I don't think that's necessarily the case. Social justice group identification is definitely skewed by gender, but it's not obvious that identification with LGBTQ rights is associated with gender apart from that, so I wouldn't call that *intrinsically* more gender polarizing.
Abortion, on the face of it, seems like something that would be a gender polarizing issue. And pro-choice people often frame the pro-life position as one driven by a desire to control women. But although I'm pro-choice myself, I don't think the data bears this out. When you break down support for abortion by actual policy preferences, not identification with broad labels like "pro-choice" or "pro-life," there's actually very little distance between men's and women's positions on average. I think support for or opposition to abortion varies very little according to actual desire to oppress or control women, and mostly hinges on the moral weight people assign to fetuses, and men's and women's positions don't actually differ very much on that issue.
It's possible the figures I've seen are outdated, and I don't recall the source to dig it p again, but the research I've seen which broke things down more finely than "legal under all/legal under some/illegal under all," to actually address what circumstances people favored legality under, showed a difference between men and women which was statistically significant, but not large.
Politics is becoming the biggest filter and shibboleth on dating apps now. Most of the questions are political, they have explicitly political banners people can put on their profile, many women say in their profile that they will only date good, ideologically-conformant liberals, etc.
And I'm sure conservative women do the exact same thing with liberal men. If anything, I suspect that conservative women are even stricter with their politicized dating preferences! (I've seen a fair amount of conservative male/progressive female couples, but almost no conservative female/progressive male couples. And the disparity is large enough that it can't simply be explained by the fact that women tend to lean more progressive on average.)
Hyper-partisanship is not exclusively the purview of the Other Side - and if someone acts like it is, that's usually a good indication that they're hyper-partisan themselves.
One would assume that conservative men and liberal women have to lower their standards more than conservative women and liberal men, given the relative availability of politically matched partners for each.
Possibly a lack of highly visible banners acts as a sign someone is willing to compromise.
The political disparity between genders isn't that large. It's around 60/40, not 90/10. There are plenty of conservative women and liberal men out there. No one needs to lower their standards due to lack of availability.
A 60/40 disparity means a fifth of the population at minimum is dating across political lines. In that sense the disparity is quite large.
Obviously in real life there are degrees of political belief such that compromise comes more easily to some than to others, but I think some people really would need to lower their standards.
I'm a moderate female and my husband is a progressive male.
Then again, I became less progressive mainly due to becoming a mother six years ago. Females are known to become more conservative when they become mothers. I wonder if the later age of first births is partly responsible for the 18-29 cohort being/staying so progressive.
I'd bet there's *less* filtering the other direction. I think men in general care about politics less overall, are less filter-bubbled and ideological, and will just play along to a varying degree (varying with how desirable the girl in question is, presumably).
But sure, your hardcore libertarians or conservatives or whatever will want to strongly filter out any lib girls, I'm sure. I'd just bet on there being a lot less of them than there are of liberal girls trying to ensure ideological conformance in their suitors.
I meant the other *political* direction, from women. I have a hard time believing that while those progressive meanies filter out non-progressive men, right-wing women (who are right-wing enough to put their politics in their profile) are just fine and dandy with dating progressive or squishy men.
Ah, yeah. Speaking from experience, you hardly ever see this. Like less than 1 in 30 women, I'd guesstimate, say something like "I'm conservative and will only date conservative men," or equivalent. But maybe that's in line with their actual incidence? I know young women particularly skew massively liberal.
You DO see a lot of non-white (usually black) girls who specifically request Christian men who are strong in their faith, and say their faith is important to them, and their profiles will often be accompanied by liberal shibboleths and banners (for understandable reasons). I wish them the very best in their search. Not sure how that one lines up in practice in terms of liberal / conservative splits, it's always seemed like the worst of both sides to me, so I've never inquired.
> Speaking from experience, you hardly ever see this. Like less than 1 in 30 women, I'd guesstimate, say something like "I'm conservative and will only date conservative men," or equivalent. But maybe that's in line with their actual incidence? I know young women particularly skew massively liberal.
There's another reason you might not see women making this declaration: they don't need to. If you have unusually feminine politics and you demand the same from your boyfriend, that might be hard to find, giving you a reason to publicize the demand.
But if you have moderately masculine politics and you demand the same of your boyfriend, you might not run into enough trouble that it occurs to you that you need to make any demands.
Related to your second paragraph, it's interesting that everyone talks about women being liberal and men being conservative when religion skews so strongly in the other direction. Women are religious and men aren't, conservatives are religious (and so are liberals, but conservatives are coded as religious and liberals are coded as secular...); that means women are liberal and men are conservative.
For what it's worth, I have the opposite intuition. That is, I anticipate men caring more about politics and being more inclined to filter on partners' politics, and the opposite for women.
This intuition is based mainly on observing people I know, where half the guys will go into considerable detail about how the Hated Other Side's policy preferences are Just Awful and here's 99 reasons why anyone who supports them is a moral abomination, while the women mostly don't have (visible) political philosophies. If your objection to the other side follows (or at least pretends to follow) coherent principles rather than simple ingroup/outgroup identification, it seems like it would be harder to convince yourself that "oh, if it's you it's okay".
I am not sure to what extent this generalizes outside my social group, though. Evidently not *that* far.
Yeah, honestly I'd just bet that we have similarly filtered social circles, and yours is filtered on "cares about politics" as one of the measures, and mine is filtered on "disdains politics" as one of the measures.
Who knows where the greater unfiltered population's truth lies?
When I was dating age, I had a coupla idiosyncratic filters, and my women friends all had their own sets of filters, usually different from mine. Of course there were no dating apps., so I had to pick up the guy's attitudes from their conversations and actions and what I knew about their life. (Almost everyone I dated was someone I knew from school or work or rock climbing, so I already knew some stuff about them before we considered stepping into the romance zone.). I think the main filter I had was how bohemian their attitudes were -- they had to at least lean boho. Also, I was not comfortable with religious Christians (observant Jews and other faiths were OK). And they had to be taller than me, but a couple inches taller was enough (and I'm average height, so few men were lost to that filter). I did not give a shit about their politics, their wealth, or their muscle definition. My friends also had idiosyncratic filters and filter combinations of their own. It seems -- I dunno, grim, like a bad sign -- if in fact a lot of people of dating age are using political ideology as their main filter. Have people lost track of all the other dimensions? Or are young people now much more alike than my set was when we were young -- so the main markers they have of who they are is their political affiliation?
I think both the benefit and the drawback of using dating apps/sites is that you can use "easy" filters. Swipe left because you don't particularly like how they look, even though you'd definitely consider them if you knew each other as human beings. Because there are so many people available, so it doesn't seem to cost you much to restrict your search to the top half by some easy-to-apply metrics. I think politics is an easy filter. Also, some filters being made explicit give specific impressions about you, so putting this one forward might be simply better aligned with current mores (which is not the same as actually being currently the most important ones).
Yeah, I think it's another manifestation and aspect of "filter bubbling" and technology-mediated matching in general. When you have a matching problem with a seemingly infinite pool of candidates, and you're the chooser, you just go crazy with checking boxes, because why not? You have 1000x more candidates than you know what to do with, so you may as well winnow the field aggressively.
In dating, that's women, in employment, that's hiring managers or HR.
It makes sense that it would. It's well known that the experience of (cis) men and women are practically opposites on most dating apps. Generalizing:
- Men are much less likely to get messages/matches at all (stemming from various factors). The narrative this aligns most closely with is the "incel/redpill" narrative, which is a well-known right-wing pipeline.
- Women, conversely, will get *too many* messages, but most will be low quality. By sheer message volume, the majority (or at least a significant enough portion) of these messages will be from the from gross men who are desperate and bitter towards women (from suffering the above and by definition being on the platform the longest), which aligns with the "all-men-are-pigs feminism" narrative, which serves as a funnel for the left.
Obviously, this is a simplification, but across the whole population I could see it definitely being a trend.
Somewhat of a tangent: as a men the closest thing I've come to the 'female experience on a dating app' is having a LinkedIn profile as a programmer; with recruiters playing the role of the suitors sending many messages, most of them low quality.
I've never had that happen to me. I wonder what the equivalent for a recruiter would be.
I guess the recruiter / software developer relation is a bit more like what I imagine Grindr looks like, if there's a big difference in attractiveness between the users? (Instead of male / female on hetero focussed dating apps.)
In the sense, that I appreciate if a recruiter is very direct and tells me straight up what what the roles are and what budgets they have; instead of trying to 'flirt' ie small talk first.
One of my biggest pet peeves is that recruiters want to talk over the phone, instead of asynchronously sending over the details as written communication.
(I suspect that's because the average recruiter is a lot more neurotypical, and normal people don't mind talking over the phone as much? And perhaps they see getting your number in the se way guys on dating apps do?)
>I've never had that happen to me. I wonder what the equivalent for a recruiter would be.
I guess the recruiter / software developer relation is a bit more like what I imagine Grindr looks like
"Job's mostly vanilla sex, so long as you aren't too picky about what you count as vanilla, with occasional BDSM and watersports participation expected."
Think I need a CS degree to get in on that? I know in the past there was a claim that the field was much more meritocratic than most — but I think I've heard credentialism has now become just as common in software as anywhere else...?
Got a worthless undergrad chem degree, lol, and... well, I'm no rock-star developer, but I'm not *terrible*.
Kinda wonder if I ought to try changing it up and going that route. I dunno. I worked terrible horrible jobs for the first half of my working life, jobs that made life a misery I didn't care about losing; THEN I had a well-paying job that didn't involve horrible people, back-breaking labor, humiliating constant oversight such that I needed permission to go take a piss, etc...
...it was wonderful. I would do anything to have a position like that again. Programming is the only skill I have that I feel like I could get an employer to look at!
('cause no one wants a chem-anything without a PhD; and the work I did till now was half fleet-&-equipment analytics, and half management.
I can certainly get a good reference, since most of my co-workers and superiors were sympathetic to the reason I quit — and since without me, they had to hire *three* people all told to replace me, ha! fuck 'em... take a demotion-in-all-but-name just so the CEO's worthless kid could have a sinecure? NAH. — ...but without a degree in data analysis or an MBA or something I sort of feel like I'll simply get laughed at...)
I don't know. I'm depressed. What was I talking about again
I haven't noticed any age discrimination so far. And I'm turning 40 soon. (And I haven't notice anyone else being discriminated against because of age.)
There are places that make it quite clear that they prefer young people, but it seems to me that those places pay less and expect more overtime, so I am okay with this kind of discrimination, because I actually wouldn't want to work there.
Basically, I mentally translate "we have a young collective" to "we hire people inexperienced at salary negotiation and keeping work-life balance".
Think 33 would be sneered at? If so, I'm doubly-fucked! I really can't think of what else I could do that isn't just goddamn miserable.
I really liked that I had autonomy in my previous position... it wasn't even the pay, just that I had very little supervision — just basically "everything going OK? saved us some money, stayed below budget, fleet operational? alright good work see you next quarter" heh — and didn't have to do anything but sit in an office most of the time.
I think I will probably literally blow my brains out if I have to work the sort of jobs I did before. Maybe I shouldn't have been so dramatic and proud... could've just taken the "you do the work like before, but your raise and promotion goes to the boss's son"—L.
man, it made me mad but I might not have thought it through too well...
...esp. on the timing: losing wife and then losing girlfriend (yes these are related, I know, karma) and THEN losing job... Hell, I barely wanted to keep going *before*; now? well... if I stop posting, y'all know why. lol
Seriously, ask the people here who are coders (or more accurately, wait for them to comment, one has already jumped in). This place isn't exactly short of computer people.
You should have just done the poly thing like all the other geeks. ;)
> So... programmers are still in demand, are they?
At least I still get spammed by recruiters; and my company is also still hiring.
> Think I need a CS degree to get in on that? I know in the past there was a claim that the field was much more meritocratic than most — but I think I've heard credentialism has now become just as common in software as anywhere else...?
I don't have a degree. I studied some math, but never finished that. (Thanks, ADHD..)
When we are hiring, we don't require a degree either. (And neither did, evidently, any of the previous companies I worked for, like Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, etc.)
Of course, having a prestigious uni on your CV does open doors. Not gonna lie. But it's not a hard requirement for a programming job.
I'm happy to give you some advice, if you want it. (Though I'm always a bit skeptical about how much my experience applies to other people..)
I appreciate it, Matthiamigo my fren 👊 You certainly don't have to — you've helped already! — but I'll not turn down any advice; I'm sort of lost, really, not sure if I need to go back and get a degree or if maybe some contributions to an open-source project or two would be best use of time or just give up and go back to being a roughneck or what!
Following up on this: I earned a degree in computer engineering in 2006, but I literally haven't written a line of code since then. Assuming that I did decide to put in the effort to learn a marketable programming language, what would be the best way to keep my resume from just going into the proverbial trash and prove to a prospective employer that I actually can code?
There are multiple ways. What I found works well is getting referred by existing employees.
Most companies have referral programs. The trick for you as an outsider is finding ways to contact existing employees of those companies. You can do that by eg going to physical meetups, or by interacting with someone who runs a technical blog and works at a company you might find interesting.
Generally, those referral programs are easy for the employee to use. On the upside, if a referral leads to a hire, the employee gets a bonus (size depend son company). If no hire, there are no consequences.
So employees have a relatively low threshold for referring people. Basically I would refer anyone who asked who's not an obviously an idiot.
As a job seeker, you can make the referrers life easier by giving them the answers to all the questions the referral form asks, and have your CV handy, too. (You can brainstorm for five minutes and probably figure out all the form's questions from the comfort of your armchair. Or you can do a websearch or ask GPT or even ask a human.)
Some other people swear by contributing to open source projects and putting stuff on GitHub. I think that can also work.
As a third alternative, you can also sign up the eg Oxford's part time MSc for software engineering or security. See https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/
(It's part time, and mostly but not completely remote. And it grants a full MSc)
You don't even have to wait until you finish, you can honestly put that you are currently studying at Oxford on your CV the moment you sign up. Getting Oxford on your CV helps you bypass a lot of keyword filters.
(Full disclosure, I started on that programme, but never finished it..)
Of course, you can mix and match the approaches. And come up with your own.
Programmers are definitely still in demand. Despite all the hype talk about AI replacing them (us), it won't happen in the near future. There is a lot of what human developers are doing that LLMs can't cover on their own. Speaking as a researcher who is actually working on an AI system that can write code.
I would say that your best bet is to combine your previous knowledge and experience with some coding skills. For example, you can take your chemistry degree and go to a company that does some chemical modeling. If a company is working in a specific domain and needs some developers, they will definitely see value in somebody who not only has coding skills, but also understands something about the field and the product.
Probably has to do with the decline of family formation. There have been studies showing that men who become fathers have a drop in testosterone. Also, men who have daughters become more leftwing or at least adopt more liberal attitudes towards women.
Studies in the other directions are lacking (for obvious reasons), but we know that married women are more conservative than unmarried women. Obviously, it's a chicken-egg situation, but my guess is something marriage is a moderating force in the other direction for women.
Could single parent vs two parent households be a variable to look at? Most single-parent households are headed by women with no male parenting counterpart. If there is this big gendered shift, maybe it's stronger in single female parent households than in two-gender pair of parents households.
This seems strongly confounded by single-parentness, the most obvious cause being less income correlating with reliance on government-aid correlating with support for liberal policies that increase government-aid.
A more fair comparison would be single-mother households vs single-father households, although the comparative rarity of the latter might make it hard to get good sample sizes.
I would expect single-father households to be richer on average than single-mother households. Mostly just because mothers seem to get the kids by default in most cases, and fathers have to work for them (on average).
I expect widows and widowers to be roughly equally common, so they wouldn't have much influence on the balance. (Apart from adding random noise.)
If there's any contest for custody, I expect that fathers would need to demonstrate a higher amount of resources and commitment than mothers. On average. So there's a strong selection effect that predominantly filters out poor fathers.
Hence my assumption that on average single-father households would be richer. (Add in that man on average earn more money.)
To some extent this isn't entirely a confounder though. If men on average earn more money and this in turn causes them to be more conservative and this in turn causes their children to be more conservative, then we successfully measure the relationship we're trying to measure between political bent and gender integration, even if the causation has a couple chains along the way.
Even if they are equally common, if what you care about is single-parent households you'd have to look at rates of remarriage while children are young. My guess is that would not be gender neutral, given how men and women each feel about each other's "baggage".
My theory is this has to do with the decline of marriage. The theory behind this being that men and women who commit to one another in marriage are more likely to have their political views converge over time. Apparently there are studies showing that women who have children become more conservative, so perhaps a decline in fertility is related in some way too. I'd be interested to see if there's anything to any of that in the data.
I'm not trying to explain why society or young people have become less conservative over time. I'm speculating as to why it is that men and women seem to be diverging over time, with men becoming more conservative and women more liberal.
This seems like an argument that could work in both ways. If there is a parallel universe where women recently became *more* conservative, they probably explain it like "now that many women have their careers, of course they care more about lowering the taxes etc.".
I've always thought of "conservative" as pertaining to traditional values or risk/reward, as opposed to financial capital. although financial capital can certainly play a role.
The words 'conservative' and 'liberal' are purely there to describe different political tribes. Actual policy stances are not fixed, and can move around; and nobody seems to find that weird, while still pretending that the issues matter.
> [...] why would young people be conservative, what do they have to conserve?
Please don't confuse the name of the political tribe with any particular policy. Especially when you apply the same name in different countries and across time.
Lots of policies even shift across the political spectrum, and no one seems to find that weird. (Or some issues disappear completely from discussion, as in no one voices any strong opinion on tribal lines. Or for some other issues there's a consensus across tribal lines.)
'Conservatives' don't conserve anything. Or at least not more (or less) than any other political tribe on average over time.
Marriage is declining for SO many good reasons though. As a legal and cultural institution, it needs a major overhaul. And the centuries of precedent, common-law, and cultural baggage surrounding it are explicitly working in the opposite directions that it needs to go to make sense.
Why do people get married? For children, or for tax benefits and logistical smoothing when it comes to health benefits, next-of-kin things, and whatever.
For all the non-children cases (and let's not forget, ~20% of women in the USA or Europe never have kids at all in recent years), all of those things should be sign-uppable for any couple regardless of marital status.
Why? Because marriage is a gigantic, one-sided trap for people.
For both genders: if you have any assets whatsoever, you immediately sign half over. Vintage-level divorce rates are ~42%, then "mutually unhappy" results in marriage are probably half-again that number, for 60%-66% of marriages net unhappy. Do you really want to bet half your assets on anything with a 2/3 failure rate?
For men: they're more likely to have assets, AND 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Do you really want to bet half your assets on something with a 2/3 failure rate, where 70% of the time, you didn't even want to split?? Also, in a split, the woman ends up with the kids much more often, and ends up spending a lot more time with them. You won't see your kids as much, or be able to influence their childhoods as much.
For women: the reason 70% of divorces are initiated by women is that men suck, and are basically giant babies who want to be taken care of just like a kid. You do the majority of the housework and cleaning and child-rearing, even if you have a career and income too. Not just that, but in the event of divorce, most women are worse off financially and standard of living wise, and men don't have a penalty on that front nearly as big. Oh, and if you have assets, you're going to end up giving away half of them to get rid of the chump in that 70% case.
Marriage's main result, empirically, is to increase net misery-years by making it harder and more friction-ful to break up. But the prior should be that ANY given relationship has a 70%+ chance of breaking up and being net-negative (assuming non-marriage relationships break up or end up net-miserable at a slightly higher rate than marriages). So we should not add any friction in terms of making it harder to break up a relationship, and we CERTAINLY shouldn't make it drastically expensive with a 70% rate of failure for anyone with assets of either gender!
What about kids? I submit to you that kids are worse off in a house with a net-negative marriage. They see and hear you fighting, too, you know. It's better to break up sooner for the KIDS too, not just for the marriage participants, because it reduces fighting and conflict at home.
Marriage: not even once!
Where we really need to go is to a place with shorter term, non-financially penalized breakups. 5 year contracts, or 10 or 20 year, with kids. Half your assets shouldn't be at risk in a breakup either, although of course children need to be supported financially by whoever the non-custodial parent is. But child support is WAY less than half your assets if you have any, and should be based on average cost of living for the area the kids live in.
My understanding was that unless you're careful to specifically call them out and set them aside, they're generally pooled on marriage. And the methods to set them aside are prenups (high failure rate) or trusts, generally.
But if you know of a different common method, I'd love to be educated about it. It probably varies by state, too.
At least in California, there's no "careful to specifically call them out and set them aside"; if you e.g. acquired clear title to a car in 2014 and married in 2015, the car is just plain yours when you divorce in 2024.
Anything you paid for with money you earned while married, is community property. If you want to keep a separate bank account full of money you earned before marriage (only) so that you can buy things that you get to keep in the divorce, *that* might need to be carefully set up and maintained.
For the aforementioned tax / logistics / whatever benefits you get with marriage now, but you're unsure if you're going to stay together or have kids.
Like one of you is starting a PHd and (god help you) wants to go into academia, or one of you knows you may get an offer to move overseas in a few years, or you're just not sure enough of the other person to sign up for more than that for various reasons.
People are varied, there could be lots of reasons, but you could still want the ease of logistics and bureaucratic advantages of an on-paper "marriage" for the interim.
I mean, personally, my serious LTR's all last about 4-5 years lately, and it's been for various reasons, but it seems a fairly natural time chunk to consider if you don't lead an extraordinarily stable life, whether you're poly or monogamous.
You need to factor in that having kids negatively impacts the mother's (or less commonly the father's) income, future earning potential, and pension due to time off work and reduced focus on career for a number of years. Also, it's not that uncommon for one spouse's career to be prioritised over the other, eg by moving for a better job vs taking what's available in the area, even if there are no kids. Marriage and sharing assets compensates for this.
Yes. "Haven't found the right partner yet" is the #1 reason people cite for why they haven't met their fertility goals yet. The average ages of both first marriage and first birth are increasing.
And as you say, women (including myself) become more conservative after they have children. If that's now happening later in life, then women's conservative shift might be too, leaving the 18-29 cohort in the OP graph increasingly progressive.
I would say that Burn-Murdoch's observation is correct, but that Paul Graham's explanation of it is not. Rather, there are cultural and memetic factors at work that are not chiefly about association.
Yeah, his last sentence, the Instagram and video games explanation, reads as very facetious. Do genders really hang out less with each other? I think people hang out less with each other, period, but when they do I'd imagine they do that with the same old mixing.
What? No. Young women on the internet are mostly on instagram and tiktok. Young men are not. And the men who do spend more time on those places are almost certainly selected for liberalism anyway.
And of course, this type of "hanging out" wouldn't plausibly lead to exchange of values anyway.
pg's comment about women being on Instagram sticks out to me, since I tend to think of Instagram as being slightly male-coded. I never use instagram though and don't have an account, so maybe I'm just wrong. But when I look up the gender statistics by users, men sit at 51.8% while women sit at 48.2% for the year 2023. So I don't think I'm crazy on this.
Unfortunately the internet has allowed people to self-select any group they want to hang out with, broken down by politics, or interests, or hobbies, or whatever. Prior to the internet most people had to hang out with people in their physical proximity to a much greater degree. Even in big cities it was much easier and more common to hang out with people in your neighborhoods. Now next door neighbors can each find the smallest niche community in the world and join it and never talk to each other at all.
Even consider something like Reddit, where you'd think that people are all on the same platform and are interacting. Instead it's thousands of sub-communities with wildly different ways of looking at life.
I think this explains a lot. The ability and incentive to bubble are quite high, and I suspect doing so serves primarily to strengthen and entrench pre-existing beliefs.
> If anything, they "hang out" more with each other now without even realizing it due to the centralization of the internet.
Not sure that this is true. At least the Paul Graham quote, facetious as it is, suggests that the genders use the internet differently, so might not meet each other online much.
But, of course, people self-select by politics even more to decide where to hang out online and who to interact with. So expect Internet exposure to harden any previously existing political leanings?
I’ve definitely noticed all the female avatars on Reddit. Based on comment volume it honestly doesn’t even feel majority-male to me anymore, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the data shows it still is.
This was my thought too. It's certainly not obvious to me that men and women spend less time together today than in the past when single sex spaces were common (e.g. working mens clubs, sports, most work places).
Right? One group says, "Strong men are important, traditional masculine values are important, traditional (i.e. patriarchal) gender roles are good and important." The other says, "Men should stfu and get out of politics, they've had their turn, we should prefer women candidates, let women speak to the exclusion of men, etc."
Shocking that people sort themselves with more men in the first group and more women in the second group. Truly shocking.
Culturally things have gotten quite a bit more extreme since then but I recall that Obama's shovel ready stimulus program was paused and redesigned away from infrastructure because it was going to be creating more jobs for men, who had lost more jobs
I also recall Milo Yianappolis sincerely debating in his early days claiming men are getting less out of school and college and his counterpart not engaging with the statistics he was presenting at all - maintaining that all efforts must be directed towards women. I swear I saw a gear shift as he became radicalized in real time. This wasn't a debate, it was a fight - zero sum and between men and women
I think in terms of perception the hostile group may win out and thereby influence a change in loyalty aside from their real effects
Searching the stimulus and gender got me left wing sources. One said the bill would create 49% of its jobs for women, while another argued that although 80% of job losses were men the 40% of stimulus jobs projected for women would be lower paid and insufficient. I didn't look too hard but maybe there was one weird article claiming it was gender overhauled that I took as being correct
Both his stereotypes seem extreme. For whatever it's worth, I've also met a woman who valued traditional gender roles, and I'm sure she's not alone in the world.
> In general a lot of nostalgia for the past is imagining yourself as a top 1%-er of the past, not the average person in the past.
That sounds completely backwards to me. Imagining the past, I think of my grandparents living in their average farmhouse in the Midwest, making a living off farming, supporting a large family and still managing to have some modest income leftover to add a new machine shed or build an addition onto the house every so often. Sure it’s the midwest, it’s not glamorous, but they were paying off their debts, not pissing away money on rent. They weren’t even upper quartile of income, let alone 1%.
When people say they prefer the way things are today, it seems like a purely hypothetical preference based on the income they *hope* to have one day, that hasn’t really kept up with the changing economy. Millennials like the idea of city living based off the instagram fantasies we’re constantly exposed to, but look at how screwed we’re getting the rental economy.
The reality is the near-past (40+ years ago) was much better for the average person, although I would still probably trade it away in favor of being 1% in todays world.
I believe it was David Harvey I was listening to when I heard the argument that in the "more traditional past" (half a century ago?) workers (men) were paid a salary that befitting him who was the sole earner of a household, i.e. (let's say) about twice as much. There's many things going into it, but in a manner, "going to work" is not some absolute privilege in comparison to "stay to take care of home and the kids" is. But I suppose one was more respected than the other, or otherwise its respect was expressed more loudly in society. And, too, the way that finances worked (for a lack of a better word), this arrangement made one more depended of the other, such that if there's a divorce then one loses a cook and a cleaner (bad) but the other loses income (worse), to put it roughly. Otherwise, had marriages been eternal (and also if they are not, really), the traditional ideology /gender role assignment is just a particular arrangement of labour, not necessarily worse for the one or the other gender, all else being equal.
Of course this also feeds into the urban-rural split. A big house and four kids on a single middle-class income is thinkable in Twin Falls ID but not in San Francisco or New York.
Yeah, it's all part of the Big Sort. Want a big family? Go to a red state, and pick up the red-state values while you're at it, either by osmosis or just to fit in.
Don't? Go to a blue state and do the reverse.
There are real racial factors too, but I can't comment on those.
It's just meant to be illustrative by presenting an extreme example, it's not intended to be taken as a real crystallization of the absolute truth of both movements or anything. I thought it was obvious that it wasn't meant to be taken too literally but can't assume anything on the internet I guess lol.
It's not even portraying one party as worse than the other, but somehow it's taken as "right-wing."
Maybe it should have read "one party is sexist pigs and the other is reasonable and just" so it would read as neutral and not unfairly biased against the Good Party.
I don't think they put it that way though. They'll look for a religious guy who follows God, and the rest follows from that.
'Christian' implies he goes to church, thinks he'll go to hell if he cheats, thinks it's his job to have and support a traditional family (and will let you stay home and keep house and take care of kids), and probably will avoid porn too. Not that all Christians do those things, but they at least will try to. (I don't know a lot of Orthodox Jews but I'll let them comment--I'm sure there are subtle difference.)
'Traditional gender roles' just implies he'll boss you around, even if it also meant those other things back in the 50s.
How is it a stereotype? Left wing parties routinely have women only shortlists and the current American VP was selected specifically because she's a woman. I don't see any straw men in that post, the left is quite open about holding those ultra-feminist views and many similar.
I think political views are a reflection of deeply-held values, but not in the way you're suggesting - a person's politics are generally an expression of their personality, which then gets backfilled with ideological arguments that explain why the way they feel is also empirically correct.
I think that there's some truth to the fact that there are contexts in which "the left" gives preferential treatment to women over men, but it's disingenuous (and arguably an example of the weakman fallacy) to claim that as a general rule. In general, the dogma of liberalism (which is what "the left" is on the above graph) holds that men and women should be *equal*, and any actions that seem, on the micro scale, to run counter to that are merely attempts to achieve that steady state on the macro scale. (And it's clear that even liberals still advantage men over women on the macro scale; the supermajority of Democratic congresspeople are still men, for example.)
The reverse cannot be said of conservatism. The dogma is that men and women *are not* equal, and it's clear which are given preferential treatment if you look at any conservative leadership structure.
I've never met anyone on the modern left who believed men and women should be treated equally. That is always a conservative or "old left" view. Female supremacy is a core part of leftist identity which is why they constantly rip each other apart over trans issues.
Certainly my experience has been that middle class women basically always implement hard core female preference to the level that I no longer believe women can be trusted to make decisions involving justice/hiring/firing/predictions/laws etc at all. The results are always grossly misandrist. Blue collar women are better though.
>I've never met anyone on the modern left who believed men and women should be treated equally.
I can only assume you've either constructed a definition of "modern left" that makes this a tautology, or your sample for what you're using that term to describe is almost all people you've gotten into arguments with online, because a belief in unilateral female supremacy is certainly not the norm.
Do you live in a conservative area where only the most vocal SJWs outwardly identify as "left"? What field do you work in where blatant gender discrimination in favor of women is actually common? Because that's certainly not my experience in STEM.
Edit: The people downthread who seem to genuinely believe that women are all conspiring to oppress men, while at the same time being too inept to be in STEM, are simply providing evidence for why women are being pushed away from the right.
You can make the female supremacy disappear. Just read the top level mission statement: "men and women should be treated equally."
But then if you read the *rest* - there's a Patriarchy, there's unconscious bias, there's a surfeit of qualified men for historical reasons and that must be balanced out, there's hidden and imperceptible ways men can oppress women and that must be guarded against - then you watch the sum total of where all the little rules take you and boom, like magic, the female supremacy has come back.
People who are talking about the real, in-practice reality where female supremacy is law can get quite frustrated with people arguing from the pretty sounding theory and pretending nothing untoward is happening.
"What field do you work in where blatant gender discrimination in favor of women is actually common? Because that's certainly not my experience in STEM."
I find this extremely hard to believe. There are no scholarships for women in your field? Hiring committees don't use "diversity" as one of the criteria, making the bar lower for women than for men? "White men" isn't an insult? I'm in STEM too, and I would be shocked if what you said is true.
Somewhat tangentially, I would recommend separating out the categories of "liberal" and "progressive". The phrase "the illiberal left" holds a distinct meaning for a lot of us here, but the way you use the words, it sounds like a contradiction in terms.
Yeah, I've written my fair share of complaints specifically about the way the term "liberal" is used, but unfortunately for the context of this argument, it's the term used in the study. Also, I think it's fair to say that your average "liberal" is more liberal than your average conservative, and the average far-leftist is more liberal the average far-conservative (mitigated only because right-libertarianism is such a relatively popular fringe position)
Partly a reason to avoid the term is that it means different things in different places - ask an American, an Australian, and a Brit. And partly it's because, when used in a more British sense, it's a different dimension, and collapsing a two- dimensional model to a one-dimensional model is going to make the data harder to understand.
It seems to me that both the right and the left agree that men and women are equal in some very abstract sense, and also propose many specific inequalities.
R: "Of course both men and women have their own specific importance and dignity. God has created both of them for a reason; without any of them the society would fall apart. Now women please shut up and listen to what the men are telling you."
L: "Of course the ultimate goal is equality. Judging people based on their gender is exactly the thing we are fighting against all the time. Now men please check your privilege and shut up, and listen to what the women are telling you."
These are obviously representative hyperbole, but I've heard the literal L version. I have never heard the literal R version, nor do I expect to outside 4chan.
I think your characterisation of the right is just as unfair as Argos's characterisation of the left, but that both of these characterisations are pretty germane to the point at hand. If young people are out there hearing things like "the left believes that men need to be chased out of town" and "the right believes that women should be literally slaves" then it's no wonder that they're being polarised by sex.
I don't think it is "just as unfair", especially considering of the examples you chose, the "left" one is not a belief where anything even resembling it has serious support in any left-leaning area (I invite you to give me any similar counterexample), whereas "a wife must always obey her husband"[1] is in some archetypal conservative demographics[2] a near-universal belief, and one that is enforced by people with real social and political power. It's a common enough belief in practice even in less conservative demographics, too.
This is where the word "conservative" breaks into a kaleidoscope of traditions. Conservatives in different parts of the world (take the US, Hungary, and Saudi Arabia as just three examples) all oppose various aspects of "progress" toward a more cosmopolitan and secular world. But the underlying cultures that they seek to Conserve are very different. A "secularist progressive" might mean basically the same thing across continents, but a "conservative" means different things in different cultures, precisely because they are defending different cultures.
