It's inspiring to know that we really can create a better and more peaceful society, just by pursuing some simple ideals like killing fifty percent of males.
(I didn't fully understand that part. So the males who ate the infected meat didn't spread the TB to females? And when the male/female ratio changed, that shifted the social dynamics and made everyone more peaceful because there was less reason for status competition? Or because the next generation had only nonviolent female role models and so learned less violence?)
No. I have heard Sapolsky tell that story before, and unless I completely misunderstood it the point is not that killing males made them peaceful, but that the strongest and most aggressive males disappeared. Then the remaining baboons in the troop were females and submissive males, and any new arrivals were integrated in a baboon "society" that had been created by females and submissive males.
This is otherwise known as the Dexter Principle: if you're gonna kill 'em anyway, you may as well make the world better while you're at it.
So the true lesson of this post is that we should get rid of all the aggressive alpha males in our society. I guess I always found the idea obvious, but now that it has been validated, can we please start devising some plan for implementing it?
So the true lesson of this post is that we should get rid of all the aggressive alpha males in our society. I guess I always found the idea obvious, but now that it has been validated, can we please start devising some plan for implementing it?
Sod off! Overt aggression is a pleasant relief compared to the subtle, catty 'niceness' that the most competitive humans excel at. Only get rid of aggressive alpha males who act out violently (ie. those without sufficient restraint to abide by laws.)
It's inspiring to know that we really can create a better and more peaceful society, just by pursuing some simple ideals like killing fifty percent of males.
I think some famous feminist recommended unspecified disappearing of 90% of males to make the world a better place, but right now I can't find the quote.
However, from scientific point of view, this situation could be an inspiration for some interesting experiments. If you remove dominant males from one generation, how long does it take until the next generation creates new ones? (I would expect one or two at most.)
It's Mary Daly, Catholic theologian and radical feminist: http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j16/daly.asp?pf=1
Well, there's some evidence that having a ratio skewed in favor of males in a society increases violence. I don't know if you could make the contrary claim that one skewed in favor of females would actually decrease violence.
You'd have to distinguish between the relatively uncontroversial claim that unmarried males (who'll be more common with a pro-male sex ratio) are the most likely group to commit violence, versus the very speculative claim that even if all males have sufficient opportunity to marry off, more female presence will make them less violent - either because "female values" dominate the society, or because the less competition for "sufficiently good" mates they expect, the less competitive they will act.
I guess a feminist that imagines a perfect continent inhabited only by women, does not imagine it inhabited by heterosexual women.
All my information about this topic is second-hand, but it seems to me that a few feminists were promoting female homosexuality as a weapon against "patriarchy".
Read the reference Ozy gave.
WIE: Sally Miller Gearhart, in her article "The Future—If There Is One—Is Female" writes: "[...] The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race." What do you think about this statement?
MD: I think it's not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.
Admittedly, this can be interpreted as sex selection of gametes and embryos, not disappearance of currently living people.
Your model of feminism is probably wrong. Feminists are varied and complicated. Some parts of feminism are completely rotten and people in them claim that all porn is rape, that rape of men doesn't matter, that no woman enjoys blowjobs. In particular, Mary Daly said some awful things about trans people, and refused male students in her classes.
Wowzers! Daly is so essentialist (i.e. thinks women all inherently have certain mental characteristics). I'm not surprised that someone held her positions so much as I am surprised that she's considered an (recent) influential feminist. I thought that all (contemporary?) feminism was just applied post-modernist (i.e. noticing that gender roles are historically contingent). But that's clearly inconsistent with Daly. Model updated.
That said, I suspect I'm a lot more sympathetic to many of the arguments than you are. I don't think I need to reject Andrea Dworkin in order to reject the essentialism of Daly. That said, I hope that Dworkin hasn't said that the gender of the rape victim matters, because it shouldn't matter. (She essentially agrees with your other examples, I think).
I think a straw feminist is meant to be a character (a fictional character, or a persona played by a troll, or an imaginary opponent), not a person sincerely expressing their position. So Daly and Dworkin weren't (or kept up the charade for quite a long time). Straw feminists say stupid and offensive things to make actual feminists look bad. Bugmaster meant that the quote sounds more like something someone would attribute to a feminist in order to make feminism look bad, than like something a feminist would say.
But there are in fact fringe feminists who are indistinguishable from their parodies.
Rape is very often not violent, and there are many contexts where it wouldn't be thought degrading by the victim or by the culture, such as marital rape in a culture where it's considered normal.
Consensual degrading and violent sex is certainly kinky, but not necessarily a kind of kink that counts as BDSM and certainly not necessarily rape play. (I feel like I should be making innuendo here about developing your imagination or something.) The "cunnilingus and cuddles" feminist crowd probably don't think it can truly be consensual, but they're just obviously wrong; people might be brainwashed by the patriarchy to go along with something their partner wants, but not to seek it out secretly.
articles by feminists about how anyone, no matter how charming and friendly and good to have in your tribe, can be a predator
Chirping in: This formulation is problematic. Rapists aren't "predators disguising as people" until they shed their social pretense and let loose their inner evil upon unsuspecting victims. This is not a "one of them could be inherently rapist, we just don't know who".
Until they rape, rapists are just people in the exact same way that until they get elected/nominated politicians are just people. It could be argued that for the entire set of all humans, there exists for each human at least one non-contrived configuration-space of "current situation" in which they would rape, either by choice while aware of it, by choice while not realizing that it's rape, or with some form of pressure that makes it clearly unreasonable not to.
