My theory of the day: Feminism is not about men vs. women, but popular people vs. unpopular men

“The problem with the war between the sexes is there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.” — attributed to Kissinger.

You may wish to refer back to my post about dorkiness and assholes, and how popular movements get overtaken by popular people who may have very little interest in whatever the movement was originally supposed to be about. Instead, the movement becomes yet another way of reinforcing the status quo of popular people, which is why, of course, virtually everyone babbling on about other peoples’ “privilege” is insanely privileged. To be perfectly frank, I don’t hear any of the homeless people I talk to complaining about privilege.

So if you’re trying to avoid people who talk about privilege, try volunteering with the homeless. Besides, they actually need the help.

Anyway, back on track. As I was thinking about all of these things, I had another of those little moments of clarity. Feminism is framed as a females vs. males thing. It is very literally about raising up women, as a group, and fighting the “patriarchy”, symbolic of the all-male power structure.

Perhaps at some point it was that.

But this runs into an obvious problem that Kissinger himself articulated: men and women live together. You can’t tear down men without tearing down the women who live with them (and you can’t build up women without building up the men who live with them.) My [male relative]’s bad divorce outcome will have a direct and measurable effect on my material well-being; money going to his ex-wife is money that will not go to me. Since both of us are female, there is no net gain in female well-being. (Technically, it’s a net loss due to legal fees.) This is only an anecdote, of course. Let’s not overthink it.

If feminists were really serious about tearing down the patriarchy, we’d see different behavior. They’d block-vote for female political candidates, not vote for male candidates, set up all female communities and businesses, etc. In reality, feminists spend a lot of time arguing about whether some character in a popular movie or video game is sexist or posting on Twitter about how much they hate creeps. This doesn’t make any sense, until you realize that the whole notion of Males vs. Females is bunk and not even what feminists are trying to achieve.

We do not live in a society where females exist physically separate from men and desire to act as a single block in opposition to a single block of men. That is not how we live and act. Rather, we live in a society where males and females are intricately linked–as are their social statuses. Popular politicking, then, is about asserting the popular people’s dominance over the non-popular.

Popular men and women unite behind a common moral facade in order to assert dominance over unpopular men.

To the extent that this raises up women generally, it only raises them up relative to already unpopular men, not so much relative to men generally, and not so much relative to men who are actually the prime movers of the “patriarchy” (though earlier or more genuine forms of feminism may have had such effects, and there may be un-intended “trickle up” effects.)

Overall, feminism doesn’t seem to have many direct effects on unpopular or low-power women, except inasmuch as these women are generally connected to low-status males. Unfortunately, our society’s notions of popularity and status are pretty darn worthless, leading to the denigration of sincerity, hard work, and intelligence.

This suggests a big difference between the dynamics of feminism and the critical race theories it is so closely associated with these days: most members of different races actually don’t live with each other. So arguments about one set of group dynamics probably aren’t valid when applied to the other set of dynamics.

This theory doesn’t seem great for easily quantified predictive value, but someone else may be able to think one up.

The Spoils

Someone else’s theory, with my own reflections:

Let’s assume most of politics is actually people arguing over political spoils–who gets to eat the gov’t pie.

When Gov’t is small, there’s not a lot of pie to argue over. It might be corrupt pie, with all of the pieces going to the family of whoever’s in charge, but there’s just not much to fight over.

When gov’t is big, there’s a lot more pie to fight over. The bigger the pie, the more fighting we should get.

With gov’t spending somewhere around 40% of GDP, that’s a fucking HUGE pie. No wonder people fight so much over politics. It doesn’t really matter if you think “privilege” is a dumb or brilliant word; it does matter if you get free healthcare, a job building drones, or food stamps, and as a result, you will probably fight pretty hard to keep whatever part of the gov’t pie you are and fight pretty hard against people you don’t like getting more of the pie.

At 40%, it’s not even meaningful anymore to talk about the benefits of socialism vs. libertarianism; our system is socialist and it’s going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Most likely, it will only become more socialist (and btw, it’s the Republicans who actually do the most to push us in the socialist direction by increasing the % of GDP that’s gov’t spending–they just like to spend it all on bombs.)

At its most extreme, the problem with socialist systems is that if one group of people effectively captures the political system, they can just decide that they don’t want to give any resources anymore to those guys they don’t like, and the result us Holodomor, because 0% of 100% is death.

At its most extreme, the problem with libertarian systems is also death, though in a much less organized way–see the Great Depression, or whatever example you’d like to supply.