See also Scott's classic "how the West was Won" and his discussion of universal culture (secular-progressive) and its opponents.
If you think "conservative" is overly broad, try "liberal", or worse, "the left".
Regardless of isolated demands for rigor, the fact that "conservative" refers to many things misses (the charitable version of) the point OP was making, which is that the "left" and "right" are tainted by association with these extreme members. And in this specific case, women are justified in looking at conservatism's strong association with religious conservatives that at best view them as a second-class gender with little autonomy and at worst actively want to take away their rights... and thereby finding conservatism as a whole less attractive because of it.
There is a difference between "a wife must always obey her husband" and "the government should force a wife to obey her husband or let him force her to obey him". The latter are supported by very few people in any of the countries discussed in the post; the former without the latter is not really a *political* belief at all. And while devout Muslims are a significant conservative demographic globally, they have very little influence on the Western countries' right.
I would put it a bit more broadly and just say that it's about changes on the supply side, not the demand side. What the political parties are selling has changed.
A few decades ago the left-right split was a working class vs middle class split. For a variety of reasons, this has receded and instead the parties work to capture groups segregated by sex/race/religion/etc rather than by class.
Not sold on the hypothesis, but question is whether siblings "hang out." Personal experience says no. It's rare for siblings to hang out together socially, especially opposite sex.
Might help a little to throw age delta between siblings in, but probably not available?
they often LIVE together, but don't always "hang out" in the "have a motive to adopt similar political attitudes" sort of way. I would assume you see a "similar politics" effect from having the same parents/upbringing, but controlling for that, especially for similarly aged opposite sex siblings, that might drive them apart in adult political views, just from sibling antagonism.
That's fine, as long as they hang out with their siblings more often than people who literally have no siblings, there should still be a small effect.
I haven't considered the sibling antagonism angle. From anecdotal evidence and general vibes, it seems to me that people aren't politically polarized like rival siblings who understand and know exactly how to best hurt each other, but rather the two poles barely interact and don't understand each other at all.
Yep, certainly some effect, I just don't know if the differences would swamp it.
"general vibes, it seems to me that people aren't politically polarized like rival siblings who understand and know exactly how to best hurt each other,"
Uh, I kinda get exactly the opposite feeling? Especially among the cohort of right-trending young ~22yo males, I get the feeling that they are actually very aware of (at least the portions they find outrageous) the political viewpoints of left-trending similarly-aged females, and have actually indeed moved towards their own political views with an explicit mind to antagonize those who hold them (not just the same-age women), in a way that seems (to me anyway!) very similar to rival siblings! I presume the first "backlash" political effect was two monkey siblings arguing over which one mom-monkey liked best.
I mean, I'm old (OK, middle-aged), but passing through 90s late second-wave feminism, 2000s game, and 2010s #metoo has made me go from 'I'll vote for the best candidate regardless of their gender' back in the 90s to 'I' won't vote for a woman even if she could adequately fulfill her duties, because the sexes are natural enemies, and women's interests are opposed to mine'.
Though I'll make an exception for Nikki Haley, because Trump is insane.
- Siblings typically live together but may have large age gaps and may not socialize together.
- Neolocal residence has little or nothing to do with this? Country-specific culture could be relevant here, but that's just another reason to add some controls
- As my comment was about Scott's data, the other countries in the graph are only relevant if they are well represented therein.
I lived for more than 12 years with both male and female siblings. I have literally no idea what my female siblings were doing at least 99% of the time. I have very little idea what one of my male siblings was doing probably 90% of the time. I had maybe 50% an idea what the other male sibling was up to most of the time.
I don't think my experience was crazy, though it might have been a bit on the outlier side.
Modulo abuse or neglect, parenting seems to have little effect on development beyond, and I believe the consensus is mainly because, past a certain age, the amount of time spent away from parents dwarfs the time spent with parents. The same argument should apply to siblings.
I don't think it's rare for same-sex siblings to hang out socially, when they're close in age. Opposite-sex siblings, definitely rarer. Certainly not unheard of, but in a dataset that doesn't even isolate for closeness of age, I don't think it's unsurprising if there's no significant correlation, even in the case where hanging out with members of the opposite sex does tend to result in political convergence.
My personal experience says your personal experience is rare. My opposite-sex sibling and I hung out constantly in and around the house when we were little, less so in adolescence but that's to be expected (but we still did hang out). In later adolescence our friend groups overlapped significantly which entailed hanging out as part of a larger group quite often at school, parties, friends' houses, etc.
Am I the outlier here, or are you? Granted, we are very close together in age, which facilitated sharing a bedroom as little kids and ending up in the same social scene in high school.
Who knows? We're not going to find out by starting a survey in the blog comments. I'm just saying that there are some possible ways that the (dubious) claim by Paul is compatible with these findings.
Let's cut to the chase. IIRC "kids emulate their peers" is a well-established psychological phenomenon. Is there comparable support for siblings having a substantial influence over each others' behavior?
Lots of wild geese on the other side of that chase! There are endless studies of varying quality (mostly low, given the field) that will tell you myriad details of what is emulated at what phase of life by peers and siblings. If you're lucky they'll even attempt to control for gender!
Deciding whether the studies are looking at the same thing and attempting to compare measurements across them is enough work for a new study. We're currently in the comments section of a 300 word blog post debunking a twitter hypothesis without even a mention of controls.
Fairly straightforward explanation is that the left/right spectrum has become less about economic equality vs neoliberal economics, and more about "social justice" vs "traditional values". The "right" champions traditional gender roles (good for men), and the "left" champions egalitarianism (good for women/minorities).
If people follow their own interests selfishly, this is exactly what you would expect: more focus on gender roles between left and right leads to a harder gender split between left and right.
It was a million times better for men than women. Men could own property, vote, earn an income, etc. since as long as those things have been things. Not so for women. Traditionally, wives were hardly even people, unmarried women's only purpose was to find a husband, and married women's only purpose was to keep the house and incubate and raise children. It was a raw deal, and if you don't see that it was incredibly lopsided, I really don't know what to say.
As recently as about fifty years ago, "women are people" was still a radical statement.
I dunno, as a product of Pennsylvania coal/steel country, I think that's a bit simplistic. If you were to go back to like 1880 and tell the guys at Carnegie Steel who were shoveling coke for 16 hours a day at a 400 degree blast furnace that they were giving their wives a raw deal, you might get brained with a shovel.
No doubt that men and women were treated unequally, but that's not the whole story, because certain groups of men were treated very unequally as well depending on their age, background, education, ethnicity, social class, etc.
It really isn't simplistic. You're describing a bunch of people who were specifically oppressed by the capitalist society they lived in. Yay! We can always find some people more oppressed on some specific axis. Those coal miners/steel workers had it better than untouchables did in India at the time. It's not a competition, but you're really eliding a lot of what women would have faced in that environment. Domestic abuse including violence and murder, sexual harassment and sexual assault including rape, death in childbirth, unwanted pregnancy, and inability to earn a living without being supported by a man (which creates the breeding ground for many of the aforementioned issues, as well as loads some of the capitalist class-based oppression the men were facing onto the women, as well). To name a few.
Anyway, this has all been hashed out a million times, no real point hashing it out again. People have faced all different kinds of oppression, but if you're arguing that, ceteris paribus, women face less than men, you need to look around you.
I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that many different groups faced different kinds of constraints or exploitation or injustice, and gender is just one way to group people. Focusing only on one and ignoring all the others is reductive and simplistic.
Considering that men always were and still are the primary victims of war, with no end of this in sight I have a hard time believing men had it "a million times better". Ignoring this constant of death of suffering entirely seems incredibly based. They had it maybe slightly better, now depending on where you live (countries with conscription for males only) men might have it significantly worse. That's what I see when I look around.
Women have been *able* to do most of those things for a rather long time, in Western civilization and many others. And I think it was generally considered only a minor shift in gender roles when women got the vote, because "we are the ones who vote" was only a minor facet of male identity.
The difference is that women were not *required*, or even expected, to own property or earn an income or whatnot. And if you've got two groups of people, one told "get a job or starve!" and another told "here are some jobs you *can* have, but here's a non-job option you might like", then it's not quite so obvious that the first group is getting the better deal.
It seems particularly unlikely that men where getting "a million times better" deal.
I've heard from lawyers that I've asked, and other wealthy men, that prenups get thrown out a pretty high percentage of the time, and they're generally seen as not worth it in terms of asset protection in the event of divorce. What you really need now is a Trust rather than a prenup.
Having more male-only spaces in general, to balance out female-only spaces, seems like it would be beneficial for male socialization. But not in workspaces - gender nondiscrimination in employment seems pretty important.
Men and women are different and some of each can't use the others sexes strengths, Female bullying is truly awful even if men violence may have some more permanent and visible consequences we are fundamental all the same level cave man barely pretending to be non-animals; gossip and female led drama use rules that only some men can follow and play, in the same way not all girls can handle a fistfight.
Your not going to ban gossip from all the mean girls any more then your going to make all rough 6 1/2 foot tall men into knitters.
Some jobs need to be for the extremely menly men, who may not be capable of processing a female dominance game. Making 95% of jobs, have strict social rules, where sex jokes, arguments, or fist fights and etc are not ever tolerated; is to many.
And yes most people need spend their productive hours at a job that pays money, if you have a low tolerance, whatever the cause,for the other sex's social norms; are you suppose to medicate to barely cope or never work again?
If a female rape victim only looks for work at jobs where 90% of the people there are women, would you blink? Are there not men who were emotionally manipulated by women in ways you'd understand them to be a victim?
> ____ nondiscrimination in employment seems pretty important.
At this point id take open racism in employment, im pretty sure the game theory works out to be better for everyone then goodhearted metrics like interviews and degrees and zero feedback as to why your never hired.
If theres 2 jobs one from a black nationalist the other a white nationalist, and 2 candidates, one white, black; is the law making everyone need a bunch of debt getting a worthless piece of paper really the best solution here?
If theres to many racists running all the companies, rather then a law trying to limit their ability to pick who to hire, you'd be better off knowing thats a problem/opportunity and making healthy mixed race workspace, you know run by a nonracist who wants it to work
I'm a young man - I do think some extreme parts of traditional masculinity (e.g. being "too tough" to visit the doctor when it'd be prudent to do so) are poor, but overall it's much preferable to the desire leftists have to make basically... tell us it's okay/good to be weak? Encouraging us to cry, act effeminate in various ways ("gender exploration"), and be all emotional and essentially 'metrosexual'.
A particularly extreme case is found in "[theybies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theyby)" - children who are raised with they/them pronouns and not told they have a gender. The idea that there are boys and girls being raised as such - that I could've been raised as such, had I been born a decade or two later and to more left-wing parents - is quite abhorrent to me.
This post highlights a significant divide between the two camps.
Being "scared to cry" is not how us redpillers see it at all, in fact it's the same kind of feminist misattribution as a woman who says she doesn't get dates because she "intimidates men."
A man is no more "scared" to cry than he's "scared" to hand away his wallet to a stranger or be rude to his boss at work. Of course he could do it. It's just almost always a bad idea that won't help him in life.
The red pill uses a model of dimorphic humanity, where the sexes have to operate with different incentives and constraints to one another.
A woman who cries can expect sympathy and compassion with no long term consequences. A man doesn't get the same deal. Even when compassion is shown, it comes at a cost and the man's standing has changed in a woman's eyes.
If this story is accurate, then by encouraging your sons to cry and act effeminate, you will be significantly harming their future dating prospects. To the point that some would consider it abuse.
Well, red pill ideas have flourished and spread despite strong stigma and extremely concerted opposition from mainstream and left-leaning outlets.
Its main asset is that it is an incredibly pragmatic theory, focussing on doing what works, and it built its model by "field reports", entailing trial, error, feedback, and iteration.
Given the numbers of men who came in, got to grips with the ideas and found they worked, I think there's a clear answer to your questions about former incels and who's having success. No other ideology is so "data-driven", or as workmanlike in how it pursues its followers' best interests.
Also, I must apologise, from the way you write I had assumed you were a woman yourself.
Just so you know: I'm a woman, and most of them men who have been important to me have cried at some point. It did not lower my opinion of them in the slightest. In fact it made me feel extra close to them, and amped up my physical attraction to them for the rest of the day. I am not particularly politically liberal, and think raising kids as "theybies" is a terrible idea. So I'm not making a case for different politics -- just giving you a data point about how one actual woman feels about men crying.
I'd need a lot more context to make that fit into my model of the world.
Context like, what were they crying about? Was it done in public or just in front of you (and do you think you would feel the same way if it was in public?) And, how frequent is it/how easy does it come (and would you feel the same way if they cried more frequently and easily?)
I can make the physical attraction thing make sense to myself, in a sort of bundle-of-emotions, shared-intimacy, i-feel-maternal-and-needed kind of way. Does that ring true with how it feels subjectively for you?
> I'm in a very liberal environment and no one believes it is "ok to be weak"
Okay, it is true that they don't typically directly state it as such. But what else can one call the encouragement to do the things I listed thereafter? The crying, for instance. Crying is mainly done by babies, then less so children, then women, then least of all by men. And if you encounter a femboy or a transvestite, they do not exactly tend to be bodybuilders or dominant/assertive in a masculine way.
> I'm probably raising my children as theybies, because I want them to be as strong and independent as possible, and traditional gender roles are just a pipeline to behavior without independent thought
And confusing them as to what they are is going to lead to independent thought? It's not like boys and girls are just identical except to how they're raised - even baby male chimps prefer toys for boys - so why would one raise them as such?
If one raises a boy as a boy one generally gets a man. I'm unsure what one gets when one raises a boy as a... genderless being... (theybies are a relatively new thing - it'll be interesting to see how they turn out at 18) but presumably it'd involve a lot more (on average) gender dysphoria and effeminacy. It hardly seems ideal to have been turned into such an individual: transgenders tend to be quite suicidal, and one's dating prospects are probably quite diminished when one can't help but act as a genderless/highly-effeminate male - that's not exactly what girls are into.
> the idea that crying is a sign of weakness is growth limiting idea
But that's literally what crying is. No one will look at a crying person and think: "wow, they're so dominant/assertive/strong/tough," instead they will feel pity or perhaps think the individual is a bit pathetic (not necessarily pejoratively). It's a sign of "comfort me; I'm weak" used primarily by children.
> I think most men aren't too strong too cry, I think they're too scared to
Why not both? Sure, acting like a 'pussy'[1] is scary; as is acting in any other way that makes one ashamed of oneself and which incurs social penalties. The idea of publicly wetting oneself in fear over something stupid like a spider is scary - that does not mean we should start doing it[2].
> [men] shouldn't feel limited by societies judgements
"Should" or "should not", society will judge all the same. Generally the self will judge too - hence men do not want to act weak even in private.
> Don't you ever wonder about all the things you're closed off to because you're afraid to act effeminate?
Like engaging in various flavors of transvestism, lacking (psychological) strength, and being overemotional? No, can't say that appeals to me. If it did I would still avoid it however.
[1] What one cries over is obviously important here. Crying due to grief upon suffering a tremendous loss is very different from crying every other day over trivialities.
[2] One might say this analogy is imperfect because there's another reason to avoid wetting oneself: it's not very sanitary and you'll have to change your clothes. I think people care far more about the "I don't want others to see me having urinated myself"/"I don't want to be the kind of person who urinates themselves" parts than the "I don't want to have to change my clothes" part, so I think the analogy is good enough.
> I actually find this to be like super not true, and in fact the opposite. How often do you go to drag shows? Those folks are buff as shit. Do you know the muscles it takes to jump around and dance in heels?
So you’re saying even in a space that exists explicitly to be accepting of feminine males, in reality it’s dominated by the more masculine ones? That’s definitely not what I would’ve expected, but I’ve never been to a drag show.
Crying isn't about the actual physical act of crying. It's just an external manifestation of a general ability to regulate emotions.
The ability to regulate emotions is an unalloyed good. It's no good if you're hyperventilating every time the situation is stressful, or punching someone every time you're upset, or crying every time things don't go your way. These are the reactions of a child, but they're not acceptable in someone to whom actual responsibility is going to be added -- if there's an emergency on my plane then I want my pilot focused on fixing it, not crying.
Crying is perfectly appropriate in some circumstances, even for men.
I don't know how it pans out in aggregate and among the rank and file, but American male conservative politicians seem to "get emotional" all the time.
Personally, and from the leftist perspective, I find myself agreeing with the right-wing takes that crying is useless. I just wouldn't make a gender-based distinction on the matter.
According to accounts by people I've known, also written accounts, women who are taking hormones to transition to maleness begin to find it much harder to cry, whether alone or in public. They also describe experiencing anger in a different way -- there's more of a component of craving to attack the person they're angry at physically. Crying is less acceptable for men, but it may be less acceptable because fewer can do it so fewer do. It makes male crying kind of anomalous.
Yeah, but upright posture and lack of fur and a tail aren't destiny either. From about ages 4-7 I had an imaginary companion who was a child tiger. I really believed she existed, and sometimes instead of having her as a companion I was her. My parents accepted this cheerfully and played along, but they did not ask me if I felt I was meant to live in the jungle, and offer to pack me a lunch of a dead rabbit and take me out into the local woods, to try running around naked and snarling -- or tell me it might be possible to find a zoo to live in.
I'm female, but as I kid, after my tiger phase, I also at different times was sure I wanted to be a fireman. Also wanted to go to West Point and become a soldier (at the time I don't think West Point took women -- in any case, I assumed it did not). My parents seemed startled but also sort of impressed. Nobody asked me if I felt like I was really a boy. I think I would have been confused and disturbed by the question. What I wanted was to be a fireman or a soldier. Yeah, I thought of them as male occupations, but it was the occupations that attracted me, not the gender of the people in the roles.
So I grew up to be a mildly bisexual woman. I lost interest in macho jobs when I became interested in intellectual things, and daydreamed about being a novelist or a philosopher. I think I look and dress more femmy than the average woman, but think and talk in a blunter, more assertive, more masculine way. I am grateful my parents were respectful of my childhood ideas about who I was, but also that they did not take them too literally and get all intrusive and weird by telling me some people with a girl body are actually boys inside and asking whether I thought I was one of those.
If you enjoy and are respectful all your kids' phases, they will figure out on their own in what ways they are masculine and in what ways feminine. If one of them has some serious gender dysphoria going on they will tell you, and you can take it from there.
I have glanced at Calvin and Hobbes a couple times, but really don't have a sense of what it's like. What would it mean to have a Calvin and Hobbes childhood?
There are several possible reasons for how much one cries, such as:
* hormones; basically how easily the physiological reaction is triggered by mental activity;
* awareness of your emotions, or maybe alexithymia;
* beliefs about whether it is proper to cry, and what it "means" about you when you cry;
* the reaction you expect to get, based on your previous experience.
The popular stereotype about men is that they do not cry because they believe that it would be improper (here the conservatives would say that this belief is indeed correct, and the liberals would call the belief sexist)... and also because they are not in contact with their emotions, mostly as a result of lack of practice.
Red pill puts an emphasis to the experience. You get more of the behavior that is rewarded, and less of the behavior that is punished. Heterosexual men are typically punished for displaying weakness, as it makes them less attractive even in the eyes of those women who on the ideological level approve of that.
Some trans people mention that taking hormones dramatically changed their frequency of crying.
So I guess it is a bit of all.
Speaking for myself (a man), I rarely feel an impulse to cry, and I prefer to cry when I am alone because it indeed is socially punished. I have zero prejudice about what that "means" about me, but from the outside it probably still seems like the stereotypical male behavior.
The idea that showing the slightest signs of vulnerability or abnormality is a sign of "weakness" is just... such a suffocating worldview. No wonder all these conservatives seem so miserable and resentful. Having to live in constant fear of failure and social alienation and death... It doesn't have to be this way.
It kinda does have to be that way. Men expect other men to maintain a certain threshold level of normalcy and stability, and if you fall below it other men will consider you unreliable and/or a weirdo. In either case, you'll get kicked out of Normieville, or if forced to keep dealing with you they'll resent you as someone who can't pull their weight. The ways in which you are allowed to deviate can certainly fluctuate across the years, (you can be gay and treated as a normie by most dudes now as long as you keep the kinksters out of your pride parade) but there's always a limited range and male socialization is brutal during teenage years to those who step outside of it.
Your interpretation of conservative views on vulnerability as weakness is alien to conservative framing of the issue. That is a leftist simulacrum of a conservative view (which reads as mind reading to me… ) … which is maybe the topic at hand after all.
>the desire leftists have to make basically... tell us it's okay/good to be weak? Encouraging us to cry, act effeminate in various ways ("gender exploration"), and be all emotional and essentially 'metrosexual'.
This is a bizarre stereotype. Or, rather, attributing the acknowledgement of human frailty and the existence of emotions or a lax attitude toward gender norms to "leftists" rather than to educated 21st century Westerners in general is bizarre.
I can sort of see how this political coding comes about, though, at least in the United States where male right-wingers often adopt as protective coloration a cartoonish version of "traditional" masculinity as filtered through 20th century junk pop culture--men don't cry, men don't communicate, men don't introspect, men do sport, men eat borger, etc. With that as a backdrop, it's understandable (but still weird and out of touch with reality) that someone ensconced in that world might assume that any other kind of behavior from men must be part of The Leftist Agenda.
I'm discarding your last sentence on the assumption that you're being facetious...but the rest of your claims, while reading like ad copy for a drugstore spray deodorant, are not terribly outlandish. In fact, I might even agree with a weak version of them, with appropriate qualifications.
Still, I wonder: were you trying to shed some light on the point I was making about the very strong claims of the person I was responding to ("leftists" desire to make men weak; weakness = having or showing basic human emotions)?
I’m just saying what I believe to be true. Being unafraid to express emotions is not weak, it’s strong, but being easily overwhelmed by emotions is not manly. It’s an important distinction. I don’t really care if you’re left wing or right wing. I think the original commenter was saying “the left encourages men to be weak” which probably has a grain of truth but it’s too broad a statement to be taken seriously
I mean, I don't really believe in gender roles. I used to cry a lot when I was younger, liked books instead of sports, and in general think people should be able to do what they want. Theybie, whatever, wear a dress if you like, this is America, or at least used to be.
But I'll take the stupid 'tough guy' right any day over the crawling, submissive, 'yes everything is my fault and I'm happy to step aside for you queen' the left wants me to be. I used to hate the jocks until I realized the feminists hated me even more. The jocks are happy to have me run the numbers--the feminists want me to be their cringing slave.
I'm not sure how descriptive the labels left/right liberal/conservative are. For example where would a preference for free speech fall on the right/left spectrum? Or a belief in meritocracy vs. equity (is that even a binary? Is meritocracy a traditional value?)?
Add to that the problem that some people don't believe in male/female as binary categories either.
It's become right-coded, but plenty of people just mildly to the right of center still support free speech, if only because the left has most of the organs of communication.
Idk, my brother has been passed over for multiple jobs because he is a white male (this is specifically what they told him, nothing to do with his qualifications.) my subjective sense is that lots of people on the left think that you should hire the less qualified minority
There is literally no evidence of this happening at a large scale to the point it meaningfully explains variance in outcomes between blacks and whites.
The average blsck college graduate has poorer literacy and numeracy skills, and IQ, than the average white high school graduate. The same is true for black graduate degree holders vs white college drop-outs.
In a meritocracy, black people are going to be less successful than white people (in cognitively demanding fields) because they're simply not as smart as white people. DEI advocates do not accept this and will find any excuse to justify giving an advantage to the less capable minority candidate.
Literally no DEI program ever has sought out to prove that minority candidates in a given situation are more capable. The most they'll do is say that the black candidate is more "qualified" by having more college education or something, but again, this is meaningless because affirmative action means white college grads are significantly smarter than black ones, even when they have less college education.
And the most common argument of all made by DEI people is that DIVERSITY itself (you know, the D part?) Is important in and of itself. If it were anti-discrimination, it would be called antidiscrimination. But rhey don't want anti-discriminstion, they want DIVERSITY, period. A perfectly meritocratic state of affairs could be a very undiverse one, but this is inherently unacceptable for people who value diversity in and of itself.
Also, it lizard brain when white men hire Indian women or Chinese men? These types of people are more successful on average. Oh that's right, you have some convoluted theory wherein brown skinned Indian people have "white privilege", right?
There's more nuance indeed - or why your "DEI is all about ensuring that decisions are based on a meritocracy" is perhaps too strong a statement:)
Too many times, the term is used to describe choosing a candidate from a limited pool - typically a minority or even an intersection of minorities. And these minorities can be expected to produce fewer exceptional candidates - saying this as a factual, not a normative statement.
Now you can say "yes, this is because of generations of oppression and lack of opportunity!" and you may well be right. But there's a difference between engaging in development and encouragement of talent and choosing a likely-to-be-less-qualified candidate right here right now.
Note that you spoke of "within companies". Yes. Companies do care about the bottom line. Universities - much less so, to give an obvious example. If the term "DEI" is more likely to be used in a way that correlates with merit when profit is on the line, shouldn't we conclude that it means less merit when used in other ways?
Also, even in companies, if DEI is simply equivalent to "good hiring practices", then a. are we sure we need all these extra departments and rules for it? b. is it a miraculous coincidence that there has been a wave of industry pushback against it, the moment this became socially viable?
I didn't "define" DEI as "anti-meritocratic", DEI is just aiming at something other than merit and attempting to optimize two different things at a time means tradeoffs.
Here's a simple example: it's common for children to follow after their children in terms of occupations. These parents give their children a leg up not just in unfair ways of an old-boys hiring network but also in helping them to actually be good at their job. A meritocratic hiring system that just hires the people most suited for the job will thus hire lots of people with such advantages. If you think the status quo is lacking and not diverse enough, then you will want to hire people without such advantages.
You have engaged in argument over the definition of DEI. Different people may have different experiences with the term and may drawn varying fuzzy boundaries around the term. We may further agree or disagree with each other over those boundaries. But, the disagreement is over a social convention - it is grammatical in nature.
You keep posting an idea of the left that doesn't match at all what everyone else experiences.. Where on earth do you live? Every DEI program ever has explicitly and openly opposed the idea of merit, they think it doesn't exist and are happy to argue that in public!
I would like to hear your answer to his question about where you live. And what you do for work, and what news/media/entertainment you and your friends consume. Etc.
You are quite clearly in a very different bubble to the rest of us and this might be our only point of contact with it.
You got a pretty thick bubble you're stuck in, sorry to say. If meritocracy and diversity were goals that never conflicted, you wouldn't hear people obsessing about the latter, but that never happens.
Yeah, see this is a reasonable perspective, it's just that this crazy Mikker dude is arguing that DEI is *the same* as selecting people based on their merit, which is wild! And 50 people so far have told him he's wrong, and there are no signs of it sinking in!
DEI is about more minorities being hired/promoted *period*. To DEI advocates, there's literally never a valid reason not to hire more minorities.
The fact that e.g. black people are under-represented in X field/comapny/job level is not evidence of discrimination at all. But DEI advocates will never, ever accept this and meritocracy to them means hiring equal proportions of all groups (or less than equal hiring of white men)
And by "preserving existing power structures", what you really mean is "hiring based on ability instead if demographics", which is meritocracy. The fact that straight white men benefit from this is because they're smarter and more competent than certain other groups, and anyone who doubts this has a pool of cheap, supposedly competent but neglected black labor to hire from and outcompete "racist" companies. In reality, companies are falling over themselves to hire any competent black people they can find, and the single reason they don't hire more is because the smart ones are already hired.
Which ultimately comes back to my first point, that DEI advocates hate genuine meritocracy because their in group cannot compete on the basis of genuine ability.
Out of curiosity, do you live in North America? Maybe things are different in other parts of the world, but where I am, the faction that supports DEI actively mocks any use of the word "meritocratic".
Never mind, I didn't see how many people had already responded, and I don't want to pile on.
I was actually thinking about responding in your conversation with rebelcredential above, saying that I absolutely understand what you want out of a conversation where the other person is willing to be introspective and potentially change their mind. But as I was composing in my head, I was also reading onward, and this popped up, and I couldn't believe what you were saying. **shrug** It sounds like you do live in the USA, so my next guess would be that you live in a locally deep red area where things like DEI may still be useful correctives. But eh, you're probably sick of this conversation.
I object to Mikker's characterisation of me by the way. Both he and I talk from our own perspectives. I at the very least often try to clarify what "side" I'm speaking for when I do.
That guy only started attacking my "introspection" when I didn't let him gracefully duck out of the dialogue, and he only tried to do that when I didn't let him ignore the things he was trying to ignore.
I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that someone standing on a completely different paradigm might make claims that seem ridiculous or even downright trollish, and the task of getting a full picture of their worldview is all the more important for that.
Yep. Even in the deepest recesses of "DEI done right" people will notice how awfully it's implemented in the other 95% of the country. You can't be as ignorant of DEI's "failings" (aka, its actual point and goal) as the weasel is.
Many leftists start with the assumption that humans are 0% nature and 100% nurture. If you accept this axiom, then whatever happens to you is a combination of "fair" and "unfair" factors, and if you remove all the unfair factors, whatever remains will be the perfect meritocracy.
As a corollary, whenever you see something that doesn't seem like perfect meritocracy, it means there is still some unfairness left. What does perfect meritocracy seem like? Well, for the species that is 0% nature and 100% nature, it would seem like a randomly selected sample of a population. So, whenever you see a group of people who don't resemble the randomly selected sample of a population (for example some sex or ethnicity is over-represented), there is clearly some unfairness (sexism or racism) that needs to be fixed.
So far it was simple -- there was absolutely no tension between meritocracy / fairness / equality -- the same politics can achieve all of them at the same time.
Things get more complicated when you drop the 0% nature assumption, and admit that people actually differ in abilities and in preferences significantly. Suddenly, you have to choose you values. Even if you removed all the unfairness in the society, some people would still get better results based on having better abilities. Would you rather have the people with more profitable skills and preferences on the top, or keep everyone equal?
Some leftists choose equality. From their perspective, getting better genes is the same dumb luck as getting rich parents -- neither of that means that you "deserve" to live in poverty.
Some leftists choose meritocracy. Not sure if I can represent their attitude fairly, but I get the impression that some degree of Darwinian struggle is okay for them, as long as it represents qualities in the individual, as opposed to the circumstances of their birth (such as social class, parental wealth, parental care).
But most leftists seem to choose... to deny the nature. ("IQ is a myth." "Boys and girls having different preferences is a myth.") It keeps the uncomfortable choice away.
Regardless of how descriptive they are for free speech or meritocracy, they're very descriptive for social justice issues. Ask 100 self-identified leftists and conservatives if they think men have male privilege or if the USA is a white supremacist country. You'll get a very different set of answers.
When I was growing up, free speech was a left-wing preference, attacked from the (mostly religious) right; today it is a right-wing preference, attacked from the (mostly progressive) left.
The lesson I learned from this is that principle is dead. Or more specifically, was never alive.
My favorite example along these lines came whilst serving as a pollworker: an elderly woman asked my help to do her voting. It was one of those years they didn't have much to write about I guess so they had declared it to be the "Year of the Woman" election-wise. I'm pretty sure we've had more than one Year of the Woman, but maybe they really had gone out of their way to recruit women candidates. Seemed to me like it was already mostly women, but I guess I was mistaken. She wanted to vote for "the woman" in each race (a couple dozen at least). Her vision wasn't so good, I can't remember. Anyway, we went through the list one by one, me reading out the names and her selecting the woman, if there was one, which there was in nearly all races, sometimes both candidates were women - and I don't remember what she did about that conundrum. Sometimes there were foreign names whose gender she wasn't sure about; but she made her choices, I think generally correctly. But in one instance, it so happened that the male candidate had a strangely female name, and the female candidate had a guy's name. (I for some reason intuited this.) I guess I failed my stupid civic duty because I didn't utter a word as she voted for the man.
I related this anecdote to my husband that night.
"Damn" he replied, though grinning. He had of course voted in an opposite manner to the old woman, and gotten tripped up on the selfsame race. Chatter about "the Year of the Woman" could not have had any other effect on him, than straight-ticket (gender) voting.
Ah, got it. I can't imagine viewing voting in that light. And of course, if a modern-day T.R. showed up, as a woman this time - he'd vote for her of course. Whether such a combination would be possible, is another question.
I mean, she wouldn't do the macho thing. Conservative women do run for office, and they talk about their families, their faith, and their records running businesses if they have one.
People vote for people for all kinds of reasons. As for the party, they are very sensitive to demographics as it's one of the few variables that reliably predicts voting. A big part of the 'Great Replacement' business is that minorities are more likely to vote Democrat than whites are, which means the Democrats want to increase immigration (which means nonwhites, since since most whites are in rich countries and don't want to give up their health insurance, and poor areas like Eastern Europe try to get into Western Europe which is closer), and the Republicans don't.
People who support traditional gender roles do not think they're "good for men", they think they're good for everyone and society, it's just that the current state of affairs and those which the left support are actively bad for men.
On the other hand, the left today is much more straightforwardly advocating for group interests, in the form of either race nationalism or gender "nationalism" (i.e. feminism), often explicitly at the expense of men, especially white men. Maybe they think in some roundabout way this makes society as a whole better, but its not in the way that men are going to be happier in the next few decades if the left really gets what they want. The more extreme elements of the left actually want things to be worse for white men, or for white men not to exist at all.
1. Divide society based on arbitrary categories of race, gender, and sexuality. Embrace victimhood. Encourage groups to resent those more successful than they are and drag them down
What, if you're the left-leaning party? A majority of the population in the USA is something other than a straight white man. If they're convinced they're oppressed, they're more likely to vote for you.
