I actually started an account two years ago, but after a few comments I decided I wasn’t emotionally or intellectually ready for active membership. I was confused and hurt for various reasons that weren’t Less Wrong’s fault, and I backed away to avoid saying something I might regret. I didn’t want to put undue pressure on myself to respond to topics I didn’t fully understand. Now, after many thousands of hours reading and thinking about neurology, evolutionary psychology, and math, I’m more confident that I won’t just be swept up in the half-understood arguments of people much smarter than I am. :)
Like almost everyone here, I started with atheism. I was raised Hindu, and my home has the sort of vague religiosity that is arguably the most common form in the modern world. For the most part, I figured out atheism on my own, when I was around 11 or 12. It was emotionally painful and socially costly, but I’m stronger for the experience. I started reading various mediocre atheist blogs, but I got bored after a couple of years and wanted to do something more than shoot blind fish in tiny barrels. I wanted to build something up, not just tear something down (no matter how much it really should be torn down.)
The actual direct link to Less Wrong came from TV Tropes. I suspect it’s one of the best gateway drugs because TV Tropes, while not explicitly atheist or rationalist, does more to communicate the positive ideals and emotional memes of LW-style rationality than most of the atheosphere does. For the first time, I got the sense that “our” way of thinking could be so much more powerful than simply bashing religion and astrology.
One important truth beyond atheism that I have slowly come to accept is inborn IQ differentials, between individuals and groups of individuals. I had to face the fact that P(male| IQ 2 standard deviations above mean) was significantly higher than 50%. I had to deal with the fact that historical oppression probably wasn’t the end-all be-all explanation for why women on average hadn’t done as much inventing and discovering and brilliant thinking as men. I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
I further learned that my brain was modular, and the bits of me that I choose to call “I” don’t constitute everything. My own brain could sabotage the values and ideals and that “I” hold so dearly. For a long time I struggled with the idea that everything I believed in and loved was fake, because I couldn’t force my body to actually act accordingly. Did I value human life? Why wasn’t I doing everything I possibly could to save lives, all the time? Did I value freedom and autonomy and gender equality? Why could I not help sometimes being attracted to domineering jerks?
It took me a while to accept that the newly-evolved, conscious, abstractly-reasoning, self-reflecting “I” simply did not have the firepower to bully ancient and powerful urges into submission. It took me a while to accept that my values were not lies simply because my monkey brain sometimes contradicted them. The “I” in my brain does not have as much power as she would like; that does not mean she doesn’t exist.
Other, non-rationality related information: I love writing, and for a long time I convinced myself that therefore I would love being a novelist. Now, I recognize that I would much rather compose a non-fiction or reflective essay, although ideas for fiction stories still flood in and I rarely do much about it due to laziness and/or fear. I fell in love with Avatar: The Last Airbender for its great storytelling and its combination of intelligence and idealism. I adore Pixar and many Disney movies for the sweetness and heart. I like somewhat traditional-sounding music with easily discernible lyrics that tells a story; I can’t get into anything that involves screaming or deliberate disharmony. Show-tunes are great. :)
I don’t want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar; I consciously cultivate it and am lucky to have it. If this disposition will be “destroyed by the truth”...well, I have a choice to make then.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and I for one am glad to have you here (again)! You sound like someone who thinks very interesting thoughts.
I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
I can’t say that this is something that has ever really bothered me. Your IQ is what it is. Whether or not there’s an overall gender-based trend in one direction or another isn’t going to change anything for you, although it might change how people see you. (If anything, I found that I got more attention as a “girl who was good at/interested in science”...which, if anything, was irritating and made me want to rebel and go into a “traditionally female” field just because I could.
Basically, if you want to accomplish greatness, it’s about you as an individual. Unless you care about the greatness of others, and feel more pride or solidarity with females than with males who accomplish greatness (which I don’t), the statistical tendency doesn’t matter.
I don’t want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar; I consciously cultivate it and am lucky to have it. If this disposition will be “destroyed by the truth”...well, I have a choice to make then.
I think that more than idealism, what I wouldn’t want to lose is a sense of humour. Idealism, in the sense of “believing that the world is good deep down/people will do the best they can/etc”, can be broken by enough bad stuff happening. A sense of humour is a lot harder to break.
I know that it’s not particularly rational to feel more affiliation with women than men, but I do. It’s one of the things my monkey brain does that I decided to just acknowledge rather than constantly fight. It’s helped me have a certain kind of peace about average IQ differentials. The pain I described in the parent has mellowed. Still, I have to face the fact that if I want to major in, say, applied math, chances are I might be lonely or below-average or both. I wish I had the inner confidence to care about self-improvement more than competition, but as yet I don’t.
ETA: I characterize “idealism” as a hope for the future more than a belief about the present.
Still, I have to face the fact that if I want to major in, say, applied math, chances are I might be lonely or below-average or both.
As long as you know your own skills, there is no need to use your gender as a predictor. We use the worse information only in the absence of better information; because the worse information can be still better than nothing. We don’t need to predict the information we already have.
When we already know that e.g. “this woman has IQ 150”, or “this woman has won a mathematical olympiad” there is no need to mix general male and female IQ or math curves into the equation. (That’s only what you do when you see a random woman and you have no other information.)
If there are hundred green balls in the basket and one red ball, it makes sense to predict that a randomly picked ball will be almost surely green. But once you have randomly picked a ball and it happened to be red… then it no longer makes sense to worry that this specific ball might still be green somehow. It’s not; end of story.
If you had no experience with math yet, then I’d say that based on your gender, your chances to be a math genius are small. But that’s not the situation; you already had some math experience. So make your guesses based on that experience. Your gender is already included in the probability of you having that specific experience. Don’t count it twice!
If you had no experience with math yet, then I’d say that based on your gender, your chances to be a math genius are small.
To be perfectly accurate, any person’s chances of being a math genius are going to be small anyway, regardless of that person’s gender. There are very few geniuses in the world.
It is particularly not rational to ignore the effect of your unconscious in your relationships. That fight is a losing battle (right now), so if having happy relationships is a goal, the pursuit of that requires you pay attention.
There is almost no average IQ differential, since men pad out the bottom as well. Greater chromosomal genetic variations in men lead to stupidity as often as intelligence.
Really, this gender disparity only matters at far extremes. Men may pad out the top and bottom 1% (or something like that) in IQ, but applied mathematicians aren’t all top 1% (or even 10%, in my experience). It is easy to mistake finally being around people who think like you do (as in high IQ) with being less intelligent than them, but this is a trick!
There is almost no average IQ differential, since men pad out the bottom as well.
Sorry, you’re right, I did know that. (And it’s exasperating to see highly intelligent men make the rookie mistake of saying “women are stupid” or “most women are stupid” because they happen to be high-IQ. There’s an obvious selection bias—intelligent men probably have intelligent male friends but only average female acquaintances—because they seek out the women for sex, not conversation.)
I was thinking about “IQ differentials” in the very broad sense, as in “it sucks that anyone is screwed over before they even start.” I also suffer from selection bias, because I seek out people in general for intelligence, so I see the men to the right of the bell curve, while I just sort of abstractly “know” there are more men than women to the left, too.
And it’s exasperating to see highly intelligent men make the rookie mistake of saying “women are stupid” or “most women are stupid” because they happen to be high-IQ. There’s an obvious selection bias—intelligent men probably have intelligent male friends but only average female acquaintances—because they seek out the women for sex, not conversation.
Another possible explanation comes to mind: people with high IQs consider the “stupid” borderline to be significantly above 100 IQ. Then if they associate equally with men and women, the women will more often be stupid; and if they associate preferentially with clever people, there will be fewer women.
(This doesn’t contradict selection bias. Both effects could be at play.)
You’d have to raise the bar really far before any actual gender-based differences showed up. It seems far more likely that the cause is a cultural bias against intellectualism in women (women will under-report IQ by 5ish points and men over-report by a similar margin, women are poorly represented in “smart” jobs, etc.). That makes women present themselves as less intelligent and makes everyone perceive them as less intelligent.
Does anyone know of a good graph that shows this? I’ve seen several (none citing sources) that draw the crossover in quite different places. So I’m not sure what the gender ratio is at, say, IQ 130.
La Griffe Du Lion has goodwork on this, but it’s limited to math ability, where the male mean is higher than the female mean as well as the male variance being higher than the female variance.
The formulas from the first link work for whatever mean and variance you want to use, and so can be updated with more applicable IQ figures, and you can see how an additional 10 point ‘reporting gap’ affects things.
Unfortunately, intelligence in areas other than math seem to be an “I know it when I see it” kind of thing. It’s much harder to design a good test for some of the “softer” disciplines, like “interpersonal intelligence” or even language skills, and it’s much easier to pick a fight with results you don’t like.
It could be that because intelligence tests are biased toward easy measurement, they focus too much on math, so they under-predict women’s actual performance at most jobs not directly related to abstract math skills.
Of course, if you use IQ testing, it is specifically calibrated to remove/minimize gender bias (so is the SAT and ACT), and intelligence testing is horribly fraught with infighting and moving targets.
I can’t find any research that doesn’t at least mention that social factors likely poison any experimental result. It doesn’t help any that “intelligence” is poorly defined and thus difficult to quantify.
Considering that men are more susceptible to critical genetic failure, maybe the mean is higher for men on some tests because the low outliers had defects that made them impossible to test (such as being stillborn)?
The SAT doesn’t seem to be calibrated to make sure average scores are the same for math, at least. At least as late as 2006, there’s still a significant gender gap.
