This seems too high for 10-15 years to me, but I respect Aella taking the issue seriously.

Tbh, my first reaction was that he's covered in blood.

If China merely developed its economy as well as Taiwan did (i.e. had the same level of productivity) it would have a third of world GDP, which i'm pretty sure would be higher than any other country in modern history.

@SemioticRivalry The US was at 40% in 1960: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-share-of-global-economy-over-time/

@SemioticRivalry But to address the main point, would the specific elements in the tweet have made that much of a difference in China's GDP?

I always assumed there's a certain level of diminishing returns in development, so huge countries like China can't follow the same strategy as smaller countries like South Korea, Singapore, or Taiwan.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 i don't think it's necessarily obvious in either direction. Capital per person is definitely more important than raw population, but possibly more important than either are the gains in specialization from a larger population, tariff-free intrastate trade with more people, and increased foreign investment due to a larger market size.

@SemioticRivalry My experience comes mainly from playing Victoria 3, for whatever that's worth. The easiest strategy to increase your GDP per capita in the game is to play as a smallish country, but join the market of a much larger country, and specialize in the most profitable industries.

I think that's roughly what's happened in the real world economy in the last few decades, and it doesn't scale.

Substack version: https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/the-death-again-of-the-internet-as?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=8ddtt

I'm curious to hear people's arguments on this one, I'm currently undecided

@Nat There are a few reasons, one being that voting is just a more direct way to affect policy. If politicians who support your cause get elected, that cause is much more likely to succeed. If they don't, then it doesn't really matter how many protests there are, the politicians will just ignore it. So voting is, at the very least, a necessary thing to do if you want to support just about any political cause (whereas causes can often get by just fine without protests).

The second reason is that protests are pretty much never going to change politicians' minds. The best you can do is change the minds of the general public in hopes that they'll elect better politicians (making it an indirect way of doing what voting also does), but in many cases, protests don't change anyone's mind or are even actively counterproductive. For example, the recent protests against the war in Gaza on college campuses might have actually made people more likely to support the war because they don't like the protestors. The BLM protests in 2020 seemed like they were working in the short term, but they inspired such a backlash that it's hard to say how much they helped their cause on net, if at all.

I think there are two big reasons for this: One is that protests often involve doing things that most people disapprove of, for example, blocking roads or otherwise disrupting people's lives, causing property damage, or even violence. Even when this isn't an intended part of the protest and was just the result of things getting out of hand, it makes people less sympathetic to the protestors' cause because they see the protestors as bad people, or at least as people who are misguidedly harming others. The second thing is that protests often amplify the most extreme voices on their side of an issue, making it very easy for the opposition to smear everyone who sides with the protestors as having the most extreme views. The obvious example is right wing pundits who claimed that Democrats wanted to abolish or defund the police despite the fact that basically no Democrats want to do that.

Also, I don't necessarily think this has always been true, just that it's true now. In the past, protestors have been able to achieve a lot, but I think protestors today are much less strategic about picking their battles and making sure their protests actually get people on their side. Part of this is that protestors today are much more likely to be doing it just as a way to express their outrage, rather than as a calculated strategy to achieve their political goals.

@Nat

If politicians who support your cause get elected, that cause is much more likely to succeed.

I agree with this 100%. Getting someone elected is better than protesting for something

If they don't, then it doesn't really matter how many protests there are, the politicians will just ignore it.

Not necessarily sure I agree with this, and I suspect on the margin participating in a protest w/ effective messaging is better than you voting for a candidate that may or may not be elected. Of course, I am adding the qualifier "effective messaging"; I think the second part of your post does address the fact that most protests nowadays are probably much less effective than they were in the past. That seems true for the reasons you outlined.

@PlasmaBallin I think it depends a lot on how one chooses to protest, which makes this question hard to answer definitively. In general, though, I'm not terribly impressed with voting as a means to effect change: thanks to First-Past-The-Post, you're almost never voting on a specific solution to a particular problem. You're just choosing between [Party 1 and their platform's stance on every controversial issue] or [Party 2 and their polar opposite stance on every controversial issue].

We hate buying giant bundles of unrelated products when we only care about a few items in the pack (e.g., cable channels) so why is it so appealing to elect them? If you're lucky enough that your pet issue is fairly obscure and/or non-partisan, you might get to bend your representative's ear about it, but mostly they're going to vote how the Party tells them to. (And we encourage them to! Think about how hated Joe Manchin is for catering to his constituents instead of the Democratic party's goals.)

If you have the resources and manpower to spin up your own political machine, and cultivate hand-picked candidates for your goals, then you're getting somewhere; the Federalist Society has been incredibly successful at getting its preferred policies into law despite them contradicting the majority opinions of the American public. But is that really a glowing commendation for the electoral process, which (at least in theory) is supposed to keep that from happening? (And it's not an easy feat to replicate, as EAs' attempt to elect Carrick Flynn showed.)