Theoretically the socialist government will not discriminate and thus everyone will be equal. There's a few tens of millions of Chinese and Russian corpses who might testify there are some problems with that, but they can't talk.
No, they think society is unequal and they need to correct that. All inequalities are the result of oppression so...
Also, I think while the older batch of conservatives may have actually believed the old ways were best for everyone, there's a younger batch that's actually seeing themselves as representing male interests. (Well, what did you expect would happen?)
My vibes say: women used to assimilate into a relatively narrow mass culture controlled by men. Now there are so many more drivers of mass culture who are women, so the assimilation is less pronounced. This explains why the political attitude shift is so much stronger for women than for men.
No one cares what their siblings think. But peers that you're attracted to? You care what those people think, and might be willing to listen to their position / change your own in that scenario.
I've heard that since feminism started its spread throughout South Korea, it has started to receive pretty big backlash. So I'm very much inclined to believe that the graph that looks like a nose-dive is picking up on something.
South Korea has the additional factor that men have to serve in the army and women don't, so it puts them at a disadvantage for jobs (they still wind up filling the top roles in the end but the average guy sees an effect against him and acts accordingly).
Women are similarly disadvantage from motherhood. It would be interesting to see if one could design a society where these disadvantages were socially and economically equated, and what that would entail, eg. would mandatory military service for X years entail mandatory child rearing for X years?
I mean, they used to have mandatory military service, but the men didn't have to compete with the women in the job market.
Also many more men will want to avoid military service than women will want to avoid childrearing. Childrearing doesn't usually get you killed (nowadays--you used to die quite a bit giving birth to it).
Most mandatory military service won't get you killed either. What are the odds of dying in Italy or Switzerland's mandatory military service?
All across Asia and western countries, more and more women are opting against motherhood. Most men being part of the common defense used to be standard, just like most women becoming mothers used to be standard, but these standards depend very much on environment. Just like we've eliminated the expectation of men inevitably stepping up for the common defense, birth control has also eliminated the expectation of children from people's inevitable sexual dalliances, and we further disincentivize parenthood with a lack of support and economic penalties.
Something that’s not clear to me from that chart is whether it’s measuring the beliefs held by women/men, or just which group they say they belong to. I would be interested to know if the differences hold for particular policy positions. It seems plausible that men might be more likely to say they are conservative while holding many liberal beliefs, or for women to say they are liberal while holding many conservative beliefs.
I was thinking about this too. If you follow the link at the very bottom to Ryan Burge refuting the original tweet with a different data set, according to him the gap has held pretty constant over the last several years, though it still concludes that women are more liberal than men on average.
What does it mean for someone to be a “certain percent” liberal or conservative? Is it likelihood of voting in a certain way, or broken down by actual beliefs held? Can you factor in the survey responder’s vehemence on a particular issue (they have only one conservative value, say, but it’s so important to them that it sways their voting patterns) or their reasoning (someone could oppose a self-id bathroom bill on conservative or feminist grounds, so the fact of the opposition doesn’t necessarily indicate the left- or rightness of their belief).
Hi! First time commenting. The best explanation for your troubles replicating the graph might have to do with the original graph itself. Noah smith has a good investigation: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-things-d7e (see number 2). One problem is that the graph seems to switch between two datasets at some point, and the divergence doesn't replicate in a lot of other datasets. So it might just not be a very large effect. Also, if we are sold on there being a lot more far left women than men, it is good to remember that in the context of normal distributions, small differences in means can lead to large differences in extremes.
But I think there's a ton of uncertainty around this question (how many people under thirty really know much about their own political ideology?), and this graph doesn't seem to shed a whole lot of valuable light.
As a point of reference, what is your definition for "gender"?
The problem is that pretty much every last man, woman, and otherkin has their own idiosyncratic and often contradictory definitions for the term. My efforts to put the concept on a more scientific footing:
Are chromosomes not good enough for these sorts of things? Yes, obviously trans people and even more niche cases like androgen insensitivity exist, but they're going to be such a small minority that it won't skew the data that much.
Generally speaking and to first approximation, the most coherent definition for gender is as a range of sexually dimorphic personality traits, types, behaviours, and roles. It is an entirely different kettle of fish from sex.
And sex is, by definition, ONLY the ability to produce sperm or ova, those unable to produce either being thereby sexless. No reputable biologist defines the sexes in the basis of chromosomes because many species have sex chromosomes other than X and Y, and in many species there's no genotypical difference between males and females, sex being determined by other factors in the environment -- alligators and clownfish in particular.
You might take a look at my post. "Gender" is, by that formulation, a range of traits -- both physical and psychological, a spectrum of them, that are manifested to varying degrees.
Which justifies a two dimensional gender spectrum. For example, agreeableness -- women generally more agreeable than men, whence a "feminine gender".
But sometimes the physical differences are more important than the psychological, and vice versa.
And we've "always" thought that the earth was 6000 years old and at the center of the universe ... 🙄
Too many people seem to "think" that definitions qualify as gospel truth, that Moses brought the first dictionary down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z.
There ARE sound reasons to DEFINE gender to refer ONLY to sexually dimorphic personality traits, at least to a first approximation.
Sure, the way clownfish work is weird, but we are not clownfish. In humans, under normal circumstances, a gene within the Y chromosome is solely responsible for making people male. If we had an easy way of objectively measuring whatever the hell gender is, we could do that, but we can't. On the other hand, we can easily check sex chromosomes, and sex chromosomes are very heavily correlated with sex and gender in humans. It's not perfect, but we have to draw the line somewhere if we want to study differences between the sexes.
"correlation is not causation" ... nor even a stipulation of what are the defining variables for a category, only a suggestion of proxy variables -- useful, but "problematic". Not all vagina-havers are females -- prepubescent girls, menopausees, and CAIS being notable exceptions.
wait, are you saying that prepubescent girls are *not* female? That's a very weird take.
Regardless of your weird edge cases elsewhere in the thread (like clownfish), sex is defined by which gametes an organism can potentially produce according to its phenotype. A male who has had his testicles removed is still male.
Yep. That IS the logical consequence of standard biological definitions for the sexes, those "promulgated" in reputable biological journals, dictionaries, and encyclopedias all across the land. See:
There is absolutely diddly-squat in any of those definitions about "potentially produce"; they're all about "produces gametes", present tense. For example, see the Glossary from the first article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction:
MHR: "Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
That that definition leads to "sexless" in the absence of functional gonads, see this recent article in the Wiley Online Library:
Wiley: "A widespread misconception among philosophers, biomedical scientists and gender theorists – and now also among some authors and editors of influential science journals – is that the definition of the biological sex is based on chromosomes, genes, hormones, vulvas, or penises, etc. .... Another reason for the wide-spread misconception about the biological sex is the notion that it is a condition, while in reality it may be a life-history stage.[33] For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
From zygote, to embryo, to fetus, to the onset of puberty, none of us are or were "reproductively competent" -- we are not or were not yet male or female; we are or were sexless. If that's the case then it's simply incoherent, and quite unscientific, to insist that we are all either male or female right from conception to death.
As far as I can tell, gender comes down to Bateman's principle. I.e. women bear the biological costs of reproduction, and therefore have different behavioral incentives. How that cashes-out varies by culture, of course. Though there are patterns.
But "patterns", indeed. ICYMI, fairly illuminating article on the topic over at 4thWaveNow, the graph of the joint probability distribution in particular:
I honestly don't know what the graph is supposed to prove to me.
Yes, there's overlap. No, social norms operate on network effects and therefore do not perfectly account for variance. Or did you mean to imply something else?
Did you read the text at the bottom of the graph? That say, for example, "This male will be more female-like than most males, AND the majority of females".
Part and parcel of "gender non-conforming" and of butchering autistic and dysphoric children so their genitalia more closely resemble those of the other sex. Think the whole point of the article is that atypical personality traits, or those more typical of the other sex, does not at all justify any rather odious assertions about "born in the wrong body".
THAT is the reason for being clear about the difference between sex and gender, a distinction that Scott seems blind to or is inadvertently obscuring or muddying.
Oof. I mean, that definitely skews the results quite a bit. All the arguments about gender aside, there is definitely going to be a difference psychologically depending on whether someone grew up identified as male or female, mostly due to differences in environment. Hormones affect psychology as well, but Scott never asked the trans people if they were doing HRT or not...
I guess this all ties into Steersman's point that we need a better model for gender/sex/whatever it is that we're trying to compare between the population.
One horizontal axis is three of the "Big Five" personality traits, subcategorized by sex, and the other horizontal axis is the trait values. For instance, agreeableness has a range of 1 to 5 according to a JPEG I had uploaded to Wikimedia ages ago:
Women are generally more agreeable than men -- means of, say, 4.2 and 3.8 respectively. But some men are, in fact, more agreeable than some women -- "gender non-conformance" writ large.
Mostly what I was worried about is that I expect trans people skew to the left, for reasons that have nothing to do with their siblings. So if there are a disproportionate number of them in the data set (relative to whatever other data sets were studied), that might make the effect appear smaller than it would otherwise.
If there were other groups with a similar effect, I'd suggest removing them, too, but none jumped to mind. Like, if 1/8th of the men here had been MeToo'd, I'd expect that would shift those men solidly to the right, in ways that were completely unrelated to their siblings.
Do you also oppose research on curing baldness because who knows how many hairs are needed to not being bald? Or maybe it's all about the reflectiveness of the uncovered scalp...
Not all we do is formal math, and the existence of edge cases shouldn't stop us from using categories that are useful for society-level thinking. Which is distinct from sympathy to individual edge cases, to be clear.
I'm not "opposing any research". I'm just pointing to some rather sloppy uses of the categories of sex and gender.
“If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms.” How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.” — Will Durant
We're not talking in the abstract. Would you, in fact, struggle to classify at least 95% (more like 99% but let's be generous. A quick google search says that transgenders are 0.6% of people above age 13) of people into "men" or "women" based on a combination of a few basic observations, self-identification and chromosomes in a way that would be extremely likely to be consistent with what a thousand random people would decide as well?
If the answer is that you wouldn't struggle with this task (as it should be), then these categories are useful enough to go on with, *in this specific context*. Attempts to increase complexity at the expense of clarity do not, in fact, contribute. This is simply a misplaced attempt at rigor - and not at all an obviously harmless one.
Voltaire and Durant were not actual logicians engaged in formally rigorous thinking. One thing you learn when you actually do math is that definitions can be good or bad depending on their usefulness (and thus get routinely, and productively, overlooked or deliberately abused). Frequently they cloud an issue, when used inappropriately. Certainly when overused they slow you down - or do you, when speaking of your weight, always pause for a discussion about how it's only correct on Earth under certain conditions? And again, we're not even doing math.
To return to the object level - do you actually believe that whatever the verdict is regarding this particular topic of political divergence would be changed by any distinction you propose? Like, assuming this finding replicates at all, would you expect any more careful definition to substantially change our world-view? Is there the slightest of indications this particular sharpening (if it is a sharpening at all) is in any way germane to the actual discussion? That the sloppiness you see (real or purported) matters?
Of course this is likely to skew the results *for Scott's survey*, not for the phenomenon in question. Unless you're going to argue that 1/8 is representative of the population. This is simply "oh, here's why Scott's data is less relevant to the question than one might have thought". Note how just saying "more transgenders than typical in the population" communicates this idea without the need to spill oceans of ink.
If you sample heavily from known outliers (As ACT data is known to be, in some senses), then your results might suffer - you'd get the same experience if you'd ask about about polyamory or knowledge of Icelandic sagas or whatever other way ACT is unusual. This is not because we need a better definition of "Iceland".
Scott's question is "Does Gender Integration Moderate Politics?"
But you're using statistical surveys to describe that "phenomenon in question" so of course both your skewed data AND the poorly defined categories for "binning the results" are going to preclude answering that question.
I haven't checked, but I'd guess that these surveys are self reported on gender. Are you suggesting that the survey doesn't tell us anything because every person who responds has their own definition of gender, and so their self reporting is useless?
If there are no objective correlates or criteria for membership in particular gender categories then "useless" is certainly a possibility. What "gender" is a transwoman?
Many people think sex and gender are the same, but some reason to argue -- as I and many others have done -- that they're entirely different kettles of fish. If not species from different phyla -- petunias and aardvarks.
Certainly, but as an empirical matter, trans folks are enough of a numerical minority that they wouldn't explain the observed difference. i.e. even if you counted only cis people the effect would still show up.
Many scientific journals are explicitly calling for the use of sex -- NOT gender -- as criteria for characterizing various populations, simply because gender is, at best, a rather poorly defined and vague, if not unscientific, spectrum of sexually dimorphic personality traits.
Some reason to argue or suggest, as I have done, that "gender", as a system of categorization, is only marginally better than phrenology or astrology. Or the Myers-Briggs Type System which some have reasonably called pseudoscience and no better than a Chinese fortune cookie.
I don't really disagree, I'm just not sure how it's relevant to discussion of this study/effect?
Though I also think that's a needlessly negative framing — implying that we should just stop doing gender because it's made-up, as it were. Lots of human behaviours and categorisations are wooly social constructs. I don't see why it's more "unscientific" to identify as a particular gender than as a member of a particular philosophical movement, subculture, political group, etc. That seems a better comparison than phrenology or the like. (Of course, some overly dogmatic assertions about what gender is could still be pseudo-science, in much the same way that a theory of political affiliation or fashion style as a specific biological feature of people's brains might be pseudo-science.)
I mean, I'm mostly trying to figure out what you think about the actual subject of the post, this survey. What I'm hearing is that its worthless because the thing its describing doesn't represent anything real. Is that right?
I wouldn't say it's "worthless", but "Moon Moth" above has just argued that some 1/8th of the "women" who responded to Scott's survey -- as women -- are in fact transwomen:
But I'm not saying, as you're apparently suggesting, that "gender doesn't represent anything real". I'm just pointing out that it's an imprecisely defined category or set of criteria, and that it MIGHT be possible to put the concept on a more scientific footing.
And that really should be Job One -- as an old Ford commercial once put it. 🙂 The "actual subject of the survey and post" is then somewhat secondary.
It depends on who "people" is. Do you imagine I care more about what someone who puts "political scientist" in quotation marks in the above sentence has to say?
This is great stuff, I'm mildly embarrassed I didn't think to bounce it off the ACX survey before now. Obv plenty of ways to make it more rigorous, but a good tool for a first gut-check.
Siblings would be a problematic way to judge this on its own terms. Much of the segregation-to-radicalization claims in Korea carry the implication that decreasing intersexual socialization *while the other is the object of each's sexual desire* makes the alien gender (and critiques of their gender-culture) a natural scapegoat for personal frustrations and discontent.
But the sexes were far more segregated hundreds of years ago, and I don't think there was any noticable political polarization between the them. Though, women weren't allowed much agency back then in the first place...
I'm not sure who would try or how they could succeed in determining polarization when women couldn't vote. No exit polls or similar mechanism, and no reason to court their votes specifically.
My intuition is that women had extremely different political views than men. See: Suffragettes and the Temperance movement.
I think siblings are just too early to make a difference one way or the other. A lot of the """development""" of political beliefs happens in College, when kids are separated from family/siblings for the first extended period of time. I don't think this proves or disproves the hypothesis
Most people don't go to college, and most of those who do don't go to 4 year residential colleges. If this survey has a meaningful sample, college will only impact a relatively small number of the people who responded.
Furthermore, young women are currently much more likely than young men to attend college:
'Men represent only 42% of students ages 18 to 24 at four-year schools, down from 47% in 2011. '
Could this not be a big part of the story? College is associated with extremely left-wing political views, and it is increasingly also associated with women instead of men. There's bound to be a significant spillover effect: if 57% of zoomers are college students or graduates, and 60% of these are women, and if women are much more likely than their male peers to cluster in academic fields that lean left (sociology vs. electrical engineering, let's say), then surely there's a significant spillover of left/right attitudes to those men and women who don't fall within those categories due to peer social effects, etc.
This is silly. You don't go to college as a blank slate, and college selects for liberalism in the first place. I became less liberal during college, not because college isn't a liberal dominated environment, but because I came into college ideologically very different to most other people.
Does anyone have the survey question used for lib/conservative in the cooperative election study?
I run across a decent amount of young self identified liberals who will call themselves right wing, but not conservative; and vote GOP only as a matter of contempt for the other side.
it can also be a barometer only of how "right" or "left" leaning one is on the current question one cares most about. Most democracies aren't as bipolar as the US so people have additional choices that might more closely reflect their political views, at some point the right/left labeling becomes pretty useless.
I don't think that different media is the proposed mechanism. I think the proposed mechanism is that they're at home consuming media instead of spending time with each other.
It seems reasonable that siblings might not be moderating. You might only moderate your views for people you view as a romantic prospect, or siblings may simply not “hang out” in such a way that moderates views.
I personally think Graham’s theory is debatable and probably wrong but not for the reasons given here
"It just suggests it doesn’t extend to siblings. Which would, admittedly, be weird."
But why? Relationships with opposite-sex siblings are different across the metric of "how likely I am to adopt their political views" than social ones with peers. I had a younger (3 years) sister, we were pretty antagonistic as kids. I often adopted positions (it is morally just that I get to watch the TV right now) purely in opposition to her. We have relatively similar politics now, as 39 and 42 year old adults, but 25 years ago if she believed X, there would've been at least a small movement for me to believe not-X.
- Does the survey data show the general trend in the chart that young women are more left than young men, and that this hasn't always been the case? From a quick analysis I did it seems like this is the case. Young men are more left-leaning than older men in the sample but young women are still much more left-leaning
- Your stats are for the whole survey group not just the young people. However, I redid the analysis (again quickly) on only the 30 and younger respondents and you still don't reject the null with much confidence
Again my analysis was done rather quickly so it's possible I made mistakes.
This gender gap seems like exactly the kind of clickbaity result that would get spread around by journalists and social media regardless of whether the paper it's from had any merit. Is there any reason to think this one in particular is worth taking seriously?
The disparity is deeply historic and physical, with women typically left holding the bag for male expansionism. Nursing the injured during war, caring for the vulnerable children, preparing food, experiencing childbirth, etc. Adventurism relies more on "male" detachment so that material, earthly, and bodily concerns are abstracted sufficiently to support bold action favoring the strong; whereas "females" (just like today's liberals) are left to clean up the mess and support anyone who the strong considers weak.
Yes, of course, this platform's statistics are far from significant. A bit like polling House GOP members, whose females somehow wound up like frat boys in Animal House (see MTG and LB).
Ah yes, let us put aside the terribly inconvenient fact that the suffragettes were avid supporters of the draft and would shame men for not fighting.
And tell me, are women in America, Canada and Australia "holding the bag" for male adventurism? Or are they actually enjoying some of the most privileged existences of any class of people in history precisely as a product of the conquests of men?
And no, by the way. White men are the biggest net taxpaying group in the US, covering the worse fiscal impact of women and minorities today.
To me as an outsider it looks like in the US that war is pretty much bipartisan now while the politicians don't necessarily reflect the views of the population.
Given that this is a community with a lot of contrarians and people on the spectrum, ACX readers' political views might be less influenced by their IRL peers than most people.
Right, and it's almost entirely male, and selected specifically for otherwise-formerly-liberal men with reservations about feminism due to the history of the blog.
This isn't as simple to test as it may seem. I think you need to (at least) run a regression with some controls. One obvious control would be for the total number of siblings. Larger families are less likely to have all children of the same gender. Larger families are also different in income, education, race, culture, etc., which are all correlated with political ideology.
I don't think my sister and I shaped each other's political views at all, because by the time I was old enough to have political views she was out of the house. We have similar views, but I think that's our parents' influence.
On the other hand, her husband underwent a pretty major political change, largely because of her. And I've heard that Kids These Days don't date as much as we did, so maybe that has something to do with it?
If I recall correctly, there is evidence indicates that sex roles generally get more different as a country gets richer. Ie women in Norway are more likely to work in stereotypically female jobs than women in poorer countries. The usual explanation is that being richer allows women to indulge their preferences – in poorer countries women have to work at the highest paying job they can find, which are often stereotypically male jobs, whereas in richer countries women can afford to work in jobs they prefer. My theory is that divergence in political views is that the same phenomenon at the political level.
Choice of profession get more different as a country gets richer. (It's probably wages rather than general wealth.) Basically, both men and women appear to value each incremental dollar less and less but this function is stronger/happens faster for women. But gender roles, like who does chores or frequency of homemaking, get weaker.
You could analogize this by saying that politics is getting less serious and therefore women are more quick to move to decide on relatively marginal concerns. But I'm not sure that politics is getting less serious. And "cares less about being rich" does not really directly analogize to "cares less about politics" so that'd need to be proven out.
OK, thanks for the info. Seems broadly consistent w my thesis, which is that increasing wealth relaxes constraints and reveals underlying differences in preferences.
In the past 10 years, more young men in the US are having no sex, while the trend for women is much flatter. Growing conservatism and resentment among young men could be driven by increased female selectiveness in the era of dating apps and a resulting feeling among men of rejection from society. As women exceed men in college attendance and career success rates, they need men less and men tangibly feel this loss of status and access. Check out this chart--
This of course is not happening in a vacuum, its a product of the economy we live in which is turn is significantly driven by the government's policies on trade and other things. Women still depend enormously on men for their standards of living, but much of this is now the invisible labor of men in places like China and India, who do all the dirty jobs these days that women in the US would never dream of doing. Imagine if the average woman's financial independence depended on working at a steel mill!
I wish people checked the study they were quoting before discoursing about them. The trend this article is talking about does not replicate with other data. The chart you (and fucking everyone doing "men don't have sex anymore" discourse) are quoting stops at 2018, so more than 5 years ago, why is that? From what I could find this trend does not continue in the subsequent years (and I'm pretty sure I read an article criticizing the survey method but I can't find it, if someone knows it) but that's less alarming so let's continue citing zombie statistics and blame dating apps, sure.
I would think that in the US abortion would be a strong force for this. I don't have hard data to back that hypothesis up, but it does feel like a sort of obvious explanation
I would think abortion is more of a litmus test, rather then causal; why would you expect abortion to carry much force?
Either your social group believes that a 1 day,5,6,7,8,9 month fetus is a child or they don't *and then* you believe its either slavery or murder; there's allot of emotion, but the switch is a fickle definition on a subject most people don't have answers for (biology and ship of theseus questions); no?
Only to the first order of effects and again, murder or slavery; I believe humanity has reached the point of caring if their friend's friend got murdered or captured and sold into slavery.
Do you believe a man honestly who believes that a 1 day old fetus is *his* child, upon hearing of a "post-birth abortion" doesn't have some strong emotions on the subject?
If we had functional uterine replicators, I'd mostly agree with you. But at our current technology level, there's a very physical component to childbearing.
I'm not claiming the people who believe god sends a soul the moment of conception is correct; I just want them to be seen as sincere in their beliefs; id draw the line probably near 7 or 8 months
> Either your social group believes that a 1 day,5,6,7,8,9 month fetus is a child or they don't
I don't know, I think many people have more mixed feelings on the subject than that. That abortion is not quite fully okay, but that they do want to keep the option available just in case.
Maybe it _is_ murder in some weak sense, but if it comes down to it then I guess I'll commit weak-murder to avoid ruining my life at the age of 19, and then feel bad about it afterwards.
Do you have an example of someone who finds 1 day(i.e. morning after pills) and 9 month abortions to be both mixed feelings? Rather then a sliding scale of perfectly fine, mixed feelings, horrifying thats would seem coherent to my framing?
I guess here's how I would look at it: there are four general positions that I see people hold on abortion rights:
1) oppose, usually for moral reasons.
2) neutral enough to not really affect your political position
3) support, usually for some body autonomy reasons
4) weakly-strongly support for medical reasons
I generally expect that reason 1 would be roughly even across genders, you either have that moral framework or you don't. I'd expect 3 to be predominantly women, because it directly affects them; certainly some men hold 3, but I find it's still usually less core to them, and thus not going to shift their party affiliations as much. 4 I'd expect to be weakly female sided because it affects people like them, and empathy is strong.
Basically, 3 and 4 will pull women to the left harder, while men will be less constrained in their political affiliations by the issue
> 3) support, usually for some body autonomy reasons
> I'd expect 3 to be predominantly women
I dont believe this makes sense at all, there airnt many women libertarians(and oh those they are more likely then the general public to oppose abortion); are they advocating for anyone to get *any other* radical bodily freedom? Face tatoos of racial slurs at 14, or whatever age they imagine teenagers needs to get abortions at without consulting law enforcement/parents? Which side of the mandating vaccine debate are they on? Wheres the women for legalizing all drugs?
Like unironically imagine asking someone who supports abortion what age should abortion be provided without law enforcement or parents being notified, and instantly follow up what age someone can get a tattoo of a racial slur on their forehead; if there's any discrepancy in say how it needs to be funded or the age of majority offered; poke and prod. What do you imagine the outcomes would be?
"my body my choice" is a narrow conclusion based on a fetus not being fully human not an universal principled axiom making a very hard choice.
This has just been my experience with basically everyone who's pro-choice, is that it is a particularly strong setting in which they advocate for bodily autonomy. Whether or not that's a consistent position is honestly beside the point of whether or not more women hold it. I think we both have such different views on why people on both sides of the debate hold their views that I'm not sure that we're going to have a productive conversation, since I feel like we're sort of talking past eachother, and I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to argue for
I have a hypothesis that this could be due to an increasing role of LGBT issues in political division. I suspect that men have a greater aversion to LGBT issues, whether innate or learnt. The timing of this is about right (corresponding to a rise sometime around the 2010s), and pew research center polls do record that women are more likely to be accepting than men of homosexuality. However, I don't think the magnitude of the effect can be accounted for by the pew polls - in the UK for example, ~80% of men and ~90% of women accept homosexuality. One possibility is that men may be accepting of homosexuality, but the political lines are drawn by other LGBT issues, for instance trans issues.
Siblings have zero effect for men, either young or old. But interestingly, young women with only sisters are *more conservative* than young women with only brothers.
And for older women, the effect is *exactly reversed*.
If you have the time and feel interested, I wonder what the result would be using Scott's method but excluding trans people. My impression is that trans people lean left for reasons unrelated to siblings, and I think the survey's ratio of trans women to cis women is high enough that it might affect the results.
I was about to say: the decline in organized, traditional religion is a factor in this, particularly in Catholic countries and in countries that have large Catholic minorities. (Catholicism is an arguably male chauvinist church that - in many spcieties - appeals predominantly to women.) Maybe that's less of a factor in the US, where liberal Catholicism (however defined) is numerically relevant.
But that is just a factor that made very many women loyal to the hard right (well, again, less so in the US - and in Germany, it would be the center-right; well, I'd say CSU is hard right, but not far right). A different explanation is needed for men' rightwards shift.
(If liberalism/leftism were all about the loudest online woke folk, and conservative about Trad lunacy, then it would be clear: why would educated women be averse to the "women belong pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen" camp, and even mildly self-aware men averse to "stfu men, none you have opinions, only male opinions, get out of here and give up your jobs, also, male privilege" camp? )
Well, you do not see a strong far right in Germany for pretty obvious reasons.
I don't think it *is* all about the loudest online woke or trad folk, but they have a huge effect. The GOP just managed to ban abortion in a bunch of red states, and the media single guys are always consuming is full of anti-male messages (which is why they're turning to anime).
As for the male chauvinist church that appeals to women: a lot of them actually do want husbands and babies. It also told men they were supposed to stick to one wife (and not dump her for a younger one--divorce was illegal) and not sleep around. The trads often seem to think they can have a harem, which is decidedly less appealing.
Well, the far right is becoming stronger in Germany. Do the secular daughters and granddaughters of female CDU/CSU supporters tend to migrate to the far right or to the left, or do they tend to stay put? (My guess is that the ones with most money stay put, except for some of the more educated among them, but I'd like to see some actual data.)
One obvious difference between sibs and classmates is that most people aren't all that interested in impressing their siblings - in fact, they may just want to troll them instead. I think there are plenty of young men, for instance, who decide to moderate their views on abortion after hearing how zealous their dating partners' views on the issue are, but nobody cares that much about impressing their sister.
It's also possible that the shared effects of parental political beliefs outweigh the sibling effect somehow - the moderation effect may be more important when people differ widely in beliefs.
I have looked for evidence of these trends in data from the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies. So far I have not found a growing gender gap in political alignment, party affiliation, or policy preferences.
The critical theory 'woke' ideological complex is hinged on Care-Harm moral values. This is really attractive to women. Some suggest almost necessary for some women who have kids later and later if at all and need a substitute
I think the increasing majority of women in college, increasingly in the social sciences and humanities, are adopting this belief and moral system. I am quite surprised that men have barely budged but it does fit that concept
Paul Graham's wider political takes are generally not very good outside of stuff he has direct experience with (bureaucracy, taxes). And even there he's not hugely insightful.
With the exception of South Korea, all three cases are men mostly varying within their normal range and women getting extremely liberal. The failure to replicate is also a non-sequitur: the first chart is about supporting conservative or liberal parties or self-identification. The debunking is about a battery of ideological questions. And it shows the same phenomenon: while men have gotten somewhat more liberal women have moved further left.
That's the phenomenon and so any explanation needs to focus on why women are getting more politically radical and becoming less likely to self-identify as conservatives. It is a change and one that's been ongoing for some time (before the internet age). MR at least explains the correct phenomenon with a plausible mechanism. But many people (like Paul Graham) are avoiding seeing this as something driven by women or a longer run trend. Others are essentializing it, saying women or men have always been X or Y, when there is a change that needs explaining.
South Korea meanwhile is caught up in East Asia's gender wars and also has its own, relatively intense versions. While it might be partly driven by some global trend there's also a specific regional trend that doesn't exist outside of the region.
It's not really an East Asia gender war. Japan seems to be pretty peaceful in that regard, and I haven't heard anything about things getting that bad in China either. It really is just a South Korea thing.
This is not what I've seen. Japan has fewer issues but it's definitely still there. And polling in China is difficult but most social indicators show that gender conflict is pretty high there. Social media is full of constant grousing at least and that's with the limitations imposed by censorship. One Chinese person I know said that the conflict between genders in China is as bad as between races in the US. Which I'm not sure if that's true but that she made the claim at all is at least an anecdote.
Over here they keep losing their women to nerds, so I could see that.
Over there...I dunno. They have a chip on their shoulder as they had the biggest population and the longest culture and kept getting pushed around by either white people or their pervy neighbors to the east, from what I can tell.
Everybody seems to be just skipping past the "does not replicate" part...the Cooperative Election Study is a huge sampling collected carefully and consistently for nearly 20 years now. If a new divergence is real there needs to be some explanation for it not showing up there even a tiny bit.
? You may be using the word "divergence" differently...the point I'm highlighting is that the CES data shows no increase at all in the political divergence between men and women in the US. Not even slightly, it's literally exactly the same distance as 5 years ago or 15.
The above has nothing at all to do with which specific direction men and women have been moving on the left/right spectrum at various moments during the past 15 years.
> The share of young women who are liberal Democrats increased by 8 pts. It was +4 for young men.
Women were already more likely to be liberal Democrats, so the gap increased by ~(8-4) points. Look at conservative Republicans, and again the drop is larger among women (-3.2%) than men (-1.8%), which means an increased gap.
(A) That graphic is only for 18-29 year olds who are a small slice of the participating electorate (those who actually show up and vote in American elections).
(B) Even within that narrow group you're cherrypicking the most extreme cell pair of a 9-cell chart. Some other cell pairs in there run slightly the opposite way while others show no particular change.
Ryan himself picked the liberal Democrats cell, and I just did the conservative Republican one for symmetry. And the question we're discussing is whether young people are politically diverging, not what this means for the electorate.
Used to take PG's theories seriously until I learned of his horrible understanding of moral equivalence with regards to the Hamas-Israel war. A techno capitalist should not side with terrorists.
I very much dont agree with my siblings about politics, I'd bet family is an extremely bad predictor of politics for social media generations; maybe in an era where family was 2nd place(in thoery?) for information compared to tv news that all agreed; now people don't even share facts; my siblings least of all(they told me to stop sending them political videos)
I like this take, although it’s pretty much Baudrillard - hyper reality, information firehose and a lack of shared meaning for our symbols. It feels spot on for social media.
Personally, as a Zoomer male, I think large segments of the left dislike us. You see constant complaints of the "cishet white man" and such from many of their circles. They're not exactly making it difficult for us to feel like they're the 'enemy' so to speak.
I know this isn't true of all leftists groups, but the fact that some parts of the edifice aren't completely rotten does not really make me any less keen on the whole thing coming down; not to mention that the seemingly-innocuous groups seem to have been the precursors to the rotten ones.
Yeah, I agree. I grew up in blue areas and saw this as early as the 90s.
You have an increasing number of young men feeling feminism is bad, even apparently with otherwise liberal groups, as H. Liam Smith points out in the SPLC survey above (or below, depending on how you sort the thread):
'Young' here just means below 50, so that's a fair amount of Millennials and even Gen Xers.
Given that young men are usually the least risk-averse and most energetic segment of the population, I think there's reason for hope. Network with your friends and prepare the counterrevolution!
The above is a good video on the topic. So until the late 20th century men used to more left wing than women. Also when polled on individual issues the extent of polarisation is much lower than the initial data point would suggest. So the political positions of liberal and conservatives voters might be smaller than people expect.
Surely this is due to gender being a tool applied for the purposes of identity politics - gender is being politicized by social media algorithms and bad faith pundits and political actors.
The right have abortion bans, Trump (a rapist), anti-trans legislation, "traditional values" where women are housewives etc. The left have cancel culture, "believe victims", and vocally supporting every group except men (especially white ones).