Apparently, the correction was in the form of altering essay and story questions to de-emphasize sports and business and ask more about arts and humanities. This hasn’t been terribly effective. The gap is smaller in the verbal sections, but it’s still there. Given that the entire purpose of the test is to predict college grades directly and women do better in college than men, explanations and theories abound.
Not a rigorously conducted study, but this (third poll) suggests a rather greater tendency to at least overestimate if not willfully over-report IQ, with both men and women overestimating, but men overestimating more.
You’re right; my explanation was drawn from many PUA-types who had said similar things, but this effect is perfectly possible in non-sexual contexts, too.
There’s actually little use in using words like “stupid”, anyway. What’s the context? How intelligent does this individual need to be do what they want to do? Calling people “stupid” says “reaching for an easy insult,” not “making an objective/instrumentally useful observation.”
Sure, there will be some who say they’ll use the words they want to use and rail against “censorship”, but connotation and denotation are not so separate. That’s why I didn’t find the various “let’s say controversial, unspeakable things because we’re brave nonconformists!” threads on this site to be all that helpful. Some comments certainly were both brave and insightful, but I felt on the whole a little bit of insight was brought at the price of a whole lot of useless nastiness.
Idealism, in the sense of “believing that the world is good deep down/people will do the best they can/etc”, can be broken by enough bad stuff happening. A sense of humour is a lot harder to break.
Arguably, if it was “broken” this way it would be a mistake (specifically, of generalizing from too small a sample size). I have a job where I am constantly confronted with suffering and death, but at the end of the day, I can still laugh just like everyone else, because I know my experience is a biased sample and that there is still lots of good going on in the world.
I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
Consciously keeping your identity small and thus not identifying with everyone who happens to have the same internal plumbing might be helpful there.
PG is awesome, but his ideas do basically fall into the category of “easier said than done.” This doesn’t mean “not worth doing,” of course, but practical techniques would be way more helpful. It’s easier to replace one group with another (arguably better?) group than to hold yourself above groupthink in general.
My approach is to notice when I want to say/write “we”, as opposed to “I”, and examine why. That’s why I don’t personally identify as a “LWer” (only as a neutral and factual “forum regular”), despite the potential for warm fuzzies resulting from such an identification.
There is an occasional worthy reason to identify with a specific group, but gender/country/language/race/occupation/sports team are probably not good criteria for such a group.
I always think of that in the context of conflict resolution, and refer to it as “telling someone that what they did was idiotic, not that they are an idiot.” Self-identifying is powerful, and people are pretty bad at it because of a confluence of biases.
Great to see you here and great to hear you took the time to read up on the relevant material before jumping in. I’m confident that you will find many people who comment quite a bit don’t have such prudence, so don’t be surprised if you outmatch a long time commenter. (^_^)
For the first time, I got the sense that “our” way of thinking could be so much more powerful than simply bashing religion and astrology.
Yesss! This is exactly how I felt when I found this community.
I fell in love with Avatar: The Last Airbender for its great storytelling and its combination of intelligence and idealism.
I don’t want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar
I’m not sure about Disney, but the you should still be able to enjoy Avatar. Avatar (TLA and Korra) is in many ways a deconstruction of magical worlds. They take the basic premise of kung-fu magic and then let that propagate to it’s logical conclusions. The TLA war was enabled by rapid industrialization when one nation realized they could harness their breaking the laws of thermodynamics for energy. The premise of S1 Korra is exploring social inequality in the presence of randomly distributed magical powers.
In these ways, Avatar is less Harry Potter and more HPMoR.
They run strongly in families (although it’s not clear exactly how, since neither of Katara’s parents appears to have been a waterbender). It’s not really random.
Honestly, I was disappointed with the ending of Season 1 Korra: (rot13)
Nnat zntvpnyyl tvirf Xbeen ure oraqvat onpx nsgre Nzba gbbx vg njnl, naq gurer ner ab creznarag pbafrdhraprf gb nalguvat.
I’m not necessarily idealistic enough to be happy with a world that has no consequences or really difficult choices; I’m just not cynical enough to find misanthropy and defeatism cool. That’s why children’s entertainment appeals to me—while it can be overly sugary-sweet, adult entertainment often seems to be both narrow and shallow, and at the same time cynical. Outside of science fiction, there doesn’t seem to be much adult entertainment that’s about things I care about—saving the world, doing something big and important and good.
ETA: What Zach Weiner makes fun of here—that’s what I’m sick of. Not just misanthropy and undiscriminating cynicism, but glorifying it as the height of intelligence. LessWrong seemed very pleasantly different in that sense.
I agree; I found the ending very disappointing, as well.
The authors throw one of the characters into a very powerful personal conflict, making it impossible for the character to deny the need for a total accounting and re-evaluation of the character’s entire life and identity. The authors resolve this personal conflict about 30 seconds later with a Deus Ex Machina. Bleh.
Are you sure that’s rot13? It’s generating gibberish in two different decoders for me, although I’m pretty sure I know what you’re talking about anyway.
ETA: Yeah, looks like a shift of three characters right.
I further learned that my brain was modular, and the bits of me that I choose to call “I” don’t constitute everything. My own brain could sabotage the values and ideals and that “I” hold so dearly. For a long time I struggled with the idea that everything I believed in and loved was fake, because I couldn’t force my body to actually act accordingly. Did I value human life? Why wasn’t I doing everything I possibly could to save lives, all the time? Did I value freedom and autonomy and gender equality? Why could I not help sometimes being attracted to domineering jerks?
It took me a while to accept that the newly-evolved, conscious, abstractly-reasoning, self-reflecting “I” simply did not have the firepower to bully ancient and powerful urges into submission. It took me a while to accept that my values were not lies simply because my monkey brain sometimes contradicted them. The “I” in my brain does not have as much power as she would like; that does not mean she doesn’t exist.
I’ve been through this kind of thing before, and Less Wrong did nothing for me in this respect (although Less Wrong is awesome for many other reasons). Reading Ayn Rand on the other hand made all the difference in the world in this respect, and changed my life.
I haven’t read Ayn Rand, but those who do seem to talk almost exclusively about the politics, and I just can’t work up the energy to get too excited about something I have such little chance of affecting. Would you mind telling me where/how Ayn Rand discussed evolutionary psychology or modular minds? I’m curious now. :)
She does discuss, however, the integration of personal values into one’s philosophical system. I was struggling with a possibly similar issue; I had previously regarded rationalism as an end in itself. Emotions were just baggage that had to be overcome in order to achieve a truly enlightened state. If this sounds familiar to you, her works may help.
The short version: You’re a human being. An ethical system that demands you be anything else is fatally flawed; there is no universal ethical system, what is ethical for a rabbit is not ethical for a wolf. It’s necessary for you to live, not as a rabbit, not as a rock, not as a utility or paperclip maximizer, but as a human being. Pain, for example, isn’t to be denied—for to do so is as sensible as denying a rock—but experienced as a part of your existence. (That you shouldn’t deny pain is not the same as that you should seek it; it is simply a statement that it’s a part of what you are.)
Objectivism, the philosophy she founded, is named on the claim that ethics are objective; not subjective, which is to say, whatever you want it to be; not universal, which is to say, there’s a single ethics system in the whole universe that applies equally to rocks, rabbits, mice, and people; but objective, which is to say, it exists as a definable property for a given subject, given certain preconditions (ethical axioms; she chose “Life” as her ethical axiom).
I don’t know that I would call that “objective.” I mean, the laws of physics are objective because they’re the same for rabbits and rocks and humans alike.
I honestly don’t trust myself to go much more meta than my own moral intuitions. I just try not to harm people without their permission or deceive/manipulate them. Yes, this can and will break down in extreme hypothetical scenarios, but I don’t want to insist on an ironclad philosophical system that would cause me to jump to any conclusions on, say, Torture vs. Dust Specks just yet. I suspect that my abstract reasoning will just be nuts.
My understanding of morality is basically that we’re humans, and humans need each other, so we worked out ways to help one another out. Our minds were shaped by the same evolutionary processes, so we can agree for the most part. We’ve always seemed to treat those in our in-group the same way; it’s just that those we included in the in-group changed. Slowly, women were added, and people of different races/religions, etc.
It’s a sticky business, and different ethicists will frame the words different ways. On one view, objective includes “It’s true even if you disagree” and subjective includes “You can make up whatever you want”. On another, objective includes “It’s the same for everybody” and subjective includes “It’s different for different people”. The first distinction better matches the usual meaning of ‘objective’, and the second distinction better matches the usual meaning of ‘subjective’, so I think the terms were just poorly-chosen as different sides of a distinction.
Because of this, my intuition these days is to say that ethics is both subjective and objective, or “subjectively objective” as Eliezer has said about probability. Though I’d like it if we switched to using “subject-sensitive” rather than “subjective”, as is now commonly used in Epistemology.
So, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this distinction made here, and I have to admit I don’t get it.
Suppose I’m studying ballistics in a vacuum, and I’m trying to come up with some rules that describe how projectiles travel, and I discover that the trajectory of a projectile depends on its mass.
I suppose I could conclude that ballistics is “subjectively objective” or “subject-sensitive,” since after all the trajectory is different for different projectiles. But this is not at all a normal way of speaking or thinking about ballistics. What we normally say is that ballistics is “objective” and it just so happens that the proper formulation of objective ballistics takes projectile mass as a parameter. Trajectory is, in part, a function of mass.
When we say that ethics is “subject-sensitive”—that is, that what I ought to do depends on various properties of me—are we saying it’s different from the ballistics example? Or is this just a way of saying that we haven’t yet worked out how to parametrize our ethics to take into account differences among individuals?