As for protesting, there are so many forms that labeling them all under one umbrella doesn't really leave you with a useful concept. The 1950s protests against Jim Crow laws, which broke laws specifically to challenge them on Constitutional grounds, worked extremely well. (But you still need the right courtroom: this approach backfired disastrously in 1896.) Boycotts have a solid track record of achieving their goals, because most businesses ultimately care less about their political messaging than the almighty dollar. (Right-wing activists slammed Target last year over their Pride merch, and the retailer is rolling out a much more limited Pride collection this summer.) As for the more generic 'sign-waving' protests about raising awareness or expressing outrage... on their face they would seem less "effective," but how would you measure that? The Arab Spring was touched off by a guy who lit himself on fire. Say what you will about the outcome, that protest certainly achieved something.

@Jonagold Arab Spring isn't actually a counterexample to the tweet because it's only about protests in liberal democracies. I agree that the Civil Rights movement is a big counterexample - that was what led me to include the word "generally" in the original tweet rather than claiming something stronger like "almost always", and it's the reason why I only think the tweet is true today but wasn't necessarily true in the past.

Boycotts are maybe a modern counterexample, but it's worth noting that, even when successful, they only achieve small-scale goals. "Make Target take down their pride displays," is not the full goal of the anti-LGBT movement, and if that's all their movement can achieve, then their movement has failed miserably. If the movement succeeds in electing a bunch of anti-LGBT politicians this November, then much worse things are coming for LGBT rights than just a smaller display at Target.

a lot of men hobbies are like playing video games or table top games which i dont guess is very attractive

yeah i agree with the tweet mostly

it's making a normative claim not a descriptive claim

@jim Can you elaborate?

Edit: I finally read the original tweet thread. I think the author actually meant something more like, "To attract women, men need to choose hobbies and ambitions that women will find interesting." But (as happens on Twitter) he deliberately phrased his idea as provocatively as possible.

I still somewhat disagree with even that watered-down version, though.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 Ed's claim is that the purpose of a man's hobbies should be to attract women (a normative claim), not that the purpose of men's hobbies actually is to attract women.

I think the truth is that men should try to be good men, and that entails not wasting your time playing with toys, and the women are just a part of eudemonia or whatever (can u tell i have never bothered to read classical ethics?)

but that's all in some theoretical human world. Here in reality AGI is near, sexual relationships are pointless

@jim So (according to you) what counts as not wasting time in a reality with AGI near?

To be clear, that is according to you because I disagree that "playing with toys" is "wasting time." It is using it.

@DavidBolin all that matters is ensuring superintelligence is achieved

@jim @TimothyJohnson5c16 Actually, I think he is claiming it as a descriptive statement rather than a normative one. See for example, his response to this reply, which doesn't make any sense if he was making a normative claim: https://twitter.com/EdLatimore/status/1788943967477772690

Though I think it's a terrible take either way.

@PlasmaBallin oh yeah, you're right

Well this sure explains why Manifold is overrun with hot women looking for adventure.

the existence of manifold markets is a solid proof against this one

@SemioticRivalry Why are prediction markets overwhelmingly male? There are some trans women I guess. But not that many cis women. There are a nonzero number - @shankypanky for instance - but really not so many.

Do women, on average, just not care about the truth as much? 😭

@nathanwei

Do women just not care about the truth as much? 😭

1) what

@shankypanky yeah I don’t think that’s the reason 😂

@ShadowyZephyr What's the reason?

@nathanwei before I comment again - can you confirm it was a genuine comment and not undetected sarcasm? (whatever answer is true, of course. I just don't want to respond earnestly if it wasn't actually your position)

@shankypanky Yeah it was a genuine comment. Though, you removed the "on average" from it which makes me look like a horrible misogynist. I should have expanded a bit more.

So I think that most people - of either gender - really do not care about the truth very much. Only people on the autism spectrum and a few others really care about the truth for its own sake, are "high decoupling", and so on.

I think that a small minority of the population really cares about the truth. And of this small minority, I think that most of it is male. I'm not saying of course that no women care about the truth or that a majority of men do, but I do think that of the people who put truth as a high priority, most are male, yes.

Other things of course might be affecting the gender ratio on Manifold as well. But I do think that the idea that when I say X I am actually saying X and not making a moral claim where you infer I am also saying Y and so on, and that we should bet on X, is a very autistic/Asperger "male brain" idea.

@nathanwei just dropping a quick comment here because I'm going afk for a bit and didn't want my lack of response to be misinterpreted (I'm keen to continue this exchange)

but if you feel like answering in the interim: I'm curious how you're defining or identifying truth seeking - surely it's not only prediction markets? when you make statements about caring about the truth, the "small minority" who do, etc. how are you coming to that conclusion? what represents caring about truth in our mind? particularly on a broad scale since you've made some sweeping statements here.

@shankypanky Yeah I should clarify this a bit more.

All right, so I will say that for most people, truth is not actually that high up on their list of priorities. You agree, right? People believe and have believed all sorts of false things. And generally people don't like to bet on their beliefs. Most people have wrong and motivated beliefs that they do not want to empirically test. Most people are conformist and believe mostly what their friend group believes and so on. Now, men are on average more risk-seeking and less comformist than women. This means that of the few people in the world who really do care about the truth, most of them are male.

