Hacker News Reader

Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"It’s 2021, and it would be pretty hard to find someone who would come out and say that women deserve to be treated worse than men by default, and similarly difficult to find someone believes men shouldn’t have rights. In that sense at least we are all feminists and men’s rights activists, but nearly 100% of everyone reading this would have felt some emotional recoil from being called at least one of those two things. Why? Because there’s a vast difference between a person who believes the stated beliefs of a group as opposed to a person who holds membership in a group as a defining part of their identity."

The piece of the puzzle that this misses is the difference in perceived reality between the groups - the definitions those groups use to define equal and the policies they think would provide equality. Sometimes the policies of the two groups in question are actually at odds with each other, and even their own stated intent (equality).

View on HN

There's something in humans and I'm not sure if it's an anglo culture thing or a biological thing but men who haven't reached a certain stage in life are more or less considered sub-human. Many don't reach it and still more don't develop far past it.

I feel like I'm just there and there's a night and day difference in how people treat you but it's most extreme with your female peers. It's also nice to have some friends from before, I feel like they're the people I would go to if my life fell apart.

> difficult to find someone believes men shouldn’t have rights.

There are quite a lot of people who would try to argue that mean don't deserve rights.

"men need a curfew"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD8cwX6g3do

MRAs being counter protested: https://www.vice.com/en/article/8gd9y4/who-do-mens-rights-ac... (and this article that handwavy justifies a counter-protest)

Speech being protested and threatened: https://thevarsity.ca/2012/11/17/arrest-assaults-overshadow-...

Or the fuzzier "equity" vs "equality" debate.

Or equality of opportunity vs equality in outcomes.

I’ve seen this thrown around by Jordan Peterson and his fans but I’ve never met anyone, regardless of how crazy their ideology was, advocate for equality of outcomes outside of basic necessities. I’m convinced it’s a strawman.

Haven't had a refresher on it since high school, so I might be totally out of the loop, but isn't equality of outcome the point of marxism?

No, the point of Marxism is transitioning the society through socialism into communism.

Not even a little bit...

No, not really in any sense.

You might say that marxism is for more equal outcomes than we have under today's system, but that's true of lots of things that aren't marxist (any form of progressive taxation to fund social programs, for example).

But even that's sort of an oversimplification and doesn't do either marxism or "equality of outcomes" justice.

No, it's not. Marx was critical of the capitalist mode of production. Marxism is a lens of looking at economics and sociology.

Communism and socialism, which are considered different in modern writing but were the same in Marx's time, are something Marx believes are an inevitable outcome of capitalism.

Marxism suggests that when the workers own the companies, then benefits are distributed to the workers who own/operate the company. Profit doesn't get centered in individuals, it gets spread across the workers of a company.

Folks like Lenin/Stalin took this idea further and created an authoritarian regime out of the ideas, and create what we commonly think of as 'communism' in the states.

Edit: Parent comment asked a question about Marxism, I'm getting downvoted for explaining some high level concepts of Marxism? Do folks want me to dive deeper into the dialectical models Marx discussed? Lol

You're correct, of course. I was also downvoted for an even slightly more simplified version of this post.

Not too surprising given the general demographics of HN being quite biased towards startup founders, VC's, and the like.

I'd understand if I was out here being like, "SV SHOULD BE MARXIST" but I'm literally just answering a question that's a common misconception.

Not at all. Marxism is a method of analyzing history and the present through the lens of class conflict.

Generally "Marxism" is thrown around as a boogie man term by people with little understanding for something approximating extreme authoritarianism in which the state owns all the means of production and allocates everyone the same resources.

It's not "a boogie [sic] man". Marxist governments were definitely not "analyzing history", they were enacting government policies. That's what governments do, unsurprisingly.

(Source: I grew up in a Marxist country and was taught Marxism by a Marxist teacher.)

You're probably thinking of Marxism-Leninism, though it's hard to know without knowing what country you're talking about. I'm not even sure what a "Marxist" country could possibly entail. They'd dedicate all resources to analyzing society through the lens of historical materialism?

You surely won't be surprised if I tell you that Marxism-Leninism embeds the ideas of Marx about stages of societal development.

Also, no; most prominently, we largely dedicated our resources to pointless heavy industry at the expense of light industry and services.

Marxism-Leninism is a strict subset of Marxism. The Marxian ideas about stages of societal development for example have no bearing about whether you should focus on light or heavy industries.

If you're talking about the USSR, there was actually some dissension after the death of Lenin on whether light industry or heavy industry should be focused on. Lenin wanted to focus especially on neither, with his NEP that would create a temporary market economy to figure that out on it's own.

Eventually, the decision was taken to focus on heavy industry. The decisive arguments for a focus on heavy industry had nothing to do with Marxian economics - those arguments went either way. The main determinant of the Soviet focus on heavy industry was the failure of Stalin to obtain security assurances from Western Europe, leading to a focus on heavy industry for military purposes.

At least in the 20s this was a solid move, because Soviet heavy industry saved tens of millions of lives by stalling the Nazi offensive, whose plan was to kill 50% of the Soviet population (something very bad).

After the end of WW2 however, it was pointless in retrospect to continue the focus on heavy industry. But the Soviet Union did not really calculate the geopolitcal impact of nuclear weapons and built a military that could rival NATO, and this required a lot of heavy industry.

Pretty much, Marxism had nothing to do with Soviet investment in heavy industry. The main reason was to feed the Soviet war machine, from the very beginning.

> Marxism-Leninism is a strict subset of Marxism.

If this statement were true then the statement above about Marxism being "a method of analyzing history" would be false. So there's an obvious contradiction right there, just like a claim that a human is a head is incompatible with the statement that a leg is a subset of a human.

> The Marxian ideas about stages of societal development for example have no bearing about whether you should focus on light or heavy industries.

I didn't claim any such thing. You simply asked what did our Marxist government focus on, and I answered. And there's no reason to jump hundreds of kilometers away into the USSR and decades into the past into the NEP period; our economic failures stretched all the way from 1960's onwards all the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain.

>If this statement were true then the statement above about Marxism being "a method of analyzing history" would be false. So there's an obvious contradiction right there, just like a claim that a human is a head is incompatible with the statement that a leg is a subset of a human.

I don't see the incompatibility. Lenin used Marxism, a method of analyzing history, to derive a political program for the Russian empire. Not everything that the Soviet Union did was done because of Marxism Leninism - the vast majority was done out of practical considerations, outside of the general guidelines.

>I didn't claim any such thing. You simply asked what did our Marxist government focus on, and I answered. And there's no reason to jump hundreds of kilometers away into the USSR and decades into the past into the NEP period; our economic failures stretched all the way from 1960's onwards all the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain.

You were talking about the focus on heavy industries of the Soviet Union. I explained to you why this focus on heavy industry had nothing to do with Marxism, and everything to do with the geopolitics of the Soviet Union. I gave an explanation that was valid from death of Lenin to the end of the Cold War. It seems to me that my thesis that the Soviet government wasn't a "Marxist government" but rather a government whose political program was initially based partly on a Marxist analysis of history, but were many of the fatal decisions and errors had nothing to do with Marxism.

> I don't see the incompatibility.

Subsets can't contain elements that their supersets lack. If A is a subset of B, then if x is an element of A, x is also an element of B. So the claim that a state ideology is a subset of a method of analyzing history would necessarily imply that methods of analyzing history habitually contain elements of state ideologies at their core, which I haven't observed. Hence I see a contradiction there.

