How To Believe False Things
Intro
[you can skip this section if you don’t need context and just want to know how I could believe such a crazy thing]
In my chat community: “Open Play” dropped, a book that says there’s no physical difference between men and women so there shouldn’t be separate sports leagues. Boston Globe says their argument is compelling. Discourse happens, which is mostly a bunch of people saying “lololololol great trolling, what idiot believes such obvious nonsense?”
I urge my friends to be compassionate to those sharing this. Because “until I was 38 I thought Men’s World Cup team vs Women’s World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn’t figure out why they didn’t just play each other to resolve the big pay dispute.” This is the one-line summary of a recent personal world-shattering I describe in a lot more detail here (link).
I’ve had multiple people express disbelief that this is possible. Here is how it is possible.
Who Are You Going To Believe? Everything Everyone Says Plus Everything You See, or Some Science-Illiterate Jerks?
As I talk about frequently on this blog1, autistic people have a natural tendency to believe that when other people say things they are trying to truthfully communicate what they actually believe. Because otherwise what’s the point?? Several friends say “Yes ok, but you have eyes, right? You can see things yourself?”
Can I? What is it I saw, when I looked around?
I grew up in a suburb of a small Blue city in the 90s. I did not see men fighting women. My time was spent in school where teachers interact via words and chalkboards. My peers were children and their strength was proportional to what grade they were in, not their sex. My siblings were younger than me, so weaker. My babysitter was older than me, so she was stronger. All adults were functionally infinitely strong.
At recess I read books. I opted out of gym as much as possible, it was humiliating and vulgar. The only post-puberty phys ed class I was forced to take was sex segregated so I wouldn’t have had any opportunity to see differences. In earlier gym classes I didn’t look around much. Why would I? Are people comparing themselves to see how many jumping jacks they can do? I just wanted it to be done with.
I didn’t watch sports, but even when I was exposed to them they were already sex-segregated, so how could I have observed that women are having a hard time against men? Mostly I just noticed that women were excluded from sports altogether. I was told this was due to sexism, which lined up with everything I had been told about the world, so obviously it was true.
But the Olympics!! What about the Olympics?
Men don’t compete against women, so a casual watching of a nearby TV during a conversation doesn’t give any observations. To notice a difference I would have to look for the reported numbers somewhere on the screen, write them down, and compare them across the events. Again, this is not a level of interest I held/hold for sports.
OK, but what about all of media everywhere?
I grew up in the 90s. My media diet consisted of awesome stuff like Aliens, Terminator 2, Buffy, Xena, Dark Angel, the various Star Treks, The Matrix, Farscape etc. The rule for who kicked ass was “the one that’s the main character.” If an action movie or series had a woman in it, she kicked ass.
My books were science fiction and fantasy and Marvel. What determined the winner of a fight wasn’t muscles, it was cybernetics and laser guns, or dark rituals and spell books and magic swords, or getting the best mutation.
The very earliest RPG I played did have a tiny points-neutral modifier for sex, but by the time I bought my second computer game even that was gone. Stats were allocated by the player, and could be modified by race (elf/dwarf/orc, human/ghoul/supermutant) but never by sex. Sex was purely an aesthetic choice. Why would whether you have a dick or not affect how hard you can swing a sword?
The one difference everyone did admit to was men have a modest advantage in upper-body strength, so they’ll do more pushups and pull-ups than women can.
So yes, everywhere I looked, men and women were basically identical. It’s actually very easy to not get any evidence of male physical advantage if you don’t spend much time interacting with the physical world and all your second-hand sources are politely not drawing attention to the embarrassingly unequal parts of reality. And every disparity that does exist is easily attributed to the deep sexism of society which is as well established as the heliocentric model of the solar system.
I hold that — given my experience — I was more justified in my belief than anyone who claims that men playing against women for the World Cup would be unfair. All it takes is trusting that people believe what they say over and over for decades across all of society, and getting all your evidence about reality filtered through those same people. Which is actually not very hard.
