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Comment by mwattsun | Hacker News Reader

I don't think viewing this through today's political lenses is very useful or correct.

I remember a shift in the 70's with the sexual revolution and psychological movements like EST at centers like the Esalen Institute. People discovered they had repressed emotions they should bring forth and deal with. People discovered emotional intelligence. It was an exciting time of discovery of the depth of mind that earlier generations were not comfortable with. Men started crying in group encounters. Repressed sexuality was explored. Eastern religions were considered. LSD was taken. These things started in the late 60's but went mainstream in the 70's.

To say this was bad and blame it on women is an echo of conservative criticism from those days.

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Both you and the author of the blog post assume that rationality is better than being able to show our emotions. The scientific paper doesn't say anything about it.

A few decades ago we expected women to "show emotions" and men to be strong. We are now trying to change this cliché since it hurts all of us. What we see in the paper is that this change is taking place. I think it's good news.

The idea that rationality was more prevalent until the 1970s since we "believed in science" is compelling. Since the 1970s we focus more on our emotions as you say. What's interesting is that this change took place before the era of social networks. Social networks might be an amplifier but it's definitely not the root cause.

Why do we think this cliché hurts all of us?

Because women should be free to show strength and men free to express emotions. And if they cannot without being judged or shamed then we're all worse for it. Cliches like those stifle our humanity and increase suffering.

Not to mention limit information dispersal.

Men tend to suicide more often than women. Men are also more likely to killed/be killed (although this is slowly changing).

Is it because men are intrinsically more violent than women? Or is it because of the way we bring up our kids? It's still unclear.

I went through a depression a few years ago. I noticed that my suicidal thoughts were related to my inability to express my feelings. I don't think I'm the only one.

> A few decades ago we expected women to "show emotions" and men to be strong. We are now trying to change this cliché since it hurts all of us. What we see in the paper is that this change is taking place. I think it's good news.

This cliche only hurt women, now it will hurt all of us. Repressed emotions meant people at least tried to repress their worst, but look at boomers and their unrestrained narcissism. Who can look at that and see progress?

> Repressed emotions meant people at least tried to repress their worst,

It means that people act irritated and have angry outburst at moments unrelated to original source of issue. It means acting cold toward closed ones and children in particular. It means that blame gets placed pretty much randomly, at whoever is around and weak. It also means more of rationalizing of bad behavior and less empathy towards others.

Repressed emotion dont mean better behavior.

People shouldn't excessively bottle things up, but at the same time I believe personal boundaries are essential to a functioning society.

That was the negative side of it yes, but the positive side was very strong, now we see the negatives of doubling down on emotions instead of reflecting and controling them properly and it's much worse.

Have you considered the difference between "hide emotions" and "repress emotions"; or on the flip-side.. "show emotions" and "accept emotions".

Personally, the "show emotions" should always be reasonable and proportional to to the current situation, whether you are a man or woman. Children being the exception, as they're still learning about all this stuff, and their rational minds do not fully develop until 25 years.

Socially-appropriate radical honesty.

There is value in not showing emotions when it would harm others. Little kids shouldn't have to deal with mommy or daddy's problems because it's traumatizing and damaging.

Life is suffering. Spreading suffering by inflicting baggage on others is emotional BS. One can learn to cope and deal with things themselves in constructive ways. This is one aspect of maturity.

Thanks. That's the other word I was looking for.. appropriate. Socially appropriate. Reasonable. Proportional.

> Both you and the author of the blog post assume that rationality is better than being able to show our emotions

I didn't say this. If it's not clear, I think it was a great thing and I benefited from it. I value both reason and emotion. It's not a novel or revolutionary topic. Gene Roddenberry explored it with the logic of Spock and the gut intuition of Kirk.

I've since learned it goes back even further:

The romantic writers and poets made a genuine break with the rational, orderly thinking of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. While we still think of Voltaire as a symbol of the power of reason, his contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was one of the early, prominent voices of nineteenth century romanticism

https://novaonline.nvcc.edu/Eli/Eng252/Bb_version/StudyGuide...

My own theory is that WW2 and the subsequent struggle with Communism over-emphasized the rational as a survival mechanism and the 70's were a time when we stopped doing that.