> You were talking about the focus on heavy industries of the Soviet Union.

I did not grow up in the Soviet Union, hence I wasn't talking about it.

Marxism Leninism was on paper the state ideology of the Soviet Union, sure. But in practice the vast majority of decisions taken by the Soviet Union did not have much to do with the official state ideology.

As for a method of understanding history containing and ideology, this is absolutely the case. All methods of analyzing history and social systems at some level rely on an ideology. Marxism as a method of analyzing history also is an ideology. For other methods of analyzing history often the ideology defaults to the current ruling ideology.

Marxism also contains economic theory, and social theory, all in the goal of analyzing history and changing it. Marxism writ large contains all of its sub-tendencies which understandably after 150 years evolved a lot.

As far as my assumption that you were talking about the Soviet Union, often Marxism Leninism refers to the precise ideology of the Soviet Union. If you meant it in a different way, you'll have to specify the country and time period because various different ideologies call themselves Marxism Leninism (and none of them come from Marx or Lenin).

> Marxism-Leninism is a strict subset of Marxism.

Not quite. According to the original Marxist dogma, Russia couldn't become socialist in 1917, since it had too few proletarians, and too many peasants - i.e. it wasn't capitalist enough for a socialist revolution. Bolsheviks disagreed with that, obviously (and some Marxists even say that this forcible approach in a society that wasn't ready for it is precisely why the USSR turned out like it did).

Lenin himself did not actually disagree for very long. He changed his mind very rapidly (if it was really set) and enacted the NEP. It was Stalin that tried to "force" communism with disastrous effect and killed everyone that disagreed even among the Bolsheviks, which also fucked up the Soviet political system.

That's a common misconception about marxism. "To each according to his needs" does not mean "To each the same amount". Societies that reportedly strived to be marxist, still had different people doing different things and being granted different resources - and that's inevitable. It was even a typical complaint of soviet societies, the fact that "connected" people would get more than others.

It just so happens that, given the pre-existent distribution of wealth will have followed other rules, the first step of marxist enaction inevitably ends up being "the big reset" where inequality of outcome gets temporarily removed for everyone.

No. Marxism is for the abolish ment of social classes, with classes defined as contradictory groups related to relationships of production.

So a Marxist would want, for example, the employer/employee distinction to be abolished. But there would be no issue with inequality in the employee class, an employee may very well produce 3-4 times more value than another.

This is something that Marx explicitly wrote about - he thought that different people had different needs and abilities and thus should receive sometimes very different amounts of resources. The examples he gave would be someone that works much faster and better that someone else, or someone that has children to raise.

The goal and concept of Marxism is to remove economic capital as an input to the circumstantial function that defines a person's outcome. What inputs' weights should increase to replace it is open to interpretation.

Progressives advocate abolishing advanced classes in high school because “they have too many white and Asian students”. Several schools have done so. That is equality of outcome in practice.

The only times I've seen "advanced classes" get abolished is when districts KEPT advanced classes in high schools, but got rid of "ability tracking" (read: high, middle, and low-performing tracks) in early grades (k-6 usually). This is because low-income and minority students are more likely to be tracked low performing in lower grades, thereby baking in the inequity in the system. Eliminating those tracking systems, while keeping AP and other TAG programs is actually a very good way to ensure equality in access with no promise of equality in outcome. . . .

Those headlines tend to get spun as "Chicago district eliminates advanced classes" or something to that effect, because it gets people riled (spelling?) up.

Please, point me to your sources if you are talking about something different.

EDIT: The tracking still occurs in early grades, the isolation grouping does not. Students are still tracked and tested for ability, deficiency, and performance. What they are not doing is grouping them exclusively into high, medium, and low, and letting those groups dictate resource access. They are grouping across abilities, allowing high performers to work with medium and low, thereby allowing them to take a leadership role while still providing the other two groups with valuable resources.

> This is because low-income and minority students are more likely to be tracked low performing in lower grades

Are they actually lower performing or is this an effect of bias?

It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that children with less resources do worse. I thought the purpose of performance tracking was to give the ability to help those who were struggling. Instead, you're saying that it's more helpful to just not know who's struggling and that somehow creates more equality.

Edited for clarity.

>Are they actually lower performing or is this an effect of bias?

This is why these programs in early grades are eliminated - they absolutely were based on bias and external factors. Yes, children with less resources do worse. That was the problem. Students with less access would be tracked low, thereby ensuring they had access to even fewer resources (which were diverted to high performers and TAG classes).

>Instead, you're saying that it's more helpful to just not know who's struggling and that somehow creates more equality.

I didn't explain it well. They still track student ability for interventions, they don't group solely by ability. When they did the latter of those two, the have's had even more and the have-nots had even less.

That makes much more sense although the argument I'd make is still that the issue wasn't the tracking and grouping, it was the allocation of resources. The schools/policy makers have to allocate resources in a zero sum way which makes the question whether to help those who are struggling or push those who are excelling, both, I think, are worthy motives.

The shame in all of this is that the choice has to be made at all. I think, ideally, every student should have a roughly equal amount of attention and dollars allocated to them and if a school is underfunded, everyone suffers until the problem is remediated.

I suspect there's some sort of incentive on the administrators of these schools, be through funding, personal career advancement or something else, that makes them want to max out the top end rather than raise the low end.

In my experience (granted, that is limited to a dozen or so districts in two states), they used to focus on the top end students because a) they were well-connected compared to their peers, b) they came from the higher income (and therefore higher property-tax) portions of the district and were therefore more well connected to local funding source, and c) had parents that were savvy enough of systems such as education to advocate strongly for their children.

>ideally, every student should have a roughly equal amount of attention and dollars allocated to them and if a school is underfunded, everyone suffers until the problem is remediated.

The problem is that this is sort of what happens right now, and it's not great. The current funding scheme relies disproportionately on local property taxes, which only serves to exacerbate the effects of inequality. The current system is a warehouse for student bodies, with oversize classes, underfunded supplies, underpaid teachers, and too many unfunded mandates.

Ideally, we figure out funding (that's way above my pay grade), and then we can move on to cross-ability grouping. Seriously, it's just a fact that high achievers learn much better when they are left to (roughly) their own devices, with guidance and outlines for progress as appropriate. Low achievers learn better when they are led through the process by someone who can put the language in terms they can understand; ideally with support outside of the teacher, such as from peers (look up supplemental instruction for a model in there). Middle achievers will consistently live up to the exact expectation you place on them; so they need a system and environment that places increasingly more strenuous expectations on them, both socially and educationally.

Combine all of that, and you have a wonderful cross-age, cross-ability classroom focused on social development as well as academics. The ability to specialize for various fields such as STEM, art, or technical education is just built in, as well!

If anyone is interested in funding my charter school idea - it's a neighborhood based one-room-schoolhouse model where education and learning are led by the abilities and desires of the students. Much free time, much outdoor time, and incorporating everything in the above paragraph. Completely unrealistic for public schooling in the united states due to the inordinate per pupil cost. But just a lovely idea.

> The problem is that this is sort of what happens right now, and it's not great. The current funding scheme relies disproportionately on local property taxes, which only serves to exacerbate the effects of inequality. The current system is a warehouse for student bodies, with oversize classes, underfunded supplies, underpaid teachers, and too many unfunded mandates.

I've actually ranted about this cause/effect before. I think it's particularly bad here in California given the wide variety of income levels in the state.