We might for amusement try to calculate which kind of system kills more people, fail, and argue endlessly. (I charge you with doing this for me, so I can skip straight to discussion.) We’re not at a point where we really need to worry about the extremes of either system, but I do think we are at a point where we should worry that the size of the gov’t pie is simply too big for a peaceful society.

Should we, as a society, attempt to scale back the size of the gov’t pie simply for the sake of a more peaceful society where growth is driven more by innovation and economic activity? Or should we embrace the robot economy and head even further down the socialist path, just keeping in mind the importance of getting everything comfortably divided now, rather than later, when it will be much harder?

Your thoughts and opinions?

A Structural Proposal

I have read that people are capable of maintaining about 150 relationships with other humans. This therefore seems like a reasonable maximum size for human organizations — churches, businesses, towns, etc. For maximum trustiness, perhaps all humans should live in communities of 150, which could then reasonably organize for their own self-interest, well-being and happiness.

But humans seem to desire to live in slightly bigger communities, and to network between much larger groups of people. So how to manage it?

First, each community of 150 could appoint one person to go to a meta-council of 150 people from 150 other communities.

That would be kind of pressing our meta-council members, but they would probably be able to maintain close relationships with enough of their constituents and enough of their fellow meta-council members to effectively represent their areas and cooperate with each other for regional benefits. This allows for the governing of 22,500 people, or a small city. (For comparison, the island of Palau has about 21,000 people; a few other small island nations have similar population sizes.)

The meta-meta level seems difficult to achieve, as we’re already asking people to effectively have 300 contacts, and anyone appointed to a meta-meta council would really have their primary interests back in their 150 member community, and so would do a bad job of representing the interests of everyone else in their 22,500 meta-community. (This is precisely the problem of Congress.)

The meta-meta level might be doable on a basic referendum level–that is, if the meta-meta councilors simply represent the majority views of their meta-regions in a system that does not require them to interact with or convince each other. This would allow for the administration of about 3.4 million people–a large city or small country. (By comparison, Iceland has 330,000 people; Lithuania has 2.9 million, and New Zealand has 4.6 million.)

However, we might be able to organize a few more people into our system by taking advantage of some sort of network effects at the bottom level. Perhaps instead of including all 150 people in our community in a community council, we utilize 150 heads of households (each household can appoint whoever it wants to the council). If we estimate about 4 people per household, then the basic community has 600 people, the meta-community has 90,000, and the meta-meta community has 13.5 million. (Belgium has 11.2 million people.)

Effective, long-term organization beyond this size probably becomes very difficult (unless you are okay with dictatorship, and even that can fail miserably at organizing things).

Predictive value: If my train of thought is correct, communities of <14 million should generally be stable, high-trust, efficient, and effectively democratic in nature. Communities of >14 million should generally be low trust, unstable, inefficient, or undemocratic.

 

A quick glance at a list of countries by size indicates that there are a bunch of small, poorly-run countries, which may contradict the theory. Perhaps badly run countries break up into pieces until they find an organizational level they can function on.

Here is a list of countries by interpersonal trust. (Unfortunately, this dataset seems to lack many of the tiny countries. Anyone else got a better dataset?) The top scorers–countries where most people reported trusting most of their neighbors, were:

New Zealand: trust level 102.2, population 4.6 mill

Vietnam: trust level 104.1, population 91.5 mill, not democratic

Saudi Arabia: trust level 105.8, population 31.5 mill, not democratic

Switzerland: trust level 107.4, population 8.2 mill

Finland: trust level 117.5, population 5.5 mill

China: trust level 120.9, population 1.4 billion, not democratic

Denmark: trust level 131.9, population 5.7 mill

Sweden: trust level 134.5, population 9.8 mill

Norway: trust level 148, population 5.2 mill

So, it’s a small set of countries and the small ones generally aren’t in the dataset, but the democratic, high-trust countries are all between 4 and 10 million people. The larger high-trust countries are all not democracies.

The worst scorers (countries where fewer than 1 in 10 people said they thought most people were trustworthy):

Trinidad and Tobago: trust level 7.9, population 1.3 mill

Cape Verde: trust level 9, population 500 thousand

Rwanda: trust level 10.2, population 11 mill

Turkey: trust level 10.2, population 78 mill

Botswana: trust level 12.3, population 2 mill

Malawi: trust level 14.9, population 16 mill

Cambodia: trust level 15.6, population 15.4 mill

Indonesia: trust level 16.9, population 255 mill

Brazil: trust level 17.5, population 204.3 mill

Malaysia: trust level 17.7, population 30.6 mill

Looks like unpleasant countries can come in any size.

