Is Feminism Changing For The Worse? - Bryan Caplan - #708

Bryan Caplan is an economist at George Mason University and author. Bryan wrote a letter to his young daughter encouraging her to not become a feminist. Which begs the question, why would a father not want this? In what ways are women being taken advantage of by an ideology, and how might Bryan be wrong? Expect to learn what trade offs feminism is making at the moment and why they're dangerous, why feminism does not like traditionally feminine roles, why there is so much of a lack of individual agency in the modern world, where the recent trend of demonising having children came from, why more people should not conform, how to think for yourself and much more... Timestamps: (00:00) Bryan’s Definition of Feminism (05:56) Why is Feminism So Popular Still? (13:48) Promoting Women’s Issues Without Feminism (18:02) Is Feminism Hurting Women? (22:22) Is Feminism Equal to the Manosphere? (30:45) Humiliating Sexual Harassment Training (34:50) Moving From Self-Pity to High Agency (45:30) Women Struggling to Find Mature Men (49:04) The Demonisation of Having Kids (57:25) Lying For Social Desirability (1:06:23) Be Careful of Which Experts You Trust (1:11:50) Where to Find Bryan Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: This Is How To Master Your Life - David Goggins - #577: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠⁠ How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs - Dr Jordan Peterson - #712: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠⁠ The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain - Dr Andrew Huberman - #700: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What is feminism, in your opinion?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Great question. I don't want to say what it is in my opinion. What I want to say, rather, is how do we actually use the word? Anyone can just make up a new definition. What I really wanted to think about was, let's listen to other people and see what definition fits actual usage. And the definition that I offer is this one: feminism is the view that our society generally treats men more fairly than women. Feminism is the view that our society generally treats men more fairly than women. If you look at official definitions, they will say things like, it's just the view that men and women should be treated equally. What I point out in my essays, we got public opinion data where we asked a whole lot of people, and guess what? Almost everyone who says they're not a feminist still thinks that men and women should be treated equally, so that cannot possibly

• 0:49Speaker 01

  be the actual definition. It's more of an argumentative definition, like calling your newspaper truth, and then if someone disagrees with you, say, oh, you're against truth.

• 0:59Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay, so it's a lexical Brazilian jiu-jitsu?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  Right, I understand. Why are you not a fan of it? You wrote a book for your 10-year-old daughter called Don't Be a Feminist.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  That is correct. I mean, honestly, it just comes down to the empirics. Is it really true that our society generally treats men more fairly than women? What I did in that essay, just go over all of the main complaints that people have to this effect, and try to see, does the evidence really hold up? I begin by saying, look, you can't just say that someone's treated unfairly because their performance is unequal. By that standard, I've been treated unfairly by the Olympics because I don't have any medals. What you really need to do is to go and compare someone's performance to the treatment, or some of the treatment they've gotten to the performance. Here, as an economist, the natural thing to start with is with earnings and career success. There's been a lot of work on this and the standard punchline is it's very easy to

• 1:54Speaker 01

  explain the gender gap in career success by differences in things like the number of hours that men and women work, the majors that they select in college, just the unpleasantness of the jobs. So if we go through some fairly standard differences and of course, as well as just your priorities in life, is the job the top priority in your life or there are other things that you're balancing? And when you put all that together, you can very easily statistically explain almost all of the difference in earnings between men and women. So that's one that I talk about quite a bit. Then I also go over things like complaints about inequities in dating, right? This is where I point out there is a very strong

• 2:37Speaker 01

  tendency among feminists to go and compare the average woman to the most successful men, which is not really a sensible comparison.

• 2:45Chris Williamson?

  What are they comparing? Body count?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Ah, no, you know, things more like, you know, how good is the romantic life of the very most successful men versus the very most successful women? Right? So if you compare like the lives of a Hollywood actor to a Hollywood actress and say now the Hollywood actors have it better, right? No, no, there's no female, you know, no, no actress is like Leonardo DiCaprio.

• 3:06Chris Williamson?

  Right. With regards to what? The mating success?

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Yes. And you know, things like mating success or let's see, of course, also in jobs is saying like a certain percentage of the CEOs are men or larger than 50% percentage of CEOs are men. And what I say is, look, if we're going to do that, we need to compare both the top and the bottom. And there again, there is overwhelming evidence that men are overrepresented at the bottom as well as the top. Men are much more likely to be in prison and much more likely to commit suicide, much more likely to be homeless, much more likely to be in cells, to have never been on a date. So you put all this together and it's like, it's not in any sense that men in general are treated more fairly than women in general. Rather, what we have is that there is a greater spread, which again, if anything, based upon normal ideas of insurance, the group that has the smaller spread is the advantage group.

• 3:56Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you say smaller spread and bigger spread?

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Ah, well, for things like you are less likely to be far from average. So for example, high spread would be a group that has a lot of billionaires and a lot of homeless people. Men, a low spread would be a group that has fewer billionaires and fewer homeless people, which would be women. Right? Or similarly, you could go and look at the top of achievement and say, men are overrepresented in Nobel prizes, in being bestselling authors, right? Like in being famous composers. That's all true. So while we're at it, how about we go and take a look to see whether men are also overrepresented among homeless, among suicides, among the unemployed. You know, so and let's see, actually, the last one's a little more complicated.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  But the other ones are all solid examples where we can see, wait a second, it looks like men are actually on those measures. They're overrepresented among those doing worst.

• 4:47Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to guess that if you did a genie, genie coefficient for men, you would have much higher inequality. On pick whatever outcome it is that you want, lifespan, health span, happiness, mental IQ, income, body count.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So body count is probably the main exception because there are prostitutes who just have enormous numbers of partners. So they, they probably increase the inequality for women.

• 5:15Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Not all of your other ones, I think, very good. And by the way, you know, like just what I'm doing is what I think everyone should be doing on these issues, which is not just going and saying, I have a philosophy and it applies in all cases. It's like, let's think about the individual facts of the individual cases. And maybe your theory will work eight times out of 10, someone who thinks the theory works a thousand times out of a thousand. It's like, yeah, that's doesn't sound like anything that happens to any actual theory about human behavior. It's more like someone who's so dogmatic and fanatical in their sense of their own omniscience that all facts get twisted to fit the theory.

• 5:54Chris Williamson?

  Why is it the case in your opinion, then, that feminism is still such a pervasive cultural meme? If your assessment of it is correct, which is that the lack of fairness doesn't seem to be affecting women in the way that it's proposed.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Right. That is a great question. I mean, your wording makes it sound sort of like feminism is on the decline, but it's still lingering, whereas I'd say it's probably at least near its all-time peak. In terms of what's going on, here is my story. I think there is actually very general human tendency to care more about female well-being and especially female suffering. I don't think that this is unique to the modern world of Russian countries. I think that you can read almost anything written by human beings from almost any period, and you'll see this norm. You can go and read ancient books like the Bible. And if you want to show that someone's really bad, you show them murdering women. Right? Same thing in mythology. This is just

• 6:52Speaker 01

  a general human attitude that murdering men is like, well, you know, maybe had it coming. But murdering women, that is something that it is just a deeply rooted feeling in human nature that is especially horrible. And what I think has happened in the modern world is that we start with these very standard human feelings that I think are indeed deeply rooted in human nature and evolution. And then it becomes a philosophy. And once you make something a philosophy, then you take an attitude which can be balanced against other attitudes, or it can just be hypocrisy, and it doesn't get that bad as it gets implemented. But once it becomes a philosophy, then there's a demand for consistency. And once there's a demand for

• 7:32Speaker 01

  consistency, then you start overruling everything else that actually comes down on the other side, and also treating doubt and questions as sin. And that is, I think, what really explains the success of feminism, is that it codifies human feelings that have always been around, but nevertheless have been held inconsistently and hypocritically before, which my view is, given that the philosophy is wrong, hypocrisy and inconsistency is an improvement over consistency and

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Single-minded devotion.

