Huffman is standing firm on FPH being banned, so I guess that's a good thing.

Excluding dubs of Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh, my first anime was Elfen Lied.

I was hooked on anime ever since.

Your entire attitude is wrong.

It seems like you are distant from, uncomfortable with, and perhaps even deeply intimidated by, the girl you are courting. No matter what you say to her in this state or how well thought out it is, the insecurity will be visible through your body language, and it will not be attractive to anyone.

Relationships are primarily emotional and physical in nature. The first things you have to ask yourself are 1) whether you can be comfortable being very close friends with this girl, and 2) is it reasonable that she could find you physically attractive? If the answer to either of these questions is no, then either fix the problem with yourself, or seek out a relationship with a different person.

I , too, love Flatland. It's also a pretty on-point satire of Victorian society.

Never got into HPMOR though. Yudkowski's writing style is kind of headache inducing, and complicates otherwise simple concepts in an effort to impress and overawe. Sometimes when the point is explained plainly, contradictions in his ideas become obvious. Like the chapter where he goes on about how "the map is not the territory", yet does the transfiguration be reifying the "map" that is quantum field theory anyways.

It's a wonderful movie. Pixar did really well this time!

SPOILERS:

I especially liked how the moral of the story was that it is ok, and sometimes necessary, to express sadness. The rest of our culture is obsessed with telling us that we ought to be happy all the time, and if not, we should consume until we are. Inside Out was a welcome and refreshing corrective to this.

There's quite a dearth of anime suggestions here. I strongly recommend Psycho-Pass (but only Series 1), though it's more dystopian sci-fi than post-apocalyptic.

If you're into something more low-key and philosophical, I would suggest Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex, as well as the original GITS movie, which is a classic.

I'm just not sure why having children is more important than other aspirations or, for that matter, why child-rearing ought to be specific to women.

Honestly, it's because I'm working under the assumption that childcare is necessary labor to sustain the population and thus maintain society. But if you believe that most jobs are going to be automated away in the future, and so less people would be a better thing, and childcare is a non-essential choice, I can see where you're coming from. Indeed, a basic income would be liberating for everyone, including women.

But I'm still confused by your lack of concern about the lack of leverage that women have relative to men and the real indignities that it enables. Again, back to the geopolitical analogy: Would you advise a country to not maintain a standing army just because taxes infringe a bit on free choice? How, then, will the country defend itself from the threat of external aggression or secure its state interests against its competitors? Why is it any different when it comes to competition between classes?

One last thing, we do have some maternity leave in the US, but it's atrocious compared to what exists in almost every other country.

The point is that people will discriminate in favour of women, not against.

If you weren't so absurdly politically biased, you would recognize immediately that this statement doesn't follow from the conclusion of the study you linked. People "associating more positive attributes" with women is inherently tied to discrimination against women; it means they're treated like children and not like adults.

People have the same bias towards evaluating children positively too, but we don't allow children to have any responsibility.

As for the first study you linked, there's another study that follows almost an identical methodology and comes to exactly the opposite result. It's a gross distortion to present your single study as the last word of SCIENCE!!!! on gender equality in stem. Here is a good overview of the problem. Personally, I feel that college labs at least strive to be quite gender neutral on the whole (even if sometimes they don't quite succeed), and the conclusions of both studies simply reflect the known political biases of their authors.

Arguably, reforming our labor laws and subsidizing childcare would increase women's agency and the choices that women can make in their lives by removing the heavy opportunity cost between career and family. And it is estimated to be a cause of a large portion of the overall gender wage gap as well.

If anything, we should both be able to agree that this is a good idea, even if our political frameworks are completely different!

I have to say, though it's nice to be able to have conversations like this, intractable as our positions may become, without all the hostility I'm used to seeing surrounding this sort of thing.

Ikr? Hubski is amazing.

I'd say that for the most part we have changed the social system to be more fair.

Yes, we have, but clearly not enough. Example: A huge part of the overall wage gap can be attributed to the fact that most workplaces simply aren't flexible enough to accommodate women who become pregnant and have to take care of a young child for a few years. Hence there is currently a huge opportunity cost between career success and having a family. So, the mass of women who choose their career end up driving down the fertility rate, and the other mass of women who do choose to have a few children end up driving up the gender wage gap at the same time.

The obvious solution to both these problems is to get the state to extensively subsidize childcare and pay for it with increased taxes, like they do in France. But of course in America they're idiotically resistant to anything that makes sense.

Gendered oppression is often not about sexism at all; a lot of the time there's just some shitty economic or political policy behind it.

If women tend not to be as interested in working 60 hours a week as men, why should we need them to? How is that oppressing their full agency?

Because it denies them wealth and promotions, putting them in an inferior economic and social position that leaves them weak when it comes to representing their collective interests (like including women's reproductive health in company healthcare packages, or making sure they aren't sexually harassed) and defending their collective rights (perhaps if we had a few more female billionaires to lobby Congress, they wouldn't have dismantled abortion access across the South).