I can't believe so many people are confused about this. It's clearly #MeToo-style feminism. (#MeToo, of course, started in 2017. But the variety of feminism that it epitomizes is much older, and was around in the aughts.)
Does no one remember the genderwars of the early 2010s? These issues aren't as discussed anymore, but that isn't because the underlying causes behind them went away.
The timing definitely lines up with MeToo. But I still want more surveys that have consistent results before I’m confident that the genders have politically divided so much. It sure does seem consistent with my personal sense of the vibes for what that’s worth. And also consistent with that other SPLC survey I saw that roughly half (46%) of young _Democratic_ men think that “feminism has done more harm than good. [https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/06/01/poll-finds-support-great-replacement-hard-right-ideas]
“Boys and girls used to hang out together more” seems glaringly false to me. Things used to be WAY more gender-segregated, but have gotten more coed over time. In the past 10 years alone, my college dorm decreased its number of single-gender floors by 75%, as well as allowing opt-in ability to have opposite gender roommates in doubles. Coed bathrooms have also drastically increased in number (mostly due to the prevalence of nb people now), and while no one really hangs out in bathrooms, I think it’s a sign of just how many other things went coed first.
More anecdotally, everyone in my social group has opposite gender friends nowadays, while I know that my dad had basically never talked to women even by the time he’d graduated. Everyone I know also seems happy to live with opposite gender roommates in their apartments, while this would have been unpopular a few decades ago and outright scandalous a few decades before that.
I think a much simpler explanation for increasing political differences is that liberal politics have gotten more focused on social justice (which is often exclusive towards men) and conservative politics have become more focused on the pro-life side of the abortion debate (which is repellent to many women for obvious reasons).
There's formal vs informal integration. Informally, a school may give students the same lunch hour regardless of their demographic traits. Informally, they will cluster on traits at certain lunch tables. We are increasingly able to opt into our own preferred "filter bubbles" these days rather than having segregation imposed on us.
As a sanity check, perhaps you could sample from liberal and conservative political groups and see if they’re male or female, rather than sampling men and women and asking if they’re liberal or conservative, just to see if the two approaches are roughly comparable to each other. Of course, you’d have to be able to account for age.
I guess you could get lists of liberal and conservative groups from Wikipedia or something and get a nice sample size (though I'm sure some people belong to multiple groups), but they list 100 liberal groups to start. I don't know how to program a web scraper, but I'm sure someone else here does!
Part of this has to be a function of education, right? People with graduate degrees have very liberal views, generally speaking, and more and more such degrees are going to women (I think both in raw numerical terms and the proportion of such degrees that are awarded).
What do conservative and liberal even mean in this context? If we divide each category further with social and economic qualifiers would the resulting 4 groups relate to each other in the same way? What if the terms feminine and masculine were used in place of liberal and conservative, would the results be similar?
To me the most confounding part of anything like this is in a respondent's self-reporting what broad cohort they should be placed within. I think in truth this detail is situational and malleable, and is always a matter of relative perspective.
The problem with sampling ACX readers on this is not where they fall on the political spectrum, but WHY they fall where they did. Your readers seem generally more likely to be the sort of people who arrived at their political opinions through some kind of intentional deliberation (or at least formulated a defensible post hoc rationale for the ones they already have.) I suspect your readers are meaningfully less susceptible to changing positions merely to get along socially, and when they sometimes have to pretend to believe in X because of their peer group they're more likely to be able to compartmentalize that and maintain their true belief in not-X which is reported in private surveys.
If I was dating a gal in the Sierra Club and had to feign sympathy towards some useless endangered species, I could probably do so and still maintain my true belief in a basically libertarian property rights approach and accurately report that on a survey. But most people, if they say something enough times, start to inch towards believing it. I suggest that the kind of folks who read your blog and those like it are arrogant about our intellect and reasoning ability, think we're smarter than most people we meet on a regular basis, and are therefore less likely to be influenced by the herd effect being discussed in those tweets.
...Yin in the ascendency, always brings chaos, thus the growing disequilibrium between men and women in the everyday, not just in the political. Pursuing kindness at the societal scale, is a path paved by a good intention, but as we are seeing across the West, compassion before justice, in the particular and at large, impoverishes all. The quiet part, but getting louder, is that new wave feminism/progressivism is the witchcraft of our age. (If you want some numbers to tell you something Scott, check out how the original witchcraft wave played out in the U.S. and Europe)
Yin in the ascendancy? If you've got an actual Chinese source for this, I'd be really curious. For one, anything that's true in China and the West has a good chance of being a universal law. For another, they have a long history of societies falling and rising to study, so their 'n' is much bigger.
...There's no Chinese press release announcing Yin is moving out of balance. But there is an official crackdown underway on cultural effeminizations, of both the local and overseas sort, (such as Korean pop bands). There have been various media reports in the West about this. Sorry I don't have source references close to hand.
The Western media of course defer to the narrative that China under Xi Jinping is reverting to "communism ". That's because socialism is an ideology in the Western Civ political playbook, which, short sightedly, is the default lens we tend use for the whole of humanity and all of history. A deeper perspective, is that China is responding to the local effects there of the global crisis in the Yin Yang equilibrium, much as it has done for millennia. (See N.S. Lyon's article about Wang Huning at palladium@substack.)
An anecdote if I may. For several years I was an official in the Hong Kong government. On a Liaison trip to Beijing in 2006, the non-chinese members of the HK group were addressed by academics from Peking University, (it's still called that). The prof who addressed the elements of Chinese culture informing current policies, cited The Dao,(Yin/Yang): the Buddha; and Confucius. In response to my question, "what about Karl ?" his simple reply was, "...we tried that and it didn't work".
I would absolutely believe Chinese people would interpret geopolitical events using their own frameworks, just as we insist everything has to be about communism, capitalism, socialism, and fascism (or God) over here. So you see the feminization of the West as reflecting the ascendance of 'yin' (the feminine principle), and the Chinese government as deciding to become more 'yang' and militarize in response? Couldn't that also be seen as striking when your enemy is weak (which is common sense, and also in Sun Tzu as also doubtless in fifty Chinese war manuals I have never read and never will, lacking Mandarin)?
From the article, it seems more like Xi (and Wang Huning before him) is trying to prevent the sort of social disintegration he sees in the USA as a result of consumerism, and is trying to move back toward what we would call 'socialism' as a result. Do the Chinese have an idea of what a 'yin' society and a 'yang' society look like?
Also, aren't the 'three men over a bridge' (Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism) sort of the 'PC' elements of Chinese culture Westerners love to cite to show how cosmopolitan they are when, say, the harsh prescriptions of the Legalist school like Han Fei might also be kept in mind?
I'm also not sure how much any of this has to do with European witchcraft panics--it's not clear any of the accused witches were practicing a pagan religion, and almost nobody believes teenage neopagans now can do real harm to anyone.
(As an aside, ages ago I managed to download a crappy translation of the 'Thick Black Theory', found it incomprehensible, and set it aside. I later read 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms', and a little later read the 'Thick Black Theory' again...and holy crap, now I knew who he was talking about, and it made perfect sense! Yeah, you had to be sneaky like Liu Bei and evil like Cao Cao, like Sima Yi!)
I wonder if young men are really conservative or if they are just opposed to wokism, which they feel is hurting them. I would expect them to be much more open to traditional leftist positions like tax the rich, distribute wealth, social security for everyone, limit corporate greed and similar.
My 2 cents: because politics has become less important, it's now fashion; and men and women have radically different fashion choices.
Politics used to be life or death for lots of people. Gay people's ability to marry people literally hung on which party was elected in their locality. And that's only the most recent example. Women's rights, policies that affected non-white people, all that stuff. These days, the gap between right and left is smaller. Example: even Donald Trump, who was incompetent and terrible in so many ways, failed to derail America. The Tories, who are pure expressions of self-serving abuse of power, have not managed to destroy the UK (I really thought they might). Right and left leaning parties bring only marginal levels of change.
Therefore, people realise that their lives and livelihoods are not at stake, and vote on other factors - essentially aesthetic or fashion factors. And right now, the fashion is swinging in one particular direction. It could easily change course, and make women more right wing.
This feels like one of those ideas that's just so salient that it's dangerously difficult to avoid immediately jumping on a pet hypothesis that obviously explains it.
Even after it doesn't replicate, and thus shouldn't need any explanation.
I think that increasing time online versus interacting in person are at the heart of this, like so many other things.
Think of it this way, a brother and sister may occupy the same house, but their minds may be a thousand miles apart thanks to the Internet. If one spends all evening on tumblr and the other on 4chan (1) occupying the same household may make less of a difference than it would have in 1980.
An interesting question that could start to test this would be to look at the both gender difference in specific site usage and how boys and girls on the same site differ in the politics. Are boys and girls and tumblr more similar in political leanings than boys and girls in total? Are girls on tumblr closer in affiliation to girls on Twitter than to boys on tumblr? Are intersite political differences greater or less than intrasite political differences? I hypothesize yes in some since to all of these, but I'd be curious about empirical data.
(1) Or the Zoomer equivalents. I admit, I'm almost to the age where I'm not sure where kids hang out online these days. Tiktok?
My view is that this is mostly untrue and the non-replications are correct, at least in the US; young women are more liberal than young women 10 years ago, but young men are also more liberal than young men 10 years ago (I'm willing to believe that there's a "divergence" in the sense that the change among young women has been larger, but the design of the graphs and the agenda of the discussion depends on today's young men being increasingly conservative).
I might be willing to buy young men being more willing to *call themselves* conservative conditional on having a given set of political opinions, but that is more about vibes. Maybe also the political identity spectrum increasingly including the "trust the credentialed" vs. "one weird trick" spectrum, which has probably always had a big gender gap.
One thing I tried here was looking at cisgender Americans who selected more moderate responses (not "1" or "5") on the immigration, abortion, minimum wage, and global warming issues. In all four cases (and in the smaller sample size for all four combined) men identified as a bit more conservative on the political spectrum question, though I did not look for statistical significance.
Your blog is where I learned that all politics is signalling, so let me return the favour: this is signalling, and it's pretty funny signalling at that.
If you're a woman, you want people to think that you're caring/educated/cosmopolitan. Liberalism (which is a consumer product marketed as an identity like everything else) sells itself as caring/educated/cosmopolitan,* and has reoriented itself in response to market forces to fill that niche. Your opinions don't matter for non-signalling purposes, so you loudly proclaim yourself to be liberal.
If you're a man, you want people to think that you're tough/self-sufficient/unresponsive-to-social-pressure. Conservatism (which is a consumer product marketed as an identity like everything else) sells itself as tough/valuing self-sufficiency/standing-up-to-social-pressure. Your opinions don't matter for non-signalling purposes, so you loudly proclaim yourself to be a conservative.
My prediction would be that legacy products with skewed branding will fit this pattern; e.g. tankie Communism will be more male than female.
If this has grown over time, it's because politics as brands to express your identity has been finally finishing off that weird 19th century thing where you think about what policies would be good for the country and vote for someone who says they'll enact them. Also, development/liberalism increase gender dimorphism in personality (presumably also for signalling-competition reasons), so that would lead some of the increase too.
*Also rural. You can squint and tilt your head to say environmentalism does this, but I think that's too much of a stretch and it's just the caring thing again. The party that combines liberalism with "voting for us proves you grew up on a farm" will be guaranteed 50% of the vote though.
That 19th century thing was very much an elite thing anyway--people lower down the scale tended to vote in their self-interest.
Rural people are usually a lot less into environmentalism, because environmentalists want to stop you from using land, and that's how rural people make their living.
For the ACX survey, you could check married people vs single. I think I was more influenced by my wife's politics vs any sibling. (I guess this is age dependent.)
I think this is obvious - the left has becoming increasingly misandrist and the excessive focus on DEI and growing dislike of men, especially white men, has started to alienate and exhaust males. Therefore they are less likely to be on board with liberalism. It is well known that feminism, originally a respectable ideology, has spiraled out of control and many of its proponents are now woke idiots that hate men.
Go look up some of the second-wave stuff back in the 70s, or Mary Daly or Ti-Grace Atkinson. 'Don't breed males, don't feed males' stickers. This has always been there. It's just more successful now that fewer people are getting married--marriage used to be a moderating effect on both sexes.
Women who are not your sister are able to use additional incentives/rewards to shape male behavior (should they choose to accept the mission). It's unsurprising that they would do so, since unrelated males can be dangerous. It's also unsurprising that they tend to be more liberal as liberal ideology is more empowering to women, and at least tries to moderate male dominance.
I feel like it's less about gender integration (amount of time men and women spend together) and more about a divergence of where men and women get cultural information. It would be interesting to see how this holds up in say, single-sex private schools before social media, where boys and girls are mostly separated but are basically in the same cultural bubble.
There have always been gendered hobbies, skills, and occupations, but the past fifteen years have been historically weird with how much new, niche information can be accessed. Single women (who are doing the most political diverging) generally aren't coming up with these new ideologies themselves from hanging out with other women, but ideas are spreading in majority-female spaces that otherwise wouldn't have the chance to spread. The success rate of specific ideas is different in majority-male vs majority-female spaces, and with the vast magnitude of new ideas that get a chance to take root, this difference is accentuated.
Whereas for most of history, most people are coming up with new ideas from information they get from their family/spouse and their friends who are also in a small, local network. Coming across twenty hot takes a day from people that you've never met is pretty unprecedented.
Scott, I was thinking of re-doing the analysis using a non-parametric test, which I think is what's appropriate for data of this kind. But maybe you already did that? Did you do a t-test (parametric) or a Chi-square test (non-parametric)?
Well, the 1-10 left-right ratings are ordinal numbers, not actual quantities, & think that also calls for chi-square. But the differences between the groups with same sex and different sex siblings are so small I think there's not much chance of finding a significant result, and even if you did what you would have demonstrated would be a tiny effect, right?, so just not that interesting.
So what's interesting is that when you look at support for particularly policies there is much less discrepancy. My theory is that the difference here is largely one driven by a greater role of personal value signalling and different aesthetics about political talk in our political discussions (likely driven by social media). Basically, the theory is the way of talking about politics each side has puts the other side off -- and that these strongly correlate with male vs female differences in communication and interpersonal advertising.
I mean, I believe global warming is a serious concern and that we need to worry about how environmental degradation can harm people (eg haze in SE Asia) but when I hear the way many greens talk about how we are hurting mother earth with this vibe that seems to resent progress and our mastery over nature my emotional reaction is absolutely -- fuck that I'd rather let the earth burn than be on the same side as them.
This happens in a hundred different ways on a hundred different issues. It didn't happen before because politics was a broadcast message. The political classes talked to you (and they worked hard not to alienate anyone) but now we talk to each other and the differences between male and female communication styles and value advertising are driving us crazy.
Maybe social media isn’t the problem, it’s the way we use it? You can still occupy a principled position (against climate change, also against handicapping the economy to deal with it - thus in favour of accelerating the transition to renewable sources). Few people seem to, but those of us who do can hang out in weird corners of the internet like this one :)
I wasn't making some kind of moral case against social media, just offering a causal story. Part of the problem is that internet enabled cheap many to many media is a revolution in how we communicate with each other on the order of the printing press and we haven't yet mastered the appropriate cultural practices to deal with it appropriately.
The piece is great to show some tendencies, though it compares apples with pears - still fruits, but not really the same. The US data shows the support for ideology, while the rest is the support of a certain party. Since there are no Gallups in other countries, this is the best we have, though it does not account to how true to their ideology those parties are. In Romania, the social-democratic party cares little about social democracy, yet it will be classified as a left-wing party there.
The cultural aspect is important in understanding a rise in conservatism. Coming from Romania, it is impossible not to hear Andrew Tate's name on a weekly basis. What has he done for society? Absolutely nothing, turned a bunch of young boys into self-obsessed mean that speak fast, drink sparkling water and have an issue with fat, liberal and "woke" people. Tracing all the problems of the world to those groups is easy and requires little effort to investigate the world, thus a growth in those conservative thoughts.
My guess would be siblings don't moderate each others' political views much because they start out too similar, on account of having the same parents. Look for people who share a house, but didn't grow up together, and didn't have much chance to pre-screen prospective housemates based on political views.
It's not that it is or isn't a problem, but as with anything trends are interesting and it's a worthwhile exercise to try and understand why things are playing out the way they are.
Another thing worth noting is the established trend that male and female professions tend to diverge more as gender roles become weaker in society (this can be observed in international comparisons). This could be a reflection of the same underlying dynamics, men and women increasingly self-sorting into different tribes as they have the freedom to do so. This would imply that sexual differences are strong and persistent and naturally carry over into various areas of life if given the freedom and opportunity to do so.
It's also somewhat paradoxical in the case of politics though, since historically women have tended to be more right wing and men more left wing. But this just underscores the fact that the tribalism is itself the driver of the differences and not the specific orthodoxies of the tribes that they've self-sorted into.
Everybody (left and right) wants to make it about their personal gender war hobby horse, but it seems more likely it's due to demographic shifts, such as those mentioned by Marginal Revolution. Women historically tended to be more right wing than men, since they were less likely to be members of unions and were more religious; as women became near-equal contributors to the work force and secularized, these influences disappeared and they became more left-wing than men. If in the past such trends have been primarily demographic, why would we expect now they'd be based on gender war stuff?
Do you mean to say that something new called "gender war" is happening? Or it just a new name for good old "males and females have different evolutionary interests", which probably goes back to lizards at least?
I think the delayed and decreased marriage rate probably puts the sexes in more direct antagonism than they used to be. They don't really have that one thing they're working toward together anymore.
Yes, this whole thing honestly seems like a bugaboo to me. Gender has less of an effect on political preferences than race, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, education level, whether you lives in a rural or urban area, and the political views of your parents. Acting like gender is the primary driver of political polarization - or even a particularly noteworthy factor - seems rather silly.
If this doesn't replicate and may not exist... why elevate the topic to a discussion at all? It seems like the very stereotype of "angels dancing on the head of a pin" style discussion that generates no knowledge or information if you're merely speculating about what could cause an effect that doesn't exist.
Does every feature in data require an explanation? Even if we found a strong correlation with some other variables - or even causal relationships, if you wish - we probably wouldn’t have predictive power on the next data pattern. Phenomena like this are extremely multi variate and complex that the explanation of a segment of data at some point in time would sound like a just-so story of dubious utility.
Should we then just give up any attempt at proposing sociopolitical models? Maybe not, but I’m afraid that if we can’t make predictions we might be wasting our time - or worse, getting the illusion that we understand the world.
1. He gets to (begin to) disprove something with data (very rationalist), and it's something fashionable pushed by the media, which is extra fun.
2. It's controversial, which draws attention and comment.
I don't object--this is all over the media, with the predictable 'men are going right-wing oh no' slant, and it's nice to see someone with a reputation for looking at the data look into it.
My comment was primarily directed at the bulk of this post - 90% of the content of this post was discussing, not the validity of the original chart, but the validity of a particular interpretation of what could explain the chart, and only in an aside at the very end does he mention "also this is probably all bullshit". Engaging with a derivative when the root is p-hacked is what I'm taking issue with.
And yes, I'm aware that Scott has seemed much more to fall into clickbait and hype cycles since moving to substack, but I don't respect him any more for doing it than I do any other online personality, simply because he used to be more thoughtful.
This is purely anecdotal/gut feelings based, so I could be wildly wrong, but the tone shift to me seemed to start much further back than that; it's felt a bit like a spiral ever since his "feud" with the NYT. While understandable, it's definitely felt like he was radicalized to the point of being "anti-whatever-seems-popular-by-NYT-readers-online" (ie edging into reactionary territory) as opposed to the more original content from before that time.
It's also possible that I was simply younger and hadn't heard as many of the ideas he was discussing in the past, so they felt more original and new, and now it feels less so because I'm simply less uninformed? I honestly couldn't say.
I could if I was in any way more invested in validating my feelings than commenting on a blog post. I'm not, so that's honestly not worth the effort to me. I just wanted to share my potential biases so as to not unintentionally mislead anyone while still sharing my perspective.
Can anyone find the Washington Post-ABC News poll that found people with daughters were more likely to vote for Hillary in 2016?
As I recall the poll actually showed that people with children of mixed sexes were about as likely to vote Trump as people with only boys, whereas people with only daughters were more likely to vote Trump, so the actual finding was that having at least one son made you more likely to vote Trump. The poll appears to be paywalled, but Huffpo of all places has the finding:
My interpretation was the presence of at least one son means you would have been worried about the effects of feminism on your son if Hillary won, but I am obviously not a neutral observer here...
Why omit people with both brothers and sisters? Seems like the important part is having at least one opposite-sex sibling; not having a same-sex sibling doesn't seem important.
(I say this as a male with both a brother and sister.)
Every failed hypothesis highlights the incredible ability the human brain has to concoct a plausible-sounding hypothesis to literally ANY set of data, and that we shouldn't accept any hypothesis until we have some supporting data (and NOT what was available before the hypothesis was generated).
My personal experience is that I (M) have two sisters and a wife who are all significantly farther to the right than I am. Not that my anecdote is statistically meaningful, so much as that my personal experience leads me to be skeptical of the hypothesis sans compelling evidence.
Meanwhile, is there a more broad assessment of country trends? I'm skeptical this is just something happening in these four countries, and if we did a true international survey we'd find no general trend, just a lot of noise that only looks like 'signal' when you cherry pick the data. The failure to replicate suggests this isn't a robust observation on which to base any hypotheses. Once again, the prudence of starting any discussion of anomalous data with, "But what about the null hypothesis?" suggests itself.
... or that in this one metric collected by this one organization the data skew significantly for some (real or trivial) reason. In my experience there's often a gap between "statistic produced once" and "deep insight".
I am much less concerned about my sisters approval than I am of a potential partner. Eventhough I start getting into cooky political stuff my sister will still be my sister. However my long time partner might no longer be my partner
Presumably siblings are comfortable with each other, and there is no need to impress the opposite sex by exhibiting their approved behaviours. In other words, stranger girls and boys might rub off on one another much more than siblings.
I hate to say it, but I think an ACX sample is not very useful for assessing the USA or the rich world as a whole.
You can see from his sample it's got almost 10 times as many men as women (a big problem if you're studying gender divergence), and is composed heavily of younger men with technical interests. Given the history of the blog involves a doxxing attack on its author by a major arm of the liberal media, it tends to lean center-right.
I think it's a great sample for looking at attitudes among techies (who are a culturally important segment given the importance of computers and the internet these days), but not much more than that.
Well, the survey results in the post suggest that readers of the blog rather lean center-left, on average? You get posts here from people all over the political spectrum though, which I think is great.
I suspect we have different ideas of what it means to lean left politically. What exactly do you mean by leftism and "the left" here? Marxists? Social democrats? Liberals? Woke people? Some particular leftist bloggers? Saying that the blog goes in the face of leftism and is heavily disliked on the left makes little sense, unless you are actually thinking about a more spesific group, which I suspect you do.
I'm a young adult and still live with my siblings, and have fairly different political views from them. I think being in the same family and interacting with each other moderates us a *bit*, but our internet siloes are still very different and it generally doesn't feel worth it to work through our different worldviews built out of watching hundreds of hours of video essays and podcasts leading in different directions. The number of different assumptions and logical steps built on other steps just seems overwhelming.
to me the obvious explanation is that news feed algorithms and balkanized media amplify initially small differences, ala James Flynn's basketball argument. Media used to be more ideologically integrated when people were reading local newspapers and watching local TV channels that tried to serve everyone in a particular geographic area. Now media is all fine tuned to pander to the biases of particular ideological niche.
basically web 2.0 changed the economics of media distribution in a way that increases the profitability of niche products relative to broad-appeal products, and this caused most of the increased variance in culture and politics. That's my best guess. Increased variance in training datasets -> increased variance in resultant models. And news feeds give you training data that amplifies your model's peculiarities.
so Paul Graham is right that the root cause of the expanding political gap is an expanding difference in training data, but wrong about the cause of the expanding difference in training data. I think the latter is mostly due to social media and its effect on media economics. One interacts with one's siblings in adulthood much less than one interacts with algorithms.
Politics in general has polarised, which seems to be something not solely correlated to gender. If politics polarises, and there's already a gap between men and women on average, maybe the gap widens as a result of the landscape moving rather than a change in gender relationships?
I wonder how the gap would look when tested for individual ideas, rather than as a bundle. E.g., separating out women's rights from issues like tax burden, would be interesting. It's possible that answers around reproductive rights skews things, though I don't have a convincing argument for why the gap around those in particular would have changed.
Nope, not Chinese. Not American, just British colonial ancestry.
I think the crackdown in China is more about cultural progressivism than consumerism/capitalism. In fact in economic management terms the Chinese are actively trying to redirect from exports, to internal consumption. But the Chinese are savers, ( because there is no social welfare) so it's not working very well. The same Chinese prof I mentioned before, was also happy to explain the chaos of 1960's 'cultural revolution' as very much a shift in the Yin. ( It was Mao's wife, Jiang Qing who led the 'Gang of four').
As for other episodes of mass mania, check out Richard Landes' 2010 book, "Heaven on Earth-The varieties of the Millennial Experience". The chapters on the tragedy of the Xhosa people in the mid-19th century is especially relevant to the Greta Thunberg phenomenon.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. Social justice group identification is definitely skewed by gender, but it's not obvious that identification with LGBTQ rights is associated with gender apart from that, so I wouldn't call that *intrinsically* more gender polarizing.
Abortion, on the face of it, seems like something that would be a gender polarizing issue. And pro-choice people often frame the pro-life position as one driven by a desire to control women. But although I'm pro-choice myself, I don't think the data bears this out. When you break down support for abortion by actual policy preferences, not identification with broad labels like "pro-choice" or "pro-life," there's actually very little distance between men's and women's positions on average. I think support for or opposition to abortion varies very little according to actual desire to oppress or control women, and mostly hinges on the moral weight people assign to fetuses, and men's and women's positions don't actually differ very much on that issue.
It's possible the figures I've seen are outdated, and I don't recall the source to dig it p again, but the research I've seen which broke things down more finely than "legal under all/legal under some/illegal under all," to actually address what circumstances people favored legality under, showed a difference between men and women which was statistically significant, but not large.
It's also plausible that the reverse is true. Highly liberal women are unlikely to want to date highly conservative men, for instance.
Politics is becoming the biggest filter and shibboleth on dating apps now. Most of the questions are political, they have explicitly political banners people can put on their profile, many women say in their profile that they will only date good, ideologically-conformant liberals, etc.
And I'm sure conservative women do the exact same thing with liberal men. If anything, I suspect that conservative women are even stricter with their politicized dating preferences! (I've seen a fair amount of conservative male/progressive female couples, but almost no conservative female/progressive male couples. And the disparity is large enough that it can't simply be explained by the fact that women tend to lean more progressive on average.)
Hyper-partisanship is not exclusively the purview of the Other Side - and if someone acts like it is, that's usually a good indication that they're hyper-partisan themselves.
One would assume that conservative men and liberal women have to lower their standards more than conservative women and liberal men, given the relative availability of politically matched partners for each.
Possibly a lack of highly visible banners acts as a sign someone is willing to compromise.
The political disparity between genders isn't that large. It's around 60/40, not 90/10. There are plenty of conservative women and liberal men out there. No one needs to lower their standards due to lack of availability.
A 60/40 disparity means a fifth of the population at minimum is dating across political lines. In that sense the disparity is quite large.
Obviously in real life there are degrees of political belief such that compromise comes more easily to some than to others, but I think some people really would need to lower their standards.
My wife is conservative and I'm not. (She gave up on Trump after Jan 6.)
I'm a moderate female and my husband is a progressive male.
Then again, I became less progressive mainly due to becoming a mother six years ago. Females are known to become more conservative when they become mothers. I wonder if the later age of first births is partly responsible for the 18-29 cohort being/staying so progressive.
And I'm sure there's no filtering in the other direction, right?
I'd bet there's *less* filtering the other direction. I think men in general care about politics less overall, are less filter-bubbled and ideological, and will just play along to a varying degree (varying with how desirable the girl in question is, presumably).
But sure, your hardcore libertarians or conservatives or whatever will want to strongly filter out any lib girls, I'm sure. I'd just bet on there being a lot less of them than there are of liberal girls trying to ensure ideological conformance in their suitors.
I meant the other *political* direction, from women. I have a hard time believing that while those progressive meanies filter out non-progressive men, right-wing women (who are right-wing enough to put their politics in their profile) are just fine and dandy with dating progressive or squishy men.
Ah, yeah. Speaking from experience, you hardly ever see this. Like less than 1 in 30 women, I'd guesstimate, say something like "I'm conservative and will only date conservative men," or equivalent. But maybe that's in line with their actual incidence? I know young women particularly skew massively liberal.
You DO see a lot of non-white (usually black) girls who specifically request Christian men who are strong in their faith, and say their faith is important to them, and their profiles will often be accompanied by liberal shibboleths and banners (for understandable reasons). I wish them the very best in their search. Not sure how that one lines up in practice in terms of liberal / conservative splits, it's always seemed like the worst of both sides to me, so I've never inquired.
> Speaking from experience, you hardly ever see this. Like less than 1 in 30 women, I'd guesstimate, say something like "I'm conservative and will only date conservative men," or equivalent. But maybe that's in line with their actual incidence? I know young women particularly skew massively liberal.
There's another reason you might not see women making this declaration: they don't need to. If you have unusually feminine politics and you demand the same from your boyfriend, that might be hard to find, giving you a reason to publicize the demand.
But if you have moderately masculine politics and you demand the same of your boyfriend, you might not run into enough trouble that it occurs to you that you need to make any demands.
Related to your second paragraph, it's interesting that everyone talks about women being liberal and men being conservative when religion skews so strongly in the other direction. Women are religious and men aren't, conservatives are religious (and so are liberals, but conservatives are coded as religious and liberals are coded as secular...); that means women are liberal and men are conservative.
For what it's worth, I have the opposite intuition. That is, I anticipate men caring more about politics and being more inclined to filter on partners' politics, and the opposite for women.
This intuition is based mainly on observing people I know, where half the guys will go into considerable detail about how the Hated Other Side's policy preferences are Just Awful and here's 99 reasons why anyone who supports them is a moral abomination, while the women mostly don't have (visible) political philosophies. If your objection to the other side follows (or at least pretends to follow) coherent principles rather than simple ingroup/outgroup identification, it seems like it would be harder to convince yourself that "oh, if it's you it's okay".
I am not sure to what extent this generalizes outside my social group, though. Evidently not *that* far.
Yeah, honestly I'd just bet that we have similarly filtered social circles, and yours is filtered on "cares about politics" as one of the measures, and mine is filtered on "disdains politics" as one of the measures.
Who knows where the greater unfiltered population's truth lies?
Yecch!
When I was dating age, I had a coupla idiosyncratic filters, and my women friends all had their own sets of filters, usually different from mine. Of course there were no dating apps., so I had to pick up the guy's attitudes from their conversations and actions and what I knew about their life. (Almost everyone I dated was someone I knew from school or work or rock climbing, so I already knew some stuff about them before we considered stepping into the romance zone.). I think the main filter I had was how bohemian their attitudes were -- they had to at least lean boho. Also, I was not comfortable with religious Christians (observant Jews and other faiths were OK). And they had to be taller than me, but a couple inches taller was enough (and I'm average height, so few men were lost to that filter). I did not give a shit about their politics, their wealth, or their muscle definition. My friends also had idiosyncratic filters and filter combinations of their own. It seems -- I dunno, grim, like a bad sign -- if in fact a lot of people of dating age are using political ideology as their main filter. Have people lost track of all the other dimensions? Or are young people now much more alike than my set was when we were young -- so the main markers they have of who they are is their political affiliation?
I think both the benefit and the drawback of using dating apps/sites is that you can use "easy" filters. Swipe left because you don't particularly like how they look, even though you'd definitely consider them if you knew each other as human beings. Because there are so many people available, so it doesn't seem to cost you much to restrict your search to the top half by some easy-to-apply metrics. I think politics is an easy filter. Also, some filters being made explicit give specific impressions about you, so putting this one forward might be simply better aligned with current mores (which is not the same as actually being currently the most important ones).
Yeah, I think it's another manifestation and aspect of "filter bubbling" and technology-mediated matching in general. When you have a matching problem with a seemingly infinite pool of candidates, and you're the chooser, you just go crazy with checking boxes, because why not? You have 1000x more candidates than you know what to do with, so you may as well winnow the field aggressively.
In dating, that's women, in employment, that's hiring managers or HR.
It makes sense that it would. It's well known that the experience of (cis) men and women are practically opposites on most dating apps. Generalizing:
- Men are much less likely to get messages/matches at all (stemming from various factors). The narrative this aligns most closely with is the "incel/redpill" narrative, which is a well-known right-wing pipeline.
- Women, conversely, will get *too many* messages, but most will be low quality. By sheer message volume, the majority (or at least a significant enough portion) of these messages will be from the from gross men who are desperate and bitter towards women (from suffering the above and by definition being on the platform the longest), which aligns with the "all-men-are-pigs feminism" narrative, which serves as a funnel for the left.
Obviously, this is a simplification, but across the whole population I could see it definitely being a trend.
Somewhat of a tangent: as a men the closest thing I've come to the 'female experience on a dating app' is having a LinkedIn profile as a programmer; with recruiters playing the role of the suitors sending many messages, most of them low quality.
Hey, do they ever sink so low as to send dick pix?
I've never had that happen to me. I wonder what the equivalent for a recruiter would be.
I guess the recruiter / software developer relation is a bit more like what I imagine Grindr looks like, if there's a big difference in attractiveness between the users? (Instead of male / female on hetero focussed dating apps.)
In the sense, that I appreciate if a recruiter is very direct and tells me straight up what what the roles are and what budgets they have; instead of trying to 'flirt' ie small talk first.