> Seriously, it's just a fact that high achievers learn much better when they are left to (roughly) their own devices, with guidance and outlines for progress as appropriate. Low achievers learn better when they are led through the process by someone who can put the language in terms they can understand; ideally with support outside of the teacher, such as from peers (look up supplemental instruction for a model in there). Middle achievers will consistently live up to the exact expectation you place on them; so they need a system and environment that places increasingly more strenuous expectations on them, both socially and educationally.

I think that's all true but it doesn't account for something that I think is a noble goal with somewhat bad implications: I think we want to maximize the progress and achievement of the top achievers. People seem to want 100 doctors/scientists instead of 10,000 accountants.

> [...] they don't group solely by ability. When they did [that], the have's had even more and the have-nots had even less.

I have two thoughts on this:

1. Since our global economy is increasingly winner-take-all, we should consider focusing on the high performers. The lower performers will lose, anyway, so it's most important not to sandbag high performers.

2. It sounds like the idea is really to extort high performers into doing unpaid labor to educate their lower-performing peers, at the expense of their own opportunity to advance academically. Is this fair to high performers? Isn't it the school and faculty's job to teach students, not fellow students' job?

>1.

The issue is that low performers are often only such because of external factors (low income, food insecure, other factors like that), and not due to actual ability. If we focus exclusively on high performers in the low grade, we will only create a WIDE and absolutely inhumane division among the have's and the have not's (more so than what exists).

>2.It sounds like the idea is really to extort high performers into doing unpaid labor to educate their lower-performing peers,

No. You're 100% wrong in your assessment. One of the best ways to learn to do something really well is to teach someone else how to do it. This applies to everything. Letting high performers take a leadership role teaches them not just the core competencies, but also those 'soft skills' that are so often left out of advanced curriculum, but are vitally important to success.

Also, just to nitpick, adding [that] via edit to my quote is unnecessary to the sentence. That word isn't at all needed for context, clarity, or proper sentence formation. Not sure why you did that.

> The issue is that low performers are often only such because of external factors (low income, food insecure, other factors like that), and not due to actual ability. If we focus exclusively on high performers in the low grade, we will only create a WIDE and absolutely inhumane division among the have's and the have not's (more so than what exists).

No, those factors all contribute to the actual ability of the student; you seem to be talking about inherent or latent ability. As a student, I don't care why my low-performing peers are holding me back, I just care that they're holding me back.

We shouldn't focus exclusively on the high performers, and we should absolutely try to ameliorate those factors with things like free school meals and after-school programs. These policies help those with latent ability to turn that into actual ability.

But we can't skip that step. It's important for students to be around students of similar actual ability, because we absolutely cannot afford to slow down the high performers in a perverted quest for equity.

> No. You're 100% wrong in your assessment.

Yes, you're 100% correct in your assessment. I know that what most helped me to excel in math was tutoring my peers in basic mechanics and notation and walking them through absolutely trivial exercises with which they still struggled.

Thank God I never had to endure a class that promoted my intellectual growth by challenging me with more advanced material than my low-performing peers could handle. I learned so much more taking a leadership role.

It is obvious you have little to no personal experience in difficult technical subjects (STEM) and are invested in a political agenda to change the world as you see fit rather than enabling our best and brightest to fully self-actualize.

We have a public high school around me that is for STEM students. It has limited seats available. It is not only based on prior grades but on essays about why you deserve to go and stuff. It ends up rejecting many students every year. I can see requiring an entrance exam or prior grades to prove you have the ability and won't be slowing people down, but this goes way beyond that.

I wonder how it can be that one has the desire and aptitude to succeed there and the public school can deny people that opportunity. That just seems antithetical to public education.

> Several schools have done so.

Every time I see a news article about this, they aren't being honest about what is happening. My high school in particular is often in the news for this reason and the reactionary articles are universally BS.

Citations?

I don't know why you're being down-voted, you're right. I haven't met anyone, even in the insanely left and progressive university circles that I run in, who advocate for equality in outcome. It's equality in opportunity that's important. It's about letting 'your freedom as an individual to choose your own destiny' actually be 'free' from the start and not constrained by social mores, ingrained biases or discrimination, and/or other external factors.

The freedom in outcomes argument is 100% a strawman used by far right pop culture icons to drum up views and clicks.

It's a core belief of progressivism; those who claim it isn't know it is but are interested in protecting a movement that gives them a means of attacking those they dislike.

It absolutely isn't. Progressives, when they see inequality of outcomes at the group level, correctly identify an inequality of opportunity. There's no progressive in the world that thinks that everyone should have the same outcomes.

That's different from wanting similar outcomes between groups of millions of people, because those almost invariably come from inequality of opportunity.

I don't know of any left tendency that believes in equality of outcomes. Even communists don't believe in equality of outcome.

You believe in quotas, you believe in equality of outcome.

In fact I could be inclined to agree with you in some ways; its more accurate to state that progressives don't believe in equality of outcome in much the same way as they don't really hold any disdain for racism/sexism or any of the other causes that claim to champion but they like the power that comes from doing so.

For example no progressive has any issues with an imbalance in genders in nursing; this of course contrasts brilliantly against theirs views on it in the tech industry.

I don't believe in quotas. I don't think people from every different group should do the exact same in every job. I don't think that quotas are an effective way of dealing with inequalities either.

I do believe that roughly speaking, for an equal amount of work, black and white people should have similar salaries, for example. Something that is not the case today.

This is a disparity that can't be explained away by choice, or innate supremacy, but is instead à result of inequality of opportunity. So you have to fix the opportunity gap.

I do have an issue with the imbalance in nursing. That's because there is a strong stigma against men in nursing and men in nursing often suffer strong discrimination. In a society where these stigmas don't exist but men in general decide not to become nurses, that's fine.

Same in tech. There are stigmas and discrimination against women in tech at every level. For example, different countries have massively different amounts of women in engineering. Women in countries where this amount is lower often report discrimination. So this is clearly not a question of choice, and is thus a gap in opportunities led by sexism.

It would be nice if you wouldn't assume the absolute worst possible interpretation of the argument of your interlocutor. This is against HN's guideline and generally increases the amount of noise. It's also quite rude.

Perhaps you don't, but for progressives it remains a core part of their ideology and one that can't be no-true-scotsman-ed away, now that the belief has become publicly embarrassing to have supported.

And the same goes for your opposition to the gender gap in nursing; as demonstrated by the mysteriously absent global-push to rectify the issue.

Funnily enough I seem to recall it being the countries with far poorer track records on "equality" that tended to produce the higher number of female engineers; and that (for example) scandinavian efforts towards "equality" seemed to have quite the opposite result.

There absolutely are programs for men into nursing.

Using Scandinavia as a barometer for equity in engineering for men and women is cherry-picking. Where I live, these measures were very successful and in the leading engineering-only university the rate of women graduating is now 30%. Seems successful to me.

As for this: >Perhaps you don't, but for progressives it remains a core part of their ideology and one that can't be no-true-scotsman-ed away, now that the belief has become publicly embarrassing to have supported.

The only way to get out of this conundrum is for you to find evidence that at the ideological level progressivism is based on equality of outcome. I can't prove the negative. I can give examples however of specific far-left ideologies from anarchism to communism to mutualism to intersectional liberalism do not, at the ideological level, aim for equality of outcome.

Brushing away the example as "cherry picking" because no counter argument can be given isn't convincing, particularly when the pattern is seen in developed countries in general.

As for your university efforts I'd have to know what those actually were before making a call.

And re progresivism and quotas; it isn't based on it but it subscribes heavily to it due to its utility.

