The incel lexicon: Deciphering the emergent cryptolect of a global community | Hacker News Reader

The incel lexicon: Deciphering the emergent cryptolect of a global community

arxiv.org

26 pointsAnon8445 comments

Interesting that this is actually a study. I see the major problems here (shaky citation sources, unfounded claims, poor data), but I also see the difficulty in attempting a study like this. I can agree with the claims even if I recognize the problems. Still, having Reddit as your only source of data seems like a recipe for disaster.

Maybe a better title would have been "examining incel lexicon and dissemination into popular discourse" - but then it would have had to be a better study.

One of the things that all good grad students learn is how to do paper triage. Presume that you are faced with a large number of papers and a limited time to read a subset of them. How do you allocate your time to papers?

I, and many others follow the "3 bad attributes" rule. If you're reading the paper and you see 3 shaky things- small sample size, multiple tests without correction, concluding something not supported by the data- you just stop reading the paper.

The other detail is that you should absolutely never start by looking at figures. Figures lie. They are designed to convince you what the author wants you to believe. Instead, you need to read the parts of the paper that describe what they did in detail, and build a model of that (this is why when authors share enough code and data to reproduce their experiment fully, people like me are happy because that saves literally a day or two of work), and convince yourself that you believe their work was done competently. Most papers were not done competently. Most of what you're reading is people who managed to convince themselves they found significance instead of null hypothesis.

At the end you're typically left with a very small number of good papers which pass every test you apply to them: they state what they did (materials and methods), what they got (results). You should care less about citations as long as the authors don't make obvious mistakes that are well-esconced in the literature).

Then, and only then do you pay attention. I rejected this paper within a few sentences because it looks to be an activist paper wrapped in semi-quantative analysis on a low quality dataset.

I'm curious as to what utility this information has in the format of an academic paper. If you wanted to learn the dialect of any subculture there are always a number of documents naintained by the subculture itself that explains them. What is the point of summarizing them in the grating faux-objective tone of the social sciences?

>Previous data-driven studies on incel-related communities have aimed to identify key words, to make inferences about incel demographics, to characterize activity on various platforms, and to automate detection of related communities

Do naive-bayes based spam filters not work any more? Or just no one knows how to implement them?

Papers like these are almost comedic if they weren't depressing. What this paper describes is real but also a meme. Incel hate communities are surprisingly large and tend to badly fly under the radar by expressing opinions through memes, which may make them seem more of a 'joke'. But the actual commentators on that meme then express the actual intent of it, as seen on Reddit, youtube, the various chans, etc.

I don't see this phenomenon getting better. It's very unpopular but in my experience some of the points raised by incel communities aren't wrong. The problem is they take something that may be correct and then act on it in entirely the wrong way. For example, Tinder, POF, and other "dating" apps are overwhelmingly comprised on Men seeking Women [0], with women seeking something like the top 10% of men. In market terms this means there's a severe problem in supply/demand wherein Women have plenty of supply and are more concerned about quality. Anecdotally I've seen this on Fetlife. If you have a PFP of a woman and show up on the listings you'll be bombarded with messages of sexual offerings. If you have a man PFP you will have to put in significant work to build your reputation, talk to people, and have the physical qualities necessary.

What some incels fail to realize, and others actively exploit, is that all those offerings and attention have risk attached to them. If by telling a man "no thank you" you're verbally abused, slandered about, stalked, harassed, and overall treated as if you are required to serve this man - is that really "privledged"? It can be in a small minority, but from what I've seen the average person is not at all prepared to deal with that and you end up being abused simply for being a women.

One of the most concerning parts of Inceldom though is how much younger men comprise it. Why is it young men, and not men in their 30's-40's no longer youthfully attractive? Perhaps I'm wrong and I would like to be, but I have seen an uptick in young women for older men. I know that much of it starts from the internet, where older men are essentially legal predators whom know all the right words to say and have the resources to carry it out. Perhaps this problem isn't new though - I talked to some older women about this and have gotten largely the same response: "Men appreciate with age, women depreciate.".

I don't believe inceldom is entirely artificial, and if we ignore the reasons for it out of hand we're going to see a natural result where it just continues to increase because people don't want to understand why nor address it. If someone is an individual whom struggles with the problems above, they are going to be more inclined to join inceldom if everyone outside of it dismisses the root causes and labels it.

These are just my broken opinions, this subject is far larger and can be an entire book.

[0]https://www.netimperative.com/2019/04/05/online-dating-trend...

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