One of my biggest pet peeves is that recruiters want to talk over the phone, instead of asynchronously sending over the details as written communication.
(I suspect that's because the average recruiter is a lot more neurotypical, and normal people don't mind talking over the phone as much? And perhaps they see getting your number in the se way guys on dating apps do?)
FWIW I prefer talking over the phone :) I rarely get what I want from the written description.
Well, talking over the phone might be a good next step after getting the written description and specs like compensation and location.
>I've never had that happen to me. I wonder what the equivalent for a recruiter would be.
I guess the recruiter / software developer relation is a bit more like what I imagine Grindr looks like
"Job's mostly vanilla sex, so long as you aren't too picky about what you count as vanilla, with occasional BDSM and watersports participation expected."
I translate "I reviewed your job history and I'm quite impressed" as "Your profile came up in my database search".
Nearly all of the messages I get now are generic, and most don't even seem to have a specific position in mind.
They do make sure recruiters are attractive young women, as a rule.
I've got some of those, but also male recruiters.
I've heard it like: "LinkedIn is reverse Tinder -- girls spam boys with messages, and boys ignore them."
So... programmers are still in demand, are they?
Think I need a CS degree to get in on that? I know in the past there was a claim that the field was much more meritocratic than most — but I think I've heard credentialism has now become just as common in software as anywhere else...?
Got a worthless undergrad chem degree, lol, and... well, I'm no rock-star developer, but I'm not *terrible*.
Kinda wonder if I ought to try changing it up and going that route. I dunno. I worked terrible horrible jobs for the first half of my working life, jobs that made life a misery I didn't care about losing; THEN I had a well-paying job that didn't involve horrible people, back-breaking labor, humiliating constant oversight such that I needed permission to go take a piss, etc...
...it was wonderful. I would do anything to have a position like that again. Programming is the only skill I have that I feel like I could get an employer to look at!
('cause no one wants a chem-anything without a PhD; and the work I did till now was half fleet-&-equipment analytics, and half management.
I can certainly get a good reference, since most of my co-workers and superiors were sympathetic to the reason I quit — and since without me, they had to hire *three* people all told to replace me, ha! fuck 'em... take a demotion-in-all-but-name just so the CEO's worthless kid could have a sinecure? NAH. — ...but without a degree in data analysis or an MBA or something I sort of feel like I'll simply get laughed at...)
I don't know. I'm depressed. What was I talking about again
I'm sure there are people here who know better than me--this is ACX--but isn't there massive age discrimination?
I haven't noticed any age discrimination so far. And I'm turning 40 soon. (And I haven't notice anyone else being discriminated against because of age.)
Of course, I can only deliver anecdata.
There are places that make it quite clear that they prefer young people, but it seems to me that those places pay less and expect more overtime, so I am okay with this kind of discrimination, because I actually wouldn't want to work there.
Basically, I mentally translate "we have a young collective" to "we hire people inexperienced at salary negotiation and keeping work-life balance".
uh oh.
Think 33 would be sneered at? If so, I'm doubly-fucked! I really can't think of what else I could do that isn't just goddamn miserable.
I really liked that I had autonomy in my previous position... it wasn't even the pay, just that I had very little supervision — just basically "everything going OK? saved us some money, stayed below budget, fleet operational? alright good work see you next quarter" heh — and didn't have to do anything but sit in an office most of the time.
I think I will probably literally blow my brains out if I have to work the sort of jobs I did before. Maybe I shouldn't have been so dramatic and proud... could've just taken the "you do the work like before, but your raise and promotion goes to the boss's son"—L.
man, it made me mad but I might not have thought it through too well...
...esp. on the timing: losing wife and then losing girlfriend (yes these are related, I know, karma) and THEN losing job... Hell, I barely wanted to keep going *before*; now? well... if I stop posting, y'all know why. lol
Seriously, ask the people here who are coders (or more accurately, wait for them to comment, one has already jumped in). This place isn't exactly short of computer people.
You should have just done the poly thing like all the other geeks. ;)
> So... programmers are still in demand, are they?
At least I still get spammed by recruiters; and my company is also still hiring.
> Think I need a CS degree to get in on that? I know in the past there was a claim that the field was much more meritocratic than most — but I think I've heard credentialism has now become just as common in software as anywhere else...?
I don't have a degree. I studied some math, but never finished that. (Thanks, ADHD..)
When we are hiring, we don't require a degree either. (And neither did, evidently, any of the previous companies I worked for, like Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, etc.)
Of course, having a prestigious uni on your CV does open doors. Not gonna lie. But it's not a hard requirement for a programming job.
I'm happy to give you some advice, if you want it. (Though I'm always a bit skeptical about how much my experience applies to other people..)
I appreciate it, Matthiamigo my fren 👊 You certainly don't have to — you've helped already! — but I'll not turn down any advice; I'm sort of lost, really, not sure if I need to go back and get a degree or if maybe some contributions to an open-source project or two would be best use of time or just give up and go back to being a roughneck or what!
You can send me an email at m@mozak.com
What programming skills do you already have?
Following up on this: I earned a degree in computer engineering in 2006, but I literally haven't written a line of code since then. Assuming that I did decide to put in the effort to learn a marketable programming language, what would be the best way to keep my resume from just going into the proverbial trash and prove to a prospective employer that I actually can code?
There are multiple ways. What I found works well is getting referred by existing employees.
Most companies have referral programs. The trick for you as an outsider is finding ways to contact existing employees of those companies. You can do that by eg going to physical meetups, or by interacting with someone who runs a technical blog and works at a company you might find interesting.
Generally, those referral programs are easy for the employee to use. On the upside, if a referral leads to a hire, the employee gets a bonus (size depend son company). If no hire, there are no consequences.
So employees have a relatively low threshold for referring people. Basically I would refer anyone who asked who's not an obviously an idiot.
As a job seeker, you can make the referrers life easier by giving them the answers to all the questions the referral form asks, and have your CV handy, too. (You can brainstorm for five minutes and probably figure out all the form's questions from the comfort of your armchair. Or you can do a websearch or ask GPT or even ask a human.)
Some other people swear by contributing to open source projects and putting stuff on GitHub. I think that can also work.
As a third alternative, you can also sign up the eg Oxford's part time MSc for software engineering or security. See https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/
(It's part time, and mostly but not completely remote. And it grants a full MSc)
You don't even have to wait until you finish, you can honestly put that you are currently studying at Oxford on your CV the moment you sign up. Getting Oxford on your CV helps you bypass a lot of keyword filters.
(Full disclosure, I started on that programme, but never finished it..)
Of course, you can mix and match the approaches. And come up with your own.
Programmers are definitely still in demand. Despite all the hype talk about AI replacing them (us), it won't happen in the near future. There is a lot of what human developers are doing that LLMs can't cover on their own. Speaking as a researcher who is actually working on an AI system that can write code.
I would say that your best bet is to combine your previous knowledge and experience with some coding skills. For example, you can take your chemistry degree and go to a company that does some chemical modeling. If a company is working in a specific domain and needs some developers, they will definitely see value in somebody who not only has coding skills, but also understands something about the field and the product.
Probably has to do with the decline of family formation. There have been studies showing that men who become fathers have a drop in testosterone. Also, men who have daughters become more leftwing or at least adopt more liberal attitudes towards women.
Studies in the other directions are lacking (for obvious reasons), but we know that married women are more conservative than unmarried women. Obviously, it's a chicken-egg situation, but my guess is something marriage is a moderating force in the other direction for women.
Anecdotal evidence is that some feminists have noticed the general cultural hostility against men as a possibly bad thing after they had sons.
I think this is right, there's probably not enough zoomers in acx readership compared to older millenials and gen-xers for the effect to show up
Agree.
Could single parent vs two parent households be a variable to look at? Most single-parent households are headed by women with no male parenting counterpart. If there is this big gendered shift, maybe it's stronger in single female parent households than in two-gender pair of parents households.
This seems strongly confounded by single-parentness, the most obvious cause being less income correlating with reliance on government-aid correlating with support for liberal policies that increase government-aid.
A more fair comparison would be single-mother households vs single-father households, although the comparative rarity of the latter might make it hard to get good sample sizes.
I would expect single-father households to be richer on average than single-mother households. Mostly just because mothers seem to get the kids by default in most cases, and fathers have to work for them (on average).
When I think “single father household” I think widower, not rich guy, but now I’m curious how common it is for fathers to win custody.
I expect widows and widowers to be roughly equally common, so they wouldn't have much influence on the balance. (Apart from adding random noise.)
If there's any contest for custody, I expect that fathers would need to demonstrate a higher amount of resources and commitment than mothers. On average. So there's a strong selection effect that predominantly filters out poor fathers.
Hence my assumption that on average single-father households would be richer. (Add in that man on average earn more money.)
To some extent this isn't entirely a confounder though. If men on average earn more money and this in turn causes them to be more conservative and this in turn causes their children to be more conservative, then we successfully measure the relationship we're trying to measure between political bent and gender integration, even if the causation has a couple chains along the way.
"widows and widowers to be roughly equally common".
As far as I know, men almost always have a lower life expectancy than women. They also tend to marry older than women. So I'm not sure this is true.
It's like ca 70 vs 80 years or something like that? That's mostly outside of the relevant child rearing age?
Of course, mortality at younger ages is probably also slightly different.
Even if they are equally common, if what you care about is single-parent households you'd have to look at rates of remarriage while children are young. My guess is that would not be gender neutral, given how men and women each feel about each other's "baggage".
My theory is this has to do with the decline of marriage. The theory behind this being that men and women who commit to one another in marriage are more likely to have their political views converge over time. Apparently there are studies showing that women who have children become more conservative, so perhaps a decline in fertility is related in some way too. I'd be interested to see if there's anything to any of that in the data.
I'm not trying to explain why society or young people have become less conservative over time. I'm speculating as to why it is that men and women seem to be diverging over time, with men becoming more conservative and women more liberal.
Weird, since it's ALSO said that women's financial stability is precisely why they no longer feel as much need to get married these days
Is someone in the subthread saying there's a problem?
This seems like an argument that could work in both ways. If there is a parallel universe where women recently became *more* conservative, they probably explain it like "now that many women have their careers, of course they care more about lowering the taxes etc.".
I've always thought of "conservative" as pertaining to traditional values or risk/reward, as opposed to financial capital. although financial capital can certainly play a role.
The words 'conservative' and 'liberal' are purely there to describe different political tribes. Actual policy stances are not fixed, and can move around; and nobody seems to find that weird, while still pretending that the issues matter.
>> why would young people be conservative, what do they have to conserve?
> The words 'conservative' and 'liberal' are purely there to describe different political tribes.
normally, yes. In this context, i'm less sure.
> [...] why would young people be conservative, what do they have to conserve?
Please don't confuse the name of the political tribe with any particular policy. Especially when you apply the same name in different countries and across time.
Lots of policies even shift across the political spectrum, and no one seems to find that weird. (Or some issues disappear completely from discussion, as in no one voices any strong opinion on tribal lines. Or for some other issues there's a consensus across tribal lines.)
'Conservatives' don't conserve anything. Or at least not more (or less) than any other political tribe on average over time.
> women who have children become more conservative
I’m curious if that correlates more strongly with having sons specifically.
From comments I've seen from mothers online, it's an increased preoccupation particularly with crime and getting a good education.
Marriage is declining for SO many good reasons though. As a legal and cultural institution, it needs a major overhaul. And the centuries of precedent, common-law, and cultural baggage surrounding it are explicitly working in the opposite directions that it needs to go to make sense.
Why do people get married? For children, or for tax benefits and logistical smoothing when it comes to health benefits, next-of-kin things, and whatever.
For all the non-children cases (and let's not forget, ~20% of women in the USA or Europe never have kids at all in recent years), all of those things should be sign-uppable for any couple regardless of marital status.
Why? Because marriage is a gigantic, one-sided trap for people.
For both genders: if you have any assets whatsoever, you immediately sign half over. Vintage-level divorce rates are ~42%, then "mutually unhappy" results in marriage are probably half-again that number, for 60%-66% of marriages net unhappy. Do you really want to bet half your assets on anything with a 2/3 failure rate?
For men: they're more likely to have assets, AND 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Do you really want to bet half your assets on something with a 2/3 failure rate, where 70% of the time, you didn't even want to split?? Also, in a split, the woman ends up with the kids much more often, and ends up spending a lot more time with them. You won't see your kids as much, or be able to influence their childhoods as much.
For women: the reason 70% of divorces are initiated by women is that men suck, and are basically giant babies who want to be taken care of just like a kid. You do the majority of the housework and cleaning and child-rearing, even if you have a career and income too. Not just that, but in the event of divorce, most women are worse off financially and standard of living wise, and men don't have a penalty on that front nearly as big. Oh, and if you have assets, you're going to end up giving away half of them to get rid of the chump in that 70% case.
Marriage's main result, empirically, is to increase net misery-years by making it harder and more friction-ful to break up. But the prior should be that ANY given relationship has a 70%+ chance of breaking up and being net-negative (assuming non-marriage relationships break up or end up net-miserable at a slightly higher rate than marriages). So we should not add any friction in terms of making it harder to break up a relationship, and we CERTAINLY shouldn't make it drastically expensive with a 70% rate of failure for anyone with assets of either gender!
What about kids? I submit to you that kids are worse off in a house with a net-negative marriage. They see and hear you fighting, too, you know. It's better to break up sooner for the KIDS too, not just for the marriage participants, because it reduces fighting and conflict at home.
Marriage: not even once!
Where we really need to go is to a place with shorter term, non-financially penalized breakups. 5 year contracts, or 10 or 20 year, with kids. Half your assets shouldn't be at risk in a breakup either, although of course children need to be supported financially by whoever the non-custodial parent is. But child support is WAY less than half your assets if you have any, and should be based on average cost of living for the area the kids live in.
"For both genders: if you have any assets whatsoever, you immediately sign half over. "
This is not true. Pre-marriage assets generally remain individual assets unless you pool them with marriage assets.
My understanding was that unless you're careful to specifically call them out and set them aside, they're generally pooled on marriage. And the methods to set them aside are prenups (high failure rate) or trusts, generally.
But if you know of a different common method, I'd love to be educated about it. It probably varies by state, too.
At least in California, there's no "careful to specifically call them out and set them aside"; if you e.g. acquired clear title to a car in 2014 and married in 2015, the car is just plain yours when you divorce in 2024.
Anything you paid for with money you earned while married, is community property. If you want to keep a separate bank account full of money you earned before marriage (only) so that you can buy things that you get to keep in the divorce, *that* might need to be carefully set up and maintained.
Yeah, I was definitely thinking *actual* assets here, like real estate, equity ownership, stock holdings, etc.
I don't think cars really ping the radar for anyone with assets.
If you're about to get married, why would you choose the 5-year contract rather than the long term option? Practically, not rationally.
For the aforementioned tax / logistics / whatever benefits you get with marriage now, but you're unsure if you're going to stay together or have kids.
Like one of you is starting a PHd and (god help you) wants to go into academia, or one of you knows you may get an offer to move overseas in a few years, or you're just not sure enough of the other person to sign up for more than that for various reasons.
People are varied, there could be lots of reasons, but you could still want the ease of logistics and bureaucratic advantages of an on-paper "marriage" for the interim.
I mean, personally, my serious LTR's all last about 4-5 years lately, and it's been for various reasons, but it seems a fairly natural time chunk to consider if you don't lead an extraordinarily stable life, whether you're poly or monogamous.
You need to factor in that having kids negatively impacts the mother's (or less commonly the father's) income, future earning potential, and pension due to time off work and reduced focus on career for a number of years. Also, it's not that uncommon for one spouse's career to be prioritised over the other, eg by moving for a better job vs taking what's available in the area, even if there are no kids. Marriage and sharing assets compensates for this.
Yes. "Haven't found the right partner yet" is the #1 reason people cite for why they haven't met their fertility goals yet. The average ages of both first marriage and first birth are increasing.
And as you say, women (including myself) become more conservative after they have children. If that's now happening later in life, then women's conservative shift might be too, leaving the 18-29 cohort in the OP graph increasingly progressive.
I would say that Burn-Murdoch's observation is correct, but that Paul Graham's explanation of it is not. Rather, there are cultural and memetic factors at work that are not chiefly about association.
Yeah, his last sentence, the Instagram and video games explanation, reads as very facetious. Do genders really hang out less with each other? I think people hang out less with each other, period, but when they do I'd imagine they do that with the same old mixing.
If anything, they "hang out" more with each other now without even realizing it due to the centralization of the internet.
True, I imagine there to be more of an exchange of ideas between them
Where? On tiktok? On instagram?
No chance.
In the comments section of Astral Codex Ten?
...which may be why the survey results showed no association :)
Doesn't the survey show this comment section to be a (mostly) a sausage fest?
What? No. Young women on the internet are mostly on instagram and tiktok. Young men are not. And the men who do spend more time on those places are almost certainly selected for liberalism anyway.
And of course, this type of "hanging out" wouldn't plausibly lead to exchange of values anyway.
>What? No. Young women on the internet are mostly on instagram and tiktok. Young men are not.
What? No.
pg's comment about women being on Instagram sticks out to me, since I tend to think of Instagram as being slightly male-coded. I never use instagram though and don't have an account, so maybe I'm just wrong. But when I look up the gender statistics by users, men sit at 51.8% while women sit at 48.2% for the year 2023. So I don't think I'm crazy on this.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/802776/distribution-of-users-on-instagram-worldwide-gender/
Unfortunately the internet has allowed people to self-select any group they want to hang out with, broken down by politics, or interests, or hobbies, or whatever. Prior to the internet most people had to hang out with people in their physical proximity to a much greater degree. Even in big cities it was much easier and more common to hang out with people in your neighborhoods. Now next door neighbors can each find the smallest niche community in the world and join it and never talk to each other at all.
Even consider something like Reddit, where you'd think that people are all on the same platform and are interacting. Instead it's thousands of sub-communities with wildly different ways of looking at life.
I think this explains a lot. The ability and incentive to bubble are quite high, and I suspect doing so serves primarily to strengthen and entrench pre-existing beliefs.
> If anything, they "hang out" more with each other now without even realizing it due to the centralization of the internet.
Not sure that this is true. At least the Paul Graham quote, facetious as it is, suggests that the genders use the internet differently, so might not meet each other online much.
But, of course, people self-select by politics even more to decide where to hang out online and who to interact with. So expect Internet exposure to harden any previously existing political leanings?
I’ve definitely noticed all the female avatars on Reddit. Based on comment volume it honestly doesn’t even feel majority-male to me anymore, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the data shows it still is.
This was my thought too. It's certainly not obvious to me that men and women spend less time together today than in the past when single sex spaces were common (e.g. working mens clubs, sports, most work places).
The left gives preferential treatment to one of these groups over the other. Of course support diverges
Right? One group says, "Strong men are important, traditional masculine values are important, traditional (i.e. patriarchal) gender roles are good and important." The other says, "Men should stfu and get out of politics, they've had their turn, we should prefer women candidates, let women speak to the exclusion of men, etc."
Shocking that people sort themselves with more men in the first group and more women in the second group. Truly shocking.
Culturally things have gotten quite a bit more extreme since then but I recall that Obama's shovel ready stimulus program was paused and redesigned away from infrastructure because it was going to be creating more jobs for men, who had lost more jobs
I also recall Milo Yianappolis sincerely debating in his early days claiming men are getting less out of school and college and his counterpart not engaging with the statistics he was presenting at all - maintaining that all efforts must be directed towards women. I swear I saw a gear shift as he became radicalized in real time. This wasn't a debate, it was a fight - zero sum and between men and women
I think in terms of perception the hostile group may win out and thereby influence a change in loyalty aside from their real effects
Searching the stimulus and gender got me left wing sources. One said the bill would create 49% of its jobs for women, while another argued that although 80% of job losses were men the 40% of stimulus jobs projected for women would be lower paid and insufficient. I didn't look too hard but maybe there was one weird article claiming it was gender overhauled that I took as being correct
Both his stereotypes seem extreme. For whatever it's worth, I've also met a woman who valued traditional gender roles, and I'm sure she's not alone in the world.
> In general a lot of nostalgia for the past is imagining yourself as a top 1%-er of the past, not the average person in the past.
That sounds completely backwards to me. Imagining the past, I think of my grandparents living in their average farmhouse in the Midwest, making a living off farming, supporting a large family and still managing to have some modest income leftover to add a new machine shed or build an addition onto the house every so often. Sure it’s the midwest, it’s not glamorous, but they were paying off their debts, not pissing away money on rent. They weren’t even upper quartile of income, let alone 1%.
When people say they prefer the way things are today, it seems like a purely hypothetical preference based on the income they *hope* to have one day, that hasn’t really kept up with the changing economy. Millennials like the idea of city living based off the instagram fantasies we’re constantly exposed to, but look at how screwed we’re getting the rental economy.
The reality is the near-past (40+ years ago) was much better for the average person, although I would still probably trade it away in favor of being 1% in todays world.
I believe it was David Harvey I was listening to when I heard the argument that in the "more traditional past" (half a century ago?) workers (men) were paid a salary that befitting him who was the sole earner of a household, i.e. (let's say) about twice as much. There's many things going into it, but in a manner, "going to work" is not some absolute privilege in comparison to "stay to take care of home and the kids" is. But I suppose one was more respected than the other, or otherwise its respect was expressed more loudly in society. And, too, the way that finances worked (for a lack of a better word), this arrangement made one more depended of the other, such that if there's a divorce then one loses a cook and a cleaner (bad) but the other loses income (worse), to put it roughly. Otherwise, had marriages been eternal (and also if they are not, really), the traditional ideology /gender role assignment is just a particular arrangement of labour, not necessarily worse for the one or the other gender, all else being equal.
In absolute and inflation adjusted terms, people 50 years ago almost anywhere in the world got paid a lot less.
Of course this also feeds into the urban-rural split. A big house and four kids on a single middle-class income is thinkable in Twin Falls ID but not in San Francisco or New York.
Yes, and the anti-construction policies of SF and NYC bear a big part of the blame.
Affordability of housing used to be relatively even and 'flat' across the US until a few decades ago.
Yeah, it's all part of the Big Sort. Want a big family? Go to a red state, and pick up the red-state values while you're at it, either by osmosis or just to fit in.
Don't? Go to a blue state and do the reverse.
There are real racial factors too, but I can't comment on those.
It's just meant to be illustrative by presenting an extreme example, it's not intended to be taken as a real crystallization of the absolute truth of both movements or anything. I thought it was obvious that it wasn't meant to be taken too literally but can't assume anything on the internet I guess lol.
It's not even portraying one party as worse than the other, but somehow it's taken as "right-wing."
Maybe it should have read "one party is sexist pigs and the other is reasonable and just" so it would read as neutral and not unfairly biased against the Good Party.
I don't think they put it that way though. They'll look for a religious guy who follows God, and the rest follows from that.
'Christian' implies he goes to church, thinks he'll go to hell if he cheats, thinks it's his job to have and support a traditional family (and will let you stay home and keep house and take care of kids), and probably will avoid porn too. Not that all Christians do those things, but they at least will try to. (I don't know a lot of Orthodox Jews but I'll let them comment--I'm sure there are subtle difference.)
'Traditional gender roles' just implies he'll boss you around, even if it also meant those other things back in the 50s.
Isn’t a right wing impression of left wing politics exactly germane to the question at hand?
It's not a straw man, it's just a broad-brush illustration of a general phenomenon. It's not meant to be taken literally.
How is it a stereotype? Left wing parties routinely have women only shortlists and the current American VP was selected specifically because she's a woman. I don't see any straw men in that post, the left is quite open about holding those ultra-feminist views and many similar.
It IS shocking if you think of political views as more than merely affiliation, such as some reflection of deeply-held values or something.
I think political views are a reflection of deeply-held values, but not in the way you're suggesting - a person's politics are generally an expression of their personality, which then gets backfilled with ideological arguments that explain why the way they feel is also empirically correct.
Looks like some evidence in favour of the tribal affiliation model of political views.
I agree with this.
The *right gives preferential treatment to one of these groups over the other.
One of the core tenets of the far right is literally that women should be subservient to men.
Maybe you're both right!
I think that there's some truth to the fact that there are contexts in which "the left" gives preferential treatment to women over men, but it's disingenuous (and arguably an example of the weakman fallacy) to claim that as a general rule. In general, the dogma of liberalism (which is what "the left" is on the above graph) holds that men and women should be *equal*, and any actions that seem, on the micro scale, to run counter to that are merely attempts to achieve that steady state on the macro scale. (And it's clear that even liberals still advantage men over women on the macro scale; the supermajority of Democratic congresspeople are still men, for example.)
The reverse cannot be said of conservatism. The dogma is that men and women *are not* equal, and it's clear which are given preferential treatment if you look at any conservative leadership structure.
I've never met anyone on the modern left who believed men and women should be treated equally. That is always a conservative or "old left" view. Female supremacy is a core part of leftist identity which is why they constantly rip each other apart over trans issues.
Certainly my experience has been that middle class women basically always implement hard core female preference to the level that I no longer believe women can be trusted to make decisions involving justice/hiring/firing/predictions/laws etc at all. The results are always grossly misandrist. Blue collar women are better though.
>I've never met anyone on the modern left who believed men and women should be treated equally.
I can only assume you've either constructed a definition of "modern left" that makes this a tautology, or your sample for what you're using that term to describe is almost all people you've gotten into arguments with online, because a belief in unilateral female supremacy is certainly not the norm.
Do you live in a conservative area where only the most vocal SJWs outwardly identify as "left"? What field do you work in where blatant gender discrimination in favor of women is actually common? Because that's certainly not my experience in STEM.
Edit: The people downthread who seem to genuinely believe that women are all conspiring to oppress men, while at the same time being too inept to be in STEM, are simply providing evidence for why women are being pushed away from the right.
You can make the female supremacy disappear. Just read the top level mission statement: "men and women should be treated equally."
But then if you read the *rest* - there's a Patriarchy, there's unconscious bias, there's a surfeit of qualified men for historical reasons and that must be balanced out, there's hidden and imperceptible ways men can oppress women and that must be guarded against - then you watch the sum total of where all the little rules take you and boom, like magic, the female supremacy has come back.
People who are talking about the real, in-practice reality where female supremacy is law can get quite frustrated with people arguing from the pretty sounding theory and pretending nothing untoward is happening.
And yes, of course this is happening in STEM!
"What field do you work in where blatant gender discrimination in favor of women is actually common? Because that's certainly not my experience in STEM."
I find this extremely hard to believe. There are no scholarships for women in your field? Hiring committees don't use "diversity" as one of the criteria, making the bar lower for women than for men? "White men" isn't an insult? I'm in STEM too, and I would be shocked if what you said is true.
"the supermajority of Democratic congresspeople are still men"
That's not evidence that liberals advantage men, you can't determine that based only on outcomes.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/evidence
Ok, it's not strong evidence then.
Somewhat tangentially, I would recommend separating out the categories of "liberal" and "progressive". The phrase "the illiberal left" holds a distinct meaning for a lot of us here, but the way you use the words, it sounds like a contradiction in terms.
Yeah, I've written my fair share of complaints specifically about the way the term "liberal" is used, but unfortunately for the context of this argument, it's the term used in the study. Also, I think it's fair to say that your average "liberal" is more liberal than your average conservative, and the average far-leftist is more liberal the average far-conservative (mitigated only because right-libertarianism is such a relatively popular fringe position)
Partly a reason to avoid the term is that it means different things in different places - ask an American, an Australian, and a Brit. And partly it's because, when used in a more British sense, it's a different dimension, and collapsing a two- dimensional model to a one-dimensional model is going to make the data harder to understand.
It seems to me that both the right and the left agree that men and women are equal in some very abstract sense, and also propose many specific inequalities.
R: "Of course both men and women have their own specific importance and dignity. God has created both of them for a reason; without any of them the society would fall apart. Now women please shut up and listen to what the men are telling you."
L: "Of course the ultimate goal is equality. Judging people based on their gender is exactly the thing we are fighting against all the time. Now men please check your privilege and shut up, and listen to what the women are telling you."
These are obviously representative hyperbole, but I've heard the literal L version. I have never heard the literal R version, nor do I expect to outside 4chan.
Exactly.
I think your characterisation of the right is just as unfair as Argos's characterisation of the left, but that both of these characterisations are pretty germane to the point at hand. If young people are out there hearing things like "the left believes that men need to be chased out of town" and "the right believes that women should be literally slaves" then it's no wonder that they're being polarised by sex.
I don't think it is "just as unfair", especially considering of the examples you chose, the "left" one is not a belief where anything even resembling it has serious support in any left-leaning area (I invite you to give me any similar counterexample), whereas "a wife must always obey her husband"[1] is in some archetypal conservative demographics[2] a near-universal belief, and one that is enforced by people with real social and political power. It's a common enough belief in practice even in less conservative demographics, too.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-women-in-society/
[2] As much as it makes some American Conservatives sputter, devout Muslims are, globally, the *archetypal* conservative demographic.
This is where the word "conservative" breaks into a kaleidoscope of traditions. Conservatives in different parts of the world (take the US, Hungary, and Saudi Arabia as just three examples) all oppose various aspects of "progress" toward a more cosmopolitan and secular world. But the underlying cultures that they seek to Conserve are very different. A "secularist progressive" might mean basically the same thing across continents, but a "conservative" means different things in different cultures, precisely because they are defending different cultures.
See also Scott's classic "how the West was Won" and his discussion of universal culture (secular-progressive) and its opponents.
If you think "conservative" is overly broad, try "liberal", or worse, "the left".
Regardless of isolated demands for rigor, the fact that "conservative" refers to many things misses (the charitable version of) the point OP was making, which is that the "left" and "right" are tainted by association with these extreme members. And in this specific case, women are justified in looking at conservatism's strong association with religious conservatives that at best view them as a second-class gender with little autonomy and at worst actively want to take away their rights... and thereby finding conservatism as a whole less attractive because of it.
I try to do what's right, and therefore what I don't try to do must be left.
There is a difference between "a wife must always obey her husband" and "the government should force a wife to obey her husband or let him force her to obey him". The latter are supported by very few people in any of the countries discussed in the post; the former without the latter is not really a *political* belief at all. And while devout Muslims are a significant conservative demographic globally, they have very little influence on the Western countries' right.
I would put it a bit more broadly and just say that it's about changes on the supply side, not the demand side. What the political parties are selling has changed.
A few decades ago the left-right split was a working class vs middle class split. For a variety of reasons, this has receded and instead the parties work to capture groups segregated by sex/race/religion/etc rather than by class.
Not sold on the hypothesis, but question is whether siblings "hang out." Personal experience says no. It's rare for siblings to hang out together socially, especially opposite sex.
Might help a little to throw age delta between siblings in, but probably not available?
Don't siblings live together? I get that the US loves its neolocal residence, but is that also the case for the other countries in the graph?
they often LIVE together, but don't always "hang out" in the "have a motive to adopt similar political attitudes" sort of way. I would assume you see a "similar politics" effect from having the same parents/upbringing, but controlling for that, especially for similarly aged opposite sex siblings, that might drive them apart in adult political views, just from sibling antagonism.
That's fine, as long as they hang out with their siblings more often than people who literally have no siblings, there should still be a small effect.
I haven't considered the sibling antagonism angle. From anecdotal evidence and general vibes, it seems to me that people aren't politically polarized like rival siblings who understand and know exactly how to best hurt each other, but rather the two poles barely interact and don't understand each other at all.
Yep, certainly some effect, I just don't know if the differences would swamp it.
"general vibes, it seems to me that people aren't politically polarized like rival siblings who understand and know exactly how to best hurt each other,"
Uh, I kinda get exactly the opposite feeling? Especially among the cohort of right-trending young ~22yo males, I get the feeling that they are actually very aware of (at least the portions they find outrageous) the political viewpoints of left-trending similarly-aged females, and have actually indeed moved towards their own political views with an explicit mind to antagonize those who hold them (not just the same-age women), in a way that seems (to me anyway!) very similar to rival siblings! I presume the first "backlash" political effect was two monkey siblings arguing over which one mom-monkey liked best.
I mean, I'm old (OK, middle-aged), but passing through 90s late second-wave feminism, 2000s game, and 2010s #metoo has made me go from 'I'll vote for the best candidate regardless of their gender' back in the 90s to 'I' won't vote for a woman even if she could adequately fulfill her duties, because the sexes are natural enemies, and women's interests are opposed to mine'.
Though I'll make an exception for Nikki Haley, because Trump is insane.
- Siblings typically live together but may have large age gaps and may not socialize together.
- Neolocal residence has little or nothing to do with this? Country-specific culture could be relevant here, but that's just another reason to add some controls
- As my comment was about Scott's data, the other countries in the graph are only relevant if they are well represented therein.
I lived for more than 12 years with both male and female siblings. I have literally no idea what my female siblings were doing at least 99% of the time. I have very little idea what one of my male siblings was doing probably 90% of the time. I had maybe 50% an idea what the other male sibling was up to most of the time.
I don't think my experience was crazy, though it might have been a bit on the outlier side.
Modulo abuse or neglect, parenting seems to have little effect on development beyond, and I believe the consensus is mainly because, past a certain age, the amount of time spent away from parents dwarfs the time spent with parents. The same argument should apply to siblings.
I don't think it's rare for same-sex siblings to hang out socially, when they're close in age. Opposite-sex siblings, definitely rarer. Certainly not unheard of, but in a dataset that doesn't even isolate for closeness of age, I don't think it's unsurprising if there's no significant correlation, even in the case where hanging out with members of the opposite sex does tend to result in political convergence.