Similarly, while we acknowledge that the same projectile will follow a different trajectory in different environments, and that different projectiles of the same mass will follow different trajectories in different environments, we nevertheless say that ballistics is “universal”, because the equations that predict a trajectory can take additional properties of the environment and the projectile as parameters. Trajectory is, in part, a function of environment.
When we say that ethics is not universal, are we saying it’s different from the ballistics example? Or is this just a way of saying that we haven’t yet worked out how to parametrize our ethics to take into account differences among environments?
I think it’s an artifact of how we think about ethics. It doesn’t FEEL like a bullet should fly the same exact way as an arrow or as a rock, but when you feel your moral intuitions they seem like they should obviously apply to everyone. Maybe because we learn about throwing things and motion through infinitely iterated trial and error, but we learn about morality from simple commands from our parents/teachers, we think about them in different ways.
So, I’m not quite sure I understood you, but you seem to be explaining how someone might come to believe that ethics are universal/objective in the sense of right action not depending on the actor or the situation at all, even at relatively low levels of specification like “eat more vegetables” or whatever.
Did I get that right?
If so… sure, I can see where someone whose moral intuitions primarily derive from obeying the commands of others might end up with ethics that work like that.
“the proper formulation of objective ballistics takes projectile mass as a parameter”
I think the best analogy here is to say something like, the proper formulation of decision theory takes terminal values as a parameter. Decision theory defines a “universal” optimum (that is, universal “for all minds”… presumably anyway), but each person is individually running a decision theory process as a function of their own terminal values—there is no “universal” terminal value, for example if I could build an AI then I could theoretically put in any utility function I wanted. Ethics is “universal” in the sense of optimal decision theory, but “person dependent” in the sense of plugging in one’s own particular terminal values—but terminal values and ethics are not necessarily “mind-dependent”, as explained here.
I would certainly agree that there is no terminal value shared by all minds (come to that, I’m not convinced there are any terminal values shared by all of any given mind).
Also, I would agree that when figuring out how I should best apply a value-neutral decision theory to my environment I have to “plug in” some subset of information about my own values and about my environment.
I would also say that a sufficiently powerful value-neutral decision theory instructs me on how to optimize any environment towards any value, given sufficiently comprehensive data about the environment and the value. Which seems like another way of saying that decision theory is objective and universal, in the same sense that ballistics is.
How that relates to statements about ethics being universal,objective, person-dependent, and/or mind-dependent is not clear to me, though, even after following your link.
Surprisingly, this isn’t a bad short explanation of her ethics.
I’ve been reading a lot of Aristotle lately (I highly recommend Aristotle by Randall, for anyone who is in to that kind of thing), and Rand mostly just brought Aristotle’s philosophy into the 20th century—of course note now that it’s the 21st century, so she is a little dated at this point. Take for example, Rand was offered by various people to get fully paid-for cryonics when she was close to death, but for unknown reasons she declined, very sadly (if you’re looking for someone to take her philosophy into the 21st century, you will need to talk to, well… ahem… me).
It’s important to mention that politics is only one dimension of her philosophy and of her writing (although, naturally, it’s the subject that all the pundits and mind-killed partisans obsess over) - and really it is the least important, since it is the most derivative of all of her other more fundamental philosophical ideas on metaphysics, epistemology, man’s nature, and ethics.
I’ll willingly confess to not being interested in Aristotle in the least. Philosophy coursework cured me of interest in Greek philosophy. Give me another twenty years and I might recover from that.
Have you read TVTropes’ assessment of Objectivism? It’s actually the best summary I’ve ever read, as far as the core of the philosophy goes.
By the way, I fully share yours (and Eliezer’s) sentiment in regard to academic philosophy. I took a “philosophy of mind” course in college, thinking that would be extremely interesting, and I ended up dropping the class in short order. It was only after a long study of Rand that I ever became interested in philosophy again, once I realized I had a sane basis on which to proceed.
Specifically, her non-fiction work (if you find that sort of thing palatable) provides a lot more concrete discussion of her philosophy.
Unfortunately, Ayn Rand is little too… abrasive… for many people who don’t agree entirely with her. She has a lot of resonant points that get rejected because of all the other stuff she presents along with it.
At a guess, I would say: looking for recurring patterns in fiction, and extrapolating principles/tropes. It’s a very bottom-up approach to literature, taking special note of subversions, inversions, aversions, etc, as opposed to the more top-down academic study of literature that loves to wax poetic about “universal truths” while ignoring large swaths of stories (such as Sci Fi and Fantasy) that don’t fit into their grand model. Quite frankly, from my perspective, it seems they tend to force a lot of stories into their preferred mold, falling prey to True Art tropes.
Welcome to Less Wrong! I would say something about a rabbit hole but it would be pointless, since you already seem to be descending at quite a high rate of speed.
I thought she was going to have to end up married at the end and I was so. angry. Brave ranked up there with Mulan in terms of kids movies that I think actually teach kids good lessons, which is a pretty high honor in my book.
Personally, for their first female protagonist, I felt like Pixar could have done a lot better than a Rebellious Princess. It’s cliche, and I would have liked to see them exercise more creativity, but besides that, I think the instructive value is dubious. Yes, it’s awfully burdensome to have one’s life direction dictated to an excessive degree by external circumstances and expectations. But on the other hand, Rebellious Princesses, including Merida, tend to rail against the unfairness of their circumstances without stopping to consider that they live in societies where practically everyone has their lives dictated by external circumstances, and there’s no easy transition to a social model that allows differently.
Merida wants to live a life where she’s free to pursue her love of archery and riding, and get married when and to whom she wants? Well she’d be screwed if she were a peasant, since all the necessary house and field work wouldn’t leave her with the time, her family wouldn’t own a horse, unless it was a ploughhorse she wouldn’t be able to take out for pleasure riding, and she’d be married off at an early age out of economic rather than political necessity. And she’d be similarly out of luck if her parents were merchants, or craftsmen, or practically anyone else. Like most Rebellious Princesses, she has modern expectations of entitlement in a society where those expectations don’t make sense.
It sucks to be told you can’t do something you love because of societal preconceptions; “You shouldn’t try to be a mathematician, you’re a girl,” “’You’re a black ghetto kid, what are you doing aiming to be a businessman?” etc. But Rebellious Princesses are in a situation more analogous to “You might want not to have to go to school and be able to spend your time partying with friends and maybe make a living drawing pictures of cartoons you like, but there’s no social structure to support you if you try to do that.”
By the end of the movie, Merida and her mother birepbzr gurve cevqr naq zhghny zvfhaqrefgnaqvat, naq Zrevqn’f zbgure yrneaf gb frr gur vffhr sebz ure Zrevqn’f cbvag bs ivrj naq abg sbepr ure vagb n fhqqra zneevntr sbe cbyvgvpny rkcrqvrapl, juvyr Zrevqn yrneaf… gung fur ybirf ure zbz rabhtu gb abg jnag ure gb or ghearq vagb n orne? Fhccbfvat gur bgure gevorf jrera’g cercnerq gb pnyy bss gur zneevntr, naq fur jnf fghpx pubbfvat orgjrra n cebonoyl haunccl zneevntr naq crnpr, be ab zneevntr naq jne, jbhyq fur unir pubfra nal qvssreragyl guna fur qvq ng gur fgneg bs gur zbivr?
This probably all sounds like I disapproved of the movie a lot more than I really did, but I definitely wouldn’t rank it alongside Mulan terms of positive social message. Mulan wanted to bring her family honor and keep her father safe, so she went and performed a service for her society which demanded great perseverance and courage, which her society neither expected nor encouraged her to perform. Merida wasn’t happy with the expectations and duties her society placed on her, so she tried to duck out of them, nearly caused a disaster, and ultimately got what she wanted without having to make a hard choice between personal satisfaction and doing her part for her society.
I thought that Brave was actually a somewhat subversive movie—perhaps inadvertently so. The movie is structured and presented in a way that makes it look like the standard Rebellious Princess story, with the standard feminist message. The protagonist appears to be a girl who overcomes the Patriarchy by transgressing gender norms, etc. etc. This is true to a certain extent, but it’s not the main focus of the movie.
Instead, the movie is, at its core, a very personal story of a child’s relationship with her parent, the conflict between love and pride, and the difference between having good intentions and being able to implement them into practice. By the end of the movie, both Merida and her mother undergo a significant amount of character development. Their relationship changes not because the social order was reformed, or because gender norms were defeated—but because they have both grown as individuals.
Thus, Brave ends up being a more complex (and IMO more interesting) movie than the standard “Rebellious Princess” cliche would allow. In Brave, there are no clear villains; neither Merida nor her mother are wholly in the right, or wholly in the wrong. Contrast this with something like Disney’s Rapunzel, where the mother is basically a glorified plot device, as opposed to a full-fledged character.
The antagonist is the rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage.
There should be a word for forcing other people to have sex (with each other, not yourself). The connotations of calling a forced arranged marriage ‘rapey’ should be offensive to the victims. It is grossly unfair to imply that the wife is a ‘rapist’ just because her husband’s father forced his son to marry her for his family’s political gain. (Or vice-versa.)
I wasn’t specifying who was being rapey. Just that the entire setup was rapey.
That was clear and my reply applies.
(The person to whom the applies is the person who forces the marriage. Rape(y/ist) would also apply if that person was also a participant in the marriage.)
As per my post above, I’d argue that the “rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage” is less of a primary antagonist, and more of a bumbling comic relief character.
Upvoted. My thoughts on Brave are over here, but basically Merida is actually a really dark character, and it’s sort of sickening that she gets away with everything she does.