I gave a counter argument - for many universities this did actually work. The example I was talking about is Polytechnique Montréal. But it's far from being the only one, though admittedly Scandinavia had a failure in this goal.

As far as progressivism and quotas, I simply can't argue on this unless you give me a specific progressive tendencies. If you're talking about US progressives writ large then the main reason quotas are so popular is because the people in power that put those quotas in place, which often weren't even progressives, found quotas to be easy to implement as other solutions are very difficult and inconvenient for those in power, though popular.

Apologies I meant what those efforts entailed; what actually was done in the universities to achieve the numbers increase?

As for the 2nd point, that's more of what I'm getting at; that core populist/mainstream progressive movement. I could certainly believe that the leaders are jumping on it purely due to, as you say the simplicity and popularity of them.

> I gave a counter argument - for many universities this did actually work.

What you assert as proof that "it worked" was, if I understood your "30%!" correctly, an increase in equality of outcome.

How does this square with your claim to favour equality of opportunity, not outcome? Doesn't it show that what worked was what you claim not to favour; why would you crow about that?

If the goal is to have equal opportunity, but inequity is assumed to be indicative of unequal opportunity then that's just a long-winded way of saying the goal is equity.

> Same in tech. There are stigmas and discrimination against women in tech at every level. For example, different countries have massively different amounts of women in engineering. Women in countries where this amount is lower often report discrimination. So this is clearly not a question of choice, and is thus a gap in opportunities led by sexism.

Do you have a source for this claim? Because this contradicts the sources I have read on this topic. The share of women in engineering varies, but not by much. Most countries fall between the 20-30% range. We see no countries where women make up the majority. Furthermore, the representation of women in countries with better gender equality is actually lower than ones that are highly misogynistic [1].

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

> It would be nice if you wouldn't assume the absolute worst possible interpretation of the argument of your interlocutor. This is against HN's guideline and generally increases the amount of noise. It's also quite rude.

To me it seems you have gone to great lengths to clarify that you mean exactly what the original poster is referring to.

I don't believe their reading your argument at face value is in any way assuming the worst possible interpretation.

It's not a personal attack for someone to disagree with your beliefs.

Those are a lot of absolute statements you're making, and I just don't understand. There is so much wrong with your argument. You're attributing motive and action to someone else, with zero proof, in my opinion.

>You believe in quotas, you believe in equality of outcome.

Who is 'you' here? Who said they believe in quotas?

>they like the power that comes from doing so.

Again, who is this mysterious strawman you're building? Where is this argument coming from? What is your proof? I am very progressive, and I very much have disdain for racism, sexism, and any other bigoted activities. It has nothing to do with power. Often, I am unable to do anything about this behavior because I lack any sort of structural power in my local area. So what does that mean for your argument?

>For example no progressive has any issues with an imbalance in genders in nursing

I literally work to bring men into underrepresented fields in higher education. There are programs across the nation specifically designed to recruit, assist, and help ensure the academic success of men in nursing, men in daycare/education fields, and men in other traditionally 'feminine' fields. Claiming this absolute of a statement is just absurd.

If you would follow a couple steps up the comment chain you'll note that the discussion centred around progressive ideology; you're welcome to re-read the chain and respond again once you have familiarised yourself with the context.

I followed the chain to that comment and then asked the questions I asked. Please answer them, I would appreciate it.

You seem to be building an odd little strawman to knock down based on some bogeyman theoretical progressive you have imagined. I'm trying to point that out to you.

You're genuinely going to try and claim, on HN of all places that no one is advocating for enforced gender requirements in hiring?

> That's different from wanting similar outcomes between groups of millions of people, because those almost invariably come from inequality of opportunity.

Can you cite any evidence that this is the case? It seems you are simply defining inequality of outcome to mean the same thing as inequality of opportunity at the group level.

Unless you believe there are innate differences between the ability of these groups, then yes the two are logically equivalent. If you don't believe so, I'm not going to get in this debate today.

Or there could be equal ability, but population-wide differences in preferences, demographics, or other factors. Is it your position that men are underrepresented in teaching and nursing because these fields are highly biased against men? Likewise, there's a significant overrepresentation of Asian in tech. Does the fact that tech hotspots like the Bay Area and Seattle metro have higher than average Asian populations have no role in this disparity?

Claiming to support equal opportunity while simultaneously asserting that inequity necessarily indicates unequal opportunity amounts to a long-winded way of saying that the goal is equal outcomes.

And saying that unless someone believes in equivalency between equity and equality, then they believe in innate differences between groups is very reductive. There are plenty of factors here: culture, preferences, geography, and more.

That's not true. It is a false dichotomy. There are a myriad of reasons you'd find different behaviors or results in different groups of people besides either ingrained innate unchangeable differences and lack of opportunity for that group. Even if you sampled two equally sized samples of equal distribution of the same kind of people (whatever that means to you) you'd find aggregate disparity to some degree. No innate differences at all, and no difference in opportunity based on group membership, you'd still find disparity. Your dichotomy is false.

Additionally, I find this whole assertion I see often nowadays that there's some invisible force creating opportunity disparities between different arbitrary groups of people to be a bit hand-wavy and suspiciously convenient. To me it is comparable to asserting that the disparities are because it was the will of God.

Finally, your statement is a roundabout way of saying "if you don't agree with me you're a racist and I don't talk to racists" and that is extremely dishonest. Frankly, if you don't want to talk to people you don't agree with, why are you on a discussion website at all?

The trick is that life is a series of "opportunities" and equality of opportunity at any particular point of choice generally results in perpetuating any imbalance of opportunity that has occurred before that.

For the sake of illustration, assume two large groups of kids who innately would have had identical ability, but one's growth and education is (on average) more stunted because their families are more likely to be single parent families, or have a parent in jail, or just very poor (which affects a lot), so right now they don't have identical average ability because they did not get equal education and support some decades ago.

If you want to have equal representation of the groups, you'd have to artificially correct for all the previous differences in opportunity - without a time machine, you can't actually fix the differences in their skills and experience (no matter how fairly or unfairly those differences came to be), you can only pretend that those differences don't exist. And so we come to the core issue that granting equal treatment to unequally capable candidates means granting unequal treatment to equally capable candidates, there's no way around it.

And there's also a gap between treating individuals fairly and treating groups fairly. You can't/don't measure the opportunity differences on an individual level, but on a group level, and individual variation in opportunity is huge. In general, any "compensating opportunities" happen at a group level, because if one group is underrepresented under a "background-blind" schema, then it's because lots and lots of capable individuals from that group have "filtered away" and gone on to very different life paths long before applying - and any corrective action or quota system is not helping those individuals who suffered most from the lack of earlier opportunities (because they're already "out"), instead it's granting a larger (compensating) opportunity to other individuals who just happen to be from the same group but had enough opportunity to "stay in the game", while individuals who personally have had so-so opportunities get punished if they happen to come from a group that (on average!) has more opportunities.

Hell, if you want to take it to the limit, even Karl Marx didn't believe in equality of outcomes.

Isn't the idea of underrepresentation of certain minority groups or genders basically that? we hear that there are only xy % of women in tech or PoC in tech and that the goal is to get for example 50/50% women/men. Isn't this basically a discussion about equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. 50%/50% is basically equality of outcome. We can see for example in scandinavia that you get unequal outcomes if you amplify the equality of opportunities.