After the rape, have those people become fundamentally changed in some way? Are their neural systems now different, and now optimizing for a completely different utility function that has a parameter for reducing other peoples' utility as much as possible? They're still the same people, to the extent tha...
There was no interesting, non-emotional takeaway for me from this post. I bet I can find 10 anecdotes where nature prevailed over nurture...
Luke, your posts might become more interesting (to me at least) if you go and beat your head on a hard problem for awhile. I know that sounds like "go have an awful life so you have some interesting stories to tell us", but hey, that's how life works :-/ As far as I know, Eliezer's sequences were the aftermath of a sort of hero's journey, that's why they have so many new insights. Just copying the surface pathos won't get you there.
Now that I'm Executive Director I don't have much time to bang my head on hard (research) problems, though I did start doing that a while back.
This is a "merely" inspirational post, but I think there's room for that on LW. There isn't much new insight in A sense that more is possible, either, but I found it valuable.
Robert Sapolsky:
Scientists have never observed a baboon troupe that wasn't highly aggressive, and they have compelling reasons to think this is simply baboon nature, written into their genes. Inescapable.
Or at least, that was true until the 1980s, when Kenya experienced a tourism boom.
Sapolsky was a grad student, studying his first baboon troupe. A new tourist lodge was built at the edge of the forest where his baboons lived. The owners of the lodge dug a hole behind the lodge and dumped their trash there every morning, after which the males of several baboon troupes — including Sapolsky's — would fight over this pungent bounty.
Before too long, someone noticed the baboons didn't look too good. It turned out they had eaten some infected meat and developed tuberculosis, which kills baboons in weeks. Their hands rotted away, so they hobbled around on their elbows. Half the males in Sapolsky's troupe died.
This had a surprising effect. There was now almost no violence in the troupe. Males often reciprocated when females groomed them, and males even groomed other males. To a baboonologist, this was like watching Mike Tyson suddenly stop swinging in a heavyweight fight to start nuzzling Evander Holyfield. It never happened.
This was interesting, but Sapolsky moved to the other side of the park and began studying other baboons. His first troupe was "scientifically ruined" by such a non-natural event. But really, he was just heartbroken. He never visited.
Six years later, Sapolsky wanted to show his girlfriend where he had studied his first troupe, and found that they were still there, and still surprisingly violence-free. This one troupe had apparently been so transformed by their unusual experience — and the continued availability of easy food — that they were now basically non-violent.
And then it hit him.
Only one of the males now in the troupe had been through the event. All the rest were new, and hadn't been raised in the tribe. The new males had come from the violent, dog-eat-dog world of normal baboon-land. But instead of coming into the new troupe and roughing everybody up as they always did, the new males had learned, "We don't do stuff like that here." They had unlearned their childhood culture and adapted to the new norms of the first baboon pacifists.
As it turned out, violence wasn't an unchanging part of baboon nature. In fact it changed rather quickly, when the right causal factor flipped, and — for this troupe and the new males coming in — it has stayed changed to this day.
Somehow, the violence had been largely circumstantial. It was just that the circumstances had always been the same.
Until they weren't.
We still don't know how much baboon violence to attribute to nature vs. nurture, or exactly how this change happened. But it's worth noting that changes like this can and do happen pretty often.
Slavery was ubiquitous for millennia. Until it was outlawed in every country on Earth.
Humans had never left the Earth. Until we achieved the first manned orbit and the first manned moon landing in a single decade.
Smallpox occasionally decimated human populations for thousands of years. Until it was eradicated.
The human species was always too weak to render itself extinct. Until we discovered the nuclear chain reaction and manufactured thousands of atomic bombs.
Religion had a grip on 99.5% or more of humanity until 1900, and then the rate of religious adherence plummeted to 85% by the end of the century. Whole nations became mostly atheistic, largely because for the first time the state provided people some basic stability and security. (Some nations became atheistic because of atheistic dictators, others because they provided security and stability to their citizens.)
I would never have imagined I could have the kinds of conversations I now regularly have at the Singularity Institute, where people change their degrees of belief several times in a single conversation as new evidence and argument is presented, where everyone at the table knows and applies a broad and deep scientific understanding, where people disagree strongly and say harsh-sounding things (due to Crocker's rules) but end up coming to agreement after 10 minutes of argument and carry on as if this is friendship and business as usual — because it is.
But then, never before has humanity had the combined benefits of an overwhelming case for one correct probability theory, a systematic understanding of human biases and how they work, free access to most scientific knowledge, and a large community of people dedicated to the daily practice of CogSci-informed rationality exercises and to helping each other improve.
This is part of what gives me a sense that more is possible. Compared to situational effects, we tend to overestimate the effects of lasting dispositions on people's behavior — the fundamental attribution error. But I, for one, was only taught to watch out for this error in explaining the behavior of individual humans, even though the bias also appears when explaining the behavior of humans as a species. I suspect this is partly due to the common misunderstanding that heritability measures the degree to which a trait is due to genetic factors. Another reason may be that for obvious reasons scientists rarely try very hard to measure the effects of exposing human subjects to radically different environments like an artificial prison or total human isolation.
Much has changed in the past few decades, and much will change in the coming years. Sometimes it's good to check if the chain can still hold you. Do not be tamed by the tug of history. Maybe with a few new tools and techniques you can just get up and walk away — to a place you've never seen before.