4 ms·

>That is, if you aren’t going to starve, the most important thing is what other people think. IMO that hypothesis is politically biased. It implies that men/wo

>That is, if you aren’t going to starve, the most important thing is what other people think. IMO that hypothesis is politically biased. It implies that men/women in wealthier societies are trying harder to conform to gender norms. Blames societal norms for the difference. The simpler and less dehumanizing alternative is that people in wealthier countries are more free to live life however they want. There are less constraints.

renewiltord 5y ago
Well, then, that’s on me for misrepresenting it. Let’s try again. You can see desire to comply with gender norms as a constant X and starvation risk Y as a variable. Appropriately scale each and measure X-Y. That can go positive or negative depending on Y without X varying at all. I want to eliminate this explanation as significantly causative. Where would I find evidence for that?
- jjk166 5y ago
  You're still making the assumption that the thing competing with starvation is compliance with gender norms (or to be more general, social norms). As a thought experiment, consider being trapped on a desert island where the only thing edible were termites. My starvation risk is high, so I will eat the termites. Eventually I get back to civilization and my starvation risk is much lower, and I no longer choose to eat termites. Is this because A) the social norms which dictate that I shouldn't eat termites are now more important to me, or B) I prefer other foods to termites? It is perfectly reasonable that under differing circumstances the weights we will give different factors in decision making vary, but that does not on its own tell us what those factors actually are.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    I think I must be misspeaking quite a bit because I am not making any claims here. I am constructing a hypothesis and I want it falsified. The fact that it is falsifiable is a feature not a bug. The possibility of this not being the cause isn’t interesting. That is by construction. I want to see evidence of what is actually the case. I want to know what the factors are. And by what weight in aggregate. I am not alleging that they have any specific value.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Your example hits the nail on the head, because there are cultures in the world where people would prefer termites to, say, Pop-Tarts if they were more habituated at a young age to eating termites. We are extremely social creatures, and socialization happens starting from infancy. So the issue is that without more information, we actually can't tell whether our hypothetical desert island survivor has gone off the termites upon returning to (euro-centric) civilization because they actually don't much care for them or because you can't order them at any of the fine dining establishments in town. I mean, hell, without invoking a desert island... I know people in the United States who swear by the taste of squirrel meat and you generally won't find them eating it at the restaurants in cities.
    - jjk166 5y ago
      And why would a culture habituate to eating termites instead of pop-tarts? Because the pop-tarts are unavailable, or perhaps less nutritious, or perhaps any one of a zillion other reasons. Socialization is a how, not a why. Squirrel is surprisingly delicious. That said squirrels are impractical to farm, and thus there would be no way to maintain a consistent supply of squirrel meat in a restaurant in a typical city. Thus squirrel is generally unavailable as an option at restaurants, and thus nobody orders it, as it would be dumb to order what they don't have. There is a similar issue with muskrat, which I prefer to squirrel, despite the total absence of any social norms dictating one to be superior to the other. Getting back to the topic at hand, there is no explanative power to saying women choose a career option because they've been socialized to pursue that career option. They just as easily could have been socialized to pursue something else. For example 73% of US cashiers are women while only 35% of US counter clerks are women. "Because society" simply doesn't answer the question why.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        We can find a why for something like that in history. But note that by your definitions, this experiment is probing how, not why. Its suggested explanatory mechanism of "women in countries with higher incomes are freer to pursue their innate interests" is a how. The paper didn't control for the alternate explanation "people in countries with higher incomes, having their core survival needs more often satisfied, pursue social acceptance via adherence to cultural norms more aggressively."
shadowgovt 5y ago
> The simpler and less dehumanizing alternative Occam's razor is great, but it's probably not a reasonable assumption to make on a system as fundamentally complicated as human behavior. How would we control for the possibility that as wealth increases, the dominant effect in a person's life isn't social status (which could be enhanced by gender-norm conformity)?
deleted 5y ago
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renewiltord 5y ago

Well, then, that’s on me for misrepresenting it. Let’s try again. You can see desire to comply with gender norms as a constant X and starvation risk Y as a variable. Appropriately scale each and measure X-Y. That can go positive or negative depending on Y without X varying at all. I want to eliminate this explanation as significantly causative. Where would I find evidence for that?

jjk166 5y ago
You're still making the assumption that the thing competing with starvation is compliance with gender norms (or to be more general, social norms). As a thought experiment, consider being trapped on a desert island where the only thing edible were termites. My starvation risk is high, so I will eat the termites. Eventually I get back to civilization and my starvation risk is much lower, and I no longer choose to eat termites. Is this because A) the social norms which dictate that I shouldn't eat termites are now more important to me, or B) I prefer other foods to termites? It is perfectly reasonable that under differing circumstances the weights we will give different factors in decision making vary, but that does not on its own tell us what those factors actually are.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  I think I must be misspeaking quite a bit because I am not making any claims here. I am constructing a hypothesis and I want it falsified. The fact that it is falsifiable is a feature not a bug. The possibility of this not being the cause isn’t interesting. That is by construction. I want to see evidence of what is actually the case. I want to know what the factors are. And by what weight in aggregate. I am not alleging that they have any specific value.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Your example hits the nail on the head, because there are cultures in the world where people would prefer termites to, say, Pop-Tarts if they were more habituated at a young age to eating termites. We are extremely social creatures, and socialization happens starting from infancy. So the issue is that without more information, we actually can't tell whether our hypothetical desert island survivor has gone off the termites upon returning to (euro-centric) civilization because they actually don't much care for them or because you can't order them at any of the fine dining establishments in town. I mean, hell, without invoking a desert island... I know people in the United States who swear by the taste of squirrel meat and you generally won't find them eating it at the restaurants in cities.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    And why would a culture habituate to eating termites instead of pop-tarts? Because the pop-tarts are unavailable, or perhaps less nutritious, or perhaps any one of a zillion other reasons. Socialization is a how, not a why. Squirrel is surprisingly delicious. That said squirrels are impractical to farm, and thus there would be no way to maintain a consistent supply of squirrel meat in a restaurant in a typical city. Thus squirrel is generally unavailable as an option at restaurants, and thus nobody orders it, as it would be dumb to order what they don't have. There is a similar issue with muskrat, which I prefer to squirrel, despite the total absence of any social norms dictating one to be superior to the other. Getting back to the topic at hand, there is no explanative power to saying women choose a career option because they've been socialized to pursue that career option. They just as easily could have been socialized to pursue something else. For example 73% of US cashiers are women while only 35% of US counter clerks are women. "Because society" simply doesn't answer the question why.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      We can find a why for something like that in history. But note that by your definitions, this experiment is probing how, not why. Its suggested explanatory mechanism of "women in countries with higher incomes are freer to pursue their innate interests" is a how. The paper didn't control for the alternate explanation "people in countries with higher incomes, having their core survival needs more often satisfied, pursue social acceptance via adherence to cultural norms more aggressively."

shadowgovt 5y ago

> The simpler and less dehumanizing alternative Occam's razor is great, but it's probably not a reasonable assumption to make on a system as fundamentally complicated as human behavior. How would we control for the possibility that as wealth increases, the dominant effect in a person's life isn't social status (which could be enhanced by gender-norm conformity)?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]