I mean, if you just take it at face value, then it could be interpreted that way. I think the problem is that there isn't an easy soundbite that companies can put out to identify how they will impact equality of opportunity, so they take the easy way to seem 'woke' or whatever other adjective you want to put on it, and attack with equality of outcome. I'm not trying to have a 'no true scotsman' sort of thing, but profit-driven companies are not a great measuring tool for most social issues.

I guess, what I'm saying is, that the outcome being 'only xy% women in tech with a goal of 50/50' is an easily digestible way of saying, women do not have the same opportunity as men to get into tech. But it's harder for companies to outline the steps to ensure those opportunities than it is for them to proclaim that goal.

>We can see for example in scandinavia that you get unequal outcomes if you amplify the equality of opportunities.

Absolutely. (I actually had to look through my post history because I wondered if you were another person who brought up that statement!) What I said to them was, "And that's fair. My argument isn't that it needs to be split and completely equal. It's that the freedom to choose needs to be equal, and the playing field needs to be level, so that who is and who isn't in 'field a' is, in fact based on merit and not arbitrary classification at birth such as gender and ethnicity."

I agree. How do you propose measuring it if not using the 50/50 metric? Are we already at the point of equal opportunity? If not, why?

>How do you propose measuring it if not using the 50/50 metric?

If I had that answer, I honestly think I would be a billionaire. Really though, I have no practical ideas, because it isn't something I work with regularly. It seems like a sociologist could come up with something, some way to measure sentiment among youth, or something to that effect, but that's beyond me.

>Are we already at the point of equal opportunity? If not, why?

I don't believe so. Even the often touted Gender-equity paradox can be boiled down to gender stereotypes manifesting in individuals' decisions (https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/31063).

All I know is that I see nearly no women enter STEM majors at the institutions I have worked with, whereas education and social work is almost 100% female. That is lopsided enough to tell me that something is at play here. I just simply am not educated enough to know what, how to measure it, or how to attempt to fix it.

Have you looked into that study? That seems kind of shady to me. They are using math attitudes to say there's a stereotype. It's not even asking stuff like 'do you think boys or girls are better at math' etc. It's just stuff like "Math is important for my career" etc. Well if they already have ideas about the careers they want to perform, then obviously the study is looking at the outcomes and not the drivers - why did they choose those careers? So it seems we're back at square one - that women as an aggregate choose fields that aren't as math centric. It seems like a leap to assume some implicit meaning behind those general questions on the survey.

"If I had that answer, I honestly think I would be a billionaire."

If we can't even define the problem and the underlying causes or measure the outcomes, then how can we fix it? Even if we try things, we would have no idea if they are actually beneficial because we don't even know what to measure.

"I just simply am not educated enough to know what, how to measure it, or how to attempt to fix it."

If we can't measure it and don't know how to fix it, then do we even know that a problem exists?

"Even the often touted Gender-equity paradox can be boiled down to gender stereotypes manifesting in individuals' decisions"

But if it's their own free choice, then why should we interfere with that? It's like saying my mom doesn't want me to play football because I might get hurt, so I'm going to base my decision on that. That is up to the person to decide if they want to use that as part of their decision making. Nobody is forcing them.

The study had a question about if being a house wife is fulfilling. If a person finds that fulfilling, should we prevent them from doing that? I ha e a STEM job and I don't feel fulfilled. Judging by the number of disillusioned posts on HN, it looks like an engineering job is not something that is fulfilling. I don't see forcing people into it as a fix for anything. You're talking about swapping social norms that value family (fulfillment as a house wife) for the social norm that making more money, even at the expense of fulfillment, is what society values.

I've encountered a slightly more nuanced equity position that comes in the form of supporting equal opportunity, but simultaneously claiming that inequitable outcomes are indicative of unequal opportunity. If the goal is to fix inequality and inequity is assumed to be evidence of inequality, then that's just a roundabout way of pursuing equal outcomes.

I'm not saying that this is your position. It's just a position I've encountered with fequency.

Inequity is not evidence of inequality. Evidence of inequality are things like: sending identical resumes save for male vs. female names and measuring the difference in response rate, anonymizing candidates' voices and measuring changes in interview performance, or other tests that see changes in output directly attributable to aspects of the candidate's identity.

Quotas guarantee opportunity they don’t guarantee outcome.

> Isn't the idea of underrepresentation of certain minority groups or genders basically that?

Not really, but it's a bit nuanced.

I'm not taking a position here on what is correct, but advocates for this sort thing will state that inequality in current distribution of outcomes is due inequality of opportunity in the past. If you accept that as true, you have a problem from a policy level as to what to do about it, if anything.

One approach would be to attach the opportunity side only, and assume that in time a more equitable distribution will arrive over time. The problem is for something like this "in time" is probably measured in generations.

Another is to try an tip the scales a bit to correct to impact of opportunity on those people effected, or on your company (or other institution) or both. A problem with this approach is you by definition don't really know what the correct distribution should be, so you are likely to be a bit hamfisted about it.

You don't know any communists in your insanely left and progressive university? I find that hard to believe. I went to a fairly right wing university and the place with lousy with communists. They mostly got better, but still.

My impression is that progressives and conservatives seem to disagree about what constitutes "outcome" vs "opportunity". For example, imagine a tech company found that 20% of it's employees were female and 80% were male, and decided to try to change this by instituting a new program exclusively focused on recruiting women.

A progressive might argue that this program gives women a better "opportunity" to succeed, whereas a conservative would say that the program was created for the purpose of influencing "outcomes", and that by focusing exclusively on women the program is intentionally creating unequal "opportunities".

That seems like a very fair observation. I think I am inclined to agree with that assessment.

The left regularly trots out statistics as "proof" of racism. That something isn't equal directly indicates racism (or some other -ism). So inequality of outcome implies inequality of opportunity. It leaves no room for the possibility of equal opportunity and different outcome.

Probably the biggest of these going on right now is the inequality in pay. Women are paid less (they are). This immediately implies sexism because no other explanation is even possible.

I have met many people in left and progressive circles who literally advocate for equality in outcomes and dismiss meritocracy as various internalized not-giving-them-what-they-wantisms.

Isn't equality of outcome used to measure equality of opportunity?

> advocate for equality of outcomes

Well, usually when I see somebody arguing "equity vs. equality", they're advocating strict racial quotas: absolute equality of outcome, at the level of race.

There's this thing called communism, not sure if you have heard of it but it's becoming quite popular again amongst the younger generation.

I worked at a company that set a diversity target of 33% women in tech roles. In the same all-hands that announced this target leadership said using our definition of a "tech role" 20% of the workforce was women. To achieve this, we gave women two chances to pass the pre-onsite coding interview instead of one. Sure, this isn't as forceful as a hard 50/50 quota but it is pushing the needle away from equality and towards equity. Equity taking precedence over equality is also the basis of affirmative action used by private universities. And progressive taxation.

In fact, I'm a supporter of equity over equality in plenty of instances beyond basic necessities. I think certain avenues to pursuing this are better than others, and that there are some instances where pursing equity over equality is misguided. But yes, I do believe there are instances where pursuing equity - at least in part - is better than exclusively pursuing equality.

> And progressive taxation.

Point of order: I'm taxed the same on my one-millionth dollar of income (assuming the same source) as Jeff Bezos is.

... I just don't have a one-millionth dollar of income to tax, but if someone wants to shift things toward equality rather than equity I'll happily accept donations toward that end. To make things more equal for Bezos and to strike a blow against equity, naturally.

> To make things more equal for Bezos and to strike a blow against equity, naturally.

This is exactly my point: a flat tax rate would be more equal, but less equitable. And I do support a tax code that is more equitable, rather than more equal in this regard.

