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CronoDAS comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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Here's something interesting on gender relations in ancient Greece and Rome.
Why did ancient Greek writers think women were like children? Because they married children - the average woman had her first marriage between the ages of twelve and fifteen, and her husband would usually be in his thirties.
The reason ancient Greek writers thought women were like children is the same reason men in all cultures think women are like children: There are significant incentives to do so. Men who treat women as children reap very large rewards compared to those men who treat women as equals.
EDIT: If someone thinks this is an invalid point, please explain in a reply. If the downvote(s) is just "I really dislike anyone believing what he's saying is true, even if a lot of evidence supports it" (regardless of whether or not evidence currently supports it) then please leave a comment stating that.
EDIT 2: Supporting evidence or retraction will be posted tonight.
EDIT 3: As I can find no peer-reviewed articles suggesting this phenomenon, I retract this statement.
This conversation has been hacked.
The parent comment points to an article presenting a hypothesis. The reply flatly drops an assertion which will predictably derail conversation away from any discussion of the article.
If you're going to make a comment like that, and if you prefix it with something along the lines of "The hypothesis in the article seems superfluous to me; men in all cultures treat women like children because...", and you point to sources for this claim, then I would confidently predict no downvotes will result.
(ETA: well, in this case the downvote is mine, which makes prediction a little too easy - but the point stands.)
Thanks! I won't be able to do the work required on this right now, but will later tonight.
Wow, that's a great link.
The article suggests a direct counter-example: by having high standards, the men forfeit the labor of the women in things like 'help[ing] with finance and political advice'. Much like the standard libertarian argument against discrimination: racists narrow their preferences, raising the cost of labor, and putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
Men may as a group have incentive to keep women down, but this is a prisoner's dilemma.
The PUA community include people who come across as huge assholes, and that could be an alternative explanation of why people react negatively to the topics, by association. I'm thinking in particular of the blog "Roissy in DC", which is on OB's blogroll.
Offhand, it seems to me that thinking of all women as children entails thinking of some adults as children, which would be a map-territory mistake around the very important topic of personhood.
I did pick up some interesting tips from PUA writing, and I do think there can be valuable insight there if you can ignore the smell long enough to dig around (and wash your hands afterwards, epistemically speaking).
No relevant topics should be off-limits to a community of sincere inquiry. Relevance is the major reason why I wouldn't discuss the beauty of Ruby metaprogramming on LessWrong, and wouldn't discuss cryonics on a project management mailing list.
If discussions around topic X systematically tend to go off the rails, and topic X still appears relevant, then the conclusion is that the topic of "why does X cause us to go off the rails" should be adequately dealt with first, in lexical priority. That isn't censorship, it's dependency management.
Got that. I am suggesting that it is off-limits because this community isn't yet strong enough at the skills of collaborative truth-seeking. Past failures shouldn't be seen as eternal limitations; as the community grows, by acquiring new members, it may grow out of these failures.
To make this concrete, the community seems to have a (relative) blind spot around things like pragmatics, as well as what I've called "myths of pure reason". One of the areas of improvement is in reasoning about feelings. I'm rather hopeful, given past contributions by (for instance) Alicorn and pjeby.
There is truth to what you say but unfortunately you are letting your frustration become visible. That gives people the excuse to assign you lower status and freely ignore your insight. This does not get you what you want.
This is perhaps one of the most important lessons to be learned on the topic of 'pragmatics'. Whether you approach the topic from works like Robert Greene's on Power, War and Seduction or from the popular social skills based self help communities previously mentioned, a universal lesson is that things aren't fair, bullshit is inevitable and getting indignant about the bullshit gets in the way of your pragmatic goals.
There may be aspects of the morality here that is childlike or naive and I would be interested in your analysis of the subject since you clearly have given it some thought. But if you are reckless and throw out 'like theists' references without thought your contribution will get downvoted to oblivion and I will not get to hear what you have to say. Around here that more or less invokes the 'nazi' rule.
Edit: No longer relevant.
I think I agree. If Eliezer didn't have us all convinced that he is naive in that sense we would probably have to kill him before he casts his spell of ultimate power.
(cough The AI Box demonstrations were just warm ups...)
This kind of phrase seems designed to rile (some of) your readers. You will improve the quality of discourse substantially by understanding that and correcting for it. Unless, of course, your goal really is to rile readers rather than to improve quality of discourse.
Robin can do what he likes on his own blog without direct consequences within the blog environment. He also filters which comments he allows to be posted. I guess what I am saying is that it isn't useful to compare OB and LW on this dimension because the community vs individual distinction is far more important than the topic clustering.
I may not have been clear: I meant pragmatics in this sense, roughly "how we do things with words". I'd also include things like denotation vs connotation in that category. Your comment on "pragmatic issues" suggests you may have understood another sense.
Curiously, there is ambiguity there and both meanings seem to apply.
Why do so many people here believe that? It strongly contradicts my experience.
Your experience is atypical because you're atypical.
Man, I've barely looked at that page since I wrote it four years ago. I live with Jess now, across the road from the other two. I can heartily recommend my brand of atypicality :-)
Good answer. I keep privately asking the same question about these sorts of things, and getting the same answer from others.
What do you mean by "many people here believe that"? Believe what? And what tells you they do believe it?
People have great difficulty verbalizing their perceptions of and beliefs about social interactions. It is not obvious to me that you two have different beliefs or experiences. More likely, you do, but it would probably take a lot of work to identify and communicate those differences.
I guess because our experience contradicts your experience.
Is that true? What are the incentives and rewards? Are there circumstances under which this is a bad idea - for example, do relative ages or relative social position matter? (For example, what if the woman in question is your mother, teacher/professor, employer, or some other authority figure with power over you?) Are there also incentives for men to treat other men as children, or for women to treat men or other women as children?
I wonder if adults treat children like children merely because of the benefits they reap by doing so.
Sometimes that's definitely the case. At other times it really does appear to be for real and concrete neutral reasons.
I'm pretty sure he's trying to say basically the same thing as this OB post (specifically the part from "Suppose that middle-class American men are told..." on).
Plus women have more juvenile morphology compared to men.
Women are shorter, smaller, less muscled, beardless, have higher voices, more fatty tissue, etc. The Greeks and Romans seemed to rely on surface analogies for reasoning.
Interesting read, thanks.