Interesting enough to repeat is my suggestion for a better setting:
Consider another movie they could have made, Paisley, about a Scottish girl on the cusp of womanhood who gets a job in one of the first textile mills and is able to support herself and live independently through hard work. This story has the supreme virtue of having actually happened: arranged marriage was not done away with because a preteen girl complained that she wasn’t ready, it was done away with because people got richer and could afford something better.
I understand your critique, and I mostly agree with it. I actually would have been even happier if Merida had bitten the bullet and married the winner—but for different reasons. She would have married because she loved her mother and her kingdom, and understood that peace must come at a cost—it would still very much count as a movie with no romantic angle. She would have been like Princess Yue in Avatar, a character I had serious respect for. When Yue was willing to marry Han for duty, and then was willing to fnpevsvpr ure yvsr gb orpbzr gur zbba, that was the first time I said to myself, “Wow, these guys really do break convention.”
Merida would have been a lot more brave to accept the dictates of her society (but for the right reasons), or to find a more substantial compromise than just convincing the other lords to yrg rirelbar zneel sbe ybir. But I still think it was a sweet movie.
I agree that it was a sweet movie, and overall I enjoyed watching it. The above critique is a lot harsher than my overall impression. But when I heard that Pixar was making their first movie with a female lead, I expected a lot out of them and thought they were going to try for something really exceptional in both character and message, and it ended up undershooting my expectations on those counts.
I can sympathize with the extent to which simply having competent important female characters with relatable goals is a huge step forward for a lot of works. Ironically, I don’t think I really grasped how frustrating the lack of them must be until I started encountering works which are supposed to be some sort of wish fulfillment for guys. There are numerous anime and manga, particularly harem series, which are full of female characters graced with various flavors of awesomeness, without any significant male protagonists other than the lead who’s a total loser, and I find it infuriating when the closest thing I have to a proxy in the story is such a lousy and overshadowed character. It wasn’t until I started encountering works like those that it hit me how painful it must be to be hard pressed to find stories that aren’t like that on some level.
One thing that disappointed me about this whole story was that it was the one and only Pixar movie that was set in the past. Pixar has always been about sci fi, not fantasy, and its works have been set in contemporary America (with Magic Realism), alternate universes, or the future. Did “female protagonist” pattern-match so strongly with “rebellious medieval princess” that even Pixar didn’t do anything really unusual with it?
Even though I was happy Merida wasn’t rebelling because of love, it seems like they stuck with the standard old-fashioned feminist story of resisting an arranged marriage, when they could have avoided all of that in a work set in the present or the future, when a woman would have more scope to really be brave.
All in all, it seems like their father-son movie was a lot stronger than their mother-daughter movie.
I don’t think “This Loser Is You” is the right trope for that. Actually, I don’t think TV Tropes has the right trope for that; as best I can tell, harem protagonists are the way they are not because they’re supposed to stand for the audience in a representative sort of way but because they’re designed as a receptacle for the audience to pour their various insecurities into. They can display negative traits, because that’s assumed to make them more sympathetic to viewers that share them. But they can’t display negative traits strong enough to be grounds for actual condemnation, or to define their characters unambiguously; you’ll never see Homer Simpson as a harem lead. And they can’t show positive traits except for a vague agreeableness and whatever supernatural powers the plot requires, because that breaks the pathos. Yes, Tenchi Muyo, that’s you I’m looking at.
More succinctly, we’re all familiar with sex objects, right? Harem anime protagonists are sympathy objects.
I agree that This Loser Is You isn’t quite the right trope. There’s a more recent launch, Loser Protagonist, which doesn’t quite describe it either, but uses the same name as I did when I tried to put the trope which I thought accurately described it through the YKTTW ages ago.
If I understand what you mean by “sympathy objects,” I think we have the same idea in mind. I tend to think of them as Lowest Common Denominator Protagonists, because they lack any sort of virtue or achievement that would alienate them from the most insecure or insipid audience members.
Zrevqn yrneaf… gung fur ybirf ure zbz rabhtu gb abg jnag ure gb or ghearq vagb n orne?
Meridia learned to value her relationship with her mother, which I think a lot of kids need to hear going into adolescence. When you put it this way it doesn’t seem nearly as trite as your phrasing makes it sound.
Merida wants to live a life where she’s free to pursue her love of archery and riding, and get married when and to whom she wants? Well she’d be screwed if she were a peasant etc.
Well yeah, but the answer to “society sucks and how can I fix it” isn’t “oh it sucks for everyone and even more for others, I’ll just sit down and shut up”. (Not that you argue it is.)
From TV Tropes:
If she’s not the hero, quite often she’s the hero’s love interest. This will sometimes invoke Marry for Love not only as another way for her to rebel, but to also get out of an Arranged Marriage
This is exactly why I thought Brave was good—it moved away from this trope. It wasn’t “I don’t love this person, I love this other person!”, it was “I don’t have to love/marry someone to be a competent and awesome person”. She was the hero of her own story, and didn’t need anyone else to complete her. That doesn’t have to be true for everyone, but the counterpoint needs to be more present in society.
And I said it ranked up there. Not that it passed Mulan. :) And it gets that honor by being literally one of the two movies I can think of that has a positive message in this respect. Although I will concede that I’m not very familiar with a particularly high number of kids movies.
I edited my comment to rot13 the ending spoilers; I left in the stuff that’s more or less advertised as the premise of the movie. You might want to edit your reply so that it doesn’t quote the uncyphered text.
Meridia learned to value her relationship with her mother, which I think a lot of kids need to hear going into adolescence. When you put it this way it doesn’t seem nearly as trite as your phrasing makes it sound.
I think that’s a valuable lesson, but I felt like Brave’s presentation of it suffered for the fact that Merida and her mother really only reconcile after Merida essentially gets her way about everything. Teenagers who feel aggrieved in their relationships with their parents and think that they’re subject to pointless unfairness are likely to come away with the lesson “I could get along so much better with my parents if they’d stop being pointlessly unfair to me!” rather than “Maybe I should be more open to the idea that my parents have legitimate reasons for not being accommodating of all my wishes, and be prepared to cut them some slack.”
A more well rounded version of the movie’s approximate message might have been something like “Some burdensome social expectations and life restrictions have good reasons behind them and others don’t, learn to distinguish between them so you can focus your effort on solving the right ones.” But instead, it came off more like “Kids, you should love and appreciate your parents, at least when you work past their inclination to arbitrarily oppress you.”
Now that I think about it, very few movies or TV shows actually teach that lesson. There are plenty of works of fiction that portray the whiney teenager in a negative light, and there are plenty that portray the unreasonable parent in a negative light, but nothing seems to change. It all plays out with the boring inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
Hello!
Age: Years since 1995
Gender: Female
Occupation: Student
I actually started an account two years ago, but after a few comments I decided I wasn’t emotionally or intellectually ready for active membership. I was confused and hurt for various reasons that weren’t Less Wrong’s fault, and I backed away to avoid saying something I might regret. I didn’t want to put undue pressure on myself to respond to topics I didn’t fully understand. Now, after many thousands of hours reading and thinking about neurology, evolutionary psychology, and math, I’m more confident that I won’t just be swept up in the half-understood arguments of people much smarter than I am. :)
Like almost everyone here, I started with atheism. I was raised Hindu, and my home has the sort of vague religiosity that is arguably the most common form in the modern world. For the most part, I figured out atheism on my own, when I was around 11 or 12. It was emotionally painful and socially costly, but I’m stronger for the experience. I started reading various mediocre atheist blogs, but I got bored after a couple of years and wanted to do something more than shoot blind fish in tiny barrels. I wanted to build something up, not just tear something down (no matter how much it really should be torn down.)
The actual direct link to Less Wrong came from TV Tropes. I suspect it’s one of the best gateway drugs because TV Tropes, while not explicitly atheist or rationalist, does more to communicate the positive ideals and emotional memes of LW-style rationality than most of the atheosphere does. For the first time, I got the sense that “our” way of thinking could be so much more powerful than simply bashing religion and astrology.
One important truth beyond atheism that I have slowly come to accept is inborn IQ differentials, between individuals and groups of individuals. I had to face the fact that P(male| IQ 2 standard deviations above mean) was significantly higher than 50%. I had to deal with the fact that historical oppression probably wasn’t the end-all be-all explanation for why women on average hadn’t done as much inventing and discovering and brilliant thinking as men. I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
I further learned that my brain was modular, and the bits of me that I choose to call “I” don’t constitute everything. My own brain could sabotage the values and ideals and that “I” hold so dearly. For a long time I struggled with the idea that everything I believed in and loved was fake, because I couldn’t force my body to actually act accordingly. Did I value human life? Why wasn’t I doing everything I possibly could to save lives, all the time? Did I value freedom and autonomy and gender equality? Why could I not help sometimes being attracted to domineering jerks?
It took me a while to accept that the newly-evolved, conscious, abstractly-reasoning, self-reflecting “I” simply did not have the firepower to bully ancient and powerful urges into submission. It took me a while to accept that my values were not lies simply because my monkey brain sometimes contradicted them. The “I” in my brain does not have as much power as she would like; that does not mean she doesn’t exist.
Other, non-rationality related information: I love writing, and for a long time I convinced myself that therefore I would love being a novelist. Now, I recognize that I would much rather compose a non-fiction or reflective essay, although ideas for fiction stories still flood in and I rarely do much about it due to laziness and/or fear. I fell in love with Avatar: The Last Airbender for its great storytelling and its combination of intelligence and idealism. I adore Pixar and many Disney movies for the sweetness and heart. I like somewhat traditional-sounding music with easily discernible lyrics that tells a story; I can’t get into anything that involves screaming or deliberate disharmony. Show-tunes are great. :)
I don’t want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar; I consciously cultivate it and am lucky to have it. If this disposition will be “destroyed by the truth”...well, I have a choice to make then.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and I for one am glad to have you here (again)! You sound like someone who thinks very interesting thoughts.