 

I’d love it if someone made a scaterplot of size vs. trust, with democracies in blue and non-democracies in red.😀

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hey, DNA: What is it good for?

So why do we still have bits of Neanderthal DNA hanging around after so many years? Of course it could just be random junk, but it’s more fun to think that it might be useful.

And the obvious useful thing for it to do is climate adaptation, since Neanderthals had been living in dark, cold, ice-age Europe for much longer than the newly-arrived h. Sapiens, and so might have had some adaptations to help deal with it.

Okay, so here is something related I was reading the other day, that I consider pretty interesting. So it looks like the people who live up on the Tibetan Plateau (like the Tibetans,) are really well-adapted to the altitude. No mean feat, considering that other populations who live at similar altitudes don’t seem to be as well-adjusted, despite living up there for similar lengths of time.

Well, now it appears that the Tibetans have actually been living in Tibet for waaaay longer than expected, because the original h. Sapiens who moved into Tibet intermarried with archaic hominids who had already lived there for hundreds of thousands of years, and so probably picked up their altitude adaptations from those guys.

BTW, “species” is a social construct and you probably shouldn’t bother with it here.

So what kind of useful stuff might we have picked up from Neanderthals?

First I’d like to interject that I still find declarations of “aha, we got this gene from Neanderthals and it does this!” to be speculative and prone to changing. All of the articles I’ve read tend to report the same list of stuff in a similar fashion, so I suspect they’re all workign off one or two sources, which makes everything doubly sketchy. So we’re going in here with a big “if” this is true…

Some of the results are fairly boring, like Neanderthal DNA affecting hair and skin. We already speculate that skin tone helps us deal with sunlight levels, so that’s sensible.

More interesting is the claim that Neanderthal DNA may predispose people to Type-2 Diabetes and depression.

Now why the hell would it do that? It’s probably not *just* random–after all, large stretches of DNA have little to no Neanderthal admixture at all, suggesting that genes in those spots just weren’t useful, so why would we have retained such apparently negative traits?

Maybe, like sickle cell anemia, these things actually have a positive function–at least in the right environments.

I read a fascinating theory a few years ago that Type 2 Diabetes and Seasonal Affective Disorder are actually just part of our bodies’ natural mechanisms for dealing with winter. Basically, you’re supposed to eat plants and get fat all summer long, while plants are available, and then by winter, your ability to absorb more glucose shuts down (there’s no point since the plants are all dead) and you switch over to burning ketones instead and eating an all-mammoth diet.

(Some groups, like the Inuit and Masai, historically [and may today still] survived on diets that included virtually no plants and so ran all of their cellular energy needs through the ketogenic instead of the glucose system.)

During this winter time, humans, like other animals, slowed down and semi-hibernated to save energy and because why the fuck not, it’s dark and no one has invented lightbulbs, yet.

By spring, you’ve lost a lot of weight, the plants come back, and so does your ability to use glucose.

This theory is laid out in the book Lights Out by T. S. Wiley, if you’re curious. I thought it was a really interesting book, but you might just think it’s all crank, I dunno.

Anyway, a big hole in Wiley’s plot is how we actually got this adaptation in the first place, since it’s a pretty complicated one and h. Sapiens hasn’t actually been living in places with winter for all that long. Wiley just claims that it’s a deep internal mechanism that animals have, which always struck me as kinda bunk because why would a species that evolved in Africa, from other animals in Africa, etc., probably going back for million upon millions of years, have some sort of complicated system like this still functional in its genome? A trait that is not undergoing positive selective pressure is probably going to become non-functional pretty quickly. But the theory was cool enough otherwise to ignore this bit, so I’ve kept it around.

Right, so here’s the (potential) answer: h. Sapiens didn’t have this adaptation hiding deep inside of them, Neanderthals had it. Neanderthals had been living in cold places for way, way longer than h. Sapiens, and by inter-breeding with them, we got to take advantage of a bunch of cold-weather adaptations they’d developed over that time frame–thus getting a jump-start on evolving to cope with the weather.

At any rate, if Wiley is correct, and SAD and Type-2 Diabetes are actually part of a dealing with winter complex that benefited our cold-weather ancestors, then that wold explain why these genes would have persisted over the years instead of being bred out.

An easy way to test this would be to compare rates of Type-2 Diabetes and SAD among African immigrants to Europe/other wintery latitudes, African Americans (who have a small amount of Euro admixture,) and Europeans. (Watching out, of course, for Vit D issues.) If the Euros have more SAD and Type-2 Diabetes than Africans living at the same latitude, then those would appear to be adaptations to the latitude. If the Africans have more, then my theory fails.

