so what is the point of this piece? is he blaming the slowdown of scientific advancement in the past 40-50 years on "femininity", or straight up just woman?
maybe I'm being overly cynical in my reading, but the inclusion of that last bit doesn't smell very well reasoned. other explanations would be great
It's usually a way of saying "my assumptions about the world are self evident and any challenge to them obviously irrational".
Discounting the fact that humans aren't coldly rational is irrational. People love to hide behind "logic", but poking a bear and expecting it not to attack you because that would be an "irrational" emotional response is not smart, it's wishful thinking. I can understand why people crave a "grand unified theory" on how the world works and the importance of emotion is an obstacle to having an elegant, comprehensible model for the world, but that doesn't mean it's right to ignore it.
I think we can use rationally or emotionally-focused language to express our desires, wishes, demands etc. I think it's worth considering the language used to merely be the dress we give to what we want to say - we use the language we are accustomed to or that we think will have an impact.
So it's not always people are more or less rational/emotional, but they express their goals in that language.
We use rational language to express desire for ostensibly arbitrary choices all the time, for example. Rational language can also serve just as a way to dress up an opinion.
I agree that emotion does provide somewhat of an obstacle to building an elegant, comprehensible model for the world, but is it really that complicated?
If one simply models emotion as a specialized type/instance of thought, and thoughts as processes that run on a biological neural network (where processes are not isolated and cross contaminate each other), and consciousness and "rationality" are higher level, complex ~thoughts (predictive estimations of reality, perceived as reality itself) that emerge[1] from all of this semi-organized complexity...doesn't it seem fairly obvious what's going on?
one example where a lot of rationalists stop making sense is blaming challenges with dating on macrotrends and demographics when their own 'microtrends' of personal behavior, manners, and selection bias is the larger contributor to the issue.
No different than a company blaming the macro with 'the market wasn't ready' rather than their failure to bring a compelling product to market. Example: Instacart vs. Webvan.
Both can be true at once though. The rational person says: these are the facts, I have to work harder to date successfully. Is dating then still worth it? Some say yes, work harder, other say no, and give up. Those who give up says that society made dating too hard, not sure why you think that is wrong. You can call them lazy, sure, or maybe they don't value relationships highly, but that is hardly an irrational choice.
Is challenging your own choices and behavior worth it? The answer to that is subjective.
That doesn't make their decision irrational, except to the degree that all complex decisions are made on the basis of incomplete information. You make the best possible induction from limited information. It becomes irrational when one believes they are making infallible deductions, which is false.
Dating may not be worth it. That's a valid choice. But it's misleading to attribute it to facts which may be false or incomplete, and leads to problems with other human interactions.
(to be clear: ad hominem is bad in a reason/evidence/truth-based discussion even if the author position is junk)
I may have missed it, but I'm not seeing that blame assignment. It does seem a bit ironic that your response feeds into exactly what they're pointing out though. Rather than logically address the data, you seem to have responded emotionally to it.
The correlation is interesting, it might be worth postulating some other explanations for it here, on the discussion board.
>In texts, both fictional and non-fictional and in English and Spanish, thinking words relating to technology and social organization (experiment, gravity, weigh, cost, contract) become more common between 1850 and approximately 1977 (beginning of the great stagnation) but since then thinking words have declined markedly and feeling words relating to belief, spirituality, sapience, and intuition (e.g. forgiveness, heal, feel) have become more common.
the deliberate inclusion of such an unrelated reference (in the context of the paragraph) makes me believe the author is trying to emphasis a possible negative correlation / outcome to the discussed phenomena
his off handed remarks on how "femininity" may be the cause the discussed phenomena would then also be a cause of the referenced outcome mentioned above, if the aforementioned assumptions hold true
on a side note, I would comment by saying that the author including his speculative commentary in a discussion of a scientific paper is the height of "thinking over feeling"
Ironic :)
also ironic :)
but really I'm expressing the uncertainty I have in my statements :)
It's just a blog from 2 bored libertarian/right-leaning academic economists. Content from there pops up on HN every once in a while (because libertarians). Not much to see.