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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> Perceived cultural and societal decline

Yes, but the key word here is percieved. Almost any form of change can be sold as decline under that rubric. People who objected to Loving v Virginia legalizing interracial marriage probably called it "societal decline". Certainly we got that with legalization of gay marriage. Both of those continued to become more popular after the legal change. People hate change. A lot of people hate those who are different from them. That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.

Anyway, as gasoline prices continue to tick up we shall see what price people put on the culture war.

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> That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.

From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new. Not saying we should all become Luddites, but in any culture long-standing and deeply held beliefs have served some purpose, logically, that contributed to a society's continued stability.

And sure, people will pay attention to gasoline price increases that directly affect them, as opposed to increases in gas prices on the other side of the globe, obviously.

> From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new.

Americans are particularly susceptible to taking comfort in this idea, simply because America is big enough that they can. But even Americans are ill served by ignoring large scale trends: urbanization, cosmopolitanism, the rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.

These trends are bigger and operate unopposed on a global scale. If you think in terms of red and blue teams sloshing back-and-forth, you're going to get blindsided.

> rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.

Actually this is isolated to Europe. Russia, Africa, Asia (particularly China), the Middle East, America, and South America don’t subscribe to this nonsense, particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena.

And last I checked Europeans can’t even fill their girl quotas because it turns out most girls have no interest in leading or sitting on the board of a company. So don’t pretend like whatever this is is inexorably taking over the world. As a pretty funny aside, in Australia the biggest corporate fuckups of the past 10 years have been overseen by women (Optus, Auspost). So inexorable. When impostor syndrome comes true, you might say.

As a side note, this thread is a prime example of the point I was making: that people are stuck on the object level of "what should a society's values be?", rather than being able to zoom out to the meta level of "there are different groups that all have different sincerely-held beliefs about what a society's values should be, and each of them believes their version of reality is righteous and inevitable."

Half of university graduates in India and China are women now. The percentage is higher in GCC nations.

Yeah, and yet women in both India and China make up a laughable minority of business leadership. There’s a huge gap between getting a degree, which is trivial these days, and running a business and leading others, and it turns out that in general women don’t like/aren’t good at running businesses or leading others.

This is a bit like the female STEM problem. In the west there is all this crying about how STEM fields are dominated by males, but even when there are initiatives to push young girls into math and science at an early age, it turns out that most aren’t interested in STEM subjects or as good at them as males are. And instead of accepting the obvious (that males and females have population level preference differences), many people choose to see the eventual result (more male doctors, scientists, and engineers) as evidence of sexism. lol.

Elena Nabiullina is the Russian central bank governor. Sanae Takaichi is Japan’s prime minister. Samia Suluhu Hassan is president of Tansania. Hana Al Rostamani is CEO of First Abu Dhabi Bank. Claudia Sheinbaum is president of Mexico. Tarciana Paula Gomes Medeiros is CEO of Banco de Brazil.

> particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena

Hence why I said this. And naming the handful of exceptions you can think of doesn’t invalidate my point, which was that there is no inexorable wave of female leadership in the global business sector. Even where it is legislatively mandated (Europe), businesses can’t hit the targets.

That purpose is to further entrench and protect the power of those in power.

Ok? And?

Again, if a society has been around for awhile they (specifically their leadership) are doing something right in terms of their culture, societal organisation etc, yeah?

That is a non-sequitur. Many societies and governments (the leadership you're referring to) are not "doing something right blah blah blah." They're using "tradition", "culture" "respect for the past" as a means of controlling their populace and hanging on to power. You're conflating society with government.

And you are trying to separate them mentally as if they wouldn’t have a close relationship in a society that has existed for many generations. You seem to be suggesting that controlling a populace and ‘hanging on to power’ are necessarily inconsistent with governing a society. I can think of examples where clearly hanging on to power and working advantageously for the society don’t coincide (run of the mill African dictatorships come to mind), but there are other cases where a government’s self-interested control and domination of its population clearly coincide(d) with a society’s well being at the population level (Sparta, China). Perhaps we are referring to difference timescales here - I’m talking about, let’s say, 250 years minimum. But the longer the better (think: certain Chinese or Indian hierarchies).

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