I can’t say that this is something that has ever really bothered me. Your IQ is what it is. Whether or not there’s an overall gender-based trend in one direction or another isn’t going to change anything for you, although it might change how people see you. (If anything, I found that I got more attention as a “girl who was good at/interested in science”...which, if anything, was irritating and made me want to rebel and go into a “traditionally female” field just because I could.
Basically, if you want to accomplish greatness, it’s about you as an individual. Unless you care about the greatness of others, and feel more pride or solidarity with females than with males who accomplish greatness (which I don’t), the statistical tendency doesn’t matter.
I think that more than idealism, what I wouldn’t want to lose is a sense of humour. Idealism, in the sense of “believing that the world is good deep down/people will do the best they can/etc”, can be broken by enough bad stuff happening. A sense of humour is a lot harder to break.
I know that it’s not particularly rational to feel more affiliation with women than men, but I do. It’s one of the things my monkey brain does that I decided to just acknowledge rather than constantly fight. It’s helped me have a certain kind of peace about average IQ differentials. The pain I described in the parent has mellowed. Still, I have to face the fact that if I want to major in, say, applied math, chances are I might be lonely or below-average or both. I wish I had the inner confidence to care about self-improvement more than competition, but as yet I don’t.
ETA: I characterize “idealism” as a hope for the future more than a belief about the present.
As long as you know your own skills, there is no need to use your gender as a predictor. We use the worse information only in the absence of better information; because the worse information can be still better than nothing. We don’t need to predict the information we already have.
When we already know that e.g. “this woman has IQ 150”, or “this woman has won a mathematical olympiad” there is no need to mix general male and female IQ or math curves into the equation. (That’s only what you do when you see a random woman and you have no other information.)
If there are hundred green balls in the basket and one red ball, it makes sense to predict that a randomly picked ball will be almost surely green. But once you have randomly picked a ball and it happened to be red… then it no longer makes sense to worry that this specific ball might still be green somehow. It’s not; end of story.
If you had no experience with math yet, then I’d say that based on your gender, your chances to be a math genius are small. But that’s not the situation; you already had some math experience. So make your guesses based on that experience. Your gender is already included in the probability of you having that specific experience. Don’t count it twice!
To be perfectly accurate, any person’s chances of being a math genius are going to be small anyway, regardless of that person’s gender. There are very few geniuses in the world.
What’s true of one apple isn’t true of every apple.
It is particularly not rational to ignore the effect of your unconscious in your relationships. That fight is a losing battle (right now), so if having happy relationships is a goal, the pursuit of that requires you pay attention.
There is almost no average IQ differential, since men pad out the bottom as well. Greater chromosomal genetic variations in men lead to stupidity as often as intelligence.
Really, this gender disparity only matters at far extremes. Men may pad out the top and bottom 1% (or something like that) in IQ, but applied mathematicians aren’t all top 1% (or even 10%, in my experience). It is easy to mistake finally being around people who think like you do (as in high IQ) with being less intelligent than them, but this is a trick!
Sorry, you’re right, I did know that. (And it’s exasperating to see highly intelligent men make the rookie mistake of saying “women are stupid” or “most women are stupid” because they happen to be high-IQ. There’s an obvious selection bias—intelligent men probably have intelligent male friends but only average female acquaintances—because they seek out the women for sex, not conversation.)
I was thinking about “IQ differentials” in the very broad sense, as in “it sucks that anyone is screwed over before they even start.” I also suffer from selection bias, because I seek out people in general for intelligence, so I see the men to the right of the bell curve, while I just sort of abstractly “know” there are more men than women to the left, too.
Another possible explanation comes to mind: people with high IQs consider the “stupid” borderline to be significantly above 100 IQ. Then if they associate equally with men and women, the women will more often be stupid; and if they associate preferentially with clever people, there will be fewer women.
(This doesn’t contradict selection bias. Both effects could be at play.)
You’d have to raise the bar really far before any actual gender-based differences showed up. It seems far more likely that the cause is a cultural bias against intellectualism in women (women will under-report IQ by 5ish points and men over-report by a similar margin, women are poorly represented in “smart” jobs, etc.). That makes women present themselves as less intelligent and makes everyone perceive them as less intelligent.
Does anyone know of a good graph that shows this? I’ve seen several (none citing sources) that draw the crossover in quite different places. So I’m not sure what the gender ratio is at, say, IQ 130.
La Griffe Du Lion has good work on this, but it’s limited to math ability, where the male mean is higher than the female mean as well as the male variance being higher than the female variance.
The formulas from the first link work for whatever mean and variance you want to use, and so can be updated with more applicable IQ figures, and you can see how an additional 10 point ‘reporting gap’ affects things.
Unfortunately, intelligence in areas other than math seem to be an “I know it when I see it” kind of thing. It’s much harder to design a good test for some of the “softer” disciplines, like “interpersonal intelligence” or even language skills, and it’s much easier to pick a fight with results you don’t like.
It could be that because intelligence tests are biased toward easy measurement, they focus too much on math, so they under-predict women’s actual performance at most jobs not directly related to abstract math skills.
Of course, if you use IQ testing, it is specifically calibrated to remove/minimize gender bias (so is the SAT and ACT), and intelligence testing is horribly fraught with infighting and moving targets.
I can’t find any research that doesn’t at least mention that social factors likely poison any experimental result. It doesn’t help any that “intelligence” is poorly defined and thus difficult to quantify.
Considering that men are more susceptible to critical genetic failure, maybe the mean is higher for men on some tests because the low outliers had defects that made them impossible to test (such as being stillborn)?
The SAT doesn’t seem to be calibrated to make sure average scores are the same for math, at least. At least as late as 2006, there’s still a significant gender gap.
Apparently, the correction was in the form of altering essay and story questions to de-emphasize sports and business and ask more about arts and humanities. This hasn’t been terribly effective. The gap is smaller in the verbal sections, but it’s still there. Given that the entire purpose of the test is to predict college grades directly and women do better in college than men, explanations and theories abound.
Not a rigorously conducted study, but this (third poll) suggests a rather greater tendency to at least overestimate if not willfully over-report IQ, with both men and women overestimating, but men overestimating more.
You’re right; my explanation was drawn from many PUA-types who had said similar things, but this effect is perfectly possible in non-sexual contexts, too.
There’s actually little use in using words like “stupid”, anyway. What’s the context? How intelligent does this individual need to be do what they want to do? Calling people “stupid” says “reaching for an easy insult,” not “making an objective/instrumentally useful observation.”
Sure, there will be some who say they’ll use the words they want to use and rail against “censorship”, but connotation and denotation are not so separate. That’s why I didn’t find the various “let’s say controversial, unspeakable things because we’re brave nonconformists!” threads on this site to be all that helpful. Some comments certainly were both brave and insightful, but I felt on the whole a little bit of insight was brought at the price of a whole lot of useless nastiness.
Arguably, if it was “broken” this way it would be a mistake (specifically, of generalizing from too small a sample size). I have a job where I am constantly confronted with suffering and death, but at the end of the day, I can still laugh just like everyone else, because I know my experience is a biased sample and that there is still lots of good going on in the world.
I like this post more than I like most things; you’ve helped me, for one, with a significant amount of distress.
Consciously keeping your identity small and thus not identifying with everyone who happens to have the same internal plumbing might be helpful there.
PG is awesome, but his ideas do basically fall into the category of “easier said than done.” This doesn’t mean “not worth doing,” of course, but practical techniques would be way more helpful. It’s easier to replace one group with another (arguably better?) group than to hold yourself above groupthink in general.
My approach is to notice when I want to say/write “we”, as opposed to “I”, and examine why. That’s why I don’t personally identify as a “LWer” (only as a neutral and factual “forum regular”), despite the potential for warm fuzzies resulting from such an identification.
There is an occasional worthy reason to identify with a specific group, but gender/country/language/race/occupation/sports team are probably not good criteria for such a group.
Thank you! I’ll look for that.
Here is a typical LW comment that raises the “excessive group identification” red flag for me.
I always think of that in the context of conflict resolution, and refer to it as “telling someone that what they did was idiotic, not that they are an idiot.” Self-identifying is powerful, and people are pretty bad at it because of a confluence of biases.
Great to see you here and great to hear you took the time to read up on the relevant material before jumping in. I’m confident that you will find many people who comment quite a bit don’t have such prudence, so don’t be surprised if you outmatch a long time commenter. (^_^)
Yesss! This is exactly how I felt when I found this community.
I’m not sure about Disney, but the you should still be able to enjoy Avatar. Avatar (TLA and Korra) is in many ways a deconstruction of magical worlds. They take the basic premise of kung-fu magic and then let that propagate to it’s logical conclusions. The TLA war was enabled by rapid industrialization when one nation realized they could harness their breaking the laws of thermodynamics for energy. The premise of S1 Korra is exploring social inequality in the presence of randomly distributed magical powers.
In these ways, Avatar is less Harry Potter and more HPMoR.
They run strongly in families (although it’s not clear exactly how, since neither of Katara’s parents appears to have been a waterbender). It’s not really random.
You are correct. I wouldn’t consider it much different from personality. It’s part heritable, part environmental and upbringing, and part randomness.
Now you’ve got me wondering if philosophers in the Avatar universe have debates on whether your element/bending is nature vs nurture.
Now I want an ATLA fanfic infused with Star Trek-style pensive philosophizing. :D
I would argue that it has even more potential than HP for a rationalist makeover. Aang stays in the iceberg and Sokka saves the planet?
