I have not posted my extensive background anywhere in connection with this account, to my knowledge, and in fact I am nervous that what little background information I have provided may have been too much. I would not be willing to say what I have here if it were possible to link these words to my name.

I appreciate your request for credentials though and agree that they are relevant to the question of how much weight one's words deserve.



This cartoon is a reasonable summary of my views.

My position is grounded in taking Darwinian natural selection seriously and in recognizing that the dominant meme in our culture promotes a belief in human neurological uniformity - a belief that has its roots in Puritan Universalism and is at odds with reality.

You are putting quotation marks around words that are not a quote. Do you see why that's problematic?

He did not say "women aren't smart enough to be libertarians." The word "basically" is a bad substitute for "did not."

I agree that this shouldn't need pointing out.

I agree with this post.

This is a reasonable hypothesis. In fact, it is a very popular one with an awful lot of people. I happen to think it is almost certainly true.

If I understand what you're asking (and I'm not sure that I am), I am saying that your personal preferences ought not influence your belief about what the median or mean personal preferences of a group that you belong to are.

Social science relies heavily on surveys, which is one of the reasons that it's less reliable than the hard sciences. Although some skepticism is warranted, I think you're taking it too far. I can provide you with lots of links to studies reproducing these results, but you could just as easily find them yourself, and if you don't WANT to be persuaded/learn, then I'd just be wasting my time.

I agree with this. You should note that I have made no statements to the contrary.

It's more grammatical than anything else, but the issue isn't why so few women are libertarians, but why so few libertarians are women.

Isn't it?

I disagree with this. I think there is a lot of evidence for that proposition.

Most interesting claims about human beings and behavior are. I am comfortable making generalizations in the absence of scientific rigor - so too are you, else you could not function in the world as it is.

If you could elaborate on what you perceive to be the huge endogeneity problem, I'd appreciate it.

Can you think of non-sexist reasons for not asking it?

See below.

Yes, that is my opinion, although you couldn't have deduced that from anything I've said thus far. Making such an inference would have required making an unsupported/illogical leap.

I haven't been arguing this so far, but I do believe it is true if by "competing political philosophies" you mean mainstream competing political philosophies. Mainstream political philosophies are almost necessarily very simple - otherwise they could not be mainstream. I think most fringe political philosophies are more intellectually demanding than most mainstream ones.

Breaking from the status quo requires mental effort. Intellectually lazy people are less likely to do so. Instead, they simply ally with "Team Red" or "Team Blue" and decide what they believe about specific issues based on that simple heuristic. See:



I agree with this.

This deserves its own post:

Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians

There are no objective criteria by which STEM fields can be labeled more difficult or strenuous than non-STEM fields. All such judgments are value-laden.

Yes.

This is not something that can be known.

I'd rather not say.

They definitely do. Any rank ordering of subjects according to difficulty or strenuousness will contain an implicit gender bias.

It is true that I am concerned about having what I've written here linked to me and that explaining how I came to form my opinion on what criteria to use would help anyone who was interested in doing so. It is not true that I expect anyone to thoughtlessly accept anything I say.

Right. You support the Cathedral; therefore, you are safe. I do not support the Cathedral; therefore, I am not. That we live in a society which harshly punishes heresy is no more evidence that our theocracy's religious dogma is true than was Galileo's recantation.

Do you think studying those subjects was/would have been unpleasant for you because they did not interest you, or because you were incapable of succeeding at them? I suspect that if you had been properly incentivized, you could have done very well at any academic subject you chose to pursue.

(Watch this. The whole video is interesting, but I understand that not everyone has an hour they care to burn watching some guy talk about genetics and intelligence. I've linked to the little bit that's relevant to what we're discussing here - the relative difficulty of STEM subjects vs. non-STEM subjects.)

Also, it sounds like you have an unusually masculine brain, for a woman. Would you agree with that assessment?

I agree with you that "different" does not mean "smarter" or "dumber."

"If introspection is your only source for a belief, you should hold it very weakly."

Do you agree with this proposition?

This story makes me like you. I'm very sorry for your negative experiences during childhood, and I agree that anyone who punishes a student of any gender for being good at math is doing something wrong. I also agree that the tendency for people to compel the perpetuation of stereotypes/cultural norms has detrimental effects on people who are not naturally stereotypical.

But I do not agree that the under-representation of women in STEM subjects is attributable only to "a big damned self fulfilling prophecy." And although I recoil from having my views summarized as "girls are stupider than boys in math and science," I will bite the bullet. You admit that men and women are "different." Why, then, is it so strange to think that men might be, on average, more gifted than women in certain areas - even intellectual ones?

You've misunderstood me - I made no such assertion, although it's easy to see how one might have reasonably (but mistakenly) made such an inference.

You are obviously an intelligent person, so you will understand what I mean when I say that it sounds like you are too close to this issue to think about it in an unbiased fashion. Whether men and women as groups possess different degrees of innate mathematical prowess has no impact whatsoever on your own personal skill/ability/talent. I am not trying to denigrate or attack you.

Correct - that is not what gives them the right to use violence against other people. Might makes right.

The belief in free will is a religious fiction from which you would do well to divorce yourself.

This is potentially very interesting to me. Which statements have I made that are contrary to scientific research and evolutionary biology theory? Please understand that I do not consider myself an advocate for a position here, although I do take one. Above all, I would rather be right than wrong. If I am mistaken, let me discover it swiftly.

+1

Rhetorical question: Why do you feel the need to append the modifier "ghastly" to "stereotypes"?

Your brain has been eaten by a virus.

http://www.people-press.org/2011/05/...-news-sources/

Statistically speaking, probably not. The "capitalists without compassion" description is much more accurate than "terrorist loving do-gooders."

Did you seriously not even click the link to the journal article I shared with you? Your question was answered in the first sentence of the introduction.

I guess women really are intellectually lazy!

+1

The Dark Triad: Facilitating a Short-Term Mating Strategy in Men

If we ever succeed in creating a self-modifying AI, it will rapidly find itself in this position. If you wish to dispute the characterization of such an entity as a "person," that's fine, but you should understand that radical inequalities of power and property have not yet manifested to anything like the degree that they one day will, and denying the possibility of such an outcome strongly suggests that you do not take your own philosophy seriously.

What is happening here? Why does this thread exist?

UNCHAINED! may not have been the best move here, Spladle. Keep this up and it's hippo fart time.

Do we all get mirror-universe facial hair for participating?