Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014

Gondolinian

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I'm also highly uncovninced that this should be such a low priority issue.

Yes, we evidently disagree on that. Let's identify that as "area of contention #1", before we dive into the specifics.

I do disagree with your chain of reasoning of "(sexual harrassment) leads to (fewer women in STEM fields) leads to (fewer/worse technological solutions to the 'all the issues I described')" playing a role commensurate with the hubbub we spend on the topic.

There are many aspects to each of the causal links (for example: is the sexual harassment situation in STEM fields particularly bad, as opposed to other university courses, or as opposed to non-university occupational choices?), and I doubt a few paragraphs will suffice to cause either of us to update. I don't mind delving into #1 by any means, but let's divide and conquer, since #1 could keep a serious discussion going for months.

I'm also confused if you think this should be such a low priority why you persist in discussing it.

If you saw the public discourse and the attention of the public raptly focussed on the welfare of ponies, to the exclusion or at least neglect of all other pressing problems, you'd discuss such a misallocation of resources as well, even if you didn't care about ponies one bit. "This is not what we should spend our attention on" would probably be your message, or what other reaction to a hypothetical pony craziness would you implement?

This is just an edge case to illustrate the principle; concerning sexual harassment, which is a serious issue overall (though less so when we're talking about chat messages), the message would be "This isn't what we should spend such a huge amount of our attention on" (versus "no attention at all on").

I'm deeply confused by this. Who are these powers-that-be and how is this in any way shape or form to their advantage?

Everyone who profits from the status quo. Which is disproportionally the global elites, those who neither suffer from droughts, nor from a lack of healthcare, nor from transmittable diseases (comparatively), nor from job insecurity, nor from ... you get the picture. Those who bought and paid for government initiatives (or the lack thereof) via myriad lobby groups. This isn't some conspiracy theory; there are many different groups with many different aims. But they have plenty of game theoretic reasons not to see the boat rocked. So all the better if the plebs keeps itself busy with lynching professors over lewd online messages.

Cui bono, you ask? Again, everyone who profits from the status quo. Everyone who'd rather not see the electorate be galvanized by issues such as Citizens United (lobby groups and the industry behind them), effective Wall Street oversight (banks), Carbon Taxes (energy giants), single payer healthcare (health care industry), gerrymandering (basically most of the elected members of The House) etc. If you are the king, you (general you) wouldn't want to roll the dice either, since you'd have nowhere to go but down, relative to the rest of society.

Not all comparisons translate well from a small scope to the big leagues, but this one does: just as your attention is a finite resource, so is society's as a whole. When your whole home is a mess, you can't clean up all the rooms at the same time. Though, of course, some amount of parallelisation is possible, you can't do all at once. For example, Obama political capital in his first term was mostly spent on the ACA (and that kind of worked against all odds). So it goes for the sexual harrassment hysteria. Which doesn't mean it's not an issue. It's just not first in line, not by a long shot (goes back to our disagreement about #1).

Then again, if humanity doesn't survive the various Malthusian (and related) disasters coming our way, there'd be no more lewd text messages, so we got that going for us, which is nice.

Everyone who'd rather not see the electorate be galvanized by issues such as Citizens United (lobby groups and the industry behind them), effective Wall Street oversight (banks), Carbon Taxes (energy giants), single payer healthcare (health care industry), gerrymandering (basically most of the elected members of The House) etc.

As it happens half the issues you raise there are also distractions, but best. A number of them are also ways for the elite to con the populace into giving them more power. Keep in mind that just because you've seen through one ... (read more)

0JoshuaZ11y

Sure. I'm curious, by the way, if you saw my reply to Alienist which discussed some of the basic evidence for this being an issue. [...] Sure, but it doesn't need to be substantially worse as a whole to have a disparate impact. Sexual harassment can combine with other problems (e.g. a pre-existing gender imbalance as well as larger cultural issues). [...] Ignore it completely, just as you and I are ignoring what the vast majority of people really do seem to care about- e.g. celebrities. In general, if there really is a problem and some humans are putting resources into handling that problem, it isn't likely to be productive to spend time telling them that they should go do something else. It also isn't helpful to then use language that essentially compares caring about a cause to being somehow complcit in Roman style bread-and-circuses keeping the people down. [...] How does being well-off and not suffering from any of those problems mean that one somehow benefits from the status quo? If global warming becomes a serious enough problem, it is inconvenient to everyone. If a paperclip maximizer turns all into paperclips everyone has the same problems. And at the same time, if more people are in the STEM fields or more people who can succeed at it, we all benefit.