Honestly, I was disappointed with the ending of Season 1 Korra: (rot13)
Nnat zntvpnyyl tvirf Xbeen ure oraqvat onpx nsgre Nzba gbbx vg njnl, naq gurer ner ab creznarag pbafrdhraprf gb nalguvat.
I’m not necessarily idealistic enough to be happy with a world that has no consequences or really difficult choices; I’m just not cynical enough to find misanthropy and defeatism cool. That’s why children’s entertainment appeals to me—while it can be overly sugary-sweet, adult entertainment often seems to be both narrow and shallow, and at the same time cynical. Outside of science fiction, there doesn’t seem to be much adult entertainment that’s about things I care about—saving the world, doing something big and important and good.
ETA: What Zach Weiner makes fun of here—that’s what I’m sick of. Not just misanthropy and undiscriminating cynicism, but glorifying it as the height of intelligence. LessWrong seemed very pleasantly different in that sense.
I agree; I found the ending very disappointing, as well.
The authors throw one of the characters into a very powerful personal conflict, making it impossible for the character to deny the need for a total accounting and re-evaluation of the character’s entire life and identity. The authors resolve this personal conflict about 30 seconds later with a Deus Ex Machina. Bleh.
Are you sure that’s rot13? It’s generating gibberish in two different decoders for me, although I’m pretty sure I know what you’re talking about anyway.
ETA: Yeah, looks like a shift of three characters right.
ETA AGAIN: Fixed now, thanks.
Sorry, I dumped it into Briangle and forgot to change the setting.
V gubhtug vg jnf irel rssrpgvir. Gubhtu irvyrq fb xvqf jba’g pngpu vg, univat gur qnevat gb fubj n znva punenpgre pbagrzcyngvat naq nyzbfg nggrzcgvat fhvpvqr jnf n terng jnl gb pybfr gur nep. Gurer’f nyernql rabhtu ‘npgvba’ pbafrdhraprf qhr gb gur eribyhgvba, fb vg’f avpr onynapvat bhg univat gur irel raq or gur erfhygvat punatrf gb Xbeen’f punenpgre. Jura fur erwrpgf fhvpvqr nf na bcgvba, fur ernyvmrf gung fur ubyqf vagevafvp inyhr nf n uhzna orvat engure guna nf na Ningne. Cyhf nf bar bs gur ener srznyr yrnqf va puvyqera’f gryrivfvba, gur qenzngvp pyvznk bs gur fgbel orvat gur qr-bowrpgvsvpngvba bs gur srznyr yrnq vf uhtr. Nyfb gur nagv-fhvpvqr zrffntr orvat gung onq thlf pbzzvg zheqre/fhvpvqr naq gur tbbq thlf qba’g vf tbbq gb svavfu jvgu. V’z irel fngvfsvrq jvgu gurz raqvat vg gung jnl.
Znal fubjf raq jvgu jvgu ovt onq orvat orngra. Fubjf gung cergraq gb or zngher unir cebgntbavfgf qvr ng gur raq. Ohg Xbeen’f raqvat vf bar bs gur bayl gung fgevxrf zr nf npghnyyl zngher, orpnhfr vg’f qverpgyl n zbeny/cuvybfbcuvpny ceboyrz ng gur raq.
Gung’f na vagrerfgvat jnl gb chg vg, naq V guvax V’z unccvre jvgu gur raqvat orpnhfr bs gung. Ubjrire, V jnf rkcrpgvat Frnfba Gjb gb or Xbeen’f wbhearl gbjneq erpbirel (rvgure culfvpny be zragny be obgu) nsgre Nzba gbbx njnl ure oraqvat. Vg’f abg gung V qba’g jnag ure gb or jubyr naq unccl; vg’f whfg gung vg frrzrq gbb rnfl. V gubhtug Nzba/Abngnx naq Gneybpx’f fgbel nep jnf zhpu zber cbjreshy. Va snpg, gurve zheqre/fhvpvqr frrzrq gb unir fb zhpu svanyvgl gung V svtherq vg zhfg or gur raq bs gur rcvfbqr hagvy V ernyvmrq gurer jrer fvk zvahgrf yrsg.
Va bgure jbeqf, vg’f terng gung gur fgbel yraqf vgfrys gb gur vagrecergngvba gung vg jnf nobhg vagevafvp jbegu nf n uhzna orvat qvfgvapg sebz bar’f cbjref, ohg gurl unq n jubyr frnfba yrsg gb npghnyyl rkcyvpvgyl rkcyber gung. Nnat’f wbhearl jnf nobhg yrneavat gb fgbc ehaavat njnl naq npprcg gur snpg gung ur vf va snpg gur Ningne, naq ur pna’g whfg or nal bgure xvq naq sbetrg nobhg uvf cbjre naq erfcbafvovyvgl. Xbeen’f wbhearl jnf gb or nobhg npprcgvat gung whfg orpnhfr fur vf gur Ningne, naq fur ybirf vg naq qrevirf zrnavat sebz vg, qbrfa’g zrna fur’f abguvat zber guna n ebyr gb shysvyy. Vg sryg phg fubeg. Nnat tnir vg gb Xbeen; fur qvqa’g svaq vg sbe urefrys.
V funerq BaGurBgureUnaqyr’f qvfnccbvagzrag jvgu gur raqvat, naq V jnfa’g irel vzcerffrq jvgu Xbeen’f rzbgvbany erfbyhgvba ng gur raq. Fur uvgf n anqve bs qrcerffvba, frrzvatyl pbagrzcyngrf fhvpvqr, naq gura… rirelguvat fhqqrayl erfbyirf vgfrys. Fur trgf ure oraqvat onpx, jvgubhg nal rssbeg be cynaavat, naq jvgu ab zber fvtavsvpnag punenpgre qrirybczrag guna univat orra erqhprq gb qrfcrengvba. Gur Ovt Onq vf xvyyrq ol fbzrbar ryfr juvyr gur cebgntbavfgf’ nggragvba vf ryfrjurer, naq Xbeen tnvaf gur novyvgl gb haqb nyy gur qnzntr ur pnhfrq va gur svefg cynpr. Gur fbpvrgny vffhrf sebz juvpu ur ohvyg uvf onfr bs fhccbeg jrer yrsg hanqqerffrq, ohg jvgubhg n pyrne nirahr gb erfbyir gurz nf n pbagvahngvba bs gur qenzngvp pbasyvpg.
Vs Xbeen unq orra qevira gb qrfcrengvba, naq nf n erfhyg, frnepurq uneqre sbe fbyhgvbaf naq sbhaq bar, V jbhyq unir sbhaq gung n ybg zber fngvfslvat. Gung’f bar bs gur ernfbaf V engr gur raqvat bs Ningne: Gur Ynfg Nveoraqre uvture guna gung bs gur svefg frnfba bs Xbeen. Vg znl unir orra vanqrdhngryl sberfunqbjrq naq orra fbzrguvat bs n Qrhf Rk Znpuvan, ohg ng yrnfg Nnat qrnyg jvgu n fvghngvba jurer ur jnf snprq jvgu bayl hanpprcgnoyr pubvprf ol frrxvat bgure nygreangvirf, svaqvat, naq vzcyrzragvat bar. Ohg Xbeen’f ceboyrzf jrer fbyirq, abg ol frrxvat fbyhgvbaf, ohg ol pbzvat va gbhpu jvgu ure fcvevghny fvqr ol ernpuvat ure rzbgvbany ybj cbvag.
Jung Fcvevg!Nnat fnvq unf erny jbeyq gehgu gb vg. Crbcyr qb graq gb or zber fcvevghny va gurve ybjrfg naq zbfg qrfcrengr pvephzfgnaprf. Ohg engure guna orvat fbzrguvat gb ynhq, V guvax guvf ercerfragf n sbez bs tvivat hc, jurer crbcyr ghea gb gur fhcreangheny sbe fbynpr be ubcr orpnhfr gurl qba’g oryvrir gurl pna fbyir gurve ceboyrzf gurzfryirf. Fb nf erfbyhgvbaf bs punenpgre nepf tb, V gubhtug gung jnf n cerggl onq bar.
Nyy va nyy V jnf n sna bs gur frevrf, ohg gur raqvat haqrefubg zl rkcrpgngvbaf.
Have you seen the new My Little Pony show? It’s really good. It’s sweet without being twee.
I’ve been through this kind of thing before, and Less Wrong did nothing for me in this respect (although Less Wrong is awesome for many other reasons). Reading Ayn Rand on the other hand made all the difference in the world in this respect, and changed my life.
I haven’t read Ayn Rand, but those who do seem to talk almost exclusively about the politics, and I just can’t work up the energy to get too excited about something I have such little chance of affecting. Would you mind telling me where/how Ayn Rand discussed evolutionary psychology or modular minds? I’m curious now. :)
She doesn’t, is the short answer.
She does discuss, however, the integration of personal values into one’s philosophical system. I was struggling with a possibly similar issue; I had previously regarded rationalism as an end in itself. Emotions were just baggage that had to be overcome in order to achieve a truly enlightened state. If this sounds familiar to you, her works may help.
The short version: You’re a human being. An ethical system that demands you be anything else is fatally flawed; there is no universal ethical system, what is ethical for a rabbit is not ethical for a wolf. It’s necessary for you to live, not as a rabbit, not as a rock, not as a utility or paperclip maximizer, but as a human being. Pain, for example, isn’t to be denied—for to do so is as sensible as denying a rock—but experienced as a part of your existence. (That you shouldn’t deny pain is not the same as that you should seek it; it is simply a statement that it’s a part of what you are.)