Yeah, taxing every dollar the same would be more equal... For dollars, but not for people.

Have you never seen people decrying unequal representation in, say, tech? I've seen plenty of people make that claim and expect the distribution of groups to match the distribution in the general population. That's equality of outcome, not opportunity. It's also only really possible in two scenarios:

A. Everyone regardless of demographic has the same opportunities, talent and interest in tech

B. You force people into positions they don't want and force people out that do want them

The same goes for education, nursing, construction, sewage, fire fighting...

The trick is in how broadly you define "basic necessities." Go talk to a plains Indian in the 1700s and ask them if a permanent structure all to themselves with running water and a refrigerator is a basic necessity. Now think about access to doctors and drugs.

That's the real crux of what we talk about when we talk about equality of outcomes. What qualifies as a necessity? And that's when you start getting arguments that start with things like "well in a modern society..."

You'll probably be hard pressed to find someone that says that someone deserves to starve to death because they're unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. You'd probably also be equally hard pressed to find someone who thinks that waigu beef is a basic necessity. You say "strawman" and they say "moving the goalposts" and none of that is productive, this is a legitimate discussion that is going to be had, needs to be had and is not over or settled, shutting it down by calling the opposing viewpoint fallacious on false premises will not change that, it will only be counterproductive.

Genuine question: Isn't this equivalent to equity vs equality?

Exactly. There's a good fence and box example in here.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/equality-vs-eq...

> Genuine question: Isn't this equivalent to equity vs equality?

Not generally, no; “equity” generally refers to fairness of treatment (as distinct from non-differentiation in equality); while concepts of fairness vary, equivalence of outcomes not the moat common understanding pursued under the banner of “equity”.

Which is not to say that the two are never (especially in particular narrow domains) the same, but they aren’t in general the same.

In my experience, people who are against "equity" call it "equality of outcome" because it sounds more Orwellian/communistic/whatever your dystopian descriptor of choice is. Very few people actually advocate for "equality of outcome".

Equity is closer to "equality of opportunity" than "equality of outcome". "Equality" is neither of those things because it doesn't correct for differences in opportunity and therefore obviously doesn't yield an equal outcome.

>In my experience, people who are against "equity" call it "equality of outcome" because it sounds more Orwellian/communistic/whatever your dystopian descriptor of choice is.

I call it Harrison Bergeron:

https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...

People who use "equity" really do mean equality of outcome, and that is a huge problem.

Equality of outcome is undeniably evil.

> Very few people actually advocate for "equality of outcome"

There are certainly many people advocating for explicit "equality of outcome" policies e.g. various quota systems that mandate granting unequal opportunities for otherwise equally suitable applicants in order to achieve an equitable outcome for various groups (e.g. gender, ethnicity, caste, etc) the applicants represent.

>various quota systems that mandate granting unequal opportunities for otherwise equally suitable applicants in order to achieve an equitable outcome for various groups

This is the problem in your definitions. Are you talking about equity of outcome at the individual or group level? You are mixing the two there.

No on is advocating equity of outcome at the individual level. People are using equity of outcome at a group level as a measure of equity of opportunity at the individual level because there is an assumption that when two large groups of people have similar opportunities they will have similar normally distributed results at the individual level. If you argue otherwise, you quickly start getting into areas of bigotry by saying that a certain group is not willing or capable to make the most of opportunity.

I'm quite explicitly talking about outcome at the group level and opportunities at the individual level (as you correctly note, it does not make much sense otherwise).

But there seems to be a "definition mismatch" about what "equality of opportunity" means - I'm talking about equality of opportunity and equal treatment for individuals as they are right now at any particular decision point; and this is substantially different from what's measured by, as you say, "equity of outcome at a group level as a measure of equity of opportunity at the individual level" because that essentially measures an "integral" of all lifetime opportunities for all these individuals.

The key difference is whether we consider that "equal opportunity" should include or exclude compensating of earlier unequal opportunities. In general we're talking about specific decisions or policies that unavoidably come after some unequal opportunities e.g. the socioeconomic status of the family you're born in, which correlates with almost every measure of success. I would define "equal opportunity" as a "background blind" system that looks at the relevant attributes of individuals despite of or because of whatever earlier life they had - but it's clear that equal opportunity right now won't result in equal outcomes at the group level, since those would be influenced (and probably dominated) by all the differences accumulated before that. And vice versa, if you're trying to compensate for that, then you might get an equality of outcomes for the groupo, but at this moment you would be granting unequal opportunities to these individuals, even if they actually accurately compensate for other, earlier unequal opportunities to the same specific individuals and not just the groups to which these people happen to belong.

This goes back to my first comment about definitions. You are defining "equality of opportunity" as "equality". You basically want a meritocracy in which everyone is treated the same. I was defining "equality of opportunity" as "equity". This means people are treated differently depending on their needs. This is the classic fence example.

You admit "equality of opportunity" isn't practical right now due to existing systemic biases. The people fighting for equity would probably say it isn't practical in any foreseeable future. Maybe some day we will correct for systemic biases against certain races or genders, but odds are there will always be some sort of inherent disadvantage for various people. Physical disabilities are one example. That is where equity comes into play. Forcing an employer to install a ramp for a an employee in a wheelchair isn't being "background blind". They are not being treated equally because extra attention and resources are being devoted to them in comparison to their coworkers. However this unequal treatment is just in order to provide them an equal opportunity to overcome a disadvantage their coworkers never experienced. They would not have "equality in opportunity" without an inequality in how they are treated.

In case others are looking for more on this...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/equality-vs-eq...

The problem with the definition of equality within the modern feminist movement is that it does not make allowance for the social power that females intrinsically have over men. In particular it completely ignores that, as in the vast majority of sexually dimorphic species, women are (at social scales) effectively the gatekeepers of the bedroom, and this gives females massive influence over male behavior. The dominant socially acceptable view of equality therefore is markedly unequal, and quite self serving as the "ideal" balance of power within the feminist framework becomes rather lopsided.

> the gatekeepers of the bedroom

There is no way this can be true. Sex takes two consenting people; there is no "gate" to be unequally "kept" because both parties have autonomy.

Trying to shift to "social scales" to escape the central role of autonomy is a nifty trick. But casting individual bedroom decisions as a matter of social equality is to presume a degree of entitlement in the bedroom. After all, we're entitled to be treated equally, right?

By governments? Yes. By our managers at work? Yes. By those who we desire? No, not at all.

"Trying to shift to "social scales" to escape the central role of autonomy is a nifty trick."

I don't understand this comment. Isn't feminism addressing an issue at social scale, often in areas that include autonomy? Even looking at marriage, you are expected to treat each other fairly.

There are absolutely places where the social scale is relevant: places where one is entitled to equal treatment.

Incels mistakenly think that the bedroom is one of these places, and that they are entitled to an equal amount of sexual attention as some other man. Thus the "gatekeepers" language when there is no gate.

The social-scale concerns are totally appropriate when it comes to how we construct masculinity and what male attractiveness requires, and feminists are by and large interested in that conversation.

I saw the gatekeeper comment as being more related to the natural processes of diamorphic species. Take for example your statement below. This very much implies a "gate" and that women are making choices to keep that gate closed for some men. Just because a person is not entitled to what is behind that gate, doesn't make that gate less real. If anything, it enforces the analogy in the fact that gates do exist in real life to keep out those who are not entitled to what lies beyond them.