My personal experience says your personal experience is rare. My opposite-sex sibling and I hung out constantly in and around the house when we were little, less so in adolescence but that's to be expected (but we still did hang out). In later adolescence our friend groups overlapped significantly which entailed hanging out as part of a larger group quite often at school, parties, friends' houses, etc.
Am I the outlier here, or are you? Granted, we are very close together in age, which facilitated sharing a bedroom as little kids and ending up in the same social scene in high school.
Who knows? We're not going to find out by starting a survey in the blog comments. I'm just saying that there are some possible ways that the (dubious) claim by Paul is compatible with these findings.
Let's cut to the chase. IIRC "kids emulate their peers" is a well-established psychological phenomenon. Is there comparable support for siblings having a substantial influence over each others' behavior?
Lots of wild geese on the other side of that chase! There are endless studies of varying quality (mostly low, given the field) that will tell you myriad details of what is emulated at what phase of life by peers and siblings. If you're lucky they'll even attempt to control for gender!
Deciding whether the studies are looking at the same thing and attempting to compare measurements across them is enough work for a new study. We're currently in the comments section of a 300 word blog post debunking a twitter hypothesis without even a mention of controls.
Fairly straightforward explanation is that the left/right spectrum has become less about economic equality vs neoliberal economics, and more about "social justice" vs "traditional values". The "right" champions traditional gender roles (good for men), and the "left" champions egalitarianism (good for women/minorities).
If people follow their own interests selfishly, this is exactly what you would expect: more focus on gender roles between left and right leads to a harder gender split between left and right.
It's all relative.
It was a million times better for men than women. Men could own property, vote, earn an income, etc. since as long as those things have been things. Not so for women. Traditionally, wives were hardly even people, unmarried women's only purpose was to find a husband, and married women's only purpose was to keep the house and incubate and raise children. It was a raw deal, and if you don't see that it was incredibly lopsided, I really don't know what to say.
As recently as about fifty years ago, "women are people" was still a radical statement.
Nobody is saying it's zero sum. Men's problems are primarily class-based, women's problems are class- and gender-based.
Both are solvable, and neither requires either group to be worse off.
I dunno, as a product of Pennsylvania coal/steel country, I think that's a bit simplistic. If you were to go back to like 1880 and tell the guys at Carnegie Steel who were shoveling coke for 16 hours a day at a 400 degree blast furnace that they were giving their wives a raw deal, you might get brained with a shovel.
No doubt that men and women were treated unequally, but that's not the whole story, because certain groups of men were treated very unequally as well depending on their age, background, education, ethnicity, social class, etc.
It really isn't simplistic. You're describing a bunch of people who were specifically oppressed by the capitalist society they lived in. Yay! We can always find some people more oppressed on some specific axis. Those coal miners/steel workers had it better than untouchables did in India at the time. It's not a competition, but you're really eliding a lot of what women would have faced in that environment. Domestic abuse including violence and murder, sexual harassment and sexual assault including rape, death in childbirth, unwanted pregnancy, and inability to earn a living without being supported by a man (which creates the breeding ground for many of the aforementioned issues, as well as loads some of the capitalist class-based oppression the men were facing onto the women, as well). To name a few.
Anyway, this has all been hashed out a million times, no real point hashing it out again. People have faced all different kinds of oppression, but if you're arguing that, ceteris paribus, women face less than men, you need to look around you.
I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that many different groups faced different kinds of constraints or exploitation or injustice, and gender is just one way to group people. Focusing only on one and ignoring all the others is reductive and simplistic.
Considering that men always were and still are the primary victims of war, with no end of this in sight I have a hard time believing men had it "a million times better". Ignoring this constant of death of suffering entirely seems incredibly based. They had it maybe slightly better, now depending on where you live (countries with conscription for males only) men might have it significantly worse. That's what I see when I look around.
Learning I had to register for the draft but my female classmate didn't, at 8, guaranteed I would never be a feminist.
Women have been *able* to do most of those things for a rather long time, in Western civilization and many others. And I think it was generally considered only a minor shift in gender roles when women got the vote, because "we are the ones who vote" was only a minor facet of male identity.
The difference is that women were not *required*, or even expected, to own property or earn an income or whatnot. And if you've got two groups of people, one told "get a job or starve!" and another told "here are some jobs you *can* have, but here's a non-job option you might like", then it's not quite so obvious that the first group is getting the better deal.
It seems particularly unlikely that men where getting "a million times better" deal.
This has been hashed out a million times and it's really sad that there are still people who think women have not been and are not oppressed.
I don’t think that’s what he was saying though
> As recently as about fifty years ago, "women are people" was still a radical statement.
50 years ago was 1974. Joe Biden was 32 years old and in the Senate.
Id love to have (legal) male-only workspaces/spaces in general and at-fault divorces; Im pretty sure that alone would mark me as a reactionary
Emotional abuse could be established by a a jury if you wish, and feel free to vote on that jury with what metrics as you will.
I would just want it slowed down, the current situation sucks.
That's a miniature popularity contest. No thanks.
What do you think your comparing juries to; I would expect that describes all possible legal decision making systems?
Well... yeah. That's a pretty standard reactionary position.
You might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_marriage
That is interesting, but I expect most prenups are probably stronger
I guess it depends on whether your jurisdiction allows prenups, and what clauses their courts are willing to enforce.
Though I think most prenups in the western world can't stop a divorce, they can at most hand out contractual penalties?
I've heard from lawyers that I've asked, and other wealthy men, that prenups get thrown out a pretty high percentage of the time, and they're generally seen as not worth it in terms of asset protection in the event of divorce. What you really need now is a Trust rather than a prenup.
Having more male-only spaces in general, to balance out female-only spaces, seems like it would be beneficial for male socialization. But not in workspaces - gender nondiscrimination in employment seems pretty important.
Men and women are different and some of each can't use the others sexes strengths, Female bullying is truly awful even if men violence may have some more permanent and visible consequences we are fundamental all the same level cave man barely pretending to be non-animals; gossip and female led drama use rules that only some men can follow and play, in the same way not all girls can handle a fistfight.
Your not going to ban gossip from all the mean girls any more then your going to make all rough 6 1/2 foot tall men into knitters.
Some jobs need to be for the extremely menly men, who may not be capable of processing a female dominance game. Making 95% of jobs, have strict social rules, where sex jokes, arguments, or fist fights and etc are not ever tolerated; is to many.
And yes most people need spend their productive hours at a job that pays money, if you have a low tolerance, whatever the cause,for the other sex's social norms; are you suppose to medicate to barely cope or never work again?
If a female rape victim only looks for work at jobs where 90% of the people there are women, would you blink? Are there not men who were emotionally manipulated by women in ways you'd understand them to be a victim?
> ____ nondiscrimination in employment seems pretty important.
At this point id take open racism in employment, im pretty sure the game theory works out to be better for everyone then goodhearted metrics like interviews and degrees and zero feedback as to why your never hired.
If theres 2 jobs one from a black nationalist the other a white nationalist, and 2 candidates, one white, black; is the law making everyone need a bunch of debt getting a worthless piece of paper really the best solution here?
If theres to many racists running all the companies, rather then a law trying to limit their ability to pick who to hire, you'd be better off knowing thats a problem/opportunity and making healthy mixed race workspace, you know run by a nonracist who wants it to work
I'm a young man - I do think some extreme parts of traditional masculinity (e.g. being "too tough" to visit the doctor when it'd be prudent to do so) are poor, but overall it's much preferable to the desire leftists have to make basically... tell us it's okay/good to be weak? Encouraging us to cry, act effeminate in various ways ("gender exploration"), and be all emotional and essentially 'metrosexual'.
A particularly extreme case is found in "[theybies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theyby)" - children who are raised with they/them pronouns and not told they have a gender. The idea that there are boys and girls being raised as such - that I could've been raised as such, had I been born a decade or two later and to more left-wing parents - is quite abhorrent to me.
This post highlights a significant divide between the two camps.
Being "scared to cry" is not how us redpillers see it at all, in fact it's the same kind of feminist misattribution as a woman who says she doesn't get dates because she "intimidates men."
A man is no more "scared" to cry than he's "scared" to hand away his wallet to a stranger or be rude to his boss at work. Of course he could do it. It's just almost always a bad idea that won't help him in life.
The red pill uses a model of dimorphic humanity, where the sexes have to operate with different incentives and constraints to one another.
A woman who cries can expect sympathy and compassion with no long term consequences. A man doesn't get the same deal. Even when compassion is shown, it comes at a cost and the man's standing has changed in a woman's eyes.
If this story is accurate, then by encouraging your sons to cry and act effeminate, you will be significantly harming their future dating prospects. To the point that some would consider it abuse.
Well, red pill ideas have flourished and spread despite strong stigma and extremely concerted opposition from mainstream and left-leaning outlets.
Its main asset is that it is an incredibly pragmatic theory, focussing on doing what works, and it built its model by "field reports", entailing trial, error, feedback, and iteration.
Given the numbers of men who came in, got to grips with the ideas and found they worked, I think there's a clear answer to your questions about former incels and who's having success. No other ideology is so "data-driven", or as workmanlike in how it pursues its followers' best interests.
Also, I must apologise, from the way you write I had assumed you were a woman yourself.
Just so you know: I'm a woman, and most of them men who have been important to me have cried at some point. It did not lower my opinion of them in the slightest. In fact it made me feel extra close to them, and amped up my physical attraction to them for the rest of the day. I am not particularly politically liberal, and think raising kids as "theybies" is a terrible idea. So I'm not making a case for different politics -- just giving you a data point about how one actual woman feels about men crying.
Seriously? That's mental.
I'd need a lot more context to make that fit into my model of the world.
Context like, what were they crying about? Was it done in public or just in front of you (and do you think you would feel the same way if it was in public?) And, how frequent is it/how easy does it come (and would you feel the same way if they cried more frequently and easily?)
I can make the physical attraction thing make sense to myself, in a sort of bundle-of-emotions, shared-intimacy, i-feel-maternal-and-needed kind of way. Does that ring true with how it feels subjectively for you?
Ah, but they were *already important to you* at that point, right? I.E., value had already been established.
The love interest in the romance novel might cry once they're in love, but not when he's introduced.
> I'm in a very liberal environment and no one believes it is "ok to be weak"
Okay, it is true that they don't typically directly state it as such. But what else can one call the encouragement to do the things I listed thereafter? The crying, for instance. Crying is mainly done by babies, then less so children, then women, then least of all by men. And if you encounter a femboy or a transvestite, they do not exactly tend to be bodybuilders or dominant/assertive in a masculine way.
> I'm probably raising my children as theybies, because I want them to be as strong and independent as possible, and traditional gender roles are just a pipeline to behavior without independent thought
And confusing them as to what they are is going to lead to independent thought? It's not like boys and girls are just identical except to how they're raised - even baby male chimps prefer toys for boys - so why would one raise them as such?
If one raises a boy as a boy one generally gets a man. I'm unsure what one gets when one raises a boy as a... genderless being... (theybies are a relatively new thing - it'll be interesting to see how they turn out at 18) but presumably it'd involve a lot more (on average) gender dysphoria and effeminacy. It hardly seems ideal to have been turned into such an individual: transgenders tend to be quite suicidal, and one's dating prospects are probably quite diminished when one can't help but act as a genderless/highly-effeminate male - that's not exactly what girls are into.
> the idea that crying is a sign of weakness is growth limiting idea
But that's literally what crying is. No one will look at a crying person and think: "wow, they're so dominant/assertive/strong/tough," instead they will feel pity or perhaps think the individual is a bit pathetic (not necessarily pejoratively). It's a sign of "comfort me; I'm weak" used primarily by children.
> I think most men aren't too strong too cry, I think they're too scared to
Why not both? Sure, acting like a 'pussy'[1] is scary; as is acting in any other way that makes one ashamed of oneself and which incurs social penalties. The idea of publicly wetting oneself in fear over something stupid like a spider is scary - that does not mean we should start doing it[2].
> [men] shouldn't feel limited by societies judgements
"Should" or "should not", society will judge all the same. Generally the self will judge too - hence men do not want to act weak even in private.
> Don't you ever wonder about all the things you're closed off to because you're afraid to act effeminate?
Like engaging in various flavors of transvestism, lacking (psychological) strength, and being overemotional? No, can't say that appeals to me. If it did I would still avoid it however.
[1] What one cries over is obviously important here. Crying due to grief upon suffering a tremendous loss is very different from crying every other day over trivialities.
[2] One might say this analogy is imperfect because there's another reason to avoid wetting oneself: it's not very sanitary and you'll have to change your clothes. I think people care far more about the "I don't want others to see me having urinated myself"/"I don't want to be the kind of person who urinates themselves" parts than the "I don't want to have to change my clothes" part, so I think the analogy is good enough.
> I actually find this to be like super not true, and in fact the opposite. How often do you go to drag shows? Those folks are buff as shit. Do you know the muscles it takes to jump around and dance in heels?
So you’re saying even in a space that exists explicitly to be accepting of feminine males, in reality it’s dominated by the more masculine ones? That’s definitely not what I would’ve expected, but I’ve never been to a drag show.
Crying isn't about the actual physical act of crying. It's just an external manifestation of a general ability to regulate emotions.
The ability to regulate emotions is an unalloyed good. It's no good if you're hyperventilating every time the situation is stressful, or punching someone every time you're upset, or crying every time things don't go your way. These are the reactions of a child, but they're not acceptable in someone to whom actual responsibility is going to be added -- if there's an emergency on my plane then I want my pilot focused on fixing it, not crying.
Crying is perfectly appropriate in some circumstances, even for men.
I don't know how it pans out in aggregate and among the rank and file, but American male conservative politicians seem to "get emotional" all the time.
Personally, and from the leftist perspective, I find myself agreeing with the right-wing takes that crying is useless. I just wouldn't make a gender-based distinction on the matter.
According to accounts by people I've known, also written accounts, women who are taking hormones to transition to maleness begin to find it much harder to cry, whether alone or in public. They also describe experiencing anger in a different way -- there's more of a component of craving to attack the person they're angry at physically. Crying is less acceptable for men, but it may be less acceptable because fewer can do it so fewer do. It makes male crying kind of anomalous.
Yeah, but upright posture and lack of fur and a tail aren't destiny either. From about ages 4-7 I had an imaginary companion who was a child tiger. I really believed she existed, and sometimes instead of having her as a companion I was her. My parents accepted this cheerfully and played along, but they did not ask me if I felt I was meant to live in the jungle, and offer to pack me a lunch of a dead rabbit and take me out into the local woods, to try running around naked and snarling -- or tell me it might be possible to find a zoo to live in.
I'm female, but as I kid, after my tiger phase, I also at different times was sure I wanted to be a fireman. Also wanted to go to West Point and become a soldier (at the time I don't think West Point took women -- in any case, I assumed it did not). My parents seemed startled but also sort of impressed. Nobody asked me if I felt like I was really a boy. I think I would have been confused and disturbed by the question. What I wanted was to be a fireman or a soldier. Yeah, I thought of them as male occupations, but it was the occupations that attracted me, not the gender of the people in the roles.
So I grew up to be a mildly bisexual woman. I lost interest in macho jobs when I became interested in intellectual things, and daydreamed about being a novelist or a philosopher. I think I look and dress more femmy than the average woman, but think and talk in a blunter, more assertive, more masculine way. I am grateful my parents were respectful of my childhood ideas about who I was, but also that they did not take them too literally and get all intrusive and weird by telling me some people with a girl body are actually boys inside and asking whether I thought I was one of those.
If you enjoy and are respectful all your kids' phases, they will figure out on their own in what ways they are masculine and in what ways feminine. If one of them has some serious gender dysphoria going on they will tell you, and you can take it from there.
The daughter of a friend of mine went to West Point .. it's become possible.
Yeah, I had an ex who was accepted to West Point, it's possible since 1976.
Wait, you basically lived a literal Calvin and Hobbes childhood? Did Bill Watterson know your family??
I have glanced at Calvin and Hobbes a couple times, but really don't have a sense of what it's like. What would it mean to have a Calvin and Hobbes childhood?
There are several possible reasons for how much one cries, such as:
* hormones; basically how easily the physiological reaction is triggered by mental activity;
* awareness of your emotions, or maybe alexithymia;
* beliefs about whether it is proper to cry, and what it "means" about you when you cry;
* the reaction you expect to get, based on your previous experience.
The popular stereotype about men is that they do not cry because they believe that it would be improper (here the conservatives would say that this belief is indeed correct, and the liberals would call the belief sexist)... and also because they are not in contact with their emotions, mostly as a result of lack of practice.
Red pill puts an emphasis to the experience. You get more of the behavior that is rewarded, and less of the behavior that is punished. Heterosexual men are typically punished for displaying weakness, as it makes them less attractive even in the eyes of those women who on the ideological level approve of that.
Some trans people mention that taking hormones dramatically changed their frequency of crying.
So I guess it is a bit of all.
Speaking for myself (a man), I rarely feel an impulse to cry, and I prefer to cry when I am alone because it indeed is socially punished. I have zero prejudice about what that "means" about me, but from the outside it probably still seems like the stereotypical male behavior.
The idea that showing the slightest signs of vulnerability or abnormality is a sign of "weakness" is just... such a suffocating worldview. No wonder all these conservatives seem so miserable and resentful. Having to live in constant fear of failure and social alienation and death... It doesn't have to be this way.
Conservatives self-report higher levels of happiness.
Higher compared to what? Liberals? They're all fucking miserable for different reasons. There's just no way out of this mess. Humanity was a mistake.
No, conservatives are just significantly happier.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/10/Republicans-Happiness.pdf
This data is from before a recent swing that saw conservative young people even more happy compared to liberal/left young people.
Just from a strategic perspective, if your own ideology has lead you to that conclusion, maybe it's time to shop around for a new ideology?
Other people aren't all miserable. You might be projecting your own mental state onto everyone.
> Humanity was a mistake.
Are you an e / acc? What's the best remedy for the mistake, in your opinion?
It kinda does have to be that way. Men expect other men to maintain a certain threshold level of normalcy and stability, and if you fall below it other men will consider you unreliable and/or a weirdo. In either case, you'll get kicked out of Normieville, or if forced to keep dealing with you they'll resent you as someone who can't pull their weight. The ways in which you are allowed to deviate can certainly fluctuate across the years, (you can be gay and treated as a normie by most dudes now as long as you keep the kinksters out of your pride parade) but there's always a limited range and male socialization is brutal during teenage years to those who step outside of it.
Your interpretation of conservative views on vulnerability as weakness is alien to conservative framing of the issue. That is a leftist simulacrum of a conservative view (which reads as mind reading to me… ) … which is maybe the topic at hand after all.
>the desire leftists have to make basically... tell us it's okay/good to be weak? Encouraging us to cry, act effeminate in various ways ("gender exploration"), and be all emotional and essentially 'metrosexual'.
This is a bizarre stereotype. Or, rather, attributing the acknowledgement of human frailty and the existence of emotions or a lax attitude toward gender norms to "leftists" rather than to educated 21st century Westerners in general is bizarre.
I can sort of see how this political coding comes about, though, at least in the United States where male right-wingers often adopt as protective coloration a cartoonish version of "traditional" masculinity as filtered through 20th century junk pop culture--men don't cry, men don't communicate, men don't introspect, men do sport, men eat borger, etc. With that as a backdrop, it's understandable (but still weird and out of touch with reality) that someone ensconced in that world might assume that any other kind of behavior from men must be part of The Leftist Agenda.
Men cry, but not as often as women. Men are not scared of expressing their feelings, but neither do they let their feelings control them.
Men communicate. But they do not gossip.
Men introspect, but they aren’t wracked by guilt. They deal with what they need to, apologise if necessary, and move on.
Men 100% do sport. Men are physically and emotionally strong.
Men eat whatever keeps them strong and healthy.
Real men agree with me on each of these points, and don’t give a s**t who you vote for.
I'm discarding your last sentence on the assumption that you're being facetious...but the rest of your claims, while reading like ad copy for a drugstore spray deodorant, are not terribly outlandish. In fact, I might even agree with a weak version of them, with appropriate qualifications.
Still, I wonder: were you trying to shed some light on the point I was making about the very strong claims of the person I was responding to ("leftists" desire to make men weak; weakness = having or showing basic human emotions)?
I’m just saying what I believe to be true. Being unafraid to express emotions is not weak, it’s strong, but being easily overwhelmed by emotions is not manly. It’s an important distinction. I don’t really care if you’re left wing or right wing. I think the original commenter was saying “the left encourages men to be weak” which probably has a grain of truth but it’s too broad a statement to be taken seriously
I mean, I don't really believe in gender roles. I used to cry a lot when I was younger, liked books instead of sports, and in general think people should be able to do what they want. Theybie, whatever, wear a dress if you like, this is America, or at least used to be.
But I'll take the stupid 'tough guy' right any day over the crawling, submissive, 'yes everything is my fault and I'm happy to step aside for you queen' the left wants me to be. I used to hate the jocks until I realized the feminists hated me even more. The jocks are happy to have me run the numbers--the feminists want me to be their cringing slave.
I'm not sure how descriptive the labels left/right liberal/conservative are. For example where would a preference for free speech fall on the right/left spectrum? Or a belief in meritocracy vs. equity (is that even a binary? Is meritocracy a traditional value?)?
Add to that the problem that some people don't believe in male/female as binary categories either.
Free speech? Obviously an extremely far-right neo-Nazi value.
Which part was unclear? That was an answer to the question, "where would a preference for free speech fall on the right/left spectrum?"
It's become right-coded, but plenty of people just mildly to the right of center still support free speech, if only because the left has most of the organs of communication.
Meritocracy is obviously right wing. On what planet could it be considered part of the modern left?
The whole point of DEI is hating the distribution of jobs wealth and prestige that meritocracy leads to!
Idk, my brother has been passed over for multiple jobs because he is a white male (this is specifically what they told him, nothing to do with his qualifications.) my subjective sense is that lots of people on the left think that you should hire the less qualified minority
There is literally no evidence of this happening at a large scale to the point it meaningfully explains variance in outcomes between blacks and whites.
The average blsck college graduate has poorer literacy and numeracy skills, and IQ, than the average white high school graduate. The same is true for black graduate degree holders vs white college drop-outs.
In a meritocracy, black people are going to be less successful than white people (in cognitively demanding fields) because they're simply not as smart as white people. DEI advocates do not accept this and will find any excuse to justify giving an advantage to the less capable minority candidate.
Literally no DEI program ever has sought out to prove that minority candidates in a given situation are more capable. The most they'll do is say that the black candidate is more "qualified" by having more college education or something, but again, this is meaningless because affirmative action means white college grads are significantly smarter than black ones, even when they have less college education.
And the most common argument of all made by DEI people is that DIVERSITY itself (you know, the D part?) Is important in and of itself. If it were anti-discrimination, it would be called antidiscrimination. But rhey don't want anti-discriminstion, they want DIVERSITY, period. A perfectly meritocratic state of affairs could be a very undiverse one, but this is inherently unacceptable for people who value diversity in and of itself.
Also, it lizard brain when white men hire Indian women or Chinese men? These types of people are more successful on average. Oh that's right, you have some convoluted theory wherein brown skinned Indian people have "white privilege", right?
Classical liberal, perhaps. DEI is not about "meritocracy", and proponents of it are sometimes explicit about having to balance it against merit.
There's more nuance indeed - or why your "DEI is all about ensuring that decisions are based on a meritocracy" is perhaps too strong a statement:)
Too many times, the term is used to describe choosing a candidate from a limited pool - typically a minority or even an intersection of minorities. And these minorities can be expected to produce fewer exceptional candidates - saying this as a factual, not a normative statement.
Now you can say "yes, this is because of generations of oppression and lack of opportunity!" and you may well be right. But there's a difference between engaging in development and encouragement of talent and choosing a likely-to-be-less-qualified candidate right here right now.
Note that you spoke of "within companies". Yes. Companies do care about the bottom line. Universities - much less so, to give an obvious example. If the term "DEI" is more likely to be used in a way that correlates with merit when profit is on the line, shouldn't we conclude that it means less merit when used in other ways?
Also, even in companies, if DEI is simply equivalent to "good hiring practices", then a. are we sure we need all these extra departments and rules for it? b. is it a miraculous coincidence that there has been a wave of industry pushback against it, the moment this became socially viable?
I didn't "define" DEI as "anti-meritocratic", DEI is just aiming at something other than merit and attempting to optimize two different things at a time means tradeoffs.
Here's a simple example: it's common for children to follow after their children in terms of occupations. These parents give their children a leg up not just in unfair ways of an old-boys hiring network but also in helping them to actually be good at their job. A meritocratic hiring system that just hires the people most suited for the job will thus hire lots of people with such advantages. If you think the status quo is lacking and not diverse enough, then you will want to hire people without such advantages.
Everyone seems to think that equity means equal outcomes, do you think that's compatible with meritocracy?
You have engaged in argument over the definition of DEI. Different people may have different experiences with the term and may drawn varying fuzzy boundaries around the term. We may further agree or disagree with each other over those boundaries. But, the disagreement is over a social convention - it is grammatical in nature.
You keep posting an idea of the left that doesn't match at all what everyone else experiences.. Where on earth do you live? Every DEI program ever has explicitly and openly opposed the idea of merit, they think it doesn't exist and are happy to argue that in public!
I would like to hear your answer to his question about where you live. And what you do for work, and what news/media/entertainment you and your friends consume. Etc.
You are quite clearly in a very different bubble to the rest of us and this might be our only point of contact with it.
You're lying.
You said "DEI is all about ensuring that decisions are based on a meritocracy." Note that I did NOT say merely that you were wrong about this.
You got a pretty thick bubble you're stuck in, sorry to say. If meritocracy and diversity were goals that never conflicted, you wouldn't hear people obsessing about the latter, but that never happens.
Yeah, see this is a reasonable perspective, it's just that this crazy Mikker dude is arguing that DEI is *the same* as selecting people based on their merit, which is wild! And 50 people so far have told him he's wrong, and there are no signs of it sinking in!
You're as mainstream as it gets.
ABSOLUTELY false. Couldn't be more wrong.
DEI is about more minorities being hired/promoted *period*. To DEI advocates, there's literally never a valid reason not to hire more minorities.
The fact that e.g. black people are under-represented in X field/comapny/job level is not evidence of discrimination at all. But DEI advocates will never, ever accept this and meritocracy to them means hiring equal proportions of all groups (or less than equal hiring of white men)
And by "preserving existing power structures", what you really mean is "hiring based on ability instead if demographics", which is meritocracy. The fact that straight white men benefit from this is because they're smarter and more competent than certain other groups, and anyone who doubts this has a pool of cheap, supposedly competent but neglected black labor to hire from and outcompete "racist" companies. In reality, companies are falling over themselves to hire any competent black people they can find, and the single reason they don't hire more is because the smart ones are already hired.
Which ultimately comes back to my first point, that DEI advocates hate genuine meritocracy because their in group cannot compete on the basis of genuine ability.
He was pointing out what's obviously happening in case someone else who's on the fence wonders if you actually have a valid point.
It went over your head. Don't try to understand it. It isn't for you.
I's interesting how either side of the debate claims the label meritocracy, we might have a motte and bailey situation on our hands.
Out of curiosity, do you live in North America? Maybe things are different in other parts of the world, but where I am, the faction that supports DEI actively mocks any use of the word "meritocratic".
Never mind, I didn't see how many people had already responded, and I don't want to pile on.
I was actually thinking about responding in your conversation with rebelcredential above, saying that I absolutely understand what you want out of a conversation where the other person is willing to be introspective and potentially change their mind. But as I was composing in my head, I was also reading onward, and this popped up, and I couldn't believe what you were saying. **shrug** It sounds like you do live in the USA, so my next guess would be that you live in a locally deep red area where things like DEI may still be useful correctives. But eh, you're probably sick of this conversation.
I object to Mikker's characterisation of me by the way. Both he and I talk from our own perspectives. I at the very least often try to clarify what "side" I'm speaking for when I do.
That guy only started attacking my "introspection" when I didn't let him gracefully duck out of the dialogue, and he only tried to do that when I didn't let him ignore the things he was trying to ignore.
I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that someone standing on a completely different paradigm might make claims that seem ridiculous or even downright trollish, and the task of getting a full picture of their worldview is all the more important for that.
But I think this guy is a weasel.
> But I think this guy is a weasel.
Yep. Even in the deepest recesses of "DEI done right" people will notice how awfully it's implemented in the other 95% of the country. You can't be as ignorant of DEI's "failings" (aka, its actual point and goal) as the weasel is.
This is complicated.
Many leftists start with the assumption that humans are 0% nature and 100% nurture. If you accept this axiom, then whatever happens to you is a combination of "fair" and "unfair" factors, and if you remove all the unfair factors, whatever remains will be the perfect meritocracy.
As a corollary, whenever you see something that doesn't seem like perfect meritocracy, it means there is still some unfairness left. What does perfect meritocracy seem like? Well, for the species that is 0% nature and 100% nature, it would seem like a randomly selected sample of a population. So, whenever you see a group of people who don't resemble the randomly selected sample of a population (for example some sex or ethnicity is over-represented), there is clearly some unfairness (sexism or racism) that needs to be fixed.
So far it was simple -- there was absolutely no tension between meritocracy / fairness / equality -- the same politics can achieve all of them at the same time.
Things get more complicated when you drop the 0% nature assumption, and admit that people actually differ in abilities and in preferences significantly. Suddenly, you have to choose you values. Even if you removed all the unfairness in the society, some people would still get better results based on having better abilities. Would you rather have the people with more profitable skills and preferences on the top, or keep everyone equal?
Some leftists choose equality. From their perspective, getting better genes is the same dumb luck as getting rich parents -- neither of that means that you "deserve" to live in poverty.
Some leftists choose meritocracy. Not sure if I can represent their attitude fairly, but I get the impression that some degree of Darwinian struggle is okay for them, as long as it represents qualities in the individual, as opposed to the circumstances of their birth (such as social class, parental wealth, parental care).
But most leftists seem to choose... to deny the nature. ("IQ is a myth." "Boys and girls having different preferences is a myth.") It keeps the uncomfortable choice away.
It was a liberal idea in the 60s when it was overturning the old policies Harvard had where they would only recruit WASPs from Andover etc.
It's a conservative idea now that it opposes DEI.
Regardless of how descriptive they are for free speech or meritocracy, they're very descriptive for social justice issues. Ask 100 self-identified leftists and conservatives if they think men have male privilege or if the USA is a white supremacist country. You'll get a very different set of answers.
When I was growing up, free speech was a left-wing preference, attacked from the (mostly religious) right; today it is a right-wing preference, attacked from the (mostly progressive) left.
The lesson I learned from this is that principle is dead. Or more specifically, was never alive.
My favorite example along these lines came whilst serving as a pollworker: an elderly woman asked my help to do her voting. It was one of those years they didn't have much to write about I guess so they had declared it to be the "Year of the Woman" election-wise. I'm pretty sure we've had more than one Year of the Woman, but maybe they really had gone out of their way to recruit women candidates. Seemed to me like it was already mostly women, but I guess I was mistaken. She wanted to vote for "the woman" in each race (a couple dozen at least). Her vision wasn't so good, I can't remember. Anyway, we went through the list one by one, me reading out the names and her selecting the woman, if there was one, which there was in nearly all races, sometimes both candidates were women - and I don't remember what she did about that conundrum. Sometimes there were foreign names whose gender she wasn't sure about; but she made her choices, I think generally correctly. But in one instance, it so happened that the male candidate had a strangely female name, and the female candidate had a guy's name. (I for some reason intuited this.) I guess I failed my stupid civic duty because I didn't utter a word as she voted for the man.
I related this anecdote to my husband that night.
"Damn" he replied, though grinning. He had of course voted in an opposite manner to the old woman, and gotten tripped up on the selfsame race. Chatter about "the Year of the Woman" could not have had any other effect on him, than straight-ticket (gender) voting.
And you're still married?
Gotta say, it still works as a strategy for the left, there are slightly more women and they vote more.
I'm sorry, I don't understand the purport of your question.
The joke was you would have divorced him for refusing to vote for a woman. But that's obviously not necessarily the case.
Ah, got it. I can't imagine viewing voting in that light. And of course, if a modern-day T.R. showed up, as a woman this time - he'd vote for her of course. Whether such a combination would be possible, is another question.
I mean, she wouldn't do the macho thing. Conservative women do run for office, and they talk about their families, their faith, and their records running businesses if they have one.
People vote for people for all kinds of reasons. As for the party, they are very sensitive to demographics as it's one of the few variables that reliably predicts voting. A big part of the 'Great Replacement' business is that minorities are more likely to vote Democrat than whites are, which means the Democrats want to increase immigration (which means nonwhites, since since most whites are in rich countries and don't want to give up their health insurance, and poor areas like Eastern Europe try to get into Western Europe which is closer), and the Republicans don't.
> the "left" champions egalitarianism (good for women/minorities).
only on paper, women are very very unhappy that even the centers of leftist power found out
first result when searching "are women happier now" is "law.yale" saying no
People who support traditional gender roles do not think they're "good for men", they think they're good for everyone and society, it's just that the current state of affairs and those which the left support are actively bad for men.
On the other hand, the left today is much more straightforwardly advocating for group interests, in the form of either race nationalism or gender "nationalism" (i.e. feminism), often explicitly at the expense of men, especially white men. Maybe they think in some roundabout way this makes society as a whole better, but its not in the way that men are going to be happier in the next few decades if the left really gets what they want. The more extreme elements of the left actually want things to be worse for white men, or for white men not to exist at all.
Yeah it’s unclear to me what the end game here is
1. Divide society based on arbitrary categories of race, gender, and sexuality. Embrace victimhood. Encourage groups to resent those more successful than they are and drag them down
2. ???
