want Self-Criticism Virtue Points, criticizing the Grey Tribe is the only honest way to get them. And if I want Tolerance Points, my own personal cross to bear right now is tolerating the Blue Tribe. I need to remind myself that when they are bad people, they are merely Osama-level bad people instead of Thatcher-level bad people. And when they are good people, they are powerful and necessary crusaders against the evils of the world.

The worst thing that could happen to this post is to have it be used as convenient feces to fling at the Blue Tribe whenever feces are necessary. Which, given what has happened to my last couple of posts along these lines and the obvious biases of my own subconscious, I already expect it will be.

But the best thing that could happen to this post is that it makes a lot of people, especially myself, figure out how to be more tolerant. Not in the “of course I’m tolerant, why shouldn’t I be?” sense of the Emperor in Part I. But in the sense of “being tolerant makes me see red, makes me sweat blood, but darn it I am going to be tolerant anyway.”

I.

Another one of those times three very different people writing three very different things all remind me of each other.

Ozy got very excited recently because Heartiste wrote a post attacking polyamory (Ozy reminds me that the appropriate trigger warning for Heartiste is “trigger warning: literally the worst person alive, I am so serious about this, you think I am joking but I am not”).

Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, but it’s still nice to know that somebody known to be generally evil takes time out of his busy day to dislike my way of life specifically. It’s like a weird sort of reverse validation.

But since the Devil sometimes speaks true, what exactly does he have to say?

Genuine, egalitarian, open polyamory for all practical purposes doesn’t exist among white Westerners. There’s always one or another party out in the asexual or anhedonic cold, nursing feelings of rejection and traumatic self-doubt. And if that party is a willing participant to his or her sexual/romantic exclusion, it’s a good bet he/she is psychologically broken, mentally unstable, physically repulsive, or suffering from clinically low sex drive. In other words, human trash.

Applying enough charity to fully fund the Red Cross for the next fifty years, Heartiste seems to be saying something along the lines of “Polyamory is especially well-suited for asexual people”. And I agree!

Many of the people I know in successful polyamorous relationships are sexual, sometimes even highly sexual. But I also know a disproportionate number of asexual polyamorous people – including myself – and the combination seems to work really, really well. Part of it is the ability for asexual people to date sexual people without having to worry about the partner having no way of satisfying their higher sex drive. Part of it is the free layer of protection against sexual jealousy. And part of it is the neat ability to sidestep most of the risks of polyamory, including infection, unintended pregnancy, and the sense of disgust that some sexual people – especially Heartiste – seem to feel at the thought of having sex with less-than-virginal partners.

For me polyamory doesn’t get into any of that. It just means lots and lots of free cuddles.

II.

Which brings me to the second thing I read recently. There is a new app out, Cuddlr, which is “like Grindr, but for cuddling”. Unequally Yoked has come out against it, saying that cuddling people without knowing them first is “objectifying”.

You already know what I think of objectification, but the criticism is unusually jarring in this instance. For me, cuddling is the opposite of objectifying. I go into social encounters viewing most people as a combination of scary and boring. I can sometimes overcome that most of the way by spending months getting to know them and appreciate their unique perspective. Or I can cuddle with them for ten minutes. Either one works.

There’s a Graham Greene quote which, being a philistine, I only know because it was included in Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal:

He took another drink of brandy. As the liquid touched his tongue he remembered his child, coming in out of the glare: the sullen unhappy knowledgeable face. He said, “Oh God, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live for ever.” This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep; it was as if he had to watch her from the shore drown slowly because he had forgotten how to swim. He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone…

Wright’s point was that, there is this pure universal love that we wish we could feel for everyone all the time, but in practice we’re only able to feel it for our children, presumably because of evolutionary imperatives. As for me, I have no children, but the pure universal love I wish I could feel for everyone all the time, I’m only actually able to feel for cute girls I am cuddling with. It is definitely a good, correct kind of love – Leah would be more likely to call it agape or philia than eros. And this is important to me, because that kind of love is definitely an important psychological nutrient and my brain is very bad at feeling it any other way without, like, knowing somebody for ten years.

