Women, especially intelligent women, put a lot of weight on what high status individuals do and say. In the vast majority of times and places, this has served them well. Because of the malignant and dysgenic ideology that we call "wokeness", this is *not* the case in the America of the last 10 years.
"I am following and repeating what all the good high status people say. Why is this not working out for me? Why is it not improving my love life? Why is it not making me feel more happy and satisfied?"
It's a totally reasonable reaction. And struggling to find good emotionally-acceptable answers is what's gradually driving some of them crazy.
There are people who report on the news regularly. They wear nice suits, they are immaculately groomed, they are unfailingly civil, they convey a sense of considerable personal success. They strongly and consistently promote a long list of progressive values that the low-status deplorables call "wokeness". Thus wokeness is good! I should try to be as woke as possible. This way of thinking does make a certain degree of sense, but it fails when successful public figures start promoting bad ideas.
Some men also think like this, but most don't. Most men set specific personal goals/desires for their lives, and try to figure out how best to achieve those *specific* goals/desires. For most men, this comes down to finding a girlfriend/wife, having a nice job or career, having good entertainment, simply enjoying life and/or finding a sense of purpose in life. The failure mode for men is over-indulging in things that are enjoyable in the moment but cause long-term problems. But they're not going to buy into an ideology that is clearly counter to their basic self-interest just because the people promoting that ideology are high-status. Men put *some* value in high-status, but not *that* much.
So ultimately, the main fault is with the terrible ideology that has taken over much of the west, causing many otherwise smart people to make bad decisions. Until our societal elites fully dismiss this ideology, it will be very hard/unlikely for things to improve.
I think the intelligence effect on extremism is something that kind of has to be true if youre looking at high enough levels of extremism. To get *really* high extremism scores, you have to answer a lot of questions "correctly" from the POV of that ideology, and even extreme moods just cannot be this consistent without abstract aids.
Lower-intelligence people may be more likely to be "radical centrists", taking extreme positions in ways that *arent* consistent across questions - that seems to be what ERS is measuring.
Also, the ideological scales we judge extremism on are themselves based on abstract machinery. I think you could find political-question-aggregates on which stupid people are more extreme in either direction when looking at the whole population correlation (and I would like to see what those are), but still the *most* extreme on these scales would intelligent.
That's an interesting point. It isn't entirely clear what extreme means in many cases. I can imagine how this might cut both ways, however, depending on the nature of the ideologies. For example, an ideology with many limitations that apply to the believer themself like libertarianism requires a lot of abstract consistency to score highly, but I could imagine an ideology that was basically "There are no limits on your behavior or demands on others, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong" that requires almost no consistency other than a child's sense of being the center of the universe. In the latter case it would be very easy for low intelligence people to score very highly on extremism.
>requires almost no consistency other than a child's sense of being the center of the universe.
It requires that, and nothing else important going on emotionally. That can be mostly true, but it will never be triple nine true because thats just not how humans work.
I am not sure I quite follow your point. I was suggesting that there are probably ideologies that are basically “whatever the default stupid and unreflective person thinks “, such that a low intelligence person could answer survey questions highly accurately because the answers would be their gut instinct response.
What a stupid unreflective person thinks changes from person to person and based on what they had for breakfast. You could make an ideology that captures the general direction, but a smart person following it inentionally as a sort of populism could still score higher on it than the average stupid person. Its a bit like how picking the median allele everywhere is fitter than the average person.
I see what you are getting at. I think you will find that there are many commonly held beliefs among the unintelligent that are pretty consistent. Bryan Caplan catalogued quite a few in Myth of the Rational Voter, specifically among economic beliefs.
Now, how unintelligent is a question to consider. For quite below average, say IQ < 80, you are probably correct. For people in the 80-100 range, however, you could probably get some pretty consistent answers.
Question 1: Beer, do you want it?
Question 2: Hard work, do you like to do it?
Question 3: Should the government spend money to assist people like you?
Ok, those are jokes, but if one tried hard one could probably design an ideology that matches what people instinctively feel is right, thus allowing people who don't think about it much or have a strong need for consistency across domains to be "extreme" when it comes to answering survey questions because of how consistently their answers follow the expected answers of that ideology.
