Gender equality: reduction in male female differences in lifespan, deaths on the job, % victory in custody disputes, % in prison, % in college, % in medical school, % in law school, and eliminating any gender favoritism in college sexual harassment complaint adjudication.
"Gender equality" is a fuzzy term. Taken sufficiently literally, it's absurd (We demand equal rights for men to bear children! We demand equal rates of breast cancer for men and women!). So, when the goal is reasonable discussion (as opposed to, say, making one's ideological opponents look silly), we should either avoid using the term or interpret it more charitably.
I think there is a useful thing that the term "gender equality" is gesturing towards, even though taken absolutely literally those words don't point in quite the right direction. It means things like not giving preferential treatment to one sex or gender over another when there isn't an actual reason for doing so, and finding ways to reduce disadvantages faced by one sex or gender even if they are (incidental) consequences of real differences.
This is not the same thing as claiming that there must be absolute equality according to all measures. Neither is it the same thing as saying that any sort of equality must be enforced. (Yes, I saw what you did when you slipped in "the enforcement of". That's rude. Please desist.)
Yes, I am suggesting that a modicum of charity be extended even to your p...
So what's your problem?
That a bunch of people are deliberately misinterpreting what ArisC wrote in order to make snarky points about how People These Days are too nice to women and not nice enough to men. I think that sort of discussion is better conducted more straightforwardly, and I am rather bored of the way that every. single. time anyone on LW says anything suggesting what fir want of a better term I'll call progressive social values, someone comes along to display their oh-so-brave contrarianism by boldly sticking up for the idea that maybe Socia...
note: topic text was originally different, and included a recently-elected president's name; which would've ranked on google for related-keywords. Below is unedited comment, asking for that name not to be included
Since "Downvoting temporarily disabled", I would like to express a very, very strong disapproval of this topic being discussed on lesswrong. Rationale:
1, Politics is the mindkiller
2, It attracts the sort of people who would like to discuss these sorts of things, at the expense of those (including myself), who do not; specifically, by ra...
Large difference in estimated competence even when plenty of other information available; plausible differences in competence are mostly not large. Largest differences I've heard of from actual scientific investigations are about one standard deviation, for "mental rotation" tasks; most are smaller and they go in both directions. So for most tasks, and still more for most jobs (since a job typically involves multiple diverse tasks), I would expect average sex differences to be well under one standard deviation. Now suppose a nontrivial amount of ...
Yes, but by the same standard, all metrics are interesting to the extent they are causal to happiness!
best metric, one of the very few that are easy to meawsure:
WALL LENGTH
... and who paid for it ;-)
Note: a few people have pointed out that the president is restrained by senators and congressmen etc - I realise that; but if we are willing to admit that presidents do have some effect in society, we should be prepared to measure them.
If I go to a homeopath and get better afterwards, I could use the metric of my health to measure that the homeopath is great at helping me.
While you might not reason that way in the domain of medicine and see the error if I frame that example this way, you want to reason this way in the political domain. You want to measu...
[...] principle of charity [...] the most rational interpretation of what someone said, even if you're pretty sure he meant something dumber.
"Most rational" and "most literal" are not the same thing.
A better metric for gender equality
Oh, I dunno. I don't think it's a particularly sensible thing to try to evaluate a president on after four years. These things change slowly, and their effects propagate slowly. We could maybe measure, e.g., whether the Trump administration itself is biased against women when hiring, but gender equality in society at large? There's not that much Trump can do about it, and any effects he might have will take a long time to show up and be very difficult to disentangle from other causes.
But the sort of thing you could do ...
So basically [...]
Nope.
I don't think anybody is claiming to be particularly courageous here.
The bit about courage is my attempt at figuring out some of the mental processes that lead people to behave that way. I could of course be wrong.
I'm not sure why equality is being treated as a terminal goal
I don't think it really is. It's just a convenient shorthand. I can't speak for ArisC, but I would certainly not welcome (e.g.) equalizing incarceration rates of men and women by framing a lot of women for crimes they never committed and throwing them i...