Society Constantly Lies: A Theory

Let’s suppose there’s a group that society thinks is totally awesome and deserves social resources to protect, honor, and generally help them succeed.

For example, let’s suppose society really loves old people. They are given places of honor at family and cultural events, politicians make speeches about the importance of old people to society’s success, etc.

Any mistreatment or abuse of old people would be seen as a very serious problem, and any stories on the subject–the more sensational the better–would prompt total outrage.

By contrast, stories about an actually despised and persecuted outgroup would excite nary a yawn from people who don’t give a crap about them.

As a result, news outlets, blogs, etc., benefit from running sensationalist stories about mistreatment of society’s most favored people, and avoid yawn-worthy stories about the outgroup. As a result of that, the average person will be constantly inundated with stories about how this group they love is being horribly abused, leading to a completely false, out of proportion perception that the beloved group is actually one of the most persecuted in society.

Anyone who questions whether the beloved group is actually the most persecuted in society will of course be seen as a delusional hate-monger attempting to further the beloved group’s persecution. This makes reality very difficult to perceive/determine/discuss, while further cementing the dominant position of the beloved group.

Things could be further complicated if some parts of society actually value different groups. So some folks who do not particularly value old people could provide endless fodder for the group that does value old people.

It is pretty easy, especially in retrospect, to think of scenarios in which society has gone totally nuts trying to protect an already protected group against a basically imaginary predator. The conviction of Germans in 1935 that Jews were out to destroy their country and had to be stopped at all costs comes immediately to mind. Pol Pot’s genocide of 1/3 of Cambodia was probably motivated by similar concerns.

Closer to home, children are a highly cared for and protected group, and society demands they be protected from all dangers–including occasionally totally fictional dangers like Satanic Daycares.
Prediction: If the theory is true, then there should be at least one (perhaps multiple) group in society that is incorrectly believed to be oppressed while actually in a position of great power. You might even find that the group/s most popularly believed to be oppressed is actually one of the most popular/powerful.
Someone who doesn’t mind being hated by everyone could put together data on whether or not some of society’s favorite groups are actually being oppressed or not.

Twilight Effects?

So, has anyone documented any negative social effects due to the Twilight books?

It has now been several (or more) years since Twilight was a massively super-popular book (and movie) phenomenon beloved by millions of teen (and older) girls. It has also been a while since I heard anyone vociferously extolling the evils of Twilight and how the books are going to lead teen (and older) girls astray, resulting in abusive, fucked-up relationships.

Of course, in the meanwhile, 50 Shades of Grey came out. It sold well, though doesn’t seem to have been quite so actually popular as Twilight. Perhaps because it’s not as good; perhaps because people don’t want to talk publicly about having read it.

Disclaimer: I have read neither Twilight nor 50 SoG, but I did read the first page of 50 SoG. I thought it was remarkably bad. So bad, in fact, that it makes me despair deep down in my soul.

Anyway. My opinions on the books are irrelevant.

At their heights, people predicted that these books would result in a lot of Bad Stuff, especially bad relationship stuff.

Now that the relevant cohort of women has had several years to date other people, have we actually observed any upswing of Bad Relationship Stuff?

Seems like a great opportunity for someone to really test their theories.

It’s all or Nothin’

I posit that it is difficult for humans to adequately respond to things that they regard as merely somewhat problematic. Getting just about anything done requires a ton more work than sitting around doing nothing, so people who are motivated to change things are generally people who are convinced that things are really, really bad.

If you don’t think things are really, really bad, you’ll probably end up self-justifying that things are really good, so you don’t need to spend a bunch of time trying to change them, so you can comfortably hang out and relax.

If you do want to change things, you’ll probably have to spend a lot of time convincing yourself that things are truly dire in order to keep up the emotional energy necessary to get the work done.

Either way, you’re probably lying to yourself (or others), but I’m not sure if humans are really capable of saying, “this system is mostly good and mostly beneficial to the people in it, but it has really bad effects on a few people.”

Your opinions about a system are probably going to be particularly skewed one way or another if you have no direct or second-hand experience with that system, because you’re most likely hearing reports from people who care enough to put in the effort to talk about their systems.

Likewise, the people who care the most about political issues tend to have more extreme views; moderates tend not to be terribly vocal.

It makes an impassioned defense of moderatism kind of anomalous.

A good example of this effect is religion. If you’ve ever listened to American atheists talk about religion, you’ve probably gotten the impression that, as far as they’re concerned, religion is super duper evil.

