This question is directed to people who think gender matters for behavior and mental capabilities. Similar questions could be asked about race and other traits.

Suppose that gender is a social construct. Suppose that gendered behavior is due to just culture, not a mix of culture and genes. Suppose that women are born with equal mental capabilities to men.

If you conceded all that, what would you change your mind about, if anything? Why?

I ask this because a lot of effort is spent denying that gender is a social construct. Many right wing people are quite hostile to the social construct theory and view it as dangerous. But what negative consequences do they think it implies?

I interpret people as thinking something like "If the left was correct that gender is a social construct, then a lot of their political philosophy would be correct, and I'd have to change my mind about a bunch of stuff." I am doubtful of this and don't see that the social construct theory implies much leftist political philosophy.

If gender is a social construct, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Social constructs exist and matter. They can't be instantly or trivially changed or gotten rid of. Culture and memes are important.

This issue is complicated by biological differences between the genders for e.g. muscles. Men are stronger on average. The difference is significant. Reasonable people don't deny that. Try to focus your answer on basically intellectual differences, personality differences, behavior differences, mental differences, etc., which are the things that might be cultural.

Note that the anti social construct view claims that genes influence gendered mental traits, but do not fully determine them. They think a mix of biology and culture leads to gendered traits. They don't claim it's all biology. The social construct view, by contrast, denies the role of biology. It rejects the mixed factors view in favor of a single dominant factor.

For people who think gender is a social construct, I have similar question: What (classical) liberal ideas do you think that contradicts, if any?

David Horowitz asked on Twitter:

How do people like Victoria get so stupid?

I wrote a generic reply which has nothing to do with the partisan political statements Victoria said, which I didn't even read before replying.

At age 2 her parents order her around. She doesn't understand most orders & is punished for clarifying questions. She has to try to follow orders she doesn't understand. She ends up lowering her standards for what understanding is and goes through school not understanding much.

When she does understand something about reality correctly, it sometimes actually makes things worse. She learns the world is based on authority and social status. You can't correct the people with power over you; you must try to conform to their confused view of reality.

She learns no one understands. Everyone is just pretending to understand and hiding their weakness. Her parents and teachers are confused in many ways but have power over her anyway. She aspires to gain social status and power – to move up in the system – not to be a scientist.

My main idea here is that overreaching begins due to pressure to act before one is ready. Even if the parents orders make sense and are reasonable, it doesn't matter if a kid is being pressured to act according to ideas he doesn't yet understand. It teaches him the very bad policy/habit of trying to act before you're intellectually ready and understand what you're doing well enough.

Also social status hierarchies are a big deal and very dangerous.

They broke Robin Hanson. http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/JuneteenthApology.html

Hanson chose to be an icon and leader. Giving in is a betrayal of his followers, fans and values. It signals that you can't succeed by standing up for truth and free speech. He's discouraging them. He took on a responsibility and failed at it.

He was some sort of role model. He knew it and wanted to be. And that's why he was targeted. And then, with little fuss, RIP.

At the same time, Scott Alexander stood up to the NYT. Though, interestingly, Alexander wasn't even given the option to apologize and recant.

They gave Alexander the options fight back or not fight back, and be attacked either way using the same weapon (dox him by printing his name).

I saw something recently, forget where, about a revolution long ago, I think somewhere in China. I don't know if it's a true story or just designed to make a point. Was like:

What's the penalty for being late? Death.

What's the penalty for a revolution? Death.

So then they revolted cuz it's the same penalty anyway.

Did Hanson naively think that his job would always be safe when he criticized mainstream ideas? Did he think he lived in a society with free speech and tolerance of intellectual diversity? Or just that his particular university was especially great? I doubt it.

He ought to have known a confrontation was possible. If he wasn't prepared for the confrontation, what the hell was he doing? If his plan was to give in, he misled his readers about that.