Edit: We got to the Moon with rational systems thinking (we also got Silicon Valley) so I'm not saying it was bad. Also, I enjoy Adam Curtis documentaries that explore these topics, esp. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

Maybe tangential but that makes me think how opposing mathematics/science/rationality to art/intuition/emotions with people falling in one or the other category seems a relatively recent phenomenon, whereas in the past (Ancient Greece or Renaissance with Da Vinci being the obvious example) that distinction was not present.

Yeah, there's a long current in art, across all media, since at least the Industrial Revolution of antipathy to perceptions of modernity, technology, and hyper-rationality. Which then metastasized after the wars in the early 20th century, especially the Great War (WWI). Some of it -- especially the response to the wars -- is fair critique; some is rose-colored and reactionary. And this notion of "science" on one side, "art" on the other, course spread to the wider culture.

I think the personal computer and digital art have been healing that divide somewhat.

The Beatles said it best "It's the fool who plays it cool." Rationality without empathy often leads to psycho- or sociopathy.

Neither is more important in the mixed, messy bag of the human experience.

I was wrong =) bad sourcing.

You appear to be describing antisocial personal disorder and/or a lack of emotional self regulation, not necessarily psychopathy. The fundamental difference between sociopathy and psychopathy is conscious vs. unconscious behavioral patterns to deceive, manipulate, gain power, and control others. The psychopath doesn't know why they do it, the sociopath intends antisocial behaviors to achieve goals.

Oh, on further reading I was wrong. The dictionary was off, but psychological journals are a better source.

It's sad to see this in popular culture, but reationality does not mean total suppression of emotion. To be more accurate, modern concepts of rationality means that you are aware of your emotions, and that you can effectively process them in the correct context. So, crying in a support group is a completely rational thing to do, crying in a finance meeting, or during open heart surgery, much less so. It also means that you acknowledge and take responsibility for the care and upkeep of your emotions, and don't pawn these duties off on those who have not consented to it. Spock, while a fascinating character for a space opera, is not a good example of either rationality or emotional maturity. (At least not in the human sense.)

Yeah.

Adding to this, emotion informs rationality. There is no purely rational reason to do anything. It wouldn't be rational to avoid death if we didn't fear it. It wouldn't be rational to eat food if we didn't desire it. Rationality requires feelings like for example desire, disgust, fear, anger, hope to motivate performing any action what so ever.

It's essentially the is-ought problem, without feelings, rationality alone only presents us with things that are, not what ought to be.

If Spock was purely rational and void of any emotion, he'd be catatonic. He wouldn't eat, he wouldn't sleep, he couldn't do his job. If someone pushed him, he'd fall over and then he'd lay there with a blank stare.

Reason allows us to act in more complex ways than knee-jerk reactions, allows us to predict outcomes that may override desires and fears, to prioritize among the perceived goods, to figure that every promise may not hold up.

This is probably what people mean when they speak of acting rationally, applying rationality to the outcome of desires and fears are they really good/bad for us, or are they deceiving us into acting against our interest. This is basically Socratic ethics.

> and blame it on women

My favorite retort to this: "men are rational and women are overly emotional as long as you never classify anger as an emotion."

The gender thing is baloney. Humans are irrational.

But is this just feeling?

We live in a world where we believe things to be wrong just because we want them to be or feel they should be.

The real problem is that no one wants to be wrong, and no one wants to accept anything they don't believe in.

It's very weird when some feminists believe that women should dress, act, look, talk, and be and do exactly everything like a man does and it will solve all the world problems, and the other feminists believe turning men into women will solve all their problems.

The best part is when we started creating AI computers, we had to stop them from thinking logically because they quickly were able to be bias based on this.

Humans are irrational, but this has been proved right here already.

> some feminists believe that women should dress, act, look, talk, and be and do exactly everything like a man does and it will solve all the world problems, and the other feminists believe turning men into women will solve all their problems.

Your feminists are made of straw

But far less straw then your feminists.

I hear there are fortunes to be made doing alterations of men's suits to fit women.

Dress for success, or dress like your oppressors.

The psychological differences in the sexes are not about rationality but rather salience. In general, male brains give greater weight to material security concerns, and female brains do the same for social cohesion. Emphasis on in general; obviously there is tremendous variation among individuals.

and hierarchies are partial irrationality filter trees

You haven’t seen many hierarchies have you…?