• 8:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I it's an interesting point. I certainly agree, based on all of the data that I've seen, plus just my intuitive sense of myself, people seem to have an awful lot more sympathy for women falling behind, despite the fact that men, on average, seem to be falling further behind. There's studies that have been done, people will donate way more if they find out that it's an all-women's shelter than if it's an all-men's shelter.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yes, women are wonderful effect.

• 8:31Chris Williamson?

  Yes, news stories that proclaim the successes of women seem to be treated more favorably than ones that proclaim the successes of men. There's this gamma bias that Dr. John Barry's identified, which you may be familiar with.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  I mean, when are there ever stories about successful men? I mean, unless it's like a homeless guy getting a job, but it's very hard to even picture what these studies, what this, these stories are. I can't remember.

• 8:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so two, two things that I think are interesting here. First one being, I don't disagree that if you were to find out that women had been murdered throughout history, you would have gone, oh, my God, like, this is an aberration, whereas a sort of male mortality is just a byproduct of existence. That being said, women being sexually assaulted by some warring tribe, you know, I learned about the cultural history of how relationships have evolved from a sort of culturally memetic standpoint. And women have basically been property. They've been property of their kin. They've been property of their family. They've been property of their husbands for a very long time. So I would agree that out on the

• 9:36Chris Williamson?

  extremes for women, there are, it's treated as an aberration, but there's certainly a lot of mistreatment, which has just been, ah, it's a weasy, it's a woozy, it's a, we're the new tribe, we're taking over the old one. So there's, there's some, again, it's the not 1,000 times out of 1,000 thing.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, there I would point out that the usual story is we first murder all the men and then we enslave the women, which is terrible, but still it's like, well, which one you, which one would you rather be? Yeah, well, I'd rather be enslaved than murdered, probably.

• 10:06Chris Williamson?

  Depends who you're enslaved by.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Yes, does that there is a little bit of that, although there's also, because there are suicide opportunities in case it turns out to be worse. Definitely my preference is enslave me first and then I will. Be looking for my way out if it turns out to be more horrible than death itself.

• 10:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  I mean, on the, on the question of the legal treatment of women, and of course, that a lot of the, most of this is in the pre-modern period where we just don't have a lot of good data. I mean, there's the legal doctrine where I think that at least often you are correct. Although even there, it's a little complicated, things like under Roman law, father is just legally entitled to murder any of his children regardless of their gender.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Now, once you hear that, it's like, well, but they weren't actually doing it. Like, yeah, I think that's true. I think it is extremely unusual as Darwin would predict for someone to murder their own children, even when it's totally legal. But then I think you do have to look at, well, what's the fact of the matter? Is it really true that in a society where women were legally considered to be the property of the father? That he actually, that fathers actually did often dispose of their daughters as if they were sheep? Or rather, is it like they, rather, were they normal human beings where whatever the law says, your daughter says, I don't want to marry him, daddy. And he's like, oh, well, I couldn't possibly say no to her. She was crying. I think that, again, there are human universals and while there are, of course, cruel people who will do terrible things if the law allows it.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Much more common for the emotions that we take for granted today to have always existed and will always.

• 11:32Chris Williamson?

  Like, like whining, the emotion of, of whining and complaining.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you think that started after the, you pair out, like, because the law changed.

• 11:42Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  So, you know, like, like, of course, people, people have always been doing these kinds of things. And, and again, just the way that if you read the literature of, of earlier periods, you'll see that it does not seem like women are living in fear of their fathers going and doing things to them because, yeah, evolution, fathers love their children, they love their daughters, they love their sons. And then on, you know, on top of this is this is ba- very basic human feeling that women's suffering is especially important.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  So, you know, like my favorite example of this that I mentioned was the Hillary Clinton quote about how women are the biggest losers in war because they lose fathers and sons. It's like, um, hmm, yeah, don't the fathers and sons lose more because they're dead?

• 12:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Why this, uh, are you familiar with gamma bias? Have you heard this before?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Let's see. Maybe under, so is it like, like not caring much about the lowest status people? Or what is it?

• 12:34Chris Williamson?

  It's specifically men. So Dr. John Barry Center for Male Psychology came up with this. It's really interesting insight. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. If there is a story which is pro female, it will sex the person. If it's pro male, it will de-sex it. If it's anti male, it will sex the person. If it's anti female, it will de-sex it.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Ah, yes.

• 12:55Chris Williamson?

  So you end up with a skew. So for instance.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  So why is it called the gamma?

• 13:00Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. You'd have to ask him. He's been on the show and I'm pretty sure I did. I feel like there's other biases that come before it. And this, this happens to be there because it's in order. I'm not sure. Anyway.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

• 13:11Chris Williamson?

  So for instance, Sarah Everard was this young woman walking through a park in the UK. She was killed by a male police officer. Absolutely terrible, right? And, and there was a lot of protests about women don't feel safe in these streets. It was a flashpoint for, for sort of sex relations. One week later, a man drowned, jumping into the River Thames to save a woman who had gone in. The story essentially wasn't covered. And when it was covered, his sex wasn't revealed. It was a Londoner jumps in to save a person from drowning, or woman from drowning, or something like that. So you do get this skew. But okay, I mean, what would be, in your opinion? It, it sounds like at least part of the problem, feminism has a branding problem, right?

• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  That it's coming in with an awful lot of baggage, memetically, culturally. What, given the fact that there are still causes that women need to have support for, even in the modern world? What would be your proposal for a sanitized, new version of something that could talk about women's issues?

• 14:17Speaker 01

  I mean, honestly, I think I would say that step one is just to get the facts and find out whether it's even true that women are doing especially badly. And if that is, if the opposite is true, then it's like, well, seems like we should be focused on men.

• 14:30Chris Williamson?

  But you, what is it, you can pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. There will be certain areas in which we would want to focus on. For instance, I know that you've got some views on circumcision. I think I align pretty much with your views on that. Like, that's a very particular wing of male disadvantage, right? Looking at, is there a way that we can get women to become mothers and then get them back into the workforce? That's like a very specific element of this. So would you try and make everything quite sort of disparate and have, okay, we're going to have an employment for mothers department? And we're going to have a, we need to not circumcise our children department?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Hmm, I mean, that pat your head and rub your belly thing is quite striking because it's, of course, a lot of people can't do that. What I would say is that there's always priorities. And anytime that you say that my issue is super important, you are implicitly actually saying that the other issues are, at least I should go and get some of the attention that other issues are getting. Usually you're a little hazy about what issues you want to de-emphasize. But yeah, I do think that there are actually good reasons, once you realize that a problem is not a big deal, not to go and emphasize it and not to go and prioritize it. You've probably heard of effective altruism. It's this idea that philanthropy should be based upon, first of all, how big is the problem? Second of all, how much can we do about it?

• 15:50Speaker 01

  And what's the actual payoff that we get? So I would say that would be the general guide. I mean, I do think that not focusing on gender is at least a good presumption because it is the kind of thing that promotes the two negative emotions that I'm warning my daughter about in the essay, which first of all, antipathy of just being angry at a bunch of other people who really are not even responsible, or at least most of them are not. And then self pity of just feeling like a victim. So I say like, you don't want to have a philosophy that encourages antipathy or self pity. Human nature already naturally does way too much of both of these. It is better to go and try to free yourself of antipathy and self pity than it is to foster them or to create a whole philosophy that justifies them.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Honestly, I think that there are a number of major issues that the view that there is a problem is just false. So like the gender pay gap, I just think that it is false to say that women are being mistreated by labor markets. So the best thing would be if there is, first of all, a recognition of this fact. Second of all, an apology for making a lot of false accusations. And then we just, we're just done with it. We move on. So labor markets are actually very fair. People are getting paid based upon their performance. If you have different preferences, the market lets you satisfy those. Be grateful and stop the complaining. And if you say, well, I personally am being mistreated, like, well, then that's, you know, mostly like, like, you know, life is not perfectly fair, but it's not an issue primarily of, or even according to the evidence, you know, of being a woman, it's just that

• 17:20Speaker 01

  life's unfair.

• 17:22Chris Williamson?