Objectivism, the philosophy she founded, is named on the claim that ethics are objective; not subjective, which is to say, whatever you want it to be; not universal, which is to say, there’s a single ethics system in the whole universe that applies equally to rocks, rabbits, mice, and people; but objective, which is to say, it exists as a definable property for a given subject, given certain preconditions (ethical axioms; she chose “Life” as her ethical axiom).
I don’t know that I would call that “objective.” I mean, the laws of physics are objective because they’re the same for rabbits and rocks and humans alike.
I honestly don’t trust myself to go much more meta than my own moral intuitions. I just try not to harm people without their permission or deceive/manipulate them. Yes, this can and will break down in extreme hypothetical scenarios, but I don’t want to insist on an ironclad philosophical system that would cause me to jump to any conclusions on, say, Torture vs. Dust Specks just yet. I suspect that my abstract reasoning will just be nuts.
My understanding of morality is basically that we’re humans, and humans need each other, so we worked out ways to help one another out. Our minds were shaped by the same evolutionary processes, so we can agree for the most part. We’ve always seemed to treat those in our in-group the same way; it’s just that those we included in the in-group changed. Slowly, women were added, and people of different races/religions, etc.
See this comment regarding this common confusion about ‘objective’...
It’s a sticky business, and different ethicists will frame the words different ways. On one view, objective includes “It’s true even if you disagree” and subjective includes “You can make up whatever you want”. On another, objective includes “It’s the same for everybody” and subjective includes “It’s different for different people”. The first distinction better matches the usual meaning of ‘objective’, and the second distinction better matches the usual meaning of ‘subjective’, so I think the terms were just poorly-chosen as different sides of a distinction.
Because of this, my intuition these days is to say that ethics is both subjective and objective, or “subjectively objective” as Eliezer has said about probability. Though I’d like it if we switched to using “subject-sensitive” rather than “subjective”, as is now commonly used in Epistemology.
So, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this distinction made here, and I have to admit I don’t get it.
Suppose I’m studying ballistics in a vacuum, and I’m trying to come up with some rules that describe how projectiles travel, and I discover that the trajectory of a projectile depends on its mass.
I suppose I could conclude that ballistics is “subjectively objective” or “subject-sensitive,” since after all the trajectory is different for different projectiles. But this is not at all a normal way of speaking or thinking about ballistics. What we normally say is that ballistics is “objective” and it just so happens that the proper formulation of objective ballistics takes projectile mass as a parameter. Trajectory is, in part, a function of mass.
When we say that ethics is “subject-sensitive”—that is, that what I ought to do depends on various properties of me—are we saying it’s different from the ballistics example? Or is this just a way of saying that we haven’t yet worked out how to parametrize our ethics to take into account differences among individuals?
Similarly, while we acknowledge that the same projectile will follow a different trajectory in different environments, and that different projectiles of the same mass will follow different trajectories in different environments, we nevertheless say that ballistics is “universal”, because the equations that predict a trajectory can take additional properties of the environment and the projectile as parameters. Trajectory is, in part, a function of environment.
When we say that ethics is not universal, are we saying it’s different from the ballistics example? Or is this just a way of saying that we haven’t yet worked out how to parametrize our ethics to take into account differences among environments?
I think it’s an artifact of how we think about ethics. It doesn’t FEEL like a bullet should fly the same exact way as an arrow or as a rock, but when you feel your moral intuitions they seem like they should obviously apply to everyone. Maybe because we learn about throwing things and motion through infinitely iterated trial and error, but we learn about morality from simple commands from our parents/teachers, we think about them in different ways.
So, I’m not quite sure I understood you, but you seem to be explaining how someone might come to believe that ethics are universal/objective in the sense of right action not depending on the actor or the situation at all, even at relatively low levels of specification like “eat more vegetables” or whatever.
Did I get that right?
If so… sure, I can see where someone whose moral intuitions primarily derive from obeying the commands of others might end up with ethics that work like that.
“the proper formulation of objective ballistics takes projectile mass as a parameter”
I think the best analogy here is to say something like, the proper formulation of decision theory takes terminal values as a parameter. Decision theory defines a “universal” optimum (that is, universal “for all minds”… presumably anyway), but each person is individually running a decision theory process as a function of their own terminal values—there is no “universal” terminal value, for example if I could build an AI then I could theoretically put in any utility function I wanted. Ethics is “universal” in the sense of optimal decision theory, but “person dependent” in the sense of plugging in one’s own particular terminal values—but terminal values and ethics are not necessarily “mind-dependent”, as explained here.
I would certainly agree that there is no terminal value shared by all minds (come to that, I’m not convinced there are any terminal values shared by all of any given mind).
Also, I would agree that when figuring out how I should best apply a value-neutral decision theory to my environment I have to “plug in” some subset of information about my own values and about my environment.
I would also say that a sufficiently powerful value-neutral decision theory instructs me on how to optimize any environment towards any value, given sufficiently comprehensive data about the environment and the value. Which seems like another way of saying that decision theory is objective and universal, in the same sense that ballistics is.
How that relates to statements about ethics being universal,objective, person-dependent, and/or mind-dependent is not clear to me, though, even after following your link.
Surprisingly, this isn’t a bad short explanation of her ethics.
I’ve been reading a lot of Aristotle lately (I highly recommend Aristotle by Randall, for anyone who is in to that kind of thing), and Rand mostly just brought Aristotle’s philosophy into the 20th century—of course note now that it’s the 21st century, so she is a little dated at this point. Take for example, Rand was offered by various people to get fully paid-for cryonics when she was close to death, but for unknown reasons she declined, very sadly (if you’re looking for someone to take her philosophy into the 21st century, you will need to talk to, well… ahem… me).
It’s important to mention that politics is only one dimension of her philosophy and of her writing (although, naturally, it’s the subject that all the pundits and mind-killed partisans obsess over) - and really it is the least important, since it is the most derivative of all of her other more fundamental philosophical ideas on metaphysics, epistemology, man’s nature, and ethics.
I’ll willingly confess to not being interested in Aristotle in the least. Philosophy coursework cured me of interest in Greek philosophy. Give me another twenty years and I might recover from that.
Have you read TVTropes’ assessment of Objectivism? It’s actually the best summary I’ve ever read, as far as the core of the philosophy goes.
No I haven’t! That was quite good, thanks.
By the way, I fully share yours (and Eliezer’s) sentiment in regard to academic philosophy. I took a “philosophy of mind” course in college, thinking that would be extremely interesting, and I ended up dropping the class in short order. It was only after a long study of Rand that I ever became interested in philosophy again, once I realized I had a sane basis on which to proceed.
Specifically, her non-fiction work (if you find that sort of thing palatable) provides a lot more concrete discussion of her philosophy.
Unfortunately, Ayn Rand is little too… abrasive… for many people who don’t agree entirely with her. She has a lot of resonant points that get rejected because of all the other stuff she presents along with it.
I wonder why it is that so many people get here from TV Tropes.
Also, you’re not the only one to give up on their first LW account.
Possibly: TV Tropes approaches fiction the way LessWrong approaches reality.
How do you mean?
At a guess, I would say: looking for recurring patterns in fiction, and extrapolating principles/tropes. It’s a very bottom-up approach to literature, taking special note of subversions, inversions, aversions, etc, as opposed to the more top-down academic study of literature that loves to wax poetic about “universal truths” while ignoring large swaths of stories (such as Sci Fi and Fantasy) that don’t fit into their grand model. Quite frankly, from my perspective, it seems they tend to force a lot of stories into their preferred mold, falling prey to True Art tropes.
Because it uses as many examples from HP:MoR as it possibly could?
Welcome to Less Wrong! I would say something about a rabbit hole but it would be pointless, since you already seem to be descending at quite a high rate of speed.
We seem to have a lot of Airbender fans here at LW—Alicorn was the one who started me watching it, and I know SarahC and rubix are fans.
Welcome =)
Did you see Brave? I thought it was great.
I did. :) I was so happy to see a mother-daughter movie with no romantic angle (other than the happily married king and queen).
I thought she was going to have to end up married at the end and I was so. angry. Brave ranked up there with Mulan in terms of kids movies that I think actually teach kids good lessons, which is a pretty high honor in my book.
Personally, for their first female protagonist, I felt like Pixar could have done a lot better than a Rebellious Princess. It’s cliche, and I would have liked to see them exercise more creativity, but besides that, I think the instructive value is dubious. Yes, it’s awfully burdensome to have one’s life direction dictated to an excessive degree by external circumstances and expectations. But on the other hand, Rebellious Princesses, including Merida, tend to rail against the unfairness of their circumstances without stopping to consider that they live in societies where practically everyone has their lives dictated by external circumstances, and there’s no easy transition to a social model that allows differently.
Merida wants to live a life where she’s free to pursue her love of archery and riding, and get married when and to whom she wants? Well she’d be screwed if she were a peasant, since all the necessary house and field work wouldn’t leave her with the time, her family wouldn’t own a horse, unless it was a ploughhorse she wouldn’t be able to take out for pleasure riding, and she’d be married off at an early age out of economic rather than political necessity. And she’d be similarly out of luck if her parents were merchants, or craftsmen, or practically anyone else. Like most Rebellious Princesses, she has modern expectations of entitlement in a society where those expectations don’t make sense.
It sucks to be told you can’t do something you love because of societal preconceptions; “You shouldn’t try to be a mathematician, you’re a girl,” “’You’re a black ghetto kid, what are you doing aiming to be a businessman?” etc. But Rebellious Princesses are in a situation more analogous to “You might want not to have to go to school and be able to spend your time partying with friends and maybe make a living drawing pictures of cartoons you like, but there’s no social structure to support you if you try to do that.”