The people you get at the top are usually the people who are great at getting to the top and not much else. Dull bureaucratic players are the most numerically common. Sociopaths are next in the ranking. They would be the most common if they were not so often as destructive to themselves as others.

Every now and then you do get a “good king” who is both competent and effective and not a total psycho. These can be wonderful and very effective but they are rare. Usually they get beat out in hierarchy games by those who specialize in winning those games.

Ah please, I've seen my share. All the peter principle might be true, that doesn't mean what I say isn't complementary. I can criticize them all day long (which I do enough already).

This wasn't an apraisal but a metalevel observation. Hierarchies survived enough.. they must have enough intrisic value. In structures, very few people have knowledge (everything is distributed and fuzzy), most of them react, the irrationality just bubbles up until someone has just enough distance to calm the irrationality. It might lead to a bad solution (boss can just shove the effort down back onto employee) but somehow the fuzzy information problem is reduced to its minimum in this tree.

>To say this was bad ..

I don't know if it was bad, but are you saying it was all good? If so, why?

> To say this was bad and blame it on women is an echo of conservative criticism from those days.

You're misreading the post. Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen (who author MR) write from a generally pro-market, libertarian-ish perspective but they are not doctrinaire conservatives. Both of them are feminists. When Tabarrok writes about the "feminization of culture," he doesn't mean it in a negative way, he means it either neutrally or positively.

For my part, I think it's quite clear that our culture has been "feminized" over the past 20-30 years, resulting in negative and positive consequences. A positive is less tolerance for physical abuse, assault, and bullying. A negative is the ubiquity of reputation-destruction as a legitimate tactic in public discourse.

I'm responding to this:

The authors blame the change in language towards feelings on the failure of “neo-liberalism” which seems dubious and without plausible mechanism. If anything, I would put the causality the other way. A more plausible explanation is more female writers and the closely related feminization of culture.

Another great outcome of the 70's that I've benefited from is the explosion in interest in the psychological theories of Carl Jung. It seems every therapist in California is a Jungian.

To say that there is a feminization of culture is an error in Jungian psychology because within each of us is an anima and animus (masculine/feminine) aspect. The masculine was dominant from WW2 through the 1950's (at least). Returning to a more balanced masculine/feminine culture shouldn't really be called "the feminization of culture" in my opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_and_animus

You wrote:

> To say this was bad and blame it on women is an echo of conservative criticism from those days.

My point is that the author isn't saying it's bad. He's saying "culture has become more feminized, there are more women writers than ever before, that's why there's more emotion in writing". That does not imply that this so-called feminization is bad. It does imply that women are, on average, more emotional than men which is controversial but seems obviously true to me.

> To say that there is a feminization of culture is an error in Jungian psychology because within each of us is an anima and animus (masculine/feminine) aspect. The masculine was dominant from WW2 through the 1950's (at least). Returning to a more balanced masculine/feminine culture shouldn't really be called "the feminization of culture" in my opinion.

If culture was masculine through the 1950s then "returning to a more balanced masculine/feminine culture" could reasonably be called "feminization of culture," right?

Again, you're assuming that the term "feminization of culture" is negative. I'm saying it isn't, at least not in the context of MR blog posts. In the most literal sense, it's just referring to more women in positions of power and influence, particularly as writers (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/16/how-women-conq...).

This shift was really about a turning in on the self, and reflected more the post-60s despair and disillusionment of the Boomers in the failure to create real change in society. If anything it intensified in the 1980s, on the one hand with the "greed is good" attitude of the Yuppies, on the other with the explosion of the wellness industry that continues to this day. Probably the most egregious example was Jane Fonda, who went from the leftist guerilla manning an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi to doing aerobics videos a decade later.

This reflected the new neoliberal consensus that there is no such thing as society and only individuals are responsible for their own well-being and prosperity.

I don't know where you're from, but I'm from California where the 70's were an exciting time of personal exploration, not much of that East Coast despair (Gerald Ford to bankrupt New York City - "Drop Dead"). Then came the 80's which were a reaction to all the touchy feely stuff and the explosion of cocaine use, which translated into "Greed is Good" and making money. It turned out computers were a great way to make money in Silicon Valley and that continues to this day.

Tom Wolfe among others pointed this out at the time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation

And Reagan, after all, came from California...

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