I have a similar story. When I was very young, my mother was the primary breadwinner of the household, and put both herself and my father through law school. Growing up, it was always just kind of assumed that my sister would have to get a real job making actual money, same as my brother and I; a degree in underwater basket weaving would have required some serious justification. (She ended up going to dental school and also getting a PhD working with epigenomic data.)
I didn’t realize on a gut level that this wasn’t the norm until shortly after high school. I was hanging out with two female friends and one of them said “man, I really need more money”. I replied “sounds like you need to get a job”. The friend laughed and said “oh, I was thinking I need to get a boyfriend”, and then the other friend also laughed and said she was also thinking the boyfriend thing.
… so that was quite a shock to my worldview.
Nah. Past-you must have had many opportunities to realize you were wrong. But the way your blog post is written, as if you were defending your past self for being reasonable, sure makes it seem like you’re not even trying to analyse how your thinking went wrong in detail because you haven’t identified how you could have got the correct answer.
And you could have. The world is coherent, and five seconds of actual thinking would have revealed that “women are as physically strong as men” just makes no sense. For instance:
1) Remember the square cube law? Strength depends on size. Men are bigger than women. QED. Even if you don’t remember the exact form of the law, the general pattern that “size correlates with strength” is one you recognized, yes?
2) Even if you weren’t interested in sports records, you said you were “thinking for WEEKS” about how surely men and women are equally capable at soccer. Did you never even try to resolve your curiosity here, or argue with people about this and cite statistics or …? For that matter, did you, like, never get curious about why people don’t talk about the world’s fastest woman, or the world’s strongest woman or so on?
3) You were in your 30s before you realized your error. But since you were a teenager, you would have been stronger than the women in your life. Did no woman in your life ask you to open stuff for them, or lift something heavy or carry the heavy stuff when moving/setting up stuff? Did you never once test your strength against theirs, even accidentally? Like, I don’t know, fight with foam swords or play shove against each other?
4) Sexism! That’s another thing. Where did this come from? What allowed for the horrible treatment of women, if not for martial might? All that rape and abuse, that terrible evil, you think women just accepted it? That we could have slave revolts, caste revolts, ethnic revolts, religious revolts, but never gender revolts because ???
5) ALL OF MILITARY HISTORY. Like. All the wars, the conquests, the mass enslavement of women and slaughter of defeated males occurred because men were irrationally viewed as more dangerous and women less so? That it was terribly rare for someone to try doubling their pool of potential fighters by arming women, because ??? That there were are all military experiments like: using horses, chariots, phalanxes, archery, guns, cannons, etc but none of them tried (and succeeded!) with using lots of female soldiers?
A version of this post where you seriously grappled with how you did have opportunities to get things right, tried to find thoughts that would have led you down the right path, and integrated that into your analysis of how you were so badly wrong would have been much better.
This was pretty combative. I was thinking of saying “sorry for saying this” but that would have been kinda dishonest as I thought it’s better to post this as is then not have something like this comment exist, which were the only realistic options. I will, however, acknowledge that this is a skill issue on my part, and I would prefer to be better at communicating non-violently. I also acknowledge that I’m being somewhat mean here, which isn’t virtuous. It would make sense if you thought somewhat less of me for that.
No worries, and thank you for clarifying. :) I didn’t reply because I was leaving the next day for Vibecamp and didn’t have spare time. I’m back now and will post a reply tonight.
The point of the post is that much of what we believe is acquired from social proof (Everything Everyone Says vs Science Illiterate Jerks), plus we update on synthetic data (via Fictional Evidence) all the time, esp when that evidence aligns with social proof. The few counter observations we personally make are easily overwhelmed by the weight of everyone who is smarter and more numerous + the true observations we make that confirm + observations we make on synthetic data.
I’ll address your individual points below, but you seem to be making the same mistake you accuse me of making. You say I was just making excuses for not seeing things and defending my past self as being reasonable instead of identifying how I could have gotten the correct answer. Then you go on to list individual things and demanding to know what my excuse is for nothing seeing those things. Calling me to defend my past ignorance. I’ll go ahead and do that (because, full disclosure, I already wrote that part, then realized it’s useless crap, but didn’t want to delete an hour of typing), but it won’t be satisfying because it’s exactly what you say you don’t want more of.