  Right. So you would deal with that on a case by case basis?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Yes. And just say, or, and again, of course, if an individual says I'm being treated unfairly, my normal advice is, hmm, like, is the person you're dealing with at all open to reason? It's like, well, no, if they were, we already talked about it. Like, well, you probably need to get away from that person, right? Or unless there's some other more, you know, person above that person that's open to reason. But I mean, this is just like practical guidance for living life. You can't expect that other people are going to be fair to you overall. And you need to be, on the one hand, looking out for yourself, but also not creating a big story about how life is not fair to you or to your kind, when the evidence doesn't back that up.

• 18:01Chris Williamson?

  What do you think are the trade offs that feminism is making at the moment? Because what is it? It seems to me like women aren't necessarily benefiting from feminism in the way that they might think, but are they being hurt by it?

• 18:18Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I mean, and in a way, it all it it's sort of reinforces my point that we especially care about women's suffering. The arguments against feminism that most acceptable are the ones where we say it's actually hurting women, right? Those are the ones like, oh, my God, that's terrible.

• 18:33Chris Williamson?

  The most pro feminist argument is the anti feminist argument.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Yes. In terms of what's going on. So I think at the individual level, the main issue is just promoting negative attitudes of antipathy and self pity. What I tell my daughter is like, it is just not true that men in general are out to get you or won't like you. My advice is, if you want to do well in the world, go and make as many friends as you can, especially friends with people that are positioned to go and help you. And the way that you make friends is by being friendly to them and being and not having and having a positive and constructive attitude. So and I say like, antipathy gets in the way of that. Antipathy just makes your default. Oh, this person is going to treat me badly. This person is going to be unreasonable

• 19:21Speaker 01

  or unfair. So there's that. And then same thing with the self pity. Like, you know, self pity is really baked into human nature. Like, you never need to encourage it. There's just so much self pity. Poor me. I don't have the latest iPhone. It's totally human nature to feel that way. So like, really, what you need to focus on is everything that you've got, all your opportunities, be grateful for what you have. And this is the attitude of a of a person that is going to be successful. So yeah, those are the main issues in terms of the individual woman. I'd say that there's this other big effect of just mistreating men, right? Which, again, is not going like, I said, wait, well, mistreating men, well, who cares about them? Like, that's the attitude that I'm saying is a terrible attitude. It's

• 20:03Speaker 01

  bad to be unjust to men. You should not be unjust to anyone. The fact that they're men doesn't mean that it's okay and that whatever happens to them, too bad. Like, this is the payback for 2,000 years of them mistreating us. It's like, well, was that true either?

• 20:18Speaker 01

  So there's that. In terms of sort of like collective harm, there is a lot of work on things like discrimination law saying that if people are worried that you're going to sue them, this is a reason for them to not hire you in the first place. I think that there's definitely something going on there and it's something to consider. In terms of whether discrimination law in general benefits women, though, on balance, it still might, but it's a benefit that is based upon a deep injustice.

• 20:44Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Okay. Yeah. So the widespread litigious nature of women, especially being super vigilant for potential mistreatment in the workplace, could cause some employers to look at a woman and think, she looks like she's got a good solicitor. Let's not hire her in case something occurs down the line. Yeah, I mean, I know.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, so probably one of the best examples where I think it is true that women were hurt by Me Too specifically, is there's a couple of papers showing that mentorship crashed after Me Too.

• 21:18Chris Williamson?

  Yep, I've seen.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  And that is obviously beneficial to women to go and get extra training from someone. But strikingly, the main feminist response to this was, we will not tolerate this reaction. We will, we will, it is totally ridiculous to go and penalize us because of this irrational fear that you might get sued. And we just need to go and tell men that this is not acceptable. And yeah, well, this is a situation where they're going to totally agree and then probably keep doing what is.

• 21:48Chris Williamson?

  Not hire you in any case.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Or not men. Hiring is one where it's formal and so it's easier to litigate. But mentorship is informal and anything informal is very hard to litigate unless you're going to have a system that just convicts people on an accusation, which I think is a lot of what feminists want to do.

• 22:07Chris Williamson?

  So what I'm feeling here is.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  On average, of course, there is, I emphasize.

• 22:13Chris Williamson?

  Everything is on average. That's fine. The entire podcast is on average.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Excellent.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  What I'm feeling here is an echo. I'm sensing the equivalency on the male side of the spectrum, which I'm sure that you've seen movements like the Black Pill movement, incel ideology, stuff like that. I have a number of friends that are very deep into the research with this. And I do think that there's way less misogyny in these groups than you might think. The actual most misogynistic men are the ultra-high-performing chads, not the ones that are the sort of forgotten monster-energy-marinated incels. But there is an awful lot of self-pity. There is an awful lot of antipathy within these groups

• 22:58Chris Williamson?

  toward the opposite sex. So this isn't necessarily a feminist quirk. This is a natural human response that can then be kind of perpetuated and spun up once you get into a group that has an out-group.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. So I have been actually doing compare and contrast, reading incel, the incel wiki, and then I think the femme geek wiki. There's a lot of similarity between them. I mean, I've noticed that in arguing with feminists, they often say, Brian, you're just repeating incel talking points. I'm like, no. I am saying some things that they say that are true while not actually adopting the whole philosophy, which I agree is a very destructive one of antipathy and self-pity. What I would say is that the incels that you so despise, they really are the marriage of you. And I think of myself as being someone who's just trying to fairly arbitrate between two unreasonable groups. And of course, to

• 23:59Speaker 01

  go and say that women on balance are not treated less fairly than men does not mean that there aren't any specific female complaints that are true. Of course, there are. But also, there are some specific male complaints that are true. And then, like, of course, like, the more you read them, the more you realize, well, look, people just need to tolerate some level of unfairness in society, because otherwise, people will barely be able to breathe. So, yeah, and that goes both ways.

• 24:24Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember Scott Aronson's description of his experience? Probably 15 years old now, maybe 10 years old, something like that, that blog post? Could you explain for the people who aren't familiar with this? And then Scott Alexander's untitled blog post after that? Could you give? I think this is really instructive.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Yep. For the record, so I'm good friends with Scott Aronson. I've hung out with him a lot in Texas, but I also have read the pieces. So I will claim to have some inside knowledge of the situation, although filtered through his perspective, but I trust Scott. I trust both Scots, but I especially trust Scott Aronson, who I know well personally. So Scott Aronson did a piece for his blog, Shuttle Optimized, where he, and this is barely even a caricature of it. He said, look, I'm, I 98% agree with feminism. Like, I'm so unboard, I care so much, but I just want to say one thing, which is that when I was a teenager, I was almost suicidal, or really I was suicidal because I read a lot of feminist writings, and I just felt like any thought I had about women was wrong,

• 25:25Speaker 01

  any attempt to go and talk to them, any attempt to go and just have some desperate, hopeless effort to go and find a girlfriend was wrong, thought that anything that I might do or say would be harassment. And eventually I learned better. But anyway, it'd be nice if in the midst of fighting actual injustice against women, you could just go and show a little bit of sympathy, a little bit of understanding for shy male nerds like myself, especially when they're young, and they just don't have much experience, and they don't understand what's going on. And then the feminist reaction to this was generally hysterical, calling him a rapist, or an incipient rapist. Entitled. Yes, yes, entitled. Like, you know, you think that you have a right to sex. And it's like,

• 26:10Speaker 01

  he didn't say any of those things. Rather, what he said is, you know, I pledge 98%, you know, 98% of what you say is true, and I just have a few slight doubts, and you just be a little bit nicer. That's it. And for that, like, the reaction was so absurd and insane. And it is the one where you just look at that and you say, like, you know, this is a cult of fanatics he's talking about. I did get a chance actually to tell Scott, like, Did that really make you rethink that whole 98% thing? I'm not going to repeat Scott's answer, but I definitely did hassle about that. How about we go down more to like 5% from 98? Could we do that?