Jesus Christ. This is beyond derailed. For what it's worth, gjm is right, people are either purposefully misrepresenting what I wrote (in which case they are pedantic and juvenile) or they didn't understand what I meant (in which case, you know, go out and interact with people outside your bubble).
And anyway - the reason I want to measure progress towards closing the gap where women have it worse is so that I can fairly evaluate feminist arguments about Trump in 4 years time. If in 4 years time it turns out that women earn more than men across the board, t...
can you give an example of a better metric?
A better metric of what than what?
James was being extremely charitable.
Deliberately taking someone to mean something you are pretty sure they didn't mean -- which I'm not sure whether James in particular was doing, but others in this discussion certainly have been -- is not "extremely charitable", it is rude.
It means things like not giving preferential treatment to one sex or gender over another when there isn't an actual reason for doing so, and finding ways to reduce disadvantages faced by one sex or gender even if they are (incidental) consequences of real differences.
gjm already stated what he meant by gender equality quite clearly. I see no justification for putting words in his mouth.
This is not at all easy to do, for multiple reasons, and probably not great content for LW because we will probably be attempting to reinvent a lot of wheels from political science and economics.
It might make a good topic review post if someone goes and does a literature review on the subject.
Are you really looking for metrics to evaluate Donald Trump as president or for metrics to evaluate any president? The title says the first; I think we actually want the second.
I think it's really difficult -- the important things a president can influence are all affected by lots of other factors too. Consider e.g. "Obamacare"; for good or ill, the healthcare reform Obama was actually able to get done was (for better or worse) strongly influenced by what congressional Republicans were willing to do, and of course its actual overall effect is lia...
Depends on your values. You might think free trade is causal to world peace. Or causal to world development and avoidance of XRisk. Or reduction in non-war suffering.
If you only look at the american economy you miss the other stuff.
Coming up with criteria and metrics on the economy is pretty easy
I think it can be quite hard to do this in the context of evaluating a presidency. For example while you could look at GDP, unemployment, etc. it can be hard to determine if the president had much impact on those numbers.
Does anyone know if there have been efforts to quantify the impact of a president on the economy? I would imagine that most of the change is due to randomness/external factors.
Education
This is another tricky one, in that we might need to wait more than 4 years to see the results for a lot of metrics.
It sort of seems like you have to decide what constitutes 'success' in your eyes. Going by what you've listed, I doubt you'll think that he's a success.
I'm a supporter. For me, I'd settle for:
1: Don't attack Syria 2: Sign the stuff that Congress passes as long as we have a Rep majority. 3: Appoint conservative justices to the SC if he gets the chance.
Bonus: 1: Make the countries that President Obama called 'free riders' start paying up. This seems like a passion of Trumps, he's been talking about it for 30 years. I'm moderately hopeful here, but realistic enough to know that this is probably a stretch.
I apologize for assuming you meant something semi-reasonable by what you wrote, I will refrain from making that assumption in the future.
Okay, let's go into "talking to a 5yo mode". We have these facts: a) the vast majority of people use "gender inequality" to refer to the fact that women are disadvantaged. b) terms like this are defined by common usage. c) since common usage means "women are disadvantaged", the reasonable think to do is that when a random person utters the phrase, they refer to that. Whether women are in f...
I don't see why it makes any less sense than gender equality in general.
I didn't say it does. (LW has no shortage of people objecting to "gender equality in general". I'm offering a bit of metacontrarianism here.)
If you look at the evidence, as opposed to the squid ink being thrown around to make things "controversial", it's about as well supported as most of the others.
So, just to be clear, are you saying it is well supported or it isn't? It seems to me that it is but there may be a pile of evidence I'm not familiar with.
(What I...
Obviously congress is also going to be doing things at the same time as Trump and might well have more of an effect on these measures than him personally. If there is a Democrat congress in two years time then could we perhaps try to isolate Trump's contribution by comparing between the two time periods?
I'm concerned about Trump's potential effect on the economy. Effects on employment and pay are also worth evaluating.
I got lots of helpful comments in my first post, so I'll try a second: I want to develop a list of criteria by which to evaluate a presidency. Coming up with criteria and metrics on the economy is pretty easy, but I'd like to ask for suggestions on proxies for evaluating: