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.
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.