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  Look, so here's, here's the thing that I think is a, the, the inevitable ping pong game that occurs happening. And I saw this with Melissa Carney, who came on the podcast recently. She wrote a book called, uh, The Two Parent Privilege. How America stopped getting married and started falling behind, something like that. She is a policy wonk from Washington DC. And I tried in the episode to, uh, push her beyond just what is the data telling us to? What is the implication? And maybe even what is the cause of this? Like, what's the, give me the mechanism. Why is it the case? What is happening developmentally amongst the children? And she was very tentative, right? You know, she's written this big book about things, but she very much kind of defined the rules of play of where, where she wasn't going to get out over her skis with regards to this.

• 27:35Chris Williamson?

  And I was like, hmm, that's like a, I wish that she'd just bro science to way through stuff because it's funny. But what she did was she decided, I'm going to hold myself within this sort of, uh, within my realm of expertise. And I was like, that's a, a pretty good indication of somebody that's acting in good faith with a lot of expert, like, uh, and, and trying to be really, really accurate with what they say. Since she's released it, she has been slammed online, absolutely slammed. And what I've seen, although I don't think that this is going to happen to her. I've seen somebody who is probably on a political compass test center left. Certainly somebody who wrote a book to try and reduce inequality between class groups, right? This is exactly exacerbating the precise inequality that we don't want to have happen and so on and so forth.

• 28:20Chris Williamson?

  And it was written as far as I can see with a good amount of compassion. But I'm seeing the exact mechanism by which many people become radicalized to one side or another side of some sort of aisle. Because they think, well, I mean, if I guess the only people that are ever going to listen to me about the woes that I have about the justified or sometimes unjustified antipathy or self pity that I've got. Well, I like, I'm going to go with the group that accepts me, accepts me. I'm not going to keep on, you know, trying to work. Here's 98% of my entire world going toward you. Group that says that you despise me and I'm an entitled moron incel or something like that.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Rapist.

• 28:58Chris Williamson?

  Rapist.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  I'm a rapist for really, a rapist in his heart. It's like straight out of the New Testament.

• 29:04Chris Williamson?

  Original sin. So yeah, just my point being that, you know, I see here, especially the antipathy, it creates this ever escalating cycle, right, that spins up and up and up. And people become more virulent in their distaste and their lack of ability to see the other side's issue. And this is how you have, you know, two groups of people largely just talking past each other.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, I always think about what Scott Alexander calls the gray tribe. And this is the, which he admits it's still a tribe, but it's a tribe with different norms and better norms that's trying to not actually fall into being either of the other, either the blue tribe or the red tribe, as we call them confusingly here in the US. So every other country in the world, red equals left, but somehow in the US, red equals right.

• 29:47Chris Williamson?

  Wrong way around.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yes. And then blue, I don't know the.

• 29:50Chris Williamson?

  Like the side of the road that you drive on, you got it the wrong way around.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yes, but where, I think like we're at least close to the only country that has this color scheme. But, uh, but anyway, uh, yeah, so that's, you base, quite a lot of sense. I mean, you're thinking we're mentioning that, you know, the Scott Aronson reaction to this was just to write a piece, defend, or excuse me, the Scott Alexander reaction was to write a piece standing up for Scott Aronson and saying, yes, like there is this group of shy male nerds who want to talk to women. They're not very good at it. Doesn't mean that they have any horrible, any, anything, any horrible plans. Like they're very, usually very nice people. It's just that they don't really know how to talk to women. And the only way to learn is to try it and not be very good at it at first. So can't you go and cut them some slack, which I think is totally reasonable point.

• 30:40Chris Williamson?

  You had an idea about why we all get accused of being pickpockets. What was that?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Right. This was specifically a reference to the humiliation of mandatory

• 30:53Speaker 01

  training that happens here at universities a lot. Uh, so, so, you know, like imagine if there was some kind of mandatory pickpocket training where they bring in all the workers and they say, pickpocketing is wrong. Don't pickpocket others. Pickpocketing others means reaching into their pockets without permission and taking their stuff and then keeping it. Don't be a pickpocket. All right. And it's like, okay. Um, why are you telling me this though? Like, I know all this already. This is all quite obvious. And. And yet, to me, this is very much what most sensitivity training is like, what most of the training about, you know, like internet security is like, they're telling you a bunch of totally obvious stuff. And even why? Well, a lot of it is, it really just seems to be

• 31:38Speaker 01

  to humiliate you to say, look, we are going to talk to you like children and you have to sit there and suck it up. Tough luck. Some of it is for legal purposes where if they get sued, they can say, we told them not to do it. Right? As if the main reason people pickpocket is they don't, they, no one ever told them not to do it, or they don't understand what would constitute it. Although another part of it is ratcheting up the definition so that almost anything counts as pickpocketing, where it's like, well, you looked at what was in someone's pocket without their consent. That's a kind of pickpocketing. So that's also what's going on. And once you have your training set up, they do often start just having higher and higher standards. Now, I say this just to go and make fun of various training that you'll see, especially on college campuses

• 32:20Speaker 01

  about sexual harassment. It's like, don't sleep with your students. Oh, I didn't know we weren't supposed to do that. Oh, thank you. Like, come on. Like, we all know this. Right? You know, the reason why people are doing it isn't because they aren't aware of the rules. The reason they're doing it is because they don't like the rules and the rules are stopping them from doing what they want. So, again, if it really an issue of something that's really confusing, be a different story. So maybe actually, the internet security, at least you might think that that's more complicated. Although honestly, having gone through internet security training, I'll say that the stuff they train you on is so basic, because honestly, they need to make a test that can be passed by the

• 33:01Speaker 01

  lowest IQ person in the organization. And therefore, it can't really be hard, because otherwise, they'd have to fire people over failing their IT test, right? Right? Training over, over, you don't want to do that.

• 33:12Chris Williamson?

  So one of the things that we're both fans of is agency, trying to give people a sense of personal agency, individual sovereignty. It seems to me, and I hadn't thought of these two words before, but it seems like antipathy and pity are, yeah, self pity, a pity for others, antipathy and self pity are probably about as close to solvent for agency as possible. Like, it will dissolve your ability to feel like a, an agentic individual.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. That's a great point. I mean, yeah, because like, what I like to tell people is, imagine a person who has the absolute maximum reason to feel antipathy and self pity. Like someone who was stabbed in the back and now they're paralyzed and they know the person who did it, you know, like, I don't know, it was like your, your ex-wife stabbed you in the back. Now you're paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of your life. So you have every reason to hate this person, every reason to feel sorry for yourself. And the question is, if you wanted to help this person, would you go to them and say, be full of antipathy, be full of self pity? Of course not. You'd be trying to go and come up with some story to make them feel better. And it's like, well, okay, I get like, I

• 34:23Speaker 01

  understand why you would be overwhelmed with antipathy and self pity, but you gotta get past that because if you're going to have any enjoyment out of life, if you're going to be able to salvage any part of what you're hoping for, you're going to have to go and focus on what you can do and what you can have now. And just being angry at the, at the woman who did this to you and feeling sorry for, for poor you, though completely justified, is totally unconstructive.

• 34:49Chris Williamson?

  What would you say then, given that we have an incredibly broad number of people who are wallowing in a low agency existence? What's your prescription philosophically or tactically or strategically for getting someone from antipathy and self pity into agency?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  The movie, What About Bob? Actually, the lead psychologist in it has a book called Baby Steps about how someone who has problems needs to give up on the idea of solving them all overnight and instead just try to take small little steps of improvement. The character is mock worthy in the movie, but I think it's totally sensible. If a person is having trouble with life, don't say fix everything overnight. Just say, all right, look, let's take some small steps and move from there. So that's what I would be in by doing. I mean, in terms of philosophy, I'd say that philosophically, it's easier to go and just realize a philosophy is wrong than to get rid of all the negative negativity that the philosophy has inspired. Because you know, you know, just the very fact that you decide the philosophy is incorrect

• 35:51Speaker 01

  doesn't mean you won't, you know, you'll stop feeling bad about the things the philosophy taught you to feel bad about. Uh, but still, I would, I would say, all right, well, just, next time that you are feeling bad about this, remember like, there's a philosophy that originally got me feeling bad about this. The philosophy is wrong. So now we try to go and rethink the situation from a different point of view. I would say that as well. I mean, also, I honestly, I would just say, don't hang out. Well, like another good baby step is hang out more with people who, who do not feel so much sympathy and self pity, so that your new peer group is encouraging you to improve instead of holding you back.