So this is the second reason why I think polyamory and (my particular variant of) asexuality go well together. It allows me to cuddle whoever I want and fall in love with whoever I want and have absurdly fond and protective feelings toward everybody if I so choose.

III.

The third thing that made me think of this was actually something I wrote in my post yesterday and realized I should expand upon:

Testosterone is said to affect sexual libido but not desire for “sensual touch”, and a lot of people have mentioned how anomalously some of the nerd communities I’m in tend to value cuddling compared to sex relative to the general population.

In the general population – let alone for people like Heartiste – men are supposed to consider cuddling to be that extremely annoying thing that women sometimes want to do instead of sex, and which they must be very careful to avoid lest women get the impression that this is acceptable.

On the other hand, in the nerdy, polyamorous communities I’ve been in, it’s been generally understood that people of all sorts, man or woman or Ozy, can like cuddling and there is no shame in it.

This has been really liberating. Like, if you ask someone if they want to have sex, they might say no, they might slap you, but at least they will understand the context: that is definitely a known thing people ask. If you ask someone to cuddle, they will usually just be very confused, which in a way makes it even creepier.

The formation of communities where it’s not creepy and you can just ask is, at least to this asexual, one of the more important pieces of social technology to come out of the weird incubator that is the Bay Area. It creates so many positive feelings and so much of the good kind of groupishness that it seems like a comical Publishers’ Clearing House-style $100 bill left on the ground in the relatively high-stakes Forming Cohesive Communities Game.

I am left speculating that it only works after you get a certain percent asexual, or a certain percent polyamorous, or a certain percent low testosterone, or a certain percent low jealousy. Or maybe that you have to have a certain amount of community cohesion before you try. Or maybe you need people with a certain amount of willingness to experiment and not take themselves seriously. I don’t know. I can certainly imagine most attempts to initiate it would implode horribly. I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one who tries to import cuddle culture to some other group where social cohesion is important, like the US Senate.

It just seems to be one of those really nice equilibria that form spontaneously in certain places for reasons that are difficult to pinpoint, just like the rest of civilization.

I made fun of this post on my tumblr and then Scott requested I actually argue with it.

First, let’s address the issue of homosexuality. Spandrell argues that “There’s no way on earth that a condition that makes you lose attraction towards the opposite sex is going to survive natural selection.” On the contrary, there is a lot of animal homosexuality. The linked book contains much fascinating information, such as the fact that animal sexuality has been documented in almost 500 species and that, in one study, ninety percent of observed giraffe sex was between two males. I am not sure why animal homosexuality is so common: I am not an evolutionary biologist myself. But it suggests that the simplistic model in which fucking something other than a vagina is not selected for is incorrect.

In addition, homosexuality is probably not inborn. A Swedish twin study with a sample size of 7600 found that genetic factors and shared-environment factors together explained only a third of the variance in sexual orientation, while two-thirds were explained by unshared environment. In short: sexual orientation in humans is less inborn than how hardworking you are. Indeed, Spandrell admits as much, saying that we do not know the cause of gayness. Maybe because it’s not inborn? Just saying.

One must point out that the “born this way” myth was invented by LGBT people to get people to accept us: “we can’t help it! It is mean to hurt people because of something they can’t help! Don’t worry, it’s genetic, accepting us won’t make anyone else gay!” I don’t fully understand what the Cathedral is, but if anything is part of the Cathedral the Human Rights Campaign is, and I feel like that is a fairly depressing amount of belief in the Cathedral’s myths from a self-declared neoreactionary.

Spandrell argues that female paraphiliacs do not exist because they do not usually tell researchers about being paraphiliacs. Unfortunately, he is missing the very large confounding variable, which is that women are fucking liars about sex. As I pointed out in my Anti-Heartiste FAQ, evidence suggests that the entire sexual partner gap between men and women is explicable by women being goddamned liars. There is no reason to believe they wouldn’t also be goddamned liars about their paraphilias.