Hanson is trying to proceed with blogging like nothing happened, without any explanation to his readers (other than the official apology, which doesn't explain it – a real explanation would be e.g. "they threatened my job, and i wanted to keep it, so i spoke out against the cause". That particular explanation would raise some questions before he was accepted back as an advocate and leader of the cause. If he has a better one, let's hear it. If he's muzzled, and can be threatened into not saying whatever the university leaders choose, then can we trust anything he blogs to be his real opinion?).

I was not much of Hanson fan anyway, but he's one of the symbols we have ... well had. I don't know of a bunch of better ones.

People should not accept him back. Don't act like this didn't happen. He's clearly compromised and there is no plan or strategy in place to enable his free and honest speech going forward. There are problems here which Hanson is trying to ignore instead of present solutions to. He's doing no post mortem. He's making no plan to be more successful next time. He's presumably just decided on a bunch of things he's no longer willing to say publicly, and he's hiding the list from his audience. And I doubt it's even a list, in writing, or that he has any policies to ensure he consistently follows his plan. He may well behave inconsistently and get in trouble more, or refrain from saying things that aren't on the list, or both, and there's no transparency.

Gamings Metoo is a Profitable Catastrophe

Hundreds of people in gaming industry, e.g. Twitch streamers and pro gamers, have recently faced MeToo type allegations about e.g. sexual assault. There's a big outpouring of accusations.

Some are no doubt true and horrible. Others are much milder accusations even if true, which shouldn't be lumped together as if everyone who is accused must be a vile creep. Other accusations are partially or even mostly false. Some pictures of chat logs are photoshopped (I saw an example of photoshopping when looking at a few accusations on the Competitive Overwatch subreddit in the last few days).

Accusers gain a lot of social media followers. The narrative that they have nothing to gain here, besides justice, and therefore they must be telling the truth, is false. That's a theme of the video linked above. (They also have revenge/punishment to gain – hurting their ex.)

This has major witch hunt elements. Standards of proof are low. People don't get a trial before they get fired and lose their fanbase. People aren't getting due process. This is very dangerous.

Many of the accusations are about old events which also violates the concept of a statue of limitations. Time limits being accused of most kinds of crime are important so people can feel safe and done with things, and move on in their life, after a while. Plus the older it is, the harder to investigate objectively. But this witch hunt is happy to use old accusations with little or no hard evidence. Also the cultural rules about acceptable behavior in relationships change over time, and people get cancelled for doing things that were acceptable when they did them, but which are unacceptable now (this also happens with e.g. making jokes that used to be allowed but now are considered unacceptably racist).

Some guys (and girls) do bad things. People in relationships hurt each other. Cancel Culture is not a solution, it's a huge additional danger which tries to bypass the legal system and its protections for the accused. (And this aspect of cancel culture is very biased in a sexist way. Basically women can accuse men, but men mostly don't get to accuse women.)

iamok asked on Discord:

why is objectivism so small?

Oism disagrees with the left on tons of stuff and disagrees with the right on religion, and disagrees with everyone on secondhandedness, pandering, compromising, being a moderate, and altruism. there's more but that's plenty to have trouble being big. Rand disliked libertarians too b/c of their bad philosophy and morality, and also typically their inadequate seriousness re economics and capitalism.

and it's extremely big for the kind of thing it is. over 10 million books sold.

Oism also doesn't get along with academia. ARI wants to change that by betraying Oism which is working badly in many respects.

also Rand is dead without replacement and never got a chance to spread her ideas using the internet.

ofc i get the internet and that doesn't solve the problem of getting high quality rationality to be popular

the normal thing "big" philosophies do now is sell few books but get spread by cultural elites. journalists, authors, ppl who went to Harvard...

there's this small group of "ruling class" types and most of the masses are pretty damn gullible and are influenced way more than they realize by the NYT, CNN, etc. also, on a related note, way more influenced than they realize by advertising.