By contrast, if you’ve ever talked to a religious person, you know they tend to think religion is totally awesome.

About 80% of Americans claim to be religious (though in typical me-fashion, I suspect some of them are lying because how could so many people possibly be religious?) We’ll call that 75%, because some people are just going along with the crowd. Since religion is voluntary and most religious people seem to like their religions, we’ll conclude that religion is more or less a positive in 75% of people’s lives.

Only about 40% of people actually attend religious services weekly–we’ll call these our devoted, hard-core believers. These people tend to really love their religion, though even non-attenders can get some sort of comfort out of their beliefs.

It’s difficult to determine exactly what % of Americans believe in particular forms of Christianity, but about 30% profess to be some form of “Evangelical”; Fundamentalists are a much smaller but often overlapping %, probably somewhere between 10 and 25%.

So let’s just stick with “about 75% like their religion, and about 40% have some beliefs that may be really problematic for other people” (after all, it’s not Unitarians and Neo-Pagans people are complaining about.)

For what % of people is religion really problematic? LGBT folks have it hard due to some popular religious beliefs–we can estimate them at 5%, according to the Wikipedia.

People who need or want abortions are another big category. Estimates vary, but let’s go with 1/3 of women being interested in abortion at some point in their lives, with I think 12% citing health reasons. 33 is a pretty big %, but since abortion is currently basically legal, religion is currently more of a potential problem than a real problem for most of these women.

A third category is non-Christians who face discrimination in various aspects of life, and kids/teens who have to put up with super-controlling parents. I have no idea what the stats are on them, but the logic of encounters suggests that the 30% or so of non-Christians are going to have trouble with the 40% or so of problematic-belief-Christians, mediated by non-Christians being concentrated in certain parts of the country, so lets go with 15% of people having significant issues at some point, though these are unlikely to be life-long issues (and some % of these people overlap with the previous two groups.)

So, let’s say 70% like religion; 40% have problematic beliefs; 20% suffer some sort of discrimination in their lives, and about 5% suffer significantly.

In short, most of the time, religion is actually a really positive thing for the vast majority of people, and a really bad thing for a small % of people.

But most people who have an interest in religion don’t say, “Religion is basically good but occasionally bad.” Most people say, either, “Religion is totally awesome,” or “Religion totally sucks.” And that has a lot to do with whether you and your friends are primarily people for whom it is good or bad. The moderate position gets lost.

Amygdalaaas

So, building on last night’s potential revelation, let’s review what we may or may not know about amygdalas.

I had read (summaries of) studies indicating that conservatives have larger amygdalas than liberals. From this I concluded that amygdalas were likely to be involved in some sort of processing that produces more conservative results.

But what does the amygdala do? Articles indicated involvement in the disgust reflex. I concluded that people who are more easily disgusted are just more likely to feel disgust in response to novelty.

But, Frost brings up a good point: has the initial orientation/amygdala data been confounded by researchers failing to control for ethnicity? If researchers have classed, say, Muslims who vote Labour as liberals, then obviously the data is meaningless?

There is an to solve this conundrum: Just find some data that controls for ethnicity and measures liberalness or conservatism, (rather than use self-reported orientation). If no suitable studies exist, do one–go to some rural college, collect an ethnically similar cohort, give them a quiz about their attitudes toward novel foods and other such non-emotionally charged things that seem to correlate with political orientation, and then scan the brains of equal numbers of liberals and conservatives and see what you get. If you find some sort of correlation, repeat the experiment with other ethnicities. If you find nothing, widen your scope to compare whites from different areas, or whites who are further apart in political orientation. If you still find nothing, do a multi-ethnic study and see if the initial results were just ethnic differences in party affiliation.

Recent articles further indicate that my interpretations may have been wrong, or that the picture is more complicated than I realized, eg, Neural and cognitive characteristics of extraordinary altruists, “Functional imaging and behavioral tasks included face-emotion processing paradigms that reliably distinguish psychopathic individuals from controls. Here we show that extraordinary altruists can be distinguished from controls by their enhanced volume in right amygdala and enhanced responsiveness of this structure to fearful facial expressions, an effect that predicts superior perceptual sensitivity to these expressions. These results mirror the reduced amygdala volume and reduced responsiveness to fearful facial expressions observed in psychopathic individuals.”

This does not support my “conservatives have larger disgust reflexes becuz amygdalas,” theory, but would be consistent with a “extremely conservative people were mis-categorized as liberals in other studies,” result.

More research is necessary.