Spandrell challenged me in his comment section– if female paraphilia is a thing– to find cases of female death by autoerotic asphyxiation. It is true that women are less likely to die by autoerotic asphyxiation. However, women are less likely than men to masturbate, and even when they do they masturbate less often than men do, decreasing the risk of women dying through masturbation. However, this is self-report data and thus falls under the “women are goddamned liars” explanation. Autoerotic asphyxiation deaths are massively undercounted to begin with; it is relatively common for people who die by autoerotic asphyxiation to be mistaken for suicides or “sanitized” by family members who don’t want to admit their child died by masturbation. Given that women lie massively about sex, it is possible that families are more likely to sanitize female autoerotic asphyxiators. Finally, I hate to be the feminist who points this out to the neoreactionary, but men and women are different. This probably extends to sexual fetishes. I admit that none of these are particularly solid arguments. However, I do have reason to believe that women have things that may be considered paraphilias.

Porn.

The rise of the ebook has massively expanded the amount of porn that women read. Like I said, women are fucking liars about sex. They want to read porn, but they don’t want to admit that they want to read porn– and as plausibly deniable as Harlequins are, those Fabio covers make it look a little too much like porn for a lot of readers.

Ellora’s Cave is the largest erotic ebook producer in the United States. If you are curious whether women have paraphilias, you can explore the BDSM Elements section, featuring such titles as Taming the Raven’s Son, Pack and Mate, and Elf Struck (tagline: “When a BDSM slut is matched with a warrior virgin, both tempers and desires flare.”)

Part of the problem here is that I don’t fully understand what qualifies as a ‘paraphilia’ in Spandrell’s analysis. Spandrell provides as examples: “There are all sorts of paraphilias, all of which seem to only occur in men. Some men are attracted to babies, others to feet, others to shoes, others to obese women, others to old women. There’s a lot of weird stuff out there.” If we are going to the “at least as weird as being attracted to fat women” standard, then I feel like a lot of non-BDSM things in Ellora’s Cave count. For instance, paranormal erotic romance is basically just a fetish for fucking vampires and werewolves.

However, I suspect that female paraphilias are also going to be structurally different than male paraphilias. Eliade’s List of Fanfiction Kinks, Tropes, and Cliches is the most extensive list I’m aware of of fanfiction porn tropes. Literally, I have never been able to think of one that is popular and not on her list. The interesting thing about Eliade’s list– which is something I’ve found personally in my fanfiction consumption– is the lack of distinction between purely sexual and purely narrative tropes. The list does include things like “intercrural or interfemoral sex (i.e., thrusting cock between partner’s thighs),” but also things like “makeovers.” I suspect a list of favorite male porn tropes would be unlikely to include makeovers. Similarly, it’s a common observation that a plot what plot story on AO3, which is female-dominated, and an extraordinarily plotty story on Literotica, which is male-dominated, contain approximately the same amount of plot. I suspect when one studies female paraphilias one will find primarily narrative paraphilias: where men tend to fetishize a single act, women tend to fetishize an overall storyline. While one might not consider the latter to be a paraphilia, that seems to be far more related to an androcentric definition of paraphilia than a difference in the prevalence of paraphilias between men and women per se.

Finally, let us discuss trans women. To be honest, I don’t fully understand what the difference between “trans women are homosexual men” and “trans women are heterosexual women” is. The empirical facts remain the same: many trans women transition as soon as possible, are attracted to men, and behave in ways typically considered feminine. All I can figure is that it is the result of a belief that we should call trans women men in order to be pointlessly upsetting to them.

I am aware of two studies applying Blanchard’s autogynephilia questionnaire to a group of cisgender women. The first, unpaywalled here, I shall ignore because of its 29-person sample size, despite its astonishing revelation that 93% of cisgender women are autogynephiles by Blanchard’s definition. The second actually has a reasonable sample size, so let’s examine it more closely. The study divided autogynephiliac arousal into two categories– Autogynephiliac Interpersonal Fantasy (essentially, sexual fantasies about being admired as female) and the Core Autogynephilia Scale (essentially, sexual fantasies about being a very sexy woman). There was no difference between cisgender women and transgender women in the Autogynephiliac Interpersonal Fantasy scale. However, transgender women scored significantly higher on the Core Autogynephilia Scale.