3. Utopia!
What, if you're the left-leaning party? A majority of the population in the USA is something other than a straight white man. If they're convinced they're oppressed, they're more likely to vote for you.
Theoretically the socialist government will not discriminate and thus everyone will be equal. There's a few tens of millions of Chinese and Russian corpses who might testify there are some problems with that, but they can't talk.
Yeah let’s ask Venezuela how Utopia is working out
Voting with their feet!
Of course they would argue US pressure has a lot to do with that.
It's all the patriarchy man #begaydocrimes
No, they think society is unequal and they need to correct that. All inequalities are the result of oppression so...
Also, I think while the older batch of conservatives may have actually believed the old ways were best for everyone, there's a younger batch that's actually seeing themselves as representing male interests. (Well, what did you expect would happen?)
> Fairly straightforward explanation is that the left/right spectrum has become less about economic equality vs neoliberal economics, [...]
I wish there was a part of the political spectrum that was in favour of neoliberal economics.
(Well, at least I wish the US had something like that, for their own good. My adopted home luckily has something close-enough-to-neoliberal in power.)
My vibes say: women used to assimilate into a relatively narrow mass culture controlled by men. Now there are so many more drivers of mass culture who are women, so the assimilation is less pronounced. This explains why the political attitude shift is so much stronger for women than for men.
No one cares what their siblings think. But peers that you're attracted to? You care what those people think, and might be willing to listen to their position / change your own in that scenario.
Wasn't that supposed widening ideological divide disproven? I can't remember where I saw that, it might have been on Zvi's substack.
If you read the last link before the survey data, it's about someone saying it didn't replicate.
That link still shows it growing wider. It's just that they're both moving in the same direction.
I've heard that since feminism started its spread throughout South Korea, it has started to receive pretty big backlash. So I'm very much inclined to believe that the graph that looks like a nose-dive is picking up on something.
South Korea has the additional factor that men have to serve in the army and women don't, so it puts them at a disadvantage for jobs (they still wind up filling the top roles in the end but the average guy sees an effect against him and acts accordingly).
Women are similarly disadvantage from motherhood. It would be interesting to see if one could design a society where these disadvantages were socially and economically equated, and what that would entail, eg. would mandatory military service for X years entail mandatory child rearing for X years?
I mean, they used to have mandatory military service, but the men didn't have to compete with the women in the job market.
Also many more men will want to avoid military service than women will want to avoid childrearing. Childrearing doesn't usually get you killed (nowadays--you used to die quite a bit giving birth to it).
Most mandatory military service won't get you killed either. What are the odds of dying in Italy or Switzerland's mandatory military service?
All across Asia and western countries, more and more women are opting against motherhood. Most men being part of the common defense used to be standard, just like most women becoming mothers used to be standard, but these standards depend very much on environment. Just like we've eliminated the expectation of men inevitably stepping up for the common defense, birth control has also eliminated the expectation of children from people's inevitable sexual dalliances, and we further disincentivize parenthood with a lack of support and economic penalties.
Something that’s not clear to me from that chart is whether it’s measuring the beliefs held by women/men, or just which group they say they belong to. I would be interested to know if the differences hold for particular policy positions. It seems plausible that men might be more likely to say they are conservative while holding many liberal beliefs, or for women to say they are liberal while holding many conservative beliefs.
I was thinking about this too. If you follow the link at the very bottom to Ryan Burge refuting the original tweet with a different data set, according to him the gap has held pretty constant over the last several years, though it still concludes that women are more liberal than men on average.
What does it mean for someone to be a “certain percent” liberal or conservative? Is it likelihood of voting in a certain way, or broken down by actual beliefs held? Can you factor in the survey responder’s vehemence on a particular issue (they have only one conservative value, say, but it’s so important to them that it sways their voting patterns) or their reasoning (someone could oppose a self-id bathroom bill on conservative or feminist grounds, so the fact of the opposition doesn’t necessarily indicate the left- or rightness of their belief).
Hi! First time commenting. The best explanation for your troubles replicating the graph might have to do with the original graph itself. Noah smith has a good investigation: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-things-d7e (see number 2). One problem is that the graph seems to switch between two datasets at some point, and the divergence doesn't replicate in a lot of other datasets. So it might just not be a very large effect. Also, if we are sold on there being a lot more far left women than men, it is good to remember that in the context of normal distributions, small differences in means can lead to large differences in extremes.
But I think there's a ton of uncertainty around this question (how many people under thirty really know much about their own political ideology?), and this graph doesn't seem to shed a whole lot of valuable light.
As a point of reference, what is your definition for "gender"?
The problem is that pretty much every last man, woman, and otherkin has their own idiosyncratic and often contradictory definitions for the term. My efforts to put the concept on a more scientific footing:
"A Multi-Dimensional Gender Spectrum"
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum
Are chromosomes not good enough for these sorts of things? Yes, obviously trans people and even more niche cases like androgen insensitivity exist, but they're going to be such a small minority that it won't skew the data that much.
Generally speaking and to first approximation, the most coherent definition for gender is as a range of sexually dimorphic personality traits, types, behaviours, and roles. It is an entirely different kettle of fish from sex.
And sex is, by definition, ONLY the ability to produce sperm or ova, those unable to produce either being thereby sexless. No reputable biologist defines the sexes in the basis of chromosomes because many species have sex chromosomes other than X and Y, and in many species there's no genotypical difference between males and females, sex being determined by other factors in the environment -- alligators and clownfish in particular.
Physical traits offer a more coherent bifurcation than "personality."
You might take a look at my post. "Gender" is, by that formulation, a range of traits -- both physical and psychological, a spectrum of them, that are manifested to varying degrees.
Which justifies a two dimensional gender spectrum. For example, agreeableness -- women generally more agreeable than men, whence a "feminine gender".
But sometimes the physical differences are more important than the psychological, and vice versa.
Gender and sex have always been synonymous, with the later being used either to provide clarity or to avoid evoking the idea of sexual intercourse.
The fact that some people suffer from conditions which compell then to hate their genitalia does not magically change this.
And we've "always" thought that the earth was 6000 years old and at the center of the universe ... 🙄
Too many people seem to "think" that definitions qualify as gospel truth, that Moses brought the first dictionary down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z.
There ARE sound reasons to DEFINE gender to refer ONLY to sexually dimorphic personality traits, at least to a first approximation.
You might actually try reading that post of mine.
Sure, the way clownfish work is weird, but we are not clownfish. In humans, under normal circumstances, a gene within the Y chromosome is solely responsible for making people male. If we had an easy way of objectively measuring whatever the hell gender is, we could do that, but we can't. On the other hand, we can easily check sex chromosomes, and sex chromosomes are very heavily correlated with sex and gender in humans. It's not perfect, but we have to draw the line somewhere if we want to study differences between the sexes.
"correlation is not causation" ... nor even a stipulation of what are the defining variables for a category, only a suggestion of proxy variables -- useful, but "problematic". Not all vagina-havers are females -- prepubescent girls, menopausees, and CAIS being notable exceptions.
wait, are you saying that prepubescent girls are *not* female? That's a very weird take.
Regardless of your weird edge cases elsewhere in the thread (like clownfish), sex is defined by which gametes an organism can potentially produce according to its phenotype. A male who has had his testicles removed is still male.
Yep. That IS the logical consequence of standard biological definitions for the sexes, those "promulgated" in reputable biological journals, dictionaries, and encyclopedias all across the land. See:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990 (see the Glossary)
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3063-1
https://web.archive.org/web/20181020204521/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/female
https://web.archive.org/web/20190608135422/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/male
https://twitter.com/pwkilleen/status/1039879009407037441 (Oxford Dictionary of Biology)
There is absolutely diddly-squat in any of those definitions about "potentially produce"; they're all about "produces gametes", present tense. For example, see the Glossary from the first article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction:
MHR: "Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
That that definition leads to "sexless" in the absence of functional gonads, see this recent article in the Wiley Online Library:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202200173?af=R
Wiley: "A widespread misconception among philosophers, biomedical scientists and gender theorists – and now also among some authors and editors of influential science journals – is that the definition of the biological sex is based on chromosomes, genes, hormones, vulvas, or penises, etc. .... Another reason for the wide-spread misconception about the biological sex is the notion that it is a condition, while in reality it may be a life-history stage.[33] For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
From zygote, to embryo, to fetus, to the onset of puberty, none of us are or were "reproductively competent" -- we are not or were not yet male or female; we are or were sexless. If that's the case then it's simply incoherent, and quite unscientific, to insist that we are all either male or female right from conception to death.
As far as I can tell, gender comes down to Bateman's principle. I.e. women bear the biological costs of reproduction, and therefore have different behavioral incentives. How that cashes-out varies by culture, of course. Though there are patterns.
"Yuge" incentives ... 😉🙂
But "patterns", indeed. ICYMI, fairly illuminating article on the topic over at 4thWaveNow, the graph of the joint probability distribution in particular:
https://4thwavenow.com/2019/08/19/no-child-is-born-in-the-wrong-body-and-other-thoughts-on-the-concept-of-gender-identity/
I honestly don't know what the graph is supposed to prove to me.
Yes, there's overlap. No, social norms operate on network effects and therefore do not perfectly account for variance. Or did you mean to imply something else?
Did you read the text at the bottom of the graph? That say, for example, "This male will be more female-like than most males, AND the majority of females".
Part and parcel of "gender non-conforming" and of butchering autistic and dysphoric children so their genitalia more closely resemble those of the other sex. Think the whole point of the article is that atypical personality traits, or those more typical of the other sex, does not at all justify any rather odious assertions about "born in the wrong body".
THAT is the reason for being clear about the difference between sex and gender, a distinction that Scott seems blind to or is inadvertently obscuring or muddying.
(In the general population, sure. But regarding Scott's data, over 1/8th of the women who responded to the survey are trans.)
Oof. I mean, that definitely skews the results quite a bit. All the arguments about gender aside, there is definitely going to be a difference psychologically depending on whether someone grew up identified as male or female, mostly due to differences in environment. Hormones affect psychology as well, but Scott never asked the trans people if they were doing HRT or not...
I guess this all ties into Steersman's point that we need a better model for gender/sex/whatever it is that we're trying to compare between the population.
Indeed -- and thanks. 🙂 And to Moon Moth for the corroboration.
As for your "better model", you might note this "joint probability distribution" from my post:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28cbde88-8a9b-4b3b-8f48-a07f889f1019_769x379.jpeg
One horizontal axis is three of the "Big Five" personality traits, subcategorized by sex, and the other horizontal axis is the trait values. For instance, agreeableness has a range of 1 to 5 according to a JPEG I had uploaded to Wikimedia ages ago:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joint_probability_distribution_by_sex_and_agreeablenes.jpg
Women are generally more agreeable than men -- means of, say, 4.2 and 3.8 respectively. But some men are, in fact, more agreeable than some women -- "gender non-conformance" writ large.
Mostly what I was worried about is that I expect trans people skew to the left, for reasons that have nothing to do with their siblings. So if there are a disproportionate number of them in the data set (relative to whatever other data sets were studied), that might make the effect appear smaller than it would otherwise.
If there were other groups with a similar effect, I'd suggest removing them, too, but none jumped to mind. Like, if 1/8th of the men here had been MeToo'd, I'd expect that would shift those men solidly to the right, in ways that were completely unrelated to their siblings.
Do you also oppose research on curing baldness because who knows how many hairs are needed to not being bald? Or maybe it's all about the reflectiveness of the uncovered scalp...
Not all we do is formal math, and the existence of edge cases shouldn't stop us from using categories that are useful for society-level thinking. Which is distinct from sympathy to individual edge cases, to be clear.
What??
I'm not "opposing any research". I'm just pointing to some rather sloppy uses of the categories of sex and gender.
“If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms.” How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.” — Will Durant
https://quotefancy.com/quote/3001527/Will-Durant-If-you-wish-to-converse-with-me-said-Voltaire-define-your-terms-How-many-a
We're not talking in the abstract. Would you, in fact, struggle to classify at least 95% (more like 99% but let's be generous. A quick google search says that transgenders are 0.6% of people above age 13) of people into "men" or "women" based on a combination of a few basic observations, self-identification and chromosomes in a way that would be extremely likely to be consistent with what a thousand random people would decide as well?
If the answer is that you wouldn't struggle with this task (as it should be), then these categories are useful enough to go on with, *in this specific context*. Attempts to increase complexity at the expense of clarity do not, in fact, contribute. This is simply a misplaced attempt at rigor - and not at all an obviously harmless one.
Voltaire and Durant were not actual logicians engaged in formally rigorous thinking. One thing you learn when you actually do math is that definitions can be good or bad depending on their usefulness (and thus get routinely, and productively, overlooked or deliberately abused). Frequently they cloud an issue, when used inappropriately. Certainly when overused they slow you down - or do you, when speaking of your weight, always pause for a discussion about how it's only correct on Earth under certain conditions? And again, we're not even doing math.
To return to the object level - do you actually believe that whatever the verdict is regarding this particular topic of political divergence would be changed by any distinction you propose? Like, assuming this finding replicates at all, would you expect any more careful definition to substantially change our world-view? Is there the slightest of indications this particular sharpening (if it is a sharpening at all) is in any way germane to the actual discussion? That the sloppiness you see (real or purported) matters?
"Moon Moth" above has just argued that some 1/8th of the "women" who responded to Scott's survey are in fact transwomen:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/x-fact-check-does-gender-integration/comment/49626285
You think that isn't likely to skew the results?
Of course this is likely to skew the results *for Scott's survey*, not for the phenomenon in question. Unless you're going to argue that 1/8 is representative of the population. This is simply "oh, here's why Scott's data is less relevant to the question than one might have thought". Note how just saying "more transgenders than typical in the population" communicates this idea without the need to spill oceans of ink.
If you sample heavily from known outliers (As ACT data is known to be, in some senses), then your results might suffer - you'd get the same experience if you'd ask about about polyamory or knowledge of Icelandic sagas or whatever other way ACT is unusual. This is not because we need a better definition of "Iceland".
Scott's question is "Does Gender Integration Moderate Politics?"
But you're using statistical surveys to describe that "phenomenon in question" so of course both your skewed data AND the poorly defined categories for "binning the results" are going to preclude answering that question.
I was looking at this comment by Anonymous Dude:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2022/comment/12090914
730 cis women, 128 trans women, so 128/858 = 0.149, almost 15%, and just north of 1/7th (0.1428).
I haven't checked, but I'd guess that these surveys are self reported on gender. Are you suggesting that the survey doesn't tell us anything because every person who responds has their own definition of gender, and so their self reporting is useless?
If there are no objective correlates or criteria for membership in particular gender categories then "useless" is certainly a possibility. What "gender" is a transwoman?
Many people think sex and gender are the same, but some reason to argue -- as I and many others have done -- that they're entirely different kettles of fish. If not species from different phyla -- petunias and aardvarks.
Certainly, but as an empirical matter, trans folks are enough of a numerical minority that they wouldn't explain the observed difference. i.e. even if you counted only cis people the effect would still show up.
Sure, but not really my point.
Many scientific journals are explicitly calling for the use of sex -- NOT gender -- as criteria for characterizing various populations, simply because gender is, at best, a rather poorly defined and vague, if not unscientific, spectrum of sexually dimorphic personality traits.
Some reason to argue or suggest, as I have done, that "gender", as a system of categorization, is only marginally better than phrenology or astrology. Or the Myers-Briggs Type System which some have reasonably called pseudoscience and no better than a Chinese fortune cookie.
I don't really disagree, I'm just not sure how it's relevant to discussion of this study/effect?
Though I also think that's a needlessly negative framing — implying that we should just stop doing gender because it's made-up, as it were. Lots of human behaviours and categorisations are wooly social constructs. I don't see why it's more "unscientific" to identify as a particular gender than as a member of a particular philosophical movement, subculture, political group, etc. That seems a better comparison than phrenology or the like. (Of course, some overly dogmatic assertions about what gender is could still be pseudo-science, in much the same way that a theory of political affiliation or fashion style as a specific biological feature of people's brains might be pseudo-science.)
I mean, I'm mostly trying to figure out what you think about the actual subject of the post, this survey. What I'm hearing is that its worthless because the thing its describing doesn't represent anything real. Is that right?
I wouldn't say it's "worthless", but "Moon Moth" above has just argued that some 1/8th of the "women" who responded to Scott's survey -- as women -- are in fact transwomen:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/x-fact-check-does-gender-integration/comment/49626285
Rather "suspect" at best if that's the case.
But I'm not saying, as you're apparently suggesting, that "gender doesn't represent anything real". I'm just pointing out that it's an imprecisely defined category or set of criteria, and that it MIGHT be possible to put the concept on a more scientific footing.
And that really should be Job One -- as an old Ford commercial once put it. 🙂 The "actual subject of the survey and post" is then somewhat secondary.
Political scientist John Sides was not impressed with the viral graphs; there might not be much to explain:
https://goodauthority.org/news/maybe-young-men-and-women-arent-so-ideologically-different/
Do you imagine his status as a "political scientist" makes people care *more* about what he has to say?
It depends on who "people" is. Do you imagine I care more about what someone who puts "political scientist" in quotation marks in the above sentence has to say?
This is great stuff, I'm mildly embarrassed I didn't think to bounce it off the ACX survey before now. Obv plenty of ways to make it more rigorous, but a good tool for a first gut-check.
Siblings would be a problematic way to judge this on its own terms. Much of the segregation-to-radicalization claims in Korea carry the implication that decreasing intersexual socialization *while the other is the object of each's sexual desire* makes the alien gender (and critiques of their gender-culture) a natural scapegoat for personal frustrations and discontent.
But the sexes were far more segregated hundreds of years ago, and I don't think there was any noticable political polarization between the them. Though, women weren't allowed much agency back then in the first place...
I would be surprised if there wasn't a lot of what we would today consider political polarization.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/klyde-the-barbarianhtml
I'm not sure who would try or how they could succeed in determining polarization when women couldn't vote. No exit polls or similar mechanism, and no reason to court their votes specifically.
My intuition is that women had extremely different political views than men. See: Suffragettes and the Temperance movement.
I think siblings are just too early to make a difference one way or the other. A lot of the """development""" of political beliefs happens in College, when kids are separated from family/siblings for the first extended period of time. I don't think this proves or disproves the hypothesis
Most people don't go to college, and most of those who do don't go to 4 year residential colleges. If this survey has a meaningful sample, college will only impact a relatively small number of the people who responded.
Incorrect. The last data point is a survey of young people (18-29) in 2020. Zoomers have extremely high rates of college attendance:
'Among young adults ages 18 to 21 who were “no longer in high school in 2018, 57% were enrolled in a two- or four-year college.” '
(from https://www.aecf.org/blog/generation-z-and-education)
Furthermore, young women are currently much more likely than young men to attend college:
'Men represent only 42% of students ages 18 to 24 at four-year schools, down from 47% in 2011. '
Could this not be a big part of the story? College is associated with extremely left-wing political views, and it is increasingly also associated with women instead of men. There's bound to be a significant spillover effect: if 57% of zoomers are college students or graduates, and 60% of these are women, and if women are much more likely than their male peers to cluster in academic fields that lean left (sociology vs. electrical engineering, let's say), then surely there's a significant spillover of left/right attitudes to those men and women who don't fall within those categories due to peer social effects, etc.
This is silly. You don't go to college as a blank slate, and college selects for liberalism in the first place. I became less liberal during college, not because college isn't a liberal dominated environment, but because I came into college ideologically very different to most other people.
Some other artifact that doesn’t show in polls:
Does anyone have the survey question used for lib/conservative in the cooperative election study?
I run across a decent amount of young self identified liberals who will call themselves right wing, but not conservative; and vote GOP only as a matter of contempt for the other side.
I'm not convinced these people exist, but I like them.
Lol. I consider myself liberal with a lower case l, but I will be voting right wing until the left stops taking crazy pills
I predict the right will START taking said "crazy pills" before the left stops.
In that case I’ll vote for Scott. Bring back the liturgy!
it can also be a barometer only of how "right" or "left" leaning one is on the current question one cares most about. Most democracies aren't as bipolar as the US so people have additional choices that might more closely reflect their political views, at some point the right/left labeling becomes pretty useless.
Libertarians sometimes go for 'classical liberal' as a descriptor, it's got that old-fashioned feel to it.
The observation is that women and men have different politics and the proposed mechanism is that women and men consume different media.
I think using ACX survey data won't work, not because it selects for certain politics, but because it selects for certain forms of media consumption.
Maybe you should ask about the use of Instagram and First Person Shooters in the next survey, just to make sure.
I don't think that different media is the proposed mechanism. I think the proposed mechanism is that they're at home consuming media instead of spending time with each other.
If that is the proposed mechanism, the test proposed by Nevin would be pointless from the beginning.
It seems reasonable that siblings might not be moderating. You might only moderate your views for people you view as a romantic prospect, or siblings may simply not “hang out” in such a way that moderates views.
I personally think Graham’s theory is debatable and probably wrong but not for the reasons given here
"It just suggests it doesn’t extend to siblings. Which would, admittedly, be weird."
But why? Relationships with opposite-sex siblings are different across the metric of "how likely I am to adopt their political views" than social ones with peers. I had a younger (3 years) sister, we were pretty antagonistic as kids. I often adopted positions (it is morally just that I get to watch the TV right now) purely in opposition to her. We have relatively similar politics now, as 39 and 42 year old adults, but 25 years ago if she believed X, there would've been at least a small movement for me to believe not-X.
Some things I thought of while reading
- Does the survey data show the general trend in the chart that young women are more left than young men, and that this hasn't always been the case? From a quick analysis I did it seems like this is the case. Young men are more left-leaning than older men in the sample but young women are still much more left-leaning
- Your stats are for the whole survey group not just the young people. However, I redid the analysis (again quickly) on only the 30 and younger respondents and you still don't reject the null with much confidence
Again my analysis was done rather quickly so it's possible I made mistakes.
This gender gap seems like exactly the kind of clickbaity result that would get spread around by journalists and social media regardless of whether the paper it's from had any merit. Is there any reason to think this one in particular is worth taking seriously?
The disparity is deeply historic and physical, with women typically left holding the bag for male expansionism. Nursing the injured during war, caring for the vulnerable children, preparing food, experiencing childbirth, etc. Adventurism relies more on "male" detachment so that material, earthly, and bodily concerns are abstracted sufficiently to support bold action favoring the strong; whereas "females" (just like today's liberals) are left to clean up the mess and support anyone who the strong considers weak.
Yes, of course, this platform's statistics are far from significant. A bit like polling House GOP members, whose females somehow wound up like frat boys in Animal House (see MTG and LB).
Ah yes, let us put aside the terribly inconvenient fact that the suffragettes were avid supporters of the draft and would shame men for not fighting.
And tell me, are women in America, Canada and Australia "holding the bag" for male adventurism? Or are they actually enjoying some of the most privileged existences of any class of people in history precisely as a product of the conquests of men?
And no, by the way. White men are the biggest net taxpaying group in the US, covering the worse fiscal impact of women and minorities today.
To me as an outsider it looks like in the US that war is pretty much bipartisan now while the politicians don't necessarily reflect the views of the population.
Given that this is a community with a lot of contrarians and people on the spectrum, ACX readers' political views might be less influenced by their IRL peers than most people.
Right, and it's almost entirely male, and selected specifically for otherwise-formerly-liberal men with reservations about feminism due to the history of the blog.
This isn't as simple to test as it may seem. I think you need to (at least) run a regression with some controls. One obvious control would be for the total number of siblings. Larger families are less likely to have all children of the same gender. Larger families are also different in income, education, race, culture, etc., which are all correlated with political ideology.
Also see: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/06/27/why-boys-with-sisters-are-more-likely-to-be-republicans/
I don't think my sister and I shaped each other's political views at all, because by the time I was old enough to have political views she was out of the house. We have similar views, but I think that's our parents' influence.
On the other hand, her husband underwent a pretty major political change, largely because of her. And I've heard that Kids These Days don't date as much as we did, so maybe that has something to do with it?
There's tremendous social pressure for young women to dislike Trump
...There is a also a lot of social pressure for young men to dislike Trump.
Men are less motivated by those kind of social considerations.
Farrrr less. Girls would've been ostracized for admitting they voted for Trump at my college
What about men/women with no siblings?
If I recall correctly, there is evidence indicates that sex roles generally get more different as a country gets richer. Ie women in Norway are more likely to work in stereotypically female jobs than women in poorer countries. The usual explanation is that being richer allows women to indulge their preferences – in poorer countries women have to work at the highest paying job they can find, which are often stereotypically male jobs, whereas in richer countries women can afford to work in jobs they prefer. My theory is that divergence in political views is that the same phenomenon at the political level.
Choice of profession get more different as a country gets richer. (It's probably wages rather than general wealth.) Basically, both men and women appear to value each incremental dollar less and less but this function is stronger/happens faster for women. But gender roles, like who does chores or frequency of homemaking, get weaker.
You could analogize this by saying that politics is getting less serious and therefore women are more quick to move to decide on relatively marginal concerns. But I'm not sure that politics is getting less serious. And "cares less about being rich" does not really directly analogize to "cares less about politics" so that'd need to be proven out.
OK, thanks for the info. Seems broadly consistent w my thesis, which is that increasing wealth relaxes constraints and reveals underlying differences in preferences.
I think it probably also has something to do with the fact who is getting more out of their taxes than they pay in and who isn't.
In the past 10 years, more young men in the US are having no sex, while the trend for women is much flatter. Growing conservatism and resentment among young men could be driven by increased female selectiveness in the era of dating apps and a resulting feeling among men of rejection from society. As women exceed men in college attendance and career success rates, they need men less and men tangibly feel this loss of status and access. Check out this chart--
https://www.knowledgeformen.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/young-men-driving-the-decline-in-sex.png
This of course is not happening in a vacuum, its a product of the economy we live in which is turn is significantly driven by the government's policies on trade and other things. Women still depend enormously on men for their standards of living, but much of this is now the invisible labor of men in places like China and India, who do all the dirty jobs these days that women in the US would never dream of doing. Imagine if the average woman's financial independence depended on working at a steel mill!
Not sure how this would affect women more than men though.
I wish people checked the study they were quoting before discoursing about them. The trend this article is talking about does not replicate with other data. The chart you (and fucking everyone doing "men don't have sex anymore" discourse) are quoting stops at 2018, so more than 5 years ago, why is that? From what I could find this trend does not continue in the subsequent years (and I'm pretty sure I read an article criticizing the survey method but I can't find it, if someone knows it) but that's less alarming so let's continue citing zombie statistics and blame dating apps, sure.
Yes I think you are right, Marthe. I was raising this as a possible theory, not saying it was conclusive, but looking some more I found this, which supports what you are saying-- https://datepsychology.com/how-many-sexual-partners-did-men-and-women-have-in-2021/
I would think that in the US abortion would be a strong force for this. I don't have hard data to back that hypothesis up, but it does feel like a sort of obvious explanation
I would think abortion is more of a litmus test, rather then causal; why would you expect abortion to carry much force?
Either your social group believes that a 1 day,5,6,7,8,9 month fetus is a child or they don't *and then* you believe its either slavery or murder; there's allot of emotion, but the switch is a fickle definition on a subject most people don't have answers for (biology and ship of theseus questions); no?
It's really more of a practical issue. Whether or not abortion is legal is a lot more consequential to women than men for obvious reasons.
Only to the first order of effects and again, murder or slavery; I believe humanity has reached the point of caring if their friend's friend got murdered or captured and sold into slavery.
Do you believe a man honestly who believes that a 1 day old fetus is *his* child, upon hearing of a "post-birth abortion" doesn't have some strong emotions on the subject?
If we had functional uterine replicators, I'd mostly agree with you. But at our current technology level, there's a very physical component to childbearing.
I'm not claiming the people who believe god sends a soul the moment of conception is correct; I just want them to be seen as sincere in their beliefs; id draw the line probably near 7 or 8 months
> Either your social group believes that a 1 day,5,6,7,8,9 month fetus is a child or they don't
I don't know, I think many people have more mixed feelings on the subject than that. That abortion is not quite fully okay, but that they do want to keep the option available just in case.
Maybe it _is_ murder in some weak sense, but if it comes down to it then I guess I'll commit weak-murder to avoid ruining my life at the age of 19, and then feel bad about it afterwards.
> mixed feelings
Do you have an example of someone who finds 1 day(i.e. morning after pills) and 9 month abortions to be both mixed feelings? Rather then a sliding scale of perfectly fine, mixed feelings, horrifying thats would seem coherent to my framing?
I guess here's how I would look at it: there are four general positions that I see people hold on abortion rights:
1) oppose, usually for moral reasons.
2) neutral enough to not really affect your political position
3) support, usually for some body autonomy reasons
4) weakly-strongly support for medical reasons
I generally expect that reason 1 would be roughly even across genders, you either have that moral framework or you don't. I'd expect 3 to be predominantly women, because it directly affects them; certainly some men hold 3, but I find it's still usually less core to them, and thus not going to shift their party affiliations as much. 4 I'd expect to be weakly female sided because it affects people like them, and empathy is strong.
Basically, 3 and 4 will pull women to the left harder, while men will be less constrained in their political affiliations by the issue
> 3) support, usually for some body autonomy reasons
> I'd expect 3 to be predominantly women
I dont believe this makes sense at all, there airnt many women libertarians(and oh those they are more likely then the general public to oppose abortion); are they advocating for anyone to get *any other* radical bodily freedom? Face tatoos of racial slurs at 14, or whatever age they imagine teenagers needs to get abortions at without consulting law enforcement/parents? Which side of the mandating vaccine debate are they on? Wheres the women for legalizing all drugs?
Like unironically imagine asking someone who supports abortion what age should abortion be provided without law enforcement or parents being notified, and instantly follow up what age someone can get a tattoo of a racial slur on their forehead; if there's any discrepancy in say how it needs to be funded or the age of majority offered; poke and prod. What do you imagine the outcomes would be?
"my body my choice" is a narrow conclusion based on a fetus not being fully human not an universal principled axiom making a very hard choice.
This has just been my experience with basically everyone who's pro-choice, is that it is a particularly strong setting in which they advocate for bodily autonomy. Whether or not that's a consistent position is honestly beside the point of whether or not more women hold it. I think we both have such different views on why people on both sides of the debate hold their views that I'm not sure that we're going to have a productive conversation, since I feel like we're sort of talking past eachother, and I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to argue for
I have a hypothesis that this could be due to an increasing role of LGBT issues in political division. I suspect that men have a greater aversion to LGBT issues, whether innate or learnt. The timing of this is about right (corresponding to a rise sometime around the 2010s), and pew research center polls do record that women are more likely to be accepting than men of homosexuality. However, I don't think the magnitude of the effect can be accounted for by the pew polls - in the UK for example, ~80% of men and ~90% of women accept homosexuality. One possibility is that men may be accepting of homosexuality, but the political lines are drawn by other LGBT issues, for instance trans issues.
Seems unlikely. Several right-wing populist parties (i.e. male parties) have been headed by a homosexual.
I ran it broken down by age -- which is crucial to the initial hypothesis, fwiw.
https://kmunger.github.io/im/acx.png
Siblings have zero effect for men, either young or old. But interestingly, young women with only sisters are *more conservative* than young women with only brothers.
And for older women, the effect is *exactly reversed*.
(US only, cisgender only)
Thanks for crunching some numbers!
If you have the time and feel interested, I wonder what the result would be using Scott's method but excluding trans people. My impression is that trans people lean left for reasons unrelated to siblings, and I think the survey's ratio of trans women to cis women is high enough that it might affect the results.
I was about to say: the decline in organized, traditional religion is a factor in this, particularly in Catholic countries and in countries that have large Catholic minorities. (Catholicism is an arguably male chauvinist church that - in many spcieties - appeals predominantly to women.) Maybe that's less of a factor in the US, where liberal Catholicism (however defined) is numerically relevant.
But that is just a factor that made very many women loyal to the hard right (well, again, less so in the US - and in Germany, it would be the center-right; well, I'd say CSU is hard right, but not far right). A different explanation is needed for men' rightwards shift.
(If liberalism/leftism were all about the loudest online woke folk, and conservative about Trad lunacy, then it would be clear: why would educated women be averse to the "women belong pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen" camp, and even mildly self-aware men averse to "stfu men, none you have opinions, only male opinions, get out of here and give up your jobs, also, male privilege" camp? )
Well, you do not see a strong far right in Germany for pretty obvious reasons.
I don't think it *is* all about the loudest online woke or trad folk, but they have a huge effect. The GOP just managed to ban abortion in a bunch of red states, and the media single guys are always consuming is full of anti-male messages (which is why they're turning to anime).
As for the male chauvinist church that appeals to women: a lot of them actually do want husbands and babies. It also told men they were supposed to stick to one wife (and not dump her for a younger one--divorce was illegal) and not sleep around. The trads often seem to think they can have a harem, which is decidedly less appealing.
Well, the far right is becoming stronger in Germany. Do the secular daughters and granddaughters of female CDU/CSU supporters tend to migrate to the far right or to the left, or do they tend to stay put? (My guess is that the ones with most money stay put, except for some of the more educated among them, but I'd like to see some actual data.)
One obvious difference between sibs and classmates is that most people aren't all that interested in impressing their siblings - in fact, they may just want to troll them instead. I think there are plenty of young men, for instance, who decide to moderate their views on abortion after hearing how zealous their dating partners' views on the issue are, but nobody cares that much about impressing their sister.
It's also possible that the shared effects of parental political beliefs outweigh the sibling effect somehow - the moderation effect may be more important when people differ widely in beliefs.