My thesis remains that the preponderance of evidence available to me supported the consensus of my social milieu, and this was not an accident. I was presented with a false world, explanations for the seams in the presentation, with strong incentives to accept confirming evidence and discount the relatively sparse disconfirming evidence. How could I have gotten the correct answer? By withdrawing from the social reality that guided my interactions with the world and being exposed to a social reality with a different narrative to explain the same observations. This is, in fact, how I eventually got to the correct answer. The post was pointing out that this was what happened.
Is it unreasonable to accept the world we are presented with? I don’t think one has any other option. The best you can hope for is enough discernment to swallow the fruit of knowledge when you finally stumble upon it, rather than spitting it out and returning to the garden where it’s safe.
On to the excuses:
1. Sure, to an extent. I don’t think a toddler can beat up an adult. I do (did?) think Jackie Chan can beat up Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. And if Jackie Chan can do that, a woman with the right training and determination should be able to beat up an average man. Size isn’t everything, and I thought size was far less important back then.
2. In my younger years I certainly had argued with people about this, and I thought I had won. Chyna could beat me up. Xena could def beat up teenage Eneasz, and maybe even current-day Eneasz (I have no experience in combat, I’ve never thrown a punch post-puberty). As for arguing with people re world cup… what would I argue about? The question was about pay for the womens vs mens teams. That’s mostly about men being too sexist to watch womens sports even tho they’re equally good (I thought). A match would be cool to see but it wouldn’t change their sexism, any more than the Battle of the Sexes in tennis did (yes, I now know why that match doesn’t represent a real contest. I didn’t know that before, and neither did David Letterman https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IfM9x2WxLFU ). Also I think people do talk about the world’s strongest woman and the world’s fastest woman and etc all the time. Like, I even thought that until reading your comment. They do, right?
3. So.… not really? Literally did not fight with any women, never had direct tests of strength. My female friends were all just as feminist as me. They did not ask for men to do things for them. When I moved I would invite my female friends to help move as well. They came and hauled heavy boxes back and forth with the rest of us. They helped move furniture, and didn’t complain. Likely they were working harder and I didn’t notice. If they preferentially took lighter loads I didn’t notice. You act like I had innumerable occasions to witness vast differences in feats of strength but how often do you and a female friend actually try doing the exact same physical feat sequentially? If it happens once or twice per year then even if you notice it you can chalk it up to a fluke. I was a nerdy out-of-shape accountant & video gamer, not a farmer. When I started working out in my 30s I definitely noticed I could do pullups in a way that astounded my gf/wife, but that already fit under “Men have a bit more upper body strength.” I could lift heavier things than her now, but that’s because I trained on lifting heavy things! She did not. Regular day-to-day outperformance was easily covered by “I’m now a person that works out to cultivate muscle, she’s still a person who doesn’t so she’s stuck back at the muscle levels of sedentary Eneasz.”
And yes, that sounds stupid to both of us NOW. That’s the point of the post. When all your evidence for 30 years goes one way, and then some small observable things trend against that later in life but all the other evidence (social proof, expert consensus, observed fitness levels) continues to support the old priors, who are you gonna believe?
4. How did slaves that were physically far stronger than their owners, and outnumbered them, remain enslaved? Every single type of revolt you mentioned—how did the oppressed classes end up in that position? It wasn’t because the oppressors had a massive genetic advantage in grip strength and arm-reach. How does a single tyrant with tiny percentage of the population as loyalists keep an entire nation under a reign of terror for decades, sometimes centuries via dynasty? Honestly all you have to do is look at any leftist rhetoric about oppressors right now and see exactly the arguments they use. Why do the capitalists continue to immiserate the 99%, or whatever? I bought these arguments. Many people still do.
5. Men went to war because men are violent monsters. Women aren’t. Individual women could still fight if they really wanted to, and some did. We had plenty of hero women that hid their gender and went off to fight and did just as good as the men. The US military was less sexist than most and DID have female soldiers! There was a whole damn movie about the first ones let in that demonstrated the ones willing to dedicate themselves to it were just as good as the men, and plenty of glowing media coverage of the first women in combat.