the elite group includes TV commentators (political or otherwise), reviewers, including video game reviewers and has strong ties and overlaps with many politicians, biz execs, top lawyers

and to wall street and big non profits

there's a whole social network of "elites" who have other friends in high places and trade favors and they have a ton of influence to spread their dumb ideas

oh i forgot to say professors! and all schools and teachers in general. the lower ones are controlled by govt curriculums and textbook companies and union bosses a bunch.

university administrators too

most professors aren't very influential. the connected ones get media coverage and more grants. the less elite ones still help spread the ideas to their students. which ideas? usually the ones their betters believe. the ones compatible with trying to socially climb and get admitted to more elite parties.

silicon valley, as a massive source of New Money, has challenged this in some ways and has been attacked a bunch by the elites, but also mostly panders and tries to get accepted and join existing ingroup.

I’ve been tutoring people to help them learn philosophy concepts. The videos are free and public.

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Look for opportunities to use measurements to help your judgment. And also work on developing good judgment (about anything) and developing ways to prevent, detect and correct bias, dishonesty and irrationality.

How? Many ways. E.g. these articles could help:

• Lying
• Emotions
• Using Intellectual Processes to Combat Bias

Let's talk about a different way.

Assuming you're an adult, there are some things you're already good at judging. There are some areas where you're confident, competent, skilled, etc.

You can find more stuff which is similar or related and work on that. You can try to expand the good judgment you already have by applying it to more things.

Suppose you learn math to pass school tests. You might later find the math you already know is also useful for figuring out whether a system of pulleys will let you lift a large stone. And then later you you find the math you already know can help you analyze video game strategies, e.g. figuring out how much damage you can do in 60 seconds by casting different sequences of spells.

Skills often help with many things that weren't the original purpose you learned them for.

So you can take skills you already have and look for more stuff they can already help with. If the skill is related to judgment, and you find more ways to use it, then you're expanding the scope of what you can skillfully judge.

You can also expand on the skills as you apply them to more areas. E.g. you might find learning a few more mathematical techniques helps you with your pulleys or video games. Similarly, you could learn a few new things to help your judgment skills deal with new areas.

The main thing that's great about measurement is it's easy to be objective. It deals with facts that we can quantify with numbers. Often we have measuring tools to aid us, e.g. timers, rulers, microscopes, etc.

We measure some things without tools. If I'm loading boxes onto a truck, I can count them one by one as I load them, and I can write down the count at the end (or even update the written count after every box). We count this as a measurement. Similarly, "I read book X" is close enough to the concept of measurement, and easy enough to evaluate, that one can think of it as a measurement or as similar enough. (Note the issue isn't whether you understood the book or paid much attention or gave it much thought. What's easy to judge or measure is whether you went through it page by page and read what it said. There are borderline cases like how many pages can you skip before it doesn't count? But let's not worry about that now.)

Something that's easy to judge, and involves physical objects and facts, is identifying objects or their traits. Is that a cat, yes or no? I look at it and say yes. Is that an apple? I look at it and say no it's a strawberry. Is that object red? I look at it and say yes (I could also measure that using a digital camera, a computer, and some software – and actually we now have software that's pretty good at classifying pictures as various objects like cats or apples). Is it a type of "measurement" to say that object A in my room is a chair and object B is a chair? That's just terminology. It's not especially important what we call it. Regardless, that kind of thing can easily be judged and used in our goals. We're good at doing that without being biased. It's the kind of thing we find hard to get wrong or lie to ourselves about.

What are some things we can't "measure"? Judging whether an action is moral, pious, honest, wise or fair. Saying whether raspberries taste good to me. Judging how good my understanding of Socrates is. Deciding wether capitalism or socialism is better. Considering the best activities to start learning history with. These things require judgment and some involve things that some people consider a "matter of opinion", "subjective" or "arbitrary" (which they often say when they find it hard to be objective, rather than because they have arguments that objective judgment of the matter is impossible). These issues are getting away from facts like how long an object is, whether it's made of wood, what shape it is, how heavy it is, whether it's flat, etc. They're different and trickier.