So then we'd need an additional reason why women are more likely to perceive themselves as extreme, even though they're actually centrist. Any hypotheses?
Personally, I don't buy it.
Have you ever used reddit? Specifically the /r/AmITheAsshole subreddit?
reddit is one of the biggest social media sites. It appears ahead of X on some traffic rankings. reddit is full of strident women and deferential men.
I've also seen line graphs floating around online indicating that gender political polarization is increasing, and it's driven by women, but I'm too lazy to dig those up right now.
I will have to read the Hanson poast, but I am familiar with the work of Benenson. I think of women as more objectively defined by societal momentum, but that because they are not independent thinkers as such, it is always parametrized.
As a result, because of X years of leftism (or whatever you want to call "The Thing") you get a lot more "Protect Trans kids" amongst women, but few have the conviction to adopt a position of "trans all kids" until it achieves a certain exit velocity.
Originally, this seemed to point to a sort of societal conservatism (like prohibition, which was also bolstered by other incentives, obviously), which means they will cling to dead fads not as a true belief but as a lagging effect of their ability to adjust to shifting societal priors.
That's a useful point, but I am a little leery of it since I think people tend to always think of themselves as more moderate than they are, similar to how most people describe themselves as "middle class". Except for a few of us who feel that they are very much outsiders most people seem to believe they are the normal ones and everyone else is unusual.
I agree. Lower intelligence people hardly think for themselves, they just pick whatever position seems to be popular or acceptable in their group.
Which is why you will get a lot of variances, group not being homogenous and various factors push the acceptable position depending on subject.
Very stupid people are going to have more consistent extreme views because they can't understand much and the group, they have access to cannot push them to reasonable positions.
Very intelligent people may have more extreme views on some subject but it may be because the general public is lagging behind or that they just ignore that it cannot apply to everyone because most people do not possess their ability (like a tall person requiring tables to be raised by 10 cm).
“[Female tendency toward centrist beliefs] is just a special case of the nearly universal greater male variance finding.” --> I reckon this tendency also has a lot to do with women being more conformist than men. "Extreme" beliefs are typically held by those with unusually low conformity.
That depends a lot on how you define "leftism". If you define leftism as putting the group above the individual, then it makes sense, it is just that the horse shoe points left. Or to put it another way, all thought patterns tend to drift left if left is defined as group over individual.
How can "centrist" views be a proxy for lack of craziness, given that the media has been a bought and paid for opinion-maker working for oligarchic and Jewish interests for more than fifty years?
Do you believe it is a marker of craziness to entertain the hypothesis that high D-factor personalities are more common in Ashkenazim than in native Europeans, given 1) the likely causal chain of endogamy, exploitive professions, sexual selection by parental choice, and family size being facilitated by higher income; together with 2) the actual evidence of a post-medieval Ashkenazi population explosion and the ongoing publicly-conducted genocide in Gaza?
This is my intuitive sense of things...
Women, especially intelligent women, put a lot of weight on what high status individuals do and say. In the vast majority of times and places, this has served them well. Because of the malignant and dysgenic ideology that we call "wokeness", this is *not* the case in the America of the last 10 years.
"I am following and repeating what all the good high status people say. Why is this not working out for me? Why is it not improving my love life? Why is it not making me feel more happy and satisfied?"
It's a totally reasonable reaction. And struggling to find good emotionally-acceptable answers is what's gradually driving some of them crazy.
There are people who report on the news regularly. They wear nice suits, they are immaculately groomed, they are unfailingly civil, they convey a sense of considerable personal success. They strongly and consistently promote a long list of progressive values that the low-status deplorables call "wokeness". Thus wokeness is good! I should try to be as woke as possible. This way of thinking does make a certain degree of sense, but it fails when successful public figures start promoting bad ideas.
Some men also think like this, but most don't. Most men set specific personal goals/desires for their lives, and try to figure out how best to achieve those *specific* goals/desires. For most men, this comes down to finding a girlfriend/wife, having a nice job or career, having good entertainment, simply enjoying life and/or finding a sense of purpose in life. The failure mode for men is over-indulging in things that are enjoyable in the moment but cause long-term problems. But they're not going to buy into an ideology that is clearly counter to their basic self-interest just because the people promoting that ideology are high-status. Men put *some* value in high-status, but not *that* much.