• 36:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think, uh, the story that you tell yourself about why you're feeling bad, and what does it mean that I feel bad? And what is the story that I tell myself about that? This kind of recursive narrative game that you play with yourself probably counts for a, a, a big chunk of the discontent a, a, and the pain that you feel, right? Yeah, you have the situation, but then you have these layers of guilt and shame and doubt and self esteem or lack thereof that you layer on top. And I think that is where the philosophical worldview comes in quite importantly, like i- is this happening to me? Did I get to choose this? You know, there's a, a study which I'm sure you've seen about two rats are in, uh,

• 37:11Chris Williamson?

  wheels. One rat runs and when it runs, the other rat has to run. The one rat that runs gets all of the benefits from exercise and the rat that has to run gets all of the downsides from stress. The point being that

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Don't know it.

• 37:24Chris Williamson?

  Being able to take your sense of control, your locus of control being internal is a very, very large part of, of life and, uh,

• 37:35Speaker 01

  I mean, what's interesting about that to me is that I actually have a moderate locus control because I just think it's true that luck is important in life.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  I, you know, so I realized that it would probably be psychologically better for me to have the false belief that there's no luck, but I just think that's such an insane view that I'm not going to so blind myself to the fact, well, you kind of got lucky making this friend at that right now, at that time. And it's, you know, you could imagine.

• 37:59Chris Williamson?

  You're hoisted by your own rationality.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So, but you know, like it's also like, you just be really positive about the things that you can change, focus on those. You don't need to tell yourself a big lie in order to motivate yourself to say, look, there's a lot of stuff that's in my power and I'm going to do that stuff. This does remind me of one of my favorite movies. I hope this isn't giving away, giving away in spoilers, but it's so obscure that I just doubt that anyone would watch it anyway. But it's called the upside of anger and the basic plot. And have you ever seen, have you seen it by any chance?

• 38:28Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Uh, the basic plot is that there is a dad of, you know, there's a family, there's a mom, a dad, and I think it's four daughters and the dad runs off with the secretary and just disappears and abandons the entire family. And the mom becomes a terrible, raging alcoholic and she just hates the world. She's so mad. And then there's the interaction between her and the daughters and on and on. And then at the end of the movie, they discover that it is not true. The father ran away or abandoned them. The father just fell into a ditch and died. And, and he had, and nothing to do with the secretary or anything else. And then you just realize, wow, you learn a fact and then you suddenly realize all this, these, this anger that I had is just wrong, just predicated on a totally false story of the

• 39:13Speaker 01

  world. And in watching the movie, you can almost instantly see people saying like, I don't feel angry anymore because my anger was based upon a story that is false. Now, I don't think that just abandoning a whole philosophy of life is going to make it quite as easy to feel good as that one very particular sense of betrayal. But, you know, like really in the story, it was very psychologically credible that the anger just gets replaced with a sense of horrible guilt that how could I have so wrongly judged this person who actually was loyal to his family the whole time and had an accident?

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  I swear this makes sense in my mind. Let's see if it makes sense in public. I went to dinner with RFK Junior about three months ago when he was in Austin. There was a bunch of different people there, lots of interesting people. One of them was Tim Kennedy, who's a Green Beret. You might know, he lives in Austin. He does a sort of self-defense thing called sheepdog response. Tim Kennedy was open carrying, as he does, because that's, that's, he's an ex-

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Wait, did you say, did you say Tim Kennedy?

• 40:16Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  So, so wait, is he, is he also a Kennedy?

• 40:19Chris Williamson?

  Actually, different, different Kennedy.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay. I was getting confused by the story.

• 40:24Chris Williamson?

  UFC fighter, Green Beret.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Yes, but unrelated to the Kennedy family.

• 40:28Chris Williamson?

  Precisely correct. All of RFK Junior's security was outside. He had some staff in with him, but it was a lady PR person and maybe an assistant of some kind and some other stuff. He had no security inside, tons outside, right, but no security inside. And I would remember looking at the gun on Tim's hip and thinking, if he pulled that gun out now and shot RFK Junior in the head, his entire career would be gone back over with a tooth comb to work out exactly the moment when he became a Russian sleeper agent. Oh, it was that UFC fight that they did in Abu Dhabi when secretly the Saudi prince met him backstage and that was when they changed him. And every podcast he's ever done would be reanalyzed bit by bit.

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  He did this series called Finding Hitler, Searching for Hitler or whatever. Oh, the, the reason he did that was to get into Argentina because that's where they've got. And what I realized was, like, individual actions can cause retroactively for the entire story to be rechanged. It's almost like the same as what you're talking about, right? That his entire life would have been looked at in a different manner. So, yeah, I totally see how that's the case. One of the things, I guess, to just round out this sort of agency part that I think would be interesting to find out from you is, if somebody is or somebody has a friend that is struggling with the self pity and the antipathy and the externalized locus of control, overly externalized locus of control, what, have you found anything that is a good salve for that? That can kind of start to give people a little bit of perspective?

• 41:57Chris Williamson?

  Like, you can enact change in your life. There are things that you can do. This isn't just happening to you. Is there anything philosophically that you find yourself relying on? If you end up getting too close to antipathy and self pity?

• 42:10Speaker 01

  I think much more often about how to make people feel happier with their lives than how to raise their locus of control. I so normally what I tell them is, look, the most important cause of human happiness or unhappiness is whether you're spending a lot of time with people's company you enjoy. Now that itself comes down to locus of control. Like, well, I I am with I I am stuck with people's company. I don't enjoy. And I said, well, like, you're not really stuck with them. Like, you may say you're stuck with them, but you could go and try, you know, like, you know, like, go through your mental rolodex of people who already know. Aren't there some people that you like more that you don't spend much time with? And could you try to spend more time with them? Some people that you like less, and you could just turn down the dial a bit. You don't need to start purging your grandma, because she has a big mouth. You could just see her half as often. But I would

• 42:55Speaker 01

  think of that as actually itself, you've definitely touching on locus of control, because you're telling them to go and take, you know, take actions in order to go and make and make themselves happier. So I guess I would probably start there. In terms of just saying, look, you focus on things that you can do that will improve your life and things that you can do. Don't focus on what you can't do. Think that's all totally reasonable. I mean, I recently did two really popular posts, one on advice for men on finding their soulmate, and the other one on advice for women on finding their soulmate. I think if you go through, a lot of it is basically saying, like, exert more locus of control. Right? So, you know, like, you know, like, there's a lot of things you can do. And

• 43:37Speaker 01

  these are some of the easiest steps you can take in order to make what you want to happen, happen. But yeah, if you just sit there saying, like, poor me, then, you know, nothing's gonna happen, of course, you know, at least almost certainly. You could just wait to be saved. Someone says, oh, I'm gonna save you.

• 43:52Chris Williamson?

  What were the important differences between men finding their soulmate and women finding their soulmate?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Let's see. Good one. I think for both groups, I said, put less weight on physical attractiveness, although I think for men, I said, it's especially important for them to put less weight on that. And I said, look, just consider this thought experiment. Imagine you're married to a supermodel, but she has a terrible personality. How do you feel about your life? And like everyone's yeah, terrible. I mean, I even said, imagine you start dating a supermodel, but she has a terrible personality. How long does it take before you are miserable? And yeah, like three weeks. So, all right. Well, I think you already agree with my point. It's just a matter of exerting the self-control to focus on personality over looks, which I think both genders do it, but it's especially bad for men.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  See, for, for both genders, I was telling them things like, figure out these top priorities and then just downweight everything else and be flexible in everything else. For women, I did have this advice of just go older. So like, just go five or 10 years older, especially because a very common complaint for women is men my age are so immature. All right, well, they don't have to be your age. They could be five years older. And you know, you could go and find an immature guy and then hope to change him and he'll turn out and become a mature guy. But a lot of guys never become mature. If you get an older guy, you can say, well, is he mature already? No, in that case, no. And if he is, great. I don't have to speculate about his future maturity because it's already there.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Now, if someone says, look, I can't possibly do that. It's too gross. It's like, well, what's the most you're willing to do?