To give a concrete example, historically women were religious Christians at much higher rates than men. And today women are woke at higher rates. If you were to make a prediction market about the empirical basis for Christianity or wokism, I'm sure more men than women would participate, and more women would say that the market is problematic and should be shut down.

Obviously there is huge variance within men and within women, and there are tons of sex differences that are unflattering in the other direction (e.g. men committing 95+% of murder).

@SemioticRivalry Sorry should have scrolled, too fast on the gun there.

@nathanwei "Care about the truth" is an extremely broad statement. I don’t think it’s accurate to conflate it with an extremely niche hobby like “participate in prediction markets” (let alone, specifically Manifold, i.e. the topic of this conversation). There are countless ways that one might credibly demonstrate that they "care about the truth", and it strikes me as somewhat closed-minded (or at the very least, incurious/not demonstrating much "care for the truth" on your end) to assume that only people who signal their truth-seeking in narrow, prescribed ways that you personally find legible count as people who "care about the truth".

(Edit: fwiw, this was replying to the original comment, i see there's now a more recent one)

@Ziddletwix I certainly do not intend to say that only people who use prediction markets care about the truth. I never said anything like that! But I do think that more men than women "care about the truth", and the userbase of prediction markets is sampled from the set of people who "care about the truth".

It's true that "care about the truth" is an extremely broad and nebulous statement. Let me try to give some examples. I'd be willing to bet, for instance, that people who never lie are disproportionately male (and that pathological liars and politicians are also disproportionately male). Most people with Asperger's are male. I would certainly guess that most "high decouplers" are male. Most rationalists are male. I would guess that most people who care an unusual amount about the truth (in either direction) are male. Since Manifold users are sampled from people who care about the truth an unusually high amount, this demographic leans male.

Of course women don’t care about truth. People are always telling us that this holding up hands four inches apart is ten inches.

@ClubmasterTransparent Probably the biggest pathological liars (e.g. politicans) are disproportionately men, but also the biggest non-liars are also disproportionately men.

@nathanwei Your funny bone is broken

@nathanwei Seems like just your standard "men are on average more thing/physical reality oriented while women are more people/social reality oriented". Which isn't quite the same as "not caring about the truth" - you can be people-oriented and care about true things about people's relationships I guess? - but does map to caring less about the kind of decidable fact you get in prediction markets.

@ShakedKoplewitz So make a market on this assertion of yours, which you’ve addressed to another guy-presenting person after two people in the conversation have uncloacked as actual women. Will the result be a decidable fact?

@nathanwei I think that sums up the crux of the disagreement fairly well (& it explains the earlier conclusions about gender that I do not agree with). If you look to the narrow, prescribed signals for “caring about the truth” that you personally find legible (e.g. “bet on your beliefs”, participation in your specific chosen online community, “high decoupling”, etc), then it does not surprise me that some broad demographics (e.g. women) are less likely to share those same signals.

I think those specific signals reflect the particular practices of a certain online community (which does, indeed, care about the truth!), and it's natural that you find those more familiar, and they do not comprehensively describe what it means to be truth-seeking. I personally feel like I meet many people in my daily life who care deeply about the truth—they demonstrate this in many concrete ways (e.g. rigorous analytical thinking, coherently updating their beliefs based on new evidence, curiosity, etc), but none of that requires them to use the particular signals you are listing. (the signals we find personally legible are inevitably gendered, but in my experience general truth-seeking behavior, broadly defined, is not at all gendered)

@ShakedKoplewitz I think we need some way to operationalize this disagreement. I still would guess that people betting on "will the relationship of X and Y work" on manifold.love is mostly going to be male.

@ClubmasterTransparent Well, no one is making claims about individual people here. Users of this website are not representative of the broader population in any respect. But that's right, there should be a way to operationalize this disagreement we are having here.

@Ziddletwix Interesting! I would still guess that among people who are very good at updating their beliefs based on new evidence, that most of them are probably male. Not sure how to operationalize this.

@nathanwei Your funny bone is SERIOUSLY broken man!

@Ziddletwix On a more light-hearted note, I find it extra strange that the specific signal that started this conversation—the usage of Manifold Markets—involves so much activity that isn't the slightest bit truth-seeking. I would like to imagine myself as someone who cares about the truth, but if I had to provide evidence of that, I certainly wouldn't cite my success on the Manifold leaderboards—feels like far weaker evidence compared to something normie & boring like "they wrote a paper that demonstrated rigorous & clear thinking" (which in my experience is not the slightest bit gendered).

@Ziddletwix The first pair is at least somewhat fair, I don't think that success on the leaderboard is actually indicative of truth so much as valuing success on the leaderboard. But the former does come from the latter.

I'm going to push back on the second part of that though. You can have "rigorous and clear thinking" and be a great debater or essay-writer but be totally wrong. Sophistry is a real thing. This is independent of the earlier point on gender. If anything, men are probably better sophists than women on average. But I just wanted to say that making seemingly logical arguments can be overrated, which is why you need things like prediction markets. The world is complicated and messy, and you can't just derive everything from ZFC.

@nathanwei