"Incels mistakenly think that the bedroom is one of these places, and that they are entitled to an equal amount of sexual attention as some other man."

The proof is that men aren't described as gatekeepers, even though just like women, they choose to have sex with certain people, and not with others.

The "gate" you're talking about uncontroversially belongs to each individual in the form of their bodily autonomy. Yet women are uniquely cast as "keeping out" certain people. That's not a matter of dimorphism: that's a matter of mens' bodily autonomy being assumed, and womens' being up for debate.

In other words: for the sake of argument, sure, there's a gate. But only women are viewed as gatekeepers, as though keeping others out undermines equality, rather than being part-and-parcel of having the equal autonomy to choose one's partners.

Thank you for this comment and the ones preceding it. This comment section is scary and I appreciate your lucidity.

Gatekeeping is relevant only when there is scarcity. If there is a pair of people (A, B) where A's desire for sex is three times bigger than B's, then although both A and B have full bodily autonomy (that nobody disputes), in practice only B would be a gatekeeper, as sex for A is scarce, while sex for B is plentiful (relative to their desires).

The same argument could be generalized to society. If one gender has on average much higher desire for sex, then the second gender would be considered gatekeepers in practice, as for members of the first the gate is much more selective that for the members of the second gender (due to scarcity difference). That is completely unrelated to equality or bodily autonomy, which is granted to both.

Exactly, which gets back to the actual underlying dynamic: the accusation of gatekeeping only makes sense on a societal level, not an individual one, and can only be turned into an equality issue if one (silently) shifts back to the perspective of an individual who believes they are entitled to an equal amount of sex.

This is a common and disingenuous misconstrual of the argument. It isn't about feeling entitled to sex, it's about making access to sex more evenly distributed across society, for both genders. Not because of entitlement, but because of better overall happiness for both genders.

You are talking about a movement which on its face is about social equality, but refuses to acknowledge that is explicitly engineering norms which are already creating oppressive social inequality. You clearly have disdain for them but whether you want to admit it or not, "incels" are a low status social class, and if they are the way they are because of the efforts of others then by modern progressive logic they are oppressed - by feminists. The refusal to even acknowledge the possibility that this could be happening is a form of disenfranchisement, and is inevitable when your entire worldview is based on a false oppressor/oppressed binary, which is the essence of modern feminism (progressivism really).

So, to be clear, you believe it is axiomatic that one must internalize rape-desire to observe or discuss obvious consequences of sexual reproduction under selective pressure?

It's interesting that the concept of bodily autonomy doesn't extend to the male not wanting his body to engage in a lifetime of forced labor when the female's bodily autonomy extends to carrying an irrational pregnancy to term, though, isn't it?

One might even go to say that there are very real systemic and social inequities which have nothing at all to do with your rape fixation...

That's not "gatekeeping the bedroom". That's called "bodily autonomy". They're allowed to decide who gets to stick what inside their body -- exactly the same as you have.

You appear to resent women for being allowed to decide what happens to their own bodies. You also seem to think that this is the only thing in society that actually matters -- that this one thing gives women all of the power.

I believe you should reconsider these positions. Bodily autonomy is a bare minimum. What is it about access to a woman's body that is so vitally important to you?

Who said Bodily autonomy is bad? They are just explaining the consequences of it in human species.

Access to women's body obviously important for men (sex, kids etc.). Why is this even a question?

I really take offense to the notion that simply for criticizing the feminist movement or acknowledging the romantic power dynamic, I "resent women". Nor have I implied that "this one thing gives women all of the power". Neither of these are arguments, instead they are cheap, disingenuous dismissals which only stifle meaningful discussion.

I am merely explaining that this is a particular domain over which women have massively disproportionate power, however feminists refuse to acknowledge the existence of this power while claiming to be in pursuit of social equality.

A movement which seeks to re-engineer social norms in pursuit of "equality" is bound to disenfranchise men if this power dynamic is ignored. The result is movements like "incels". None of this implies that men are entitled to access to female bodies, but there is an inescapable give and take. If women are to be treated the same as men in all domains, then restructuring romantic interactions while maintaining the onus on men to bear the brunt of initiation and rejection unfairly shifts the power dynamic in favor of women.

And this has consequences for women too. Indirectly, in that frustrated men are likely to withdraw and/or become antisocial (criminally or violently). And directly in that it shifts the dating dynamic toward hypergamy, where many females compete for a small proportion of men. Though perhaps there is an argument that some or most women prefer a polygamist arrangement, but I don't know if that's the case and it certainly is detrimental to men. Monogamy is a social norm which maximizes romantic equity for both men and women, not merely a patriarchal construct. Regardless of the argument of bodily autonomy, the romantic/social marketplace is an economy and can be modeled with the same sort of inequality measures that we apply to financial economies, with consequences for the function and overall happiness of society.

What can be done about this though? I don't think it's a good idea to make life harder for those who are privileged in some way, because it will just lead to a world where everyone is equally miserable. And it would be wrong to put all the women in this category, because not all of them have the privilege that you talk about.

> but nearly 100% of everyone reading this would have felt some emotional recoil from being called at least one of those two things

What's the rationale behind this statement? It seems like it's implying "nearly 100%" people are one or the other kind of extremists when it comes to Gender politics. Wouldn't it rather be the other way round, people knowingly identifying themselves as both Feminists and MRAs (redundant, as "Feminist" by itself means someone who strives for equality among genders), since most are normally moderate in their opinions?

The rationale behind that statement is explained in the subsequent statements in the article. Something about how there's a difference between agreeing with some group or cause's ststet principles and identifying as an in group member as a part of ones identity. The article explains it better than I am.

Honestly because neither feminists nor men's rights activists want equality, despite whatever they purport to be about.

Just like there's a political spectrum with the crazies at the edges of both left and right, there is also a spectrum on gender issues, race, or any other social issue. The crazies are to be found at the edges of that, again on both sides.

Are you equating reasonableness of the *average* person that self-identifies as feminist and the *average* men's-rights-advocate?

Considering the year on year decrease in women who identify with the movement, its fairly clear anyone who would describe said movement as "reasonable" would no doubt hold the traits inherent in the movement that so many find despicable.

You are making some pretty wild misrepresentations of reality: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/07/07/a-centu...

The closest thing I can find to your interpretation is that women of color are less probable to adopt the term "feminist" because they are less probable to feel the movement has done enough for them.

I do not know who has convinced you of an alternative definition of the word, but feminism means "believing in equal treatment / equal opportunity / etc".

Literally the first google result of "women identifying as feminst" https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/american-women-and-feminism

And plenty more for the willing student; however an ideology that considers "men are on average taller and stronger than women" to be a controversial statement might understandably place some difficulty on those in need of finding these things.

And funnily enough the definition of a group has nothing to do with how it behaves; or are you suddenly going to proudly identify as a mens rights activist? I suppose its just as well that naming North Korea a democratic peoples republic magically fixed the place overnight as well.

> an ideology that considers "men are on average taller and stronger than women" to be a controversial statement

Citation needed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5nu_INVli0

You can find footage of people defending literally any controversial take you might have. Doesn't mean there are enough subscribers to consider their position.

Could you spell out how the link you shared says anything about "year on year decrease" or anything about the movement being viewed as "despicable". Especially in the context of your very reference saying that the results depend significantly on how the question is phrased?

Ask yourself if you or other people would be more comfortable identifying as feminists publicly now as opposed to 5/10 years ago; that'll give you answer 1.

As for answer 2, I've shown what basic searches can come up with. "why im not a feminst" might give you what you're looking for.