• 45:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I see an awful lot of the, an awful lot of the complaints from women who are struggling to find men that they think is sufficiently mature at their age. And you see this in, it seems to be tied up in the data that there is a significantly bigger portion of 18 to 30 men who are single than 18 to 30 women who are single. So I think women have already largely cottoned on to this. Again, it fixes the tall girl problem of women out earning men so economically because age is one of the biggest predictors of wealth. And if wealth is something that you need to offset, all right, we'll just give him a seven-year head start and there he is. He's out ahead of you.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think like another big difference I said, well, so for men, I said, look, you just have to get it, get over your lack of confidence and ask. And so that's important. But for women, what I said is, look, it's true that you don't have to ask in order to get dates, but you do need to ask to get the guy you want, probably. So I said, like, for women, just to get a little bit more flexible on being willing to go and ask. And I think for them, I said, look, if you just feel tongue tied, like especially for women, just telling a guy, you seem promising.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Like, oh, my God, like, I hate you now. Like, you told me I seemed promising. Like, like, it's, it's like, on the one hand, like, it is far from throwing yourself at a guy, but same time, I think it is unambiguous. I think I also mentioned, like, you know, the sense of it's always obvious what the other person wants, so there's no need for me to tell them. Or it's always obvious what I want, rather. There's no need to tell them, like, just forget that nonsense. People are not mind readers. We have, like, we so greatly overrate other people's ability to read us because we're always thinking what we're thinking. But we never get inside anyone else's head. And then the idea that everyone secretly knows what it is you're thinking and they're just plain dumb.

• 47:12Chris Williamson?

  Especially if you're talking about the opposite sex. Especially if you're talking about the opposite sex. We have no idea how the inside of your mind works. Yeah, I, I had a

• 47:21Speaker 01

  We got some idea, but, but

• 47:24Chris Williamson?

  I had a piece of advice I was throwing around for a while about receptivity from women. So a lot of women still have, they feel like there's an additional lowering in status if they make the first move. But there's this story, you'll have heard of dropping a handkerchief that the ladies would have done in the sort of Renaissance period, and the aristocracy would drop a handkerchief, the gentleman would pick it up, and that would be the beginning of the conversation. Like, the modern equivalent of that is a gaze that lingers a little bit too long. Also, women need to kind of adjust the sights of whatever they're shooting with to account for me, too, and men's concern that they're going to make a woman feel uncomfortable. So there's an awful lot of sort of moving, moving, moving parts here. One of the other things that I quite enjoy

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Before you move on. So one of my big piece of advice to my daughter is never be afraid to play the I'm not one of those feminist cards with men.

• 48:11Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yes, I, okay. So, yeah. And again, this is one really, of course, like, I knew a lot of people would get angry about it. But I said, look, I'm not saying to go and denounce women or otherwise. I'm saying, look, just put people at ease. If someone is nervous, it is common sense and strategically wise just to go and smile and to say, it's all cool. Don't worry. I'm a decent person. I don't prejudge you as being bad. And I think that the I'm not one of those feminist cards is one of the best ones for women to play. It really does distinguish you from women that men just feel like they have to walk on eggshells around to one where they will talk to you freely. Right? It's great for work, great for dating, great for actually making friends. The only thing that's holding

• 48:57Speaker 01

  people back is loyalty to this philosophical dogma.

• 49:02Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think there's been a demonization of having children over the last few years? It feels like this is kind of tied into a lot of feminist meta memes and meta cultures that's going on. We've seen a decline in fertility rates. What do you think's going on with this demonization of specifically having kids?

• 49:21Speaker 01

  I think that the demonization comes from a very narrow corner of mostly the internet. The real story is not so much demonization as just apathy and disinterest. It is true, there is a demonization corner. My younger son reads reddits all the time and he's saying, okay, dad, like, right, the child free people, they're not that bad. But the anti-natalists, they're crazy. The anti-natalists, the people who post videos of kids getting trampled by horses and stuff like that and like, what? Right, but I am familiar with philosophical anti-natalism. I mean, it really does seem to heavily flow from the work of South African philosopher David Benatar. And he came up with this argument that to my mind is truly bizarre.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  You know, like he has a number of arguments, but the hardcore argument comes down to no one consents to be born because they can't, because you don't exist yet. And any, everyone who exists will experience some suffering. And even if that suffering is overwhelmingly outweighed by, by joy, still like it is wrong to ever inflict suffering on anyone without their consent. And therefore it's always wrong to have kids. Right. And this argument has persuaded a strangely large number of people to my mind. I mean, you know, my reply to this is so, this implies the good Samaritan is evil because you can't like, how do you know that unconscious guy doesn't want to die? You're going and administering first aid to a man who was beaten in desensitiveness.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  But how do you know that he doesn't want to just bleed out? It's like, well, there is this philosophical doctrine called hypothetical consent, which normally is bogus because we can just ask you whether you consent. But it is custom made for cases where like, well, he would probably consent if he was conscious, but he can't. Similarly, you would probably consent to be born or to be conceived if you could, but you can't, but it's reasonable to resume it. Then there is a broader category of people just think that life isn't worth living. Epicurus answered this 2,500 years ago, and his, his reply just consisted in, well, we're in Greece, there's cliffs. Don't like it, jump off.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  I have gotten, I got a threatening email from my university's mental health office for promoting suicide for saying stuff like this. It's like, I'm not, do you even understand what a university is about? It's about thinking about things. It's like, if that counts as promoting suicide to say epicurus said something and it's a good argument. I don't know what you're doing on a university campus, but.

• 51:54Chris Williamson?

  I am familiar with Benatar. One of my friends has podcasted with him, albeit when he didn't have his screen on because he's still pseudonymous or largely anonymous or whatever.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Really? But he's known as a philosopher, so.

• 52:08Chris Williamson?

  But no one knows his face, I don't think.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Well, he teaches at a university. How can they not know his face?

• 52:12Chris Williamson?

  I don't know if he teaches under his real name. I don't know whether that's a pseudonym. I might be wrong. Anyway.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Okay, well.

• 52:18Chris Williamson?

  Anyway, so.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  You can check it for the show notes.

• 52:20Chris Williamson?

  Even if we, even if we step ourselves a little bit away from the hardcore anti-natalist philosophers, again, you could maybe call it a generalized anti-children culture, right? And this is more toward the ambiguity that you mentioned about having kids, this hyper-individualism. Where do you think that comes from?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Hmm. I mean, I think feminism definitely has something to do with it, especially the idea that any woman that thinks that raising kids should be your first priority as an adult is just stupid and foolish and is sort of being a doormat to the patriarchy. I mean, it is striking to me that if there were a girl today in especially a suburban high school who said, I just want to be a mom, I think that like the outcry against that would be overwhelming, not because they hate the idea of having kids, but because they elevate the idea of having a career as being the most important thing in life and a kid as being an optional thing. And I would think of these are two, both two extremely important things in life. And yeah, there's a trade-off,

• 53:20Speaker 01

  of course, right? As a homeschooling dad who actually did all the night shifts for all four of my kids, I can say, yeah, I probably would have one or two more books if I didn't know kids. But I chose to be less successful as a professor so that I could go and have kids because that was more important to me and still is.