By the end of the movie, Merida and her mother birepbzr gurve cevqr naq zhghny zvfhaqrefgnaqvat, naq Zrevqn’f zbgure yrneaf gb frr gur vffhr sebz ure Zrevqn’f cbvag bs ivrj naq abg sbepr ure vagb n fhqqra zneevntr sbe cbyvgvpny rkcrqvrapl, juvyr Zrevqn yrneaf… gung fur ybirf ure zbz rabhtu gb abg jnag ure gb or ghearq vagb n orne? Fhccbfvat gur bgure gevorf jrera’g cercnerq gb pnyy bss gur zneevntr, naq fur jnf fghpx pubbfvat orgjrra n cebonoyl haunccl zneevntr naq crnpr, be ab zneevntr naq jne, jbhyq fur unir pubfra nal qvssreragyl guna fur qvq ng gur fgneg bs gur zbivr?
This probably all sounds like I disapproved of the movie a lot more than I really did, but I definitely wouldn’t rank it alongside Mulan terms of positive social message. Mulan wanted to bring her family honor and keep her father safe, so she went and performed a service for her society which demanded great perseverance and courage, which her society neither expected nor encouraged her to perform. Merida wasn’t happy with the expectations and duties her society placed on her, so she tried to duck out of them, nearly caused a disaster, and ultimately got what she wanted without having to make a hard choice between personal satisfaction and doing her part for her society.
I thought that Brave was actually a somewhat subversive movie—perhaps inadvertently so. The movie is structured and presented in a way that makes it look like the standard Rebellious Princess story, with the standard feminist message. The protagonist appears to be a girl who overcomes the Patriarchy by transgressing gender norms, etc. etc. This is true to a certain extent, but it’s not the main focus of the movie.
Instead, the movie is, at its core, a very personal story of a child’s relationship with her parent, the conflict between love and pride, and the difference between having good intentions and being able to implement them into practice. By the end of the movie, both Merida and her mother undergo a significant amount of character development. Their relationship changes not because the social order was reformed, or because gender norms were defeated—but because they have both grown as individuals.
Thus, Brave ends up being a more complex (and IMO more interesting) movie than the standard “Rebellious Princess” cliche would allow. In Brave, there are no clear villains; neither Merida nor her mother are wholly in the right, or wholly in the wrong. Contrast this with something like Disney’s Rapunzel, where the mother is basically a glorified plot device, as opposed to a full-fledged character.
How boring. Was there at least some monsters to fight or an overtly evil usurper to slay? What on earth remains as motivation to watch this movie?
The antagonist is the rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage. Vg vf fynva.
There should be a word for forcing other people to have sex (with each other, not yourself). The connotations of calling a forced arranged marriage ‘rapey’ should be offensive to the victims. It is grossly unfair to imply that the wife is a ‘rapist’ just because her husband’s father forced his son to marry her for his family’s political gain. (Or vice-versa.)
I wasn’t specifying who was being rapey. Just that the entire setup was rapey.
That was clear and my reply applies.
(The person to whom the applies is the person who forces the marriage. Rape(y/ist) would also apply if that person was also a participant in the marriage.)
As per my post above, I’d argue that the “rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage” is less of a primary antagonist, and more of a bumbling comic relief character.
Cute rot13. I never would have predicted that in a Pixar animation!
There is an evil monster to fight, of a more literal sort, but it would be a bit of a stretch to call it the primary antagonist.
Upvoted. My thoughts on Brave are over here, but basically Merida is actually a really dark character, and it’s sort of sickening that she gets away with everything she does.
Interesting enough to repeat is my suggestion for a better setting:
Of course, it’s difficult to make a movie glorifying sweatshop labor, whereas princesses are distant enough to be a tame example.
I understand your critique, and I mostly agree with it. I actually would have been even happier if Merida had bitten the bullet and married the winner—but for different reasons. She would have married because she loved her mother and her kingdom, and understood that peace must come at a cost—it would still very much count as a movie with no romantic angle. She would have been like Princess Yue in Avatar, a character I had serious respect for. When Yue was willing to marry Han for duty, and then was willing to fnpevsvpr ure yvsr gb orpbzr gur zbba, that was the first time I said to myself, “Wow, these guys really do break convention.”
Merida would have been a lot more brave to accept the dictates of her society (but for the right reasons), or to find a more substantial compromise than just convincing the other lords to yrg rirelbar zneel sbe ybir. But I still think it was a sweet movie.
I agree that it was a sweet movie, and overall I enjoyed watching it. The above critique is a lot harsher than my overall impression. But when I heard that Pixar was making their first movie with a female lead, I expected a lot out of them and thought they were going to try for something really exceptional in both character and message, and it ended up undershooting my expectations on those counts.
I can sympathize with the extent to which simply having competent important female characters with relatable goals is a huge step forward for a lot of works. Ironically, I don’t think I really grasped how frustrating the lack of them must be until I started encountering works which are supposed to be some sort of wish fulfillment for guys. There are numerous anime and manga, particularly harem series, which are full of female characters graced with various flavors of awesomeness, without any significant male protagonists other than the lead who’s a total loser, and I find it infuriating when the closest thing I have to a proxy in the story is such a lousy and overshadowed character. It wasn’t until I started encountering works like those that it hit me how painful it must be to be hard pressed to find stories that aren’t like that on some level.
One thing that disappointed me about this whole story was that it was the one and only Pixar movie that was set in the past. Pixar has always been about sci fi, not fantasy, and its works have been set in contemporary America (with Magic Realism), alternate universes, or the future. Did “female protagonist” pattern-match so strongly with “rebellious medieval princess” that even Pixar didn’t do anything really unusual with it?
Even though I was happy Merida wasn’t rebelling because of love, it seems like they stuck with the standard old-fashioned feminist story of resisting an arranged marriage, when they could have avoided all of that in a work set in the present or the future, when a woman would have more scope to really be brave.
All in all, it seems like their father-son movie was a lot stronger than their mother-daughter movie.
I don’t think “This Loser Is You” is the right trope for that. Actually, I don’t think TV Tropes has the right trope for that; as best I can tell, harem protagonists are the way they are not because they’re supposed to stand for the audience in a representative sort of way but because they’re designed as a receptacle for the audience to pour their various insecurities into. They can display negative traits, because that’s assumed to make them more sympathetic to viewers that share them. But they can’t display negative traits strong enough to be grounds for actual condemnation, or to define their characters unambiguously; you’ll never see Homer Simpson as a harem lead. And they can’t show positive traits except for a vague agreeableness and whatever supernatural powers the plot requires, because that breaks the pathos. Yes, Tenchi Muyo, that’s you I’m looking at.
More succinctly, we’re all familiar with sex objects, right? Harem anime protagonists are sympathy objects.
I agree that This Loser Is You isn’t quite the right trope. There’s a more recent launch, Loser Protagonist, which doesn’t quite describe it either, but uses the same name as I did when I tried to put the trope which I thought accurately described it through the YKTTW ages ago.
If I understand what you mean by “sympathy objects,” I think we have the same idea in mind. I tend to think of them as Lowest Common Denominator Protagonists, because they lack any sort of virtue or achievement that would alienate them from the most insecure or insipid audience members.
That’s a very fair critique. A few things though:
First, you might want to put that in ROT13 or add a [SPOILER](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_VZewGVtB3pE/S5C8VF3AgJI/AAAAAAAAAYk/5LJdTCRCb8k/eliezer_yudkowskyjpg_small.jpg) tag or something.
Meridia learned to value her relationship with her mother, which I think a lot of kids need to hear going into adolescence. When you put it this way it doesn’t seem nearly as trite as your phrasing makes it sound.
Well yeah, but the answer to “society sucks and how can I fix it” isn’t “oh it sucks for everyone and even more for others, I’ll just sit down and shut up”. (Not that you argue it is.)
From TV Tropes:
This is exactly why I thought Brave was good—it moved away from this trope. It wasn’t “I don’t love this person, I love this other person!”, it was “I don’t have to love/marry someone to be a competent and awesome person”. She was the hero of her own story, and didn’t need anyone else to complete her. That doesn’t have to be true for everyone, but the counterpoint needs to be more present in society.
And I said it ranked up there. Not that it passed Mulan. :) And it gets that honor by being literally one of the two movies I can think of that has a positive message in this respect. Although I will concede that I’m not very familiar with a particularly high number of kids movies.
I edited my comment to rot13 the ending spoilers; I left in the stuff that’s more or less advertised as the premise of the movie. You might want to edit your reply so that it doesn’t quote the uncyphered text.
I think that’s a valuable lesson, but I felt like Brave’s presentation of it suffered for the fact that Merida and her mother really only reconcile after Merida essentially gets her way about everything. Teenagers who feel aggrieved in their relationships with their parents and think that they’re subject to pointless unfairness are likely to come away with the lesson “I could get along so much better with my parents if they’d stop being pointlessly unfair to me!” rather than “Maybe I should be more open to the idea that my parents have legitimate reasons for not being accommodating of all my wishes, and be prepared to cut them some slack.”
A more well rounded version of the movie’s approximate message might have been something like “Some burdensome social expectations and life restrictions have good reasons behind them and others don’t, learn to distinguish between them so you can focus your effort on solving the right ones.” But instead, it came off more like “Kids, you should love and appreciate your parents, at least when you work past their inclination to arbitrarily oppress you.”
Now that I think about it, very few movies or TV shows actually teach that lesson. There are plenty of works of fiction that portray the whiney teenager in a negative light, and there are plenty that portray the unreasonable parent in a negative light, but nothing seems to change. It all plays out with the boring inevitability of a Greek tragedy.