So ultimately, the main fault is with the terrible ideology that has taken over much of the west, causing many otherwise smart people to make bad decisions. Until our societal elites fully dismiss this ideology, it will be very hard/unlikely for things to improve.
It makes sense that more intelligent people are less conformist (https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2017/11/rationality-and-freedom.html).
Women are both more conformist (https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/wokism#women-and-wokism) and slightly less intelligent than men (https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/sex-differences-in-intelligence) on average.
I think the intelligence effect on extremism is something that kind of has to be true if youre looking at high enough levels of extremism. To get *really* high extremism scores, you have to answer a lot of questions "correctly" from the POV of that ideology, and even extreme moods just cannot be this consistent without abstract aids.
Lower-intelligence people may be more likely to be "radical centrists", taking extreme positions in ways that *arent* consistent across questions - that seems to be what ERS is measuring.
Also, the ideological scales we judge extremism on are themselves based on abstract machinery. I think you could find political-question-aggregates on which stupid people are more extreme in either direction when looking at the whole population correlation (and I would like to see what those are), but still the *most* extreme on these scales would intelligent.
That's an interesting point. It isn't entirely clear what extreme means in many cases. I can imagine how this might cut both ways, however, depending on the nature of the ideologies. For example, an ideology with many limitations that apply to the believer themself like libertarianism requires a lot of abstract consistency to score highly, but I could imagine an ideology that was basically "There are no limits on your behavior or demands on others, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong" that requires almost no consistency other than a child's sense of being the center of the universe. In the latter case it would be very easy for low intelligence people to score very highly on extremism.
>requires almost no consistency other than a child's sense of being the center of the universe.
It requires that, and nothing else important going on emotionally. That can be mostly true, but it will never be triple nine true because thats just not how humans work.
I am not sure I quite follow your point. I was suggesting that there are probably ideologies that are basically “whatever the default stupid and unreflective person thinks “, such that a low intelligence person could answer survey questions highly accurately because the answers would be their gut instinct response.
What a stupid unreflective person thinks changes from person to person and based on what they had for breakfast. You could make an ideology that captures the general direction, but a smart person following it inentionally as a sort of populism could still score higher on it than the average stupid person. Its a bit like how picking the median allele everywhere is fitter than the average person.
I see what you are getting at. I think you will find that there are many commonly held beliefs among the unintelligent that are pretty consistent. Bryan Caplan catalogued quite a few in Myth of the Rational Voter, specifically among economic beliefs.
Now, how unintelligent is a question to consider. For quite below average, say IQ < 80, you are probably correct. For people in the 80-100 range, however, you could probably get some pretty consistent answers.
Question 1: Beer, do you want it?
Question 2: Hard work, do you like to do it?
Question 3: Should the government spend money to assist people like you?
Ok, those are jokes, but if one tried hard one could probably design an ideology that matches what people instinctively feel is right, thus allowing people who don't think about it much or have a strong need for consistency across domains to be "extreme" when it comes to answering survey questions because of how consistently their answers follow the expected answers of that ideology.
Ideology is an imprecise term, as shown in this Merriam-Webster definition:
1 a: a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture
b: the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program
c: a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture
Some of what is discussed in this thread isn't integrated or systematic, so it leads to confusion.
Lol. It's true. I'm glad I've never fitted in.
"Women are more centrist in their personality and thus their beliefs than men."
Some evidence against this claim:
"Americans' Political Ideology by Subgroup, 2021"
https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-steady-conservatives-moderates-tie.aspx
You can see that 37% of men and women both call themselves moderates.
Self-perception != actual beliefs.
So then we'd need an additional reason why women are more likely to perceive themselves as extreme, even though they're actually centrist. Any hypotheses?
Personally, I don't buy it.
Have you ever used reddit? Specifically the /r/AmITheAsshole subreddit?
reddit is one of the biggest social media sites. It appears ahead of X on some traffic rankings. reddit is full of strident women and deferential men.