• 53:39Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so there's a big, uh, there's a big memetic element going on here with regards to children.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Hmm. Ah, so that, you know, I mean, I, that's totally true. I think that is a separate point, but yes, I'll do to a large degree. Well, so, I mean, at least memetically in terms of imitating other people, there's a conformist element. Just the fact that we have baby booms and busts, a lot of it seems to be that child, you know, like the number of children that you want to have is based fairly heavily upon just what's normal in your culture or subculture.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  So that's, oh, you know, one major factor going on, which means you can sort of get a multiplied, you can get a multiplied effect. Where if women, there's, let's say, women are focusing more on their careers. That has a direct effect reducing fertility, but it also has the indirect effect of it's now normal to have fewer kids, which then means that even people are not focused on their careers. Want to go and fit in. I have worked quite a bit with the actual data of fertility and especially, you know, I think both accomplished and desired fertility. And what's, you know, so like two big lessons that I like to trumpet. So one is, at least on American data, it is, you know, that it is not true that income by itself leads to lower fertility. In fact, income by itself leads to higher fertility. Really what's going on is that

• 54:54Speaker 01

  education leads to lower fertility. And so, and if you race education against income, you see that education reduces fertility and income increases it. And the basic upshot of this is that the most fertile people are high income, low education groups, like say plumbers. And on the other hand, the least fertile groups are high education, low income, like say philosophers who drive a taxi. All right. So that's, and once you put it this way, you realize, hmm, so it isn't really the material element. It's more of the social element of education. If we actually were teaching kids in school, things like babies are, babies are gross, babies are terrible. David Benatar has the right argument. I don't know of any school that really does that.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  It's more of, you just teach people other priorities as being of overwhelming importance. And then just like with problems, if you talk about one problem all the time, you are implicitly saying other problems don't matter. And if you talk about only one life goal as being important all the time, you're implicitly saying other life goals don't matter. The other result that I think is very, well, let's see, it's not surprising, but it's really worth saying because it's the kind of thing people wouldn't want to say without data, but I do have the data.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  It's that women's education, women's income are much more important for determining the outcomes than the men's education income. For both genders, it's got the same direction. But basically, it looks very much like women's preferences are a lot more important for the outcome. Which comes down to something like, if women have an actual definite opinion about how many kids they want to have, men are more along for the ride and like, oh, you want to have three kids? Great. Want to have one kid? Great. It's not quite that men don't have any preference at all and don't bargain or don't select. But it really is more of the kind of decision that women dominate and within the family is, how many kids are we going to have?

• 56:50Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  So. Right. So when you say in terms of getting fertility up, you've got to change women's minds that's more important generally.

• 56:57Chris Williamson?

  A high income man married to a medium low education woman might be able to get this moving a little bit.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, by the way, I also, in my advice for men and women, I say like, you know, find out how many kids they want early. Maybe not the first date, but say by the third date, like, it's important thing to know.

• 57:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. The social desirability bias is something that I learned from you that you said is the most underrated effect in all of psychology. And I kind of can't stop seeing it now.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Good.

• 57:33Chris Williamson?

  Explain it to people that aren't familiar.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Simple idea, when the truth sounds bad, people lie. And often, the truth, if the truth is said sufficiently and frequently, people stop even being conscious about lying. I mean, really mundane examples are things like, am I fat? There's only one acceptable answer to that. Oh, Brian, you look great. You're wonderful. You're beautiful just the way you are. We can see this in lots of different areas. You can see it in things like church attendance. More people claim they went to church than actually went to church. More people claim to vote than actually vote. One of my favorite examples of all is there's actually a study, first of all, You ask people, would you abort a Down syndrome fetus? And only about like, I think like 20, 25% of people say they will, say they would.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  But then we see what happens when people are actually in that situation. And then it's more like 90%. All right. Now, again, this doesn't necessarily mean that people were truly lying, but they were just blurting out what sounded good without thinking about it. Until they needed to actually make a decision. And then suddenly it's no longer just words. I'd go, oh, my God, like, I don't want to do that.

• 58:39Chris Williamson?

  Stated and revealed preferences are a hell of a drug.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, that's quite right. Now I have a lot of applications of this, some again, as mundane as the strange language of want to come to my party on Saturday? Oh, I can't. It's like, hmm, will you be in a cage? Will you be in the middle of Siberia and unable to get to a plane in time? What do you mean you can't? And the answer is right, fine, I don't want to is the truth. I say I can't know because that sounds better, even though it is actually literally.

• 59:12Chris Williamson?

  I won't.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Yes, I won't.

• 59:14Chris Williamson?

  When you come to my party, I won't.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  I won't. Yes, I won't. Why, why not? Because I don't want, because I have some, there are things to do that would be better than that for me. Like, what is that? Like, sitting at home, watching TV, that's better.

• 59:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  That's often the answer. Uh, but then I say there are many areas of life where social tolerability bias just becomes overwhelmingly, it's almost the only thing going on. So I encourage people just to go and first of all, read any political speech by politician they don't like. And just go through the sentences one by one and say, like, could this possibly be literally true? And I think you'll find, wow, like the politicians I don't like are lying all the time. When PolitiFact goes and says Trump lies like 70% of the time, like, no, 99.9% is the correct number. Because you just read the sentence and it'll be, the sentences will be things like, we're doing everything possible for this. No, you aren't. If you're doing everything possible, there you spend zero on anything else. Right. So no, wrong, false, and obviously so, therefore a lie.

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  Is that not a part of just the imprecision of language and the fact that when we speak, there is a degree of like whimsy that kind of comes along for the ride?

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Interesting question. Yeah, many people say, all right, well, everybody knows it's not meant to be literally true. I say, actually, it's the kind of thing where I think that like politicians are playing on the ambiguity of maybe it's literally true, maybe it's not. If they say this is an existential risk, that's Putin's story about why they have to invade Ukraine. It's an existential risk, comrade. All right. And it's like, hmm, now, like, when people hear this, is everyone role is ever all supporters saying, well, obviously, it's not really existential. But like he's saying that to get people's attention, or there are a whole lot of people who are actually believing it, just like it's the truth from God's mouth. And I think actually in politics, there's a lot of people who are just taking it very naively. And so I do think

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  it is a problem. I think that it's not merely that you have to double the rhetoric to get the same result that you would have gotten if everyone spoke honestly. I think rather, there are just a lot of things that government does that if people were honest, just wouldn't exist. Like, like if people on during COVID were to say, look, rather than saying, look, we're doing this to keep people safe. They said, we're doing this in order to reduce the number of fatalities from 1 billion to 950,000. There'd just be a lot less support for the measures if you're if you were that honest about it.

• 1:01:34Chris Williamson?

  It well, that fundamentally comes down to, is it useful or is it true? Right? There are things that you can say that are useful, that things that are true that become less useful. And you go, okay, well, what's the point of this communication? Is it to communicate the truth? Or is it to get the intended outcome?

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Yes. Although as soon as someone starts doing that, then it's like, what useful for who? Useful for you to get power and hold it? Hmm. I wonder if that's something politicians care about, as opposed to getting the best overall result for society, doing careful cost benefit analysis after collecting the best possible statistics we could find.

• 1:02:06Chris Williamson?

  Even that, though, all the way down, still ends up with lexical semantic fuckery. And, you know, just it's

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Trademark?

• 1:02:16Chris Williamson?

  Yep, precisely. It's lexical semantic fuckery. You heard it here first.

• 1:02:21Chris Williamson?

  Because what people then start to do is they make lies of omission rather than lies of commission. They purposefully obfuscate not using words that allow them to be held up. It's what happens in law courts, it's so on and so forth. Well, I didn't say-

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  We can't prove that it's necessarily not the case that-

• 1:02:35Chris Williamson?

  Precisely.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  It's possible that-

• 1:02:37Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. Yeah, yeah. It just, it just becomes a game of plausible deniability. So I, I think this is kind of the equivalent of the justification for a performance enhancing drugs legitimized Olympics. I think just let, let the gloves come off and lie as much as you want. Don't ever hold anybody to any account and just let it become a neuro-linguistic programming soup and just see who can make the best lies all the way down. And let's see who wins then.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I, I confess to some slight emotional sympathy, but I think that if you just look at the world and to see like, you know, the very worst governments in the world are the, have the biggest lying demagogues. Part of this, I'll say is because these are almost always dictators. The dictator can just get away with bigger lies.

• 1:03:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, you know, there, there are just so many fun applications of social desirability bias. One of my favorites actually is understanding what is the point of propaganda? I'm a huge Orwell fan, and if you read Orwell, it sounds like the whole point of propaganda is just to tell, is basically to obscure the actual, the actual truth and we're basically to crush the truth. Or you know, excuse me, not propaganda, censorship rather, censorship. So, so you read Orwell, it sounds like the whole point of censorship is that the government wants to crush the truth because they know that in the contest between the truth and a lie, the lie will be defeated. So they have to go and imprison anyone, anyone who speaks the truth. Nice story. But here's the thing, if you go and look at dictatorships,

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  say that they spend a lot more time crushing other lies than they do crushing the truth. Let me go to Saudi Arabia. They're not that worried about the atheist saying like, how do we know that the Quran is even true? They're much more worried about a mullah saying, Allah does not ordain the house of Saad, Allah ordains me. Those are the people that put fear into the hearts of a Middle Eastern Islamist tyrant because that person is saying a competing lie. So the title that says, monopolize the pretty lies. Point of censorship is say, only I get to tell ridiculous lies. Anyone who says any other lies, I will kill you.

• 1:04:43Chris Williamson?

  I certainly think, I remember Rob Henderson writing something about the goal of propaganda is not to control what you think, it's to convince you of what other people think. So it's basically a game of you will, through the Abilene paradox and through memetic desire and through social desirability bias and so on, you will end up doing what you think other people think. So the goal is not actually to change your mind, it's to change your mind about what you think other people are thinking.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Probably both, but it's a good point.

• 1:05:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. You know the Abilene paradox?

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Sounds really familiar, but.

• 1:05:18Chris Williamson?

  Really good. I learned, I learned about it last week and now I can't, I can't shut up about it.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  It's one where everybody is, is it sort of like the Canes beauty contest where you're trying to figure out what other people will think, whoever other people think is the most beautiful person?

• 1:05:29Chris Williamson?

  To, to a degree, yeah. The Abilene paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the desires of the group's members, because each member assumes the others approve of it. It explains how a number of accurate individuals can become idiots when they get together. Think Emperor's New Clothes. An acquaintance invites you to his wedding despite not wanting you there because he thinks you want to attend. You attend despite not wanting to because you think he wants you there. At a business meeting, someone suggests an idea, the, making the influencer the face of the brand or a trans influencer. Each member has misgivings about this, but assumes that the others will consider them transphobic if they speak out. So everyone approves the idea despite no one liking it, or basically all of North Korea.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Yes. Right. I, I strongly suspect that you've, you've got five or 10% true believers in North Korea at least. Yes, I think the, I mean, I also have no doubt that if you open the border of South Korea, a large majority of the population would leave very quickly.

• 1:06:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. You had this other tweet that I loved from a while ago. Dear intellectuals, if you ever decide you've been deeply wrong for years, don't instantly rebrand yourself as a wise spokesperson for your new view. Instead, publicly admit that your judgment clearly isn't very good and stop pontificating for a few years. Why?

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Is inspired by a few particular people who remain nameless, who did this bizarre transformation from I'm start off as the world's expert on this view and now that view is totally wrong and stupid and I'm the expert on the other view like, well, if it's totally wrong and stupid, what does that say about the fact that you held it for 10 years? I mean, I just think that you, again, it's a lot, while it's logically possible that a person could just see through the errors and become incredibly thoughtful about a new view, I just think that it's highly unlikely and this is more of someone has either fame or money or both on the line and therefore they can't actually go through this honest period of contrition where they just say, gee, like, I could be that wrong.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  What would be a, what would be a hypothetical example of someone doing this?

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Hmm, I mean, one of my favorite ones is all of the rabid Stalinists who de-converted and then quickly claimed to be the leading spokesman for anti-communism. This is a big deal in the 40s and 50s. Whitaker Chambers comes to mind as one example. Let's see, who else, Sidney Hook. Let's see, there's a bunch of other ones. Uh, let's see, I think Max Eastman as well, right? So basically like, you know, like he was a Trotskyist, but anyway, uh, you know, they, they spend like years going and acting like Joseph Stalin is the savior of mankind. And then it's like, oh, but uh, turns out he was a horrible mass murderer. Whoops. Okay, now I'm going to go and tell everybody of how to be an anti-communist.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  I mean, on the one hand, like if you have specific things you've observed, then fine, say like, I actually saw the killing fields, so listen to me, I was, but, but on the other hand to say, but now I'm the expert on how anti-communism should work. No, I think we should probably listen to people who never thought it was a good idea and were prescient. I mean, I will say that I am, I especially have it out for Whitaker Chambers, who wrote a totally unfair review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Here's someone who had, who hated communism from her teenage years when she first encountered it, never had a good word to say about it. I think had a lot of insightful things to say about how horrible it was. And then Whitaker Chambers has the nerve to call her a fascist in his review for National Review. It's like, like that guy.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  I mean, I just want to say, you know what you like, there's a reason you became a Stalinist, which is that you don't have a correct attitude about how to think about ideas and how to treat other human beings.

• 1:09:02Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, it's the sort of performative empathy or I guess social desirability bias sort of wrapped up in a world where your words are more important than your deeds, which they certainly are now, but they are basically at any distance, right? Because we can't see what you're doing, but we can read what you wrote or hear what you said. And yeah, this has got spun up so much more recently, where you see Lizzo, you know, is supposed to be this champion for bigger bodied women, but it turns out that she's fat shaming all of her dancers backstage and making them eat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam strippers, Ellen DeGeneres.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  I have no knowledge of any of this. I'll take your word for it.

• 1:09:46Chris Williamson?

  I promise you it's true. I promise you there's videos out there. And yet my point being that it's often the people that proclaim the loudest about a thing that are the ones that are the worst

• 1:09:59Chris Williamson?

  people committing that that particular misgiving.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Right. This reminds me of a couple of other essays that I have. I have one called, Could Such A Man Care? And it just starts with, all right, you go and you hear the official, the official speeches of Kim Jong-un or Maduro, and it's all about how I'm such a great compassionate person. I love the people. I have the poor. I'm a champion. And at the current stage in their career, you're like, yeah, sure, we know what you're really doing, what you're up to. But then you go back in time and realize there was some earlier period when they didn't have power and they couldn't really go and do horrible things and they were just, but they were still going and expressing the same ideas. Kim Jong-un is not a good example because he's born into this, but Maduro is a perfectly fine example. But anyone who starts off as a non-politician, an activist, and then they eventually get it, you can go and find what they're originally saying and say,

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  all right, well, like, you know, one reaction is, well, obviously, they were really corrupted by power or whatever. But, you know, my reaction to this is, look. Think about the nicest people that you know in real life. Can you imagine that they would become mass murderers if you put them in charge? I was like, no. Like the nicest people I know, like, like they might, they probably get overthrown or assassinated, but they would not be ordering anyone to be killed. They're just too nice to do that kind of thing. And so when you look at someone who has power and they, and they have all of this wonderful altruistic rhetoric, and they had it for a long time, and you say, well, they got corrupted. No, much better story is they were always terrible. They're always the kind of person that was going and just telling people what they want to hear,

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  demagoguing, exploiting social desirability bias to gain power. And once you realize that, it's like, hmm, the fact that people are saying this kind of flowery altruistic talk, there's a good reason to go and distrust those people because it's just so common for them when they get power to be terrible.

• 1:11:49Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Brian Kaplan, ladies and gentlemen. Brian, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything you're doing.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Uh, great question. So all of my books, uh, so the main ones we talked about today were, uh, Don't Be a Feminist, as well as How Evil Are Politicians and Voters as Mad Scientists. Those are all, but all my books are available on Amazon. These books of essays are real cheap, just 12 bucks. I haven't raised the price despite high inflation. I also blog for Bet on It. And finally, I still have a personal webpage at B Kaplan.com.

• 1:12:19Chris Williamson?

  Awesome, Brian. I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  Fantastic being here. It's been a lot of fun.