I have looked for evidence of these trends in data from the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies. So far I have not found a growing gender gap in political alignment, party affiliation, or policy preferences.
https://allendowney.substack.com/p/the-political-gender-gap-is-not-growing
The critical theory 'woke' ideological complex is hinged on Care-Harm moral values. This is really attractive to women. Some suggest almost necessary for some women who have kids later and later if at all and need a substitute
I think the increasing majority of women in college, increasingly in the social sciences and humanities, are adopting this belief and moral system. I am quite surprised that men have barely budged but it does fit that concept
Paul Graham's wider political takes are generally not very good outside of stuff he has direct experience with (bureaucracy, taxes). And even there he's not hugely insightful.
With the exception of South Korea, all three cases are men mostly varying within their normal range and women getting extremely liberal. The failure to replicate is also a non-sequitur: the first chart is about supporting conservative or liberal parties or self-identification. The debunking is about a battery of ideological questions. And it shows the same phenomenon: while men have gotten somewhat more liberal women have moved further left.
That's the phenomenon and so any explanation needs to focus on why women are getting more politically radical and becoming less likely to self-identify as conservatives. It is a change and one that's been ongoing for some time (before the internet age). MR at least explains the correct phenomenon with a plausible mechanism. But many people (like Paul Graham) are avoiding seeing this as something driven by women or a longer run trend. Others are essentializing it, saying women or men have always been X or Y, when there is a change that needs explaining.
South Korea meanwhile is caught up in East Asia's gender wars and also has its own, relatively intense versions. While it might be partly driven by some global trend there's also a specific regional trend that doesn't exist outside of the region.
It's not really an East Asia gender war. Japan seems to be pretty peaceful in that regard, and I haven't heard anything about things getting that bad in China either. It really is just a South Korea thing.
This is not what I've seen. Japan has fewer issues but it's definitely still there. And polling in China is difficult but most social indicators show that gender conflict is pretty high there. Social media is full of constant grousing at least and that's with the limitations imposed by censorship. One Chinese person I know said that the conflict between genders in China is as bad as between races in the US. Which I'm not sure if that's true but that she made the claim at all is at least an anecdote.
Over here they keep losing their women to nerds, so I could see that.
Over there...I dunno. They have a chip on their shoulder as they had the biggest population and the longest culture and kept getting pushed around by either white people or their pervy neighbors to the east, from what I can tell.
I would guess that for a man, having a sister, specially a younger sister, might make you more conservative.
Everybody seems to be just skipping past the "does not replicate" part...the Cooperative Election Study is a huge sampling collected carefully and consistently for nearly 20 years now. If a new divergence is real there needs to be some explanation for it not showing up there even a tiny bit.
There is increasing divergence, it's just that men are also getting more liberal.
? You may be using the word "divergence" differently...the point I'm highlighting is that the CES data shows no increase at all in the political divergence between men and women in the US. Not even slightly, it's literally exactly the same distance as 5 years ago or 15.
The above has nothing at all to do with which specific direction men and women have been moving on the left/right spectrum at various moments during the past 15 years.
Here's further down that thread claiming a failed replication:
https://twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1751684749259870590
> Comparing 2016 vs 2022.
> The share of young women who are liberal Democrats increased by 8 pts. It was +4 for young men.
Women were already more likely to be liberal Democrats, so the gap increased by ~(8-4) points. Look at conservative Republicans, and again the drop is larger among women (-3.2%) than men (-1.8%), which means an increased gap.
(A) That graphic is only for 18-29 year olds who are a small slice of the participating electorate (those who actually show up and vote in American elections).
(B) Even within that narrow group you're cherrypicking the most extreme cell pair of a 9-cell chart. Some other cell pairs in there run slightly the opposite way while others show no particular change.
Ryan himself picked the liberal Democrats cell, and I just did the conservative Republican one for symmetry. And the question we're discussing is whether young people are politically diverging, not what this means for the electorate.
Used to take PG's theories seriously until I learned of his horrible understanding of moral equivalence with regards to the Hamas-Israel war. A techno capitalist should not side with terrorists.
I very much dont agree with my siblings about politics, I'd bet family is an extremely bad predictor of politics for social media generations; maybe in an era where family was 2nd place(in thoery?) for information compared to tv news that all agreed; now people don't even share facts; my siblings least of all(they told me to stop sending them political videos)
I like this take, although it’s pretty much Baudrillard - hyper reality, information firehose and a lack of shared meaning for our symbols. It feels spot on for social media.
Personally, as a Zoomer male, I think large segments of the left dislike us. You see constant complaints of the "cishet white man" and such from many of their circles. They're not exactly making it difficult for us to feel like they're the 'enemy' so to speak.
I know this isn't true of all leftists groups, but the fact that some parts of the edifice aren't completely rotten does not really make me any less keen on the whole thing coming down; not to mention that the seemingly-innocuous groups seem to have been the precursors to the rotten ones.
Yeah I agree. The prevailing view in some circles is “it’s fine to be racist as long as you’re racist against white men”
Also against white women, though the animus against men seems to be more intense.
This is alarming
Don't worry, Jews aren't white!
Oh wait...that's only on the right, where it's a bad thing...
Jews are racially ambiguous. We are whatever race (or at least white, non-white, or of color) depending what argument someone wants to make.
East Asians are also getting some of that ambiguity now, I think.
Yeah, I agree. I grew up in blue areas and saw this as early as the 90s.
You have an increasing number of young men feeling feminism is bad, even apparently with otherwise liberal groups, as H. Liam Smith points out in the SPLC survey above (or below, depending on how you sort the thread):
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/06/01/poll-finds-support-great-replacement-hard-right-ideas
'Young' here just means below 50, so that's a fair amount of Millennials and even Gen Xers.
Given that young men are usually the least risk-averse and most energetic segment of the population, I think there's reason for hope. Network with your friends and prepare the counterrevolution!
Allen Downey asserts that it is untrue: https://allendowney.substack.com/p/the-political-gender-gap-is-not-growing
https://youtu.be/ywtKokFjYb4
The above is a good video on the topic. So until the late 20th century men used to more left wing than women. Also when polled on individual issues the extent of polarisation is much lower than the initial data point would suggest. So the political positions of liberal and conservatives voters might be smaller than people expect.
Surely this is due to gender being a tool applied for the purposes of identity politics - gender is being politicized by social media algorithms and bad faith pundits and political actors.
The right have abortion bans, Trump (a rapist), anti-trans legislation, "traditional values" where women are housewives etc. The left have cancel culture, "believe victims", and vocally supporting every group except men (especially white ones).
I can't believe so many people are confused about this. It's clearly #MeToo-style feminism. (#MeToo, of course, started in 2017. But the variety of feminism that it epitomizes is much older, and was around in the aughts.)
Does no one remember the genderwars of the early 2010s? These issues aren't as discussed anymore, but that isn't because the underlying causes behind them went away.
The timing definitely lines up with MeToo. But I still want more surveys that have consistent results before I’m confident that the genders have politically divided so much. It sure does seem consistent with my personal sense of the vibes for what that’s worth. And also consistent with that other SPLC survey I saw that roughly half (46%) of young _Democratic_ men think that “feminism has done more harm than good. [https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/06/01/poll-finds-support-great-replacement-hard-right-ideas]
“Boys and girls used to hang out together more” seems glaringly false to me. Things used to be WAY more gender-segregated, but have gotten more coed over time. In the past 10 years alone, my college dorm decreased its number of single-gender floors by 75%, as well as allowing opt-in ability to have opposite gender roommates in doubles. Coed bathrooms have also drastically increased in number (mostly due to the prevalence of nb people now), and while no one really hangs out in bathrooms, I think it’s a sign of just how many other things went coed first.
More anecdotally, everyone in my social group has opposite gender friends nowadays, while I know that my dad had basically never talked to women even by the time he’d graduated. Everyone I know also seems happy to live with opposite gender roommates in their apartments, while this would have been unpopular a few decades ago and outright scandalous a few decades before that.
I think a much simpler explanation for increasing political differences is that liberal politics have gotten more focused on social justice (which is often exclusive towards men) and conservative politics have become more focused on the pro-life side of the abortion debate (which is repellent to many women for obvious reasons).
There's formal vs informal integration. Informally, a school may give students the same lunch hour regardless of their demographic traits. Informally, they will cluster on traits at certain lunch tables. We are increasingly able to opt into our own preferred "filter bubbles" these days rather than having segregation imposed on us.
As a sanity check, perhaps you could sample from liberal and conservative political groups and see if they’re male or female, rather than sampling men and women and asking if they’re liberal or conservative, just to see if the two approaches are roughly comparable to each other. Of course, you’d have to be able to account for age.
Does anyone have numbers for this?
I guess you could get lists of liberal and conservative groups from Wikipedia or something and get a nice sample size (though I'm sure some people belong to multiple groups), but they list 100 liberal groups to start. I don't know how to program a web scraper, but I'm sure someone else here does!
> the finding doesn’t replicate and might not be real at all.
That link still shows the gap increasing recently, even if it also shows men getting more liberal relative to the past.
Part of this has to be a function of education, right? People with graduate degrees have very liberal views, generally speaking, and more and more such degrees are going to women (I think both in raw numerical terms and the proportion of such degrees that are awarded).
What do conservative and liberal even mean in this context? If we divide each category further with social and economic qualifiers would the resulting 4 groups relate to each other in the same way? What if the terms feminine and masculine were used in place of liberal and conservative, would the results be similar?
To me the most confounding part of anything like this is in a respondent's self-reporting what broad cohort they should be placed within. I think in truth this detail is situational and malleable, and is always a matter of relative perspective.
The problem with sampling ACX readers on this is not where they fall on the political spectrum, but WHY they fall where they did. Your readers seem generally more likely to be the sort of people who arrived at their political opinions through some kind of intentional deliberation (or at least formulated a defensible post hoc rationale for the ones they already have.) I suspect your readers are meaningfully less susceptible to changing positions merely to get along socially, and when they sometimes have to pretend to believe in X because of their peer group they're more likely to be able to compartmentalize that and maintain their true belief in not-X which is reported in private surveys.
If I was dating a gal in the Sierra Club and had to feign sympathy towards some useless endangered species, I could probably do so and still maintain my true belief in a basically libertarian property rights approach and accurately report that on a survey. But most people, if they say something enough times, start to inch towards believing it. I suggest that the kind of folks who read your blog and those like it are arrogant about our intellect and reasoning ability, think we're smarter than most people we meet on a regular basis, and are therefore less likely to be influenced by the herd effect being discussed in those tweets.
If the gender split in politics is pretty recent, it might make more sense to just look at the younger respondents to the survey.
...Yin in the ascendency, always brings chaos, thus the growing disequilibrium between men and women in the everyday, not just in the political. Pursuing kindness at the societal scale, is a path paved by a good intention, but as we are seeing across the West, compassion before justice, in the particular and at large, impoverishes all. The quiet part, but getting louder, is that new wave feminism/progressivism is the witchcraft of our age. (If you want some numbers to tell you something Scott, check out how the original witchcraft wave played out in the U.S. and Europe)
Yin in the ascendancy? If you've got an actual Chinese source for this, I'd be really curious. For one, anything that's true in China and the West has a good chance of being a universal law. For another, they have a long history of societies falling and rising to study, so their 'n' is much bigger.
...There's no Chinese press release announcing Yin is moving out of balance. But there is an official crackdown underway on cultural effeminizations, of both the local and overseas sort, (such as Korean pop bands). There have been various media reports in the West about this. Sorry I don't have source references close to hand.
The Western media of course defer to the narrative that China under Xi Jinping is reverting to "communism ". That's because socialism is an ideology in the Western Civ political playbook, which, short sightedly, is the default lens we tend use for the whole of humanity and all of history. A deeper perspective, is that China is responding to the local effects there of the global crisis in the Yin Yang equilibrium, much as it has done for millennia. (See N.S. Lyon's article about Wang Huning at palladium@substack.)
An anecdote if I may. For several years I was an official in the Hong Kong government. On a Liaison trip to Beijing in 2006, the non-chinese members of the HK group were addressed by academics from Peking University, (it's still called that). The prof who addressed the elements of Chinese culture informing current policies, cited The Dao,(Yin/Yang): the Buddha; and Confucius. In response to my question, "what about Karl ?" his simple reply was, "...we tried that and it didn't work".
You're actually Chinese, eh? Now I'm interested.
I would absolutely believe Chinese people would interpret geopolitical events using their own frameworks, just as we insist everything has to be about communism, capitalism, socialism, and fascism (or God) over here. So you see the feminization of the West as reflecting the ascendance of 'yin' (the feminine principle), and the Chinese government as deciding to become more 'yang' and militarize in response? Couldn't that also be seen as striking when your enemy is weak (which is common sense, and also in Sun Tzu as also doubtless in fifty Chinese war manuals I have never read and never will, lacking Mandarin)?
From the article, it seems more like Xi (and Wang Huning before him) is trying to prevent the sort of social disintegration he sees in the USA as a result of consumerism, and is trying to move back toward what we would call 'socialism' as a result. Do the Chinese have an idea of what a 'yin' society and a 'yang' society look like?
Also, aren't the 'three men over a bridge' (Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism) sort of the 'PC' elements of Chinese culture Westerners love to cite to show how cosmopolitan they are when, say, the harsh prescriptions of the Legalist school like Han Fei might also be kept in mind?
I'm also not sure how much any of this has to do with European witchcraft panics--it's not clear any of the accused witches were practicing a pagan religion, and almost nobody believes teenage neopagans now can do real harm to anyone.
(As an aside, ages ago I managed to download a crappy translation of the 'Thick Black Theory', found it incomprehensible, and set it aside. I later read 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms', and a little later read the 'Thick Black Theory' again...and holy crap, now I knew who he was talking about, and it made perfect sense! Yeah, you had to be sneaky like Liu Bei and evil like Cao Cao, like Sima Yi!)
I wonder if young men are really conservative or if they are just opposed to wokism, which they feel is hurting them. I would expect them to be much more open to traditional leftist positions like tax the rich, distribute wealth, social security for everyone, limit corporate greed and similar.
Personally, yeah, for sure. If the left pivots to talking more about this they can have my vote back
My 2 cents: because politics has become less important, it's now fashion; and men and women have radically different fashion choices.
Politics used to be life or death for lots of people. Gay people's ability to marry people literally hung on which party was elected in their locality. And that's only the most recent example. Women's rights, policies that affected non-white people, all that stuff. These days, the gap between right and left is smaller. Example: even Donald Trump, who was incompetent and terrible in so many ways, failed to derail America. The Tories, who are pure expressions of self-serving abuse of power, have not managed to destroy the UK (I really thought they might). Right and left leaning parties bring only marginal levels of change.
Therefore, people realise that their lives and livelihoods are not at stake, and vote on other factors - essentially aesthetic or fashion factors. And right now, the fashion is swinging in one particular direction. It could easily change course, and make women more right wing.
https://manifold.markets/oh/will-the-findings-about-an-politica?r=b2g
This feels like one of those ideas that's just so salient that it's dangerously difficult to avoid immediately jumping on a pet hypothesis that obviously explains it.
Even after it doesn't replicate, and thus shouldn't need any explanation.
I think that increasing time online versus interacting in person are at the heart of this, like so many other things.
Think of it this way, a brother and sister may occupy the same house, but their minds may be a thousand miles apart thanks to the Internet. If one spends all evening on tumblr and the other on 4chan (1) occupying the same household may make less of a difference than it would have in 1980.
An interesting question that could start to test this would be to look at the both gender difference in specific site usage and how boys and girls on the same site differ in the politics. Are boys and girls and tumblr more similar in political leanings than boys and girls in total? Are girls on tumblr closer in affiliation to girls on Twitter than to boys on tumblr? Are intersite political differences greater or less than intrasite political differences? I hypothesize yes in some since to all of these, but I'd be curious about empirical data.
(1) Or the Zoomer equivalents. I admit, I'm almost to the age where I'm not sure where kids hang out online these days. Tiktok?
My view is that this is mostly untrue and the non-replications are correct, at least in the US; young women are more liberal than young women 10 years ago, but young men are also more liberal than young men 10 years ago (I'm willing to believe that there's a "divergence" in the sense that the change among young women has been larger, but the design of the graphs and the agenda of the discussion depends on today's young men being increasingly conservative).
I might be willing to buy young men being more willing to *call themselves* conservative conditional on having a given set of political opinions, but that is more about vibes. Maybe also the political identity spectrum increasingly including the "trust the credentialed" vs. "one weird trick" spectrum, which has probably always had a big gender gap.
One thing I tried here was looking at cisgender Americans who selected more moderate responses (not "1" or "5") on the immigration, abortion, minimum wage, and global warming issues. In all four cases (and in the smaller sample size for all four combined) men identified as a bit more conservative on the political spectrum question, though I did not look for statistical significance.
Your blog is where I learned that all politics is signalling, so let me return the favour: this is signalling, and it's pretty funny signalling at that.
If you're a woman, you want people to think that you're caring/educated/cosmopolitan. Liberalism (which is a consumer product marketed as an identity like everything else) sells itself as caring/educated/cosmopolitan,* and has reoriented itself in response to market forces to fill that niche. Your opinions don't matter for non-signalling purposes, so you loudly proclaim yourself to be liberal.
If you're a man, you want people to think that you're tough/self-sufficient/unresponsive-to-social-pressure. Conservatism (which is a consumer product marketed as an identity like everything else) sells itself as tough/valuing self-sufficiency/standing-up-to-social-pressure. Your opinions don't matter for non-signalling purposes, so you loudly proclaim yourself to be a conservative.
My prediction would be that legacy products with skewed branding will fit this pattern; e.g. tankie Communism will be more male than female.
If this has grown over time, it's because politics as brands to express your identity has been finally finishing off that weird 19th century thing where you think about what policies would be good for the country and vote for someone who says they'll enact them. Also, development/liberalism increase gender dimorphism in personality (presumably also for signalling-competition reasons), so that would lead some of the increase too.
*Also rural. You can squint and tilt your head to say environmentalism does this, but I think that's too much of a stretch and it's just the caring thing again. The party that combines liberalism with "voting for us proves you grew up on a farm" will be guaranteed 50% of the vote though.
That 19th century thing was very much an elite thing anyway--people lower down the scale tended to vote in their self-interest.
Rural people are usually a lot less into environmentalism, because environmentalists want to stop you from using land, and that's how rural people make their living.
For the ACX survey, you could check married people vs single. I think I was more influenced by my wife's politics vs any sibling. (I guess this is age dependent.)
I think this is obvious - the left has becoming increasingly misandrist and the excessive focus on DEI and growing dislike of men, especially white men, has started to alienate and exhaust males. Therefore they are less likely to be on board with liberalism. It is well known that feminism, originally a respectable ideology, has spiraled out of control and many of its proponents are now woke idiots that hate men.
Go look up some of the second-wave stuff back in the 70s, or Mary Daly or Ti-Grace Atkinson. 'Don't breed males, don't feed males' stickers. This has always been there. It's just more successful now that fewer people are getting married--marriage used to be a moderating effect on both sexes.
Women who are not your sister are able to use additional incentives/rewards to shape male behavior (should they choose to accept the mission). It's unsurprising that they would do so, since unrelated males can be dangerous. It's also unsurprising that they tend to be more liberal as liberal ideology is more empowering to women, and at least tries to moderate male dominance.
I feel like it's less about gender integration (amount of time men and women spend together) and more about a divergence of where men and women get cultural information. It would be interesting to see how this holds up in say, single-sex private schools before social media, where boys and girls are mostly separated but are basically in the same cultural bubble.
There have always been gendered hobbies, skills, and occupations, but the past fifteen years have been historically weird with how much new, niche information can be accessed. Single women (who are doing the most political diverging) generally aren't coming up with these new ideologies themselves from hanging out with other women, but ideas are spreading in majority-female spaces that otherwise wouldn't have the chance to spread. The success rate of specific ideas is different in majority-male vs majority-female spaces, and with the vast magnitude of new ideas that get a chance to take root, this difference is accentuated.
Whereas for most of history, most people are coming up with new ideas from information they get from their family/spouse and their friends who are also in a small, local network. Coming across twenty hot takes a day from people that you've never met is pretty unprecedented.
Scott, I was thinking of re-doing the analysis using a non-parametric test, which I think is what's appropriate for data of this kind. But maybe you already did that? Did you do a t-test (parametric) or a Chi-square test (non-parametric)?
Technically he wants a chi-square, for proportions.
Theoretically you could use Fisher's exact test, but the sample sizes are big enough normal approximations are OK.
Well, the 1-10 left-right ratings are ordinal numbers, not actual quantities, & think that also calls for chi-square. But the differences between the groups with same sex and different sex siblings are so small I think there's not much chance of finding a significant result, and even if you did what you would have demonstrated would be a tiny effect, right?, so just not that interesting.
I don't understand how merely *having* an opposite-sex sibling is a good proxy for *hanging out* with the opposite sex.
So what's interesting is that when you look at support for particularly policies there is much less discrepancy. My theory is that the difference here is largely one driven by a greater role of personal value signalling and different aesthetics about political talk in our political discussions (likely driven by social media). Basically, the theory is the way of talking about politics each side has puts the other side off -- and that these strongly correlate with male vs female differences in communication and interpersonal advertising.
I mean, I believe global warming is a serious concern and that we need to worry about how environmental degradation can harm people (eg haze in SE Asia) but when I hear the way many greens talk about how we are hurting mother earth with this vibe that seems to resent progress and our mastery over nature my emotional reaction is absolutely -- fuck that I'd rather let the earth burn than be on the same side as them.
This happens in a hundred different ways on a hundred different issues. It didn't happen before because politics was a broadcast message. The political classes talked to you (and they worked hard not to alienate anyone) but now we talk to each other and the differences between male and female communication styles and value advertising are driving us crazy.
Maybe social media isn’t the problem, it’s the way we use it? You can still occupy a principled position (against climate change, also against handicapping the economy to deal with it - thus in favour of accelerating the transition to renewable sources). Few people seem to, but those of us who do can hang out in weird corners of the internet like this one :)
I wasn't making some kind of moral case against social media, just offering a causal story. Part of the problem is that internet enabled cheap many to many media is a revolution in how we communicate with each other on the order of the printing press and we haven't yet mastered the appropriate cultural practices to deal with it appropriately.
Yeah I agree with this
The test might be incorrect: having a sibling doesn't mean you spend a lot of time together.
The piece is great to show some tendencies, though it compares apples with pears - still fruits, but not really the same. The US data shows the support for ideology, while the rest is the support of a certain party. Since there are no Gallups in other countries, this is the best we have, though it does not account to how true to their ideology those parties are. In Romania, the social-democratic party cares little about social democracy, yet it will be classified as a left-wing party there.
The cultural aspect is important in understanding a rise in conservatism. Coming from Romania, it is impossible not to hear Andrew Tate's name on a weekly basis. What has he done for society? Absolutely nothing, turned a bunch of young boys into self-obsessed mean that speak fast, drink sparkling water and have an issue with fat, liberal and "woke" people. Tracing all the problems of the world to those groups is easy and requires little effort to investigate the world, thus a growth in those conservative thoughts.
My guess would be siblings don't moderate each others' political views much because they start out too similar, on account of having the same parents. Look for people who share a house, but didn't grow up together, and didn't have much chance to pre-screen prospective housemates based on political views.
It's not that it is or isn't a problem, but as with anything trends are interesting and it's a worthwhile exercise to try and understand why things are playing out the way they are.
Another thing worth noting is the established trend that male and female professions tend to diverge more as gender roles become weaker in society (this can be observed in international comparisons). This could be a reflection of the same underlying dynamics, men and women increasingly self-sorting into different tribes as they have the freedom to do so. This would imply that sexual differences are strong and persistent and naturally carry over into various areas of life if given the freedom and opportunity to do so.
It's also somewhat paradoxical in the case of politics though, since historically women have tended to be more right wing and men more left wing. But this just underscores the fact that the tribalism is itself the driver of the differences and not the specific orthodoxies of the tribes that they've self-sorted into.
Everybody (left and right) wants to make it about their personal gender war hobby horse, but it seems more likely it's due to demographic shifts, such as those mentioned by Marginal Revolution. Women historically tended to be more right wing than men, since they were less likely to be members of unions and were more religious; as women became near-equal contributors to the work force and secularized, these influences disappeared and they became more left-wing than men. If in the past such trends have been primarily demographic, why would we expect now they'd be based on gender war stuff?
If the effect is real, of course.
The gender war is happening, as much as people may not want to talk about it. Recall the general always fighting the last war...
Video games are full of predatory microtransactions now, that doesn't mean it explains people's voting behaviors.
Do you mean to say that something new called "gender war" is happening? Or it just a new name for good old "males and females have different evolutionary interests", which probably goes back to lizards at least?
They have and they do.
I think the delayed and decreased marriage rate probably puts the sexes in more direct antagonism than they used to be. They don't really have that one thing they're working toward together anymore.
Yes, this whole thing honestly seems like a bugaboo to me. Gender has less of an effect on political preferences than race, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, education level, whether you lives in a rural or urban area, and the political views of your parents. Acting like gender is the primary driver of political polarization - or even a particularly noteworthy factor - seems rather silly.
If this doesn't replicate and may not exist... why elevate the topic to a discussion at all? It seems like the very stereotype of "angels dancing on the head of a pin" style discussion that generates no knowledge or information if you're merely speculating about what could cause an effect that doesn't exist.
Agree.
Does every feature in data require an explanation? Even if we found a strong correlation with some other variables - or even causal relationships, if you wish - we probably wouldn’t have predictive power on the next data pattern. Phenomena like this are extremely multi variate and complex that the explanation of a segment of data at some point in time would sound like a just-so story of dubious utility.
Should we then just give up any attempt at proposing sociopolitical models? Maybe not, but I’m afraid that if we can’t make predictions we might be wasting our time - or worse, getting the illusion that we understand the world.
1. He gets to (begin to) disprove something with data (very rationalist), and it's something fashionable pushed by the media, which is extra fun.
2. It's controversial, which draws attention and comment.
I don't object--this is all over the media, with the predictable 'men are going right-wing oh no' slant, and it's nice to see someone with a reputation for looking at the data look into it.
My comment was primarily directed at the bulk of this post - 90% of the content of this post was discussing, not the validity of the original chart, but the validity of a particular interpretation of what could explain the chart, and only in an aside at the very end does he mention "also this is probably all bullshit". Engaging with a derivative when the root is p-hacked is what I'm taking issue with.
And yes, I'm aware that Scott has seemed much more to fall into clickbait and hype cycles since moving to substack, but I don't respect him any more for doing it than I do any other online personality, simply because he used to be more thoughtful.
Honestly? I think he had a kid.
What's more important, giving us content or cleaning his baby's diapers?
This is purely anecdotal/gut feelings based, so I could be wildly wrong, but the tone shift to me seemed to start much further back than that; it's felt a bit like a spiral ever since his "feud" with the NYT. While understandable, it's definitely felt like he was radicalized to the point of being "anti-whatever-seems-popular-by-NYT-readers-online" (ie edging into reactionary territory) as opposed to the more original content from before that time.
It's also possible that I was simply younger and hadn't heard as many of the ideas he was discussing in the past, so they felt more original and new, and now it feels less so because I'm simply less uninformed? I honestly couldn't say.
It's on a different server no? You could read ACX and SSC and see.
I do think that would make sense, though. Getting doxxed by the NYT is a pretty radicalizing thing to have happen to you.
> You could read ACX and SSC and see.
I could if I was in any way more invested in validating my feelings than commenting on a blog post. I'm not, so that's honestly not worth the effort to me. I just wanted to share my potential biases so as to not unintentionally mislead anyone while still sharing my perspective.
Can anyone find the Washington Post-ABC News poll that found people with daughters were more likely to vote for Hillary in 2016?
As I recall the poll actually showed that people with children of mixed sexes were about as likely to vote Trump as people with only boys, whereas people with only daughters were more likely to vote Trump, so the actual finding was that having at least one son made you more likely to vote Trump. The poll appears to be paywalled, but Huffpo of all places has the finding:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/people-with-daughters-are-more-likely-to-vote-for-hillary-clinton_n_58053b6ce4b0b994d4c0e164
My interpretation was the presence of at least one son means you would have been worried about the effects of feminism on your son if Hillary won, but I am obviously not a neutral observer here...
Allen Downey has tried to replicate these results with publicly available data and found no effect
https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2024/02/11/the-political-gender-gap-is-not-growing/
Why omit people with both brothers and sisters? Seems like the important part is having at least one opposite-sex sibling; not having a same-sex sibling doesn't seem important.
(I say this as a male with both a brother and sister.)
Every failed hypothesis highlights the incredible ability the human brain has to concoct a plausible-sounding hypothesis to literally ANY set of data, and that we shouldn't accept any hypothesis until we have some supporting data (and NOT what was available before the hypothesis was generated).
My personal experience is that I (M) have two sisters and a wife who are all significantly farther to the right than I am. Not that my anecdote is statistically meaningful, so much as that my personal experience leads me to be skeptical of the hypothesis sans compelling evidence.
Meanwhile, is there a more broad assessment of country trends? I'm skeptical this is just something happening in these four countries, and if we did a true international survey we'd find no general trend, just a lot of noise that only looks like 'signal' when you cherry pick the data. The failure to replicate suggests this isn't a robust observation on which to base any hypotheses. Once again, the prudence of starting any discussion of anomalous data with, "But what about the null hypothesis?" suggests itself.
Yeah... Looking at all of this, I think the only meaningful information you can get from it is that South Korea is fucked, but we knew that already.
... or that in this one metric collected by this one organization the data skew significantly for some (real or trivial) reason. In my experience there's often a gap between "statistic produced once" and "deep insight".
I am much less concerned about my sisters approval than I am of a potential partner. Eventhough I start getting into cooky political stuff my sister will still be my sister. However my long time partner might no longer be my partner
Presumably siblings are comfortable with each other, and there is no need to impress the opposite sex by exhibiting their approved behaviours. In other words, stranger girls and boys might rub off on one another much more than siblings.
I hate to say it, but I think an ACX sample is not very useful for assessing the USA or the rich world as a whole.
You can see from his sample it's got almost 10 times as many men as women (a big problem if you're studying gender divergence), and is composed heavily of younger men with technical interests. Given the history of the blog involves a doxxing attack on its author by a major arm of the liberal media, it tends to lean center-right.
I think it's a great sample for looking at attitudes among techies (who are a culturally important segment given the importance of computers and the internet these days), but not much more than that.
Just because it was attacked by the left doesn’t mean it isn’t left of center...
Well, the survey results in the post suggest that readers of the blog rather lean center-left, on average? You get posts here from people all over the political spectrum though, which I think is great.
That is a good point, though it seems to go in the face of a lot of leftism, and is heavily disliked on the left.
Anyway, it's probably the wrong place to study polarization, since we've both agreed it has a centrist tilt (if that metaphor makes any sense).
I suspect we have different ideas of what it means to lean left politically. What exactly do you mean by leftism and "the left" here? Marxists? Social democrats? Liberals? Woke people? Some particular leftist bloggers? Saying that the blog goes in the face of leftism and is heavily disliked on the left makes little sense, unless you are actually thinking about a more spesific group, which I suspect you do.
Either the MSM woke left like the NYT or actual Marxists, who are two separate groups with frequent conflict.
Александр здравствуй, позвони мне или почини этот сайт
I'm a young adult and still live with my siblings, and have fairly different political views from them. I think being in the same family and interacting with each other moderates us a *bit*, but our internet siloes are still very different and it generally doesn't feel worth it to work through our different worldviews built out of watching hundreds of hours of video essays and podcasts leading in different directions. The number of different assumptions and logical steps built on other steps just seems overwhelming.
to me the obvious explanation is that news feed algorithms and balkanized media amplify initially small differences, ala James Flynn's basketball argument. Media used to be more ideologically integrated when people were reading local newspapers and watching local TV channels that tried to serve everyone in a particular geographic area. Now media is all fine tuned to pander to the biases of particular ideological niche.
basically web 2.0 changed the economics of media distribution in a way that increases the profitability of niche products relative to broad-appeal products, and this caused most of the increased variance in culture and politics. That's my best guess. Increased variance in training datasets -> increased variance in resultant models. And news feeds give you training data that amplifies your model's peculiarities.
so Paul Graham is right that the root cause of the expanding political gap is an expanding difference in training data, but wrong about the cause of the expanding difference in training data. I think the latter is mostly due to social media and its effect on media economics. One interacts with one's siblings in adulthood much less than one interacts with algorithms.
Politics in general has polarised, which seems to be something not solely correlated to gender. If politics polarises, and there's already a gap between men and women on average, maybe the gap widens as a result of the landscape moving rather than a change in gender relationships?
I wonder how the gap would look when tested for individual ideas, rather than as a bundle. E.g., separating out women's rights from issues like tax burden, would be interesting. It's possible that answers around reproductive rights skews things, though I don't have a convincing argument for why the gap around those in particular would have changed.
Nope, not Chinese. Not American, just British colonial ancestry.
I think the crackdown in China is more about cultural progressivism than consumerism/capitalism. In fact in economic management terms the Chinese are actively trying to redirect from exports, to internal consumption. But the Chinese are savers, ( because there is no social welfare) so it's not working very well. The same Chinese prof I mentioned before, was also happy to explain the chaos of 1960's 'cultural revolution' as very much a shift in the Yin. ( It was Mao's wife, Jiang Qing who led the 'Gang of four').
As for other episodes of mass mania, check out Richard Landes' 2010 book, "Heaven on Earth-The varieties of the Millennial Experience". The chapters on the tragedy of the Xhosa people in the mid-19th century is especially relevant to the Greta Thunberg phenomenon.
I just realized that in every case more popular within girls ideology is "left" and within boys "right"
And not only "left" and "right" have very different meaning in different countries, but they also changed during 90s-20s
I am too lazy to argument for a specific explanation