/r/AmITheAsshole appears to be mostly young women: https://imgur.com/a/r-amitheasshole-2019-subscriber-survey-POhgZsh
and they LOVE to judge everyone who's not a young woman in harsh terms: https://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/tr4aru/oc_ramitheasshole_asshole_percentage_by_age_and/
I've also seen line graphs floating around online indicating that gender political polarization is increasing, and it's driven by women, but I'm too lazy to dig those up right now.
This is the most insightful thing I've read online about gender differences. In my opinion it explains much of the gender discourse: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/women-as-worriers-who-exclude
Women conform with each other, but that's very much *not* the same as being even-handed, vanilla centrists.
Being herdlike is of course being closer to the center.
Not if you're part of a herd that's moving farther and farther left. That's basically what wokeness is.
I will have to read the Hanson poast, but I am familiar with the work of Benenson. I think of women as more objectively defined by societal momentum, but that because they are not independent thinkers as such, it is always parametrized.
As a result, because of X years of leftism (or whatever you want to call "The Thing") you get a lot more "Protect Trans kids" amongst women, but few have the conviction to adopt a position of "trans all kids" until it achieves a certain exit velocity.
Originally, this seemed to point to a sort of societal conservatism (like prohibition, which was also bolstered by other incentives, obviously), which means they will cling to dead fads not as a true belief but as a lagging effect of their ability to adjust to shifting societal priors.
You have a big sample bias when selecting women who use reddit.
Moderate women would hardly spend that much time there, they have better things to do, so it's not very conclusive data in my book.
That's a useful point, but I am a little leery of it since I think people tend to always think of themselves as more moderate than they are, similar to how most people describe themselves as "middle class". Except for a few of us who feel that they are very much outsiders most people seem to believe they are the normal ones and everyone else is unusual.
Are you saying Ayn Rand was crazy? Never!
What’s even the point of this article ? It’s just ad hominem.
I agree. Lower intelligence people hardly think for themselves, they just pick whatever position seems to be popular or acceptable in their group.
Which is why you will get a lot of variances, group not being homogenous and various factors push the acceptable position depending on subject.
Very stupid people are going to have more consistent extreme views because they can't understand much and the group, they have access to cannot push them to reasonable positions.
Very intelligent people may have more extreme views on some subject but it may be because the general public is lagging behind or that they just ignore that it cannot apply to everyone because most people do not possess their ability (like a tall person requiring tables to be raised by 10 cm).
Credibility of Eysenck is at least questionable. Many of his works gave non-replicable results.
I bet the only women you don’t hate are beards and hags. How convenient!
“[Female tendency toward centrist beliefs] is just a special case of the nearly universal greater male variance finding.” --> I reckon this tendency also has a lot to do with women being more conformist than men. "Extreme" beliefs are typically held by those with unusually low conformity.
[off-topic] I wonder why kink-shaming is more socially acceptable than non-straight shaming.
A lot of kinky people are heterosexuals. They're not as strongly left-coded.
1) Because they are women.
2) Also because they’re trying to be men, we can see same with men trying to be “women.”
"autists who looked hard at some data others don't look at"??
Few Westerners look hard at data of any kindl.
Even fewer know what to make of it.
Fewer still are persuaded by it, and none of them is in a position of power.
The reverse is true in China.
Hence we're fucked.
Fascism was a leftist ideology so horseshoe theory is bull.
That depends a lot on how you define "leftism". If you define leftism as putting the group above the individual, then it makes sense, it is just that the horse shoe points left. Or to put it another way, all thought patterns tend to drift left if left is defined as group over individual.
How can "centrist" views be a proxy for lack of craziness, given that the media has been a bought and paid for opinion-maker working for oligarchic and Jewish interests for more than fifty years?
Do you believe it is a marker of craziness to entertain the hypothesis that high D-factor personalities are more common in Ashkenazim than in native Europeans, given 1) the likely causal chain of endogamy, exploitive professions, sexual selection by parental choice, and family size being facilitated by higher income; together with 2) the actual evidence of a post-medieval Ashkenazi population explosion and the ongoing publicly-conducted genocide in Gaza?
>post with nothing about ze jews
>let's talk about them again
>posted it again award.png