Again, if we were talking about two rival nations, nobody would bat an eye at the suggestion that an equal balance of power ought to be maintained between them to deter any threat of invasion. But when it comes to social classes at odds within those nations, suddenly the more powerful party objects to any such notion that everyone ought to have sufficient leverage to protect themselves against exploitation.

We all have different motivations, different beliefs and desires, different skills and preferences.

I understand that people's freedom and diversity ought not to be infringed on without compelling reason.

But what if some of these differences are such that within our social system they allow one group of people to lord over others, thus denying the oppressed full agency? Is that not a compelling reason to, at the very least, change the social system to be more fair, or if that proves unwise, to eradicate the differences?

How would you measure relational equality?

How would you measure the balance of power between states? People don't really bother to, because it isn't necessary to. What matters in the end is: Do women as a class have sufficient means at their disposal to keep the threat of exploitation at bay without having to depend on the goodwill of men?

Also, "equality of outcome/opportunity" is a nonsensical distinction. If it is true that we live in a deterministic universe, then equal opportunity must necessarily lead to equal outcome. If not, then there are unequal differences from the very beginning, whether environmental, biological, or both, that can potentially be corrected through social policy or medicine.

Equality of opportunity is a great thing to aspire to, but insisting on equal outcomes is ridiculous. Just because women tend toward some fields while men trend toward others does not mean they're being oppressed.

I'm kind of unorthodox here in that I think what some would deem "equality of outcome" in certain general metrics is actually far more important than "equality of opportunity". If women (or indeed any class of people with particular shared interests), lack sufficient social, political, and economic leverage in society as a whole, then they won't be able to defend themselves from the attempts of men to exploit, control, or oppress them. It's like the balance of power with nation states, except applied to social classes.

Rather than calling this equality of opportunity or equality of outcome (which is a distinction that really doesn't make much sense if you accept that human behavior is deterministic), it makes more sense to call this "equality of power relations" or "relational equality" for short.

But I agree that perfect gender parity in STEM isn't strictly necessary for relational equality to exist, and that feminist activists might be obsessing over it too much. We just shouldn't have open sexist discrimination and bullying happening in laboratories and startups the way it currently is.

I did find a few good subreddits where there was a culture of intellectual virtue and quality just as you describe. Are you familiar with the badacademics subs?

It will be interesting when we get some people who deliberately try to game the system and see how they dance around trying to inject their poisonous methods of discussion into threads. My feeling is that the self moderating functionality will do a good job.

Well, the main problem there is that those kinds of people are often accompanied by other people who agree with them and do appreciate their poisonous methods as "spreading the truth at any cost". It's possible that those people will end up forming their own "network" following each other, and then the same political tensions that make Reddit and Twitter toxic places will destroy Hubski as well.

Or, as the late American philosopher Richard Rorty said, “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”

Lol, Rorty. It's good that she is familiar with him, but she could certainly have gone deeper into explaining who postempiricist/pragmatist philosophers like Rorty, Kuhn, and Feyerabend were and why their arguments against Hunt's naive philosophy of science as a search for Absolute Truth are compelling. Philosophy of science hasn't believed in such notions of absolute scientific truth for close to a century now.

The author also fails to explain the connection between patriarchy and epistemic overreach in the sciences, if there even is any.

We must seize the Memes of Production! Rise up and unite against the bourgeoise scum!

But really, I'm not sure what an internet forum being owned by its users would entail. If the site isn't a for-profit startup that the admins want to cash in at some point, then wouldn't a run-of-the-mill combination of ads, donation drives, and "freemium" perks be sufficient to keep the servers running in perpetuity, and perhaps help the admins make a living as a bonus?

This test is ridiculous and incorrect at a fundamental level. You cannot conceptualize political ideologies as things that exist in ratios of adherence to a single quantifiable set of principles.

The reason is because political ideologies all hold different principles and different interpretations of the same principles. A libertarian and a Marxist, for instance, see "equality" as completely different things, and so do not share the fundamental ground required to place them both on a single hypothetical chart with "equality" as an axis.

Furthermore, political beliefs always exist within a cultural context that can differ from place to place. For instance, this compass sees support for LGBT rights as being integral to libertarianism, when really this is only true of Western political cultures. In East Asia, LGBT rights don't make any sense because they already don't care if you are gay; Chinese and Japanese social conservatism expresses itself through a desire to uphold entrenched Confucian social relationships and traditions, not to police "sinful" sexual deviance.

Yeah, I think Reddit may be the nail in the coffin that proves that open internet forum communities are not a viable business model. The only way to maintain such a community would be as non-profit oriented projects funded by a combination of donation drives, ads, and "freemium" perks.

Hopefully more soon.

Thanks!