Not OP, but Answer 1: Yes, it's anecdotal but you definitely see the trend.

Answer 2: So I did the Google search as you requested, and read about the book [1]. I hadn't heard of it but it looks interesting, thanks for recommending. From what I can tell, it's central claim is that feminism has an image problem due to it being co-opted by the US right-wing which she calls "choice feminism", and the remedy is a need to return to a leftist concept of what she calls "radical feminism". Is that what you're saying?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-Am-Not-Feminist-Manifesto/dp/1612...

A full on reading into one particular book is probably going above and beyond (though I cant immediately see anything about right wing co-option on a skim read of that particular one; the general criticism at the moment seems to centre on the radical lefts takeover).

The search for me at least brings a number of articles which highlight common criticisms of the movement such as rampant sexism, advocacy for abolition of basic rights (free speech, right to fair trial etc), general hypocrisy and bad faith action (see the Cathy Newman vs Jordan Peterson interview for a great example of this)

Oh, so for an incognito search with clear cookies in my locale (bay area), all you get for 1-5 pages or so with the search term you provided is the book and reviews and articles discussing it (with and without quotes): https://google.com/search?q=%22why+i+am+not+a+feminist%22

Perhaps when you search with your normal Google account it's skewing to different results. This particular book and the articles discussing it are critiquing modern feminist movements as too conservative, from what you perhaps would call a "radical left" perspective. I find it interesting that this is the exact opposite of "the general criticism at the moment seems to centre on the radical lefts takeover"!

I personally feel my incognito Google search captures the current zeitgeist better than your search, that people are fed up with conservatives and want a "radical, fearless call for revolution" as Google's auto-summary of my search put it. That said, ultimately it's all "bubbles" all the way down, as there's no such thing as a so-called "algorithm" (ranking formula, etc) free from ideology, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Can you point to me the bit where its criticising it for being too conservative? Not saying its not there but I'm not seeing it.

On Amazon it's described by Jacobin (a leftwing magazine in the US popular with Bernie supporters etc): “A searing critique… a necessary contribution to the effort to push contemporary social justice movements further to the left and to weave an understanding of class politics into modern identity-based movements in order to build a radical politics of solidarity.”

All the other summaries on Amazon are similar, i.e. the very top description (New Yorker): "The point of 'Why I Am Not a Feminist' isn’t really that Crispin is not a feminist; it’s that she has no interest in being a part of a club that has opened its doors and lost sight of its politics—a club that would, if she weren’t so busy disavowing it, invite Kellyanne Conway in"

Having never read the book or even heard of the author until you introduced it to me I don't care one way or the other, but it's clear from a reading of these descriptions that her book is a critique from the left.

> feminism means "believing in equal treatment / equal opportunity / etc

While this might be what feminists like to tell themselves, that is untrue. Feminism is (and can only ever be) the movement asserting women's rights in society. It is unlikely to (and doesn't) advocate for the abolition of advantages women enjoy, like the tax disparity, criminal sentencing disparity or child custody disparity. It is also increasingly uninterested in the male perspective, further reducing its utility.

MRAs, while too androcentric as well, are a younger movement. Like the first wave of feminism, it's focusing on today's disparities. Also like feminism, it has its elements of disdain for the other perspective. And finally, like feminism, men's rights can never be anything but a narrowly focused movement ensuring men aren't treated less than women.

The word you're looking for is egalitarian.

In defence of the OP, I've also heard that less women are identifying as feminists because they feel the movement has lost its way somewhat. It seems like there's some debate if that's true or just wrong things that people repeat. I've never seen numbers one way or another - and your link doesn't present numbers either, it talks about gender equality not whether more or less women identify as feminist.

No, because men's rights advocates are a smaller group further to an extreme end of the spectrum. Let's be generous and say it's 0.2 % of the population. Are the most extreme 0.2% of the population identifying as feminists just as unhinged? Could be. I don't think either of us could say for sure, but it's plausible. There's some value judgments to be made there. But there are crazies on both sides of the issue - that's self evident, right?

The problem with this line of thought is that some of the "crazies at the edge" in the past are the sensible, moderate ideas that you no doubt hold right now. For example, viewing slavery as an evil institution was considered the "crazies at the edge" opinion in the early-mid 1800s in the US, as opposed to the dominant opinion among "sensible" abolitionists that slavery was personal sin that requires a redemption process (like drinking). In some cases, this change of sentiment can take only a couple decades: See opinion polling on gay marriage or weed legalization.

This is why both-sides-ing or argument to moderation is not really a useful or convincing rhetorical device.

Both you and parent are right, but you have to acknowledge that extremists and totalitarians do exist.

"you have to acknowledge that extremists and totalitarians do exist" is a cheap rhetorical device to sneak in "both sides are the same" fallacies. Yes, of course there are crazies in any political movement, demographic, subculture, or other group. Elevating these crazies to the first thing mentioned when discussing the actual substance of the beliefs of a group is silly at best, but more frequently it is simply a dishonest distraction. This is not a slippery slope (also typically a fallacy in practice).

To be clear, I'm not saying both sides are the same - that's a value judgment. But it's obviously not a one side is right and the other is wrong situation either.

Yeah, exactly!

It's also simply not a useful type of statement even when made in good faith. It assumes all issues fit on scales. For example, there are people today who call themselves feminists, and have extremely different views about LGBTQ+ rights compared to others who call themselves feminist (notably around the BTQ+ part). I really don't know who is the more "extreme", since that implies that I am referencing an agreed upon "center" which these positions differ from, and that simply doesn't exist. There is no agreed upon "center" for anything. Both claim to be feminists, and claim the other side is wrong, and neither would consider the other either more "extreme" or more "centrist".

This is just one example, but I would argue that this holds true in nearly every case: Reducing something to a scale with "extremes" on each side mostly just shows how the speaker perceives other positions and is otherwise not very useful.

CS stuff: IMO a better mental model would be non-Cartesian. Perhaps a weighted graph, where the vertices are ideologies (or, to be more granular, people), and the edge-weights represent some fuzzy metric of overlap of beliefs.

I think that it is just as important to talk about the extremes and the bad ideas as it is to talk about the good ones. We bring up the extremes because they're there, and they can be tempting, and so we should warn each other about them. Saying what you're saying usually (but not always) is an attempt to not address the usually perfectly reasonable point one is responding to without outright defending the extremes. Extreme ideas do need to be pointed out precisely to do what you want: prevent the reasonable discussion from becoming one between two extremes.

You are completely right in the appropriate context: when talking about ideology A we should consider more than just its most standard version. But when comparing ideology A and ideology B, focusing on the extremes of ideology A while considering only the middle ground of ideology B (what happened in this thread) is more or less whataboutism.

Nothing about what I said means that values are static over time or that the balance can't shift. It's true that today's crazies at the edge might be tomorrows center - although I find that thought troubling!

But make no mistake, the extremes at both ends harbor dangerous crazies. In politics, while the evils of the right are obvious and dangerous, the evils of the left are much more seductive but have been just as dangerous this past century (think fascists vs communists).

On gender issues, the incels are clearly unhinged. But so are the extreme feminists.

Just an aside, I've noticed that anything I post criticizing the right gets me upvotes on HN. Anything criticizing the left is much more controversial. I wonder how HN leans as a whole?

I view myself as left of center, but not left enough by the standards of this community.

I just find that interesting.

I've have had the opposite observation, probably has a lot to do with whoever is in the particular thread

Reply on news.ycombinator.com