To put it bluntly, this makes no goddamned sense. Cis women are just as likely as trans women to have a particular subtype of autogynephilia, but less likely to have autogynephilia itself?

Let us look at the Core Autogynephilia Scale a little more closely. The study authors modified the scale so that the cis woman population were asked if they have ever sexually fantasized about themselves having attractive or more attractive female body parts. However, imagine that you have a vagina and you have sexual fantasies in which you have a vagina. Nothing interesting here, probably going to mark “no” on the relevant questionnaire. Now imagine that you have a penis and you have sexual fantasies in which you have a vagina. You’re going to notice. This is contrary to expectations. If someone asks you “do you have sexual fantasies about having an attractive or more attractive vagina?”, you’re probably going to mark yes (assuming you don’t specifically fetishize having ugly genitals). The exact same behavior leads cis women to mark “no” and trans women to mark “yes.”

Essentially, autogynephilia is ordinary female sexuality. Women are often erotically aroused by dressing in lingerie and wearing makeup; women are erotically aroused by looking at themselves naked; women have sexual fantasies in which they have vulvas; for that matter, women are erotically aroused by imagining themselves as sexier than they are. If we assume that trans women are, well, women’s minds in men’s bodies, this entirely explains the autogynephilia data: women have female-typical sexuality instead of male-typical sexuality. (It does not explain the autogynephilia anecdotes, as one assumes it is quite uncommon for cis women to be aroused by the idea of knitting, but those seem to be selected for vividness rather than for representationality. One guy who is turned on by the idea of knitting does not mean that every trans woman who is attracted to other women is an autogynephile.)

Now, the pro-autogynephilia group may respond, “but it is normal for cis women to fantasize about having a vagina and deviant for trans women to!” But in that case there is no way for trans women to win. If they had sexual fantasies in which they had a penis, you would be like “ah, yes, that is proof they are men. Why would they even want sexual reassignment surgery if they are fine with having a penis?” Since they instead fantasize about having a vagina, you would be like “that is sexual deviancy!” There is no evidence that can convince you that trans women genuinely have what they say they have– a condition in which they are genuinely upset by their bodies, being seen as male, or both, which is best treated by allowing them to transition.

Spandrell opines that allowing trans women to transition and get sex reassignment surgery “can’t work well, at the very least because men have male sex drives, which are a very dangerous thing when not constrained by women.” I must remind him that the male sex drive is mediated through testosterone. Trans women typically take estrogens and anti-androgens, which lower the libido to the level of an otherwise-comparable cis woman. A woman who has had sexual reassignment surgery does not even have testicles to produce testosterone. She could not possibly have a male sex drive, unless Spandrell is advocating the theory that the male sex drive is actually mediated by ghost balls.

Finally, I must address the notion that I am an autoandrophile. First, I find it highly amusing that Spandrell believes I am the first trans person assigned female at birth to be attracted to men. I assure you I am certainly not. Second, my fetish is (mostly SFW, but TMI warning) very well documented. It is such a shame how no one ever does research before they insult you these days.

Third, I must clarify what I meant in that particular comment. In my experience, social dysphoria is subject to the hedonic treadmill: I was elated the first time someone called me ‘zie,’ but now it is an everyday thing. I imagine that if I went back, I would spend six months or so in a pit of constant dysphoria, but eventually get used to it. However, I have been constantly distressed by my breasts since puberty; when I thought I was cis, I would have constant fantasies of cutting them off with a knife; when I stop binding regularly, I notice a deep loss of psychological stability. The hedonic treadmill simply does not work for me having breasts. I value my relationship highly, but not that highly. (Being monogamous was a similar constant drain on me, and being polyamorous– several years after I started– is still a major contributor to my happiness, which is the reason I say it would be extremely hard to go back to monogamy.)