I could have stayed in this mindset forever, and many people are still in it. This is why I value the rationalist community so much. There isn’t any social good here that’s so important that it overrides trying to be (eventually, cumulatively) less wrong.
I realize this is in many ways beside the point, but even if your original belief had been correct, “The Men’s and Women’s teams should play each other to help resolve the pay disparity” is a non-sequitor. Pay is not decided by fairness. It’s decided by collective bargaining, under constraints set by market conditions.
So, given this happened—was there any update in your belief in the truthfulness of the other beliefs of those people?
What other embarrassingly unequal parts of reality are being politely ignored, except by science-illiterate jerks?
This dates back to 2019. I have had a lot of updates and changed views since then, yes.
First, I kind of object to the “science-illiterate” part (I know it is a quote from the article). The soft sciences have done many wrongs, but with regard to the average physical ability of men and women, I don’t think that the depiction of women as just as capable is based on published studies.
Second, this is kind of culture war bait, and as such might be better asked at the motte.
Despite that, here are some possible answers.
With regard to gender differences, one might look at Women in chess. WP is quick to tell us that
But also:
Personally, I think that part of the reason is that women are generally less likely to go uber-nerd on a very small topic such as chess or warhammer and dedicate their life to that topic—which is what is likely required to be a top ten chess player. But I am also 50⁄50 on there being an inherent male advantage to chess. I think I can entertain that notion without having to adjust the worth of women in general. Emmy Noether shows that we dismiss the intelligence of women at our own peril.
The other thing which comes to mind is HBD, which is it’s own can of worms. See Scott Alexander on the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis, for example.
I am not even sure some things can be meaningfully attributed to nature or nurture. Consider the following hypothesis:
Men and women are equally good at chess if they spend the same time and effort learning it.
By nature, some men are strongly attracted to chess, but practically no women.
What we would observe in this world is men being better chess players. But saying that it is “by nature” is slightly misleading. There is a causal chain, and only a small part of it is different by nature. Fixing that small part—e.g. by making chess your family hobby with local high status and lots of fun—can dramatically change the outcome. While it remains true that such things practically never happen in normal life. Also that men can naturally be highly motivated without so highly supportive families.
Shortly, if you ask “are men biologically better at chess?” it feels like both saying “yes” and “no” is highly misleading. “No” in theory and in some very rare experiments; but also “yes” in practice, if you let the nature have its way… even in an environment that would be 100% free of sexism, it’s just that no one would optimize their household to make their children play lots of chess.
It’s not just nitpicking for the sake of online debate—the more detailed model allows making better predictions. Society can change, if for some reason (not necessarily wokeness, it could also be e.g. fashion) you made lots of chess clubs for little girls, with lots of fun an emotional support, the results could change. I could even imagine this becoming a social attractor, for example at one day for random reasons rich people would start sending their daughters to chess clubs, and suddenly “send your daughter to chess club” would become a symbol of prestige and many parents would want to do that. And then you would get generations of great female chess players. Maybe.
(Personally, I don’t think that chess is worth doing this, but maybe math or computer science is.)
So what made you change your mind?
The link in the OP explains it:
Beliefs held by others are a real phenomenon, so tracking them doesn’t give them unearned weight in attention, as long as they are not confused with someone else’s beliefs. You can even learn things specifically for the purpose of changing their simulated mind rather than your own (in whatever direction the winds of evidence happen to blow).
I seems to me like you also need to have no desire to figure things out on your own. A lot of rationalists have experiences of seeking truth and finding out that certain beliefs people around them hold aren’t true. Rationalists who grow up in communities where many people believe in God frequently deconvert because they see enough signs that the beliefs of those people around them aren’t really fitting together.
Given that most people living in religious communities grow up believing in God just as the people around them do, it’s might be very normal to think that way, but it still feels really strange to me and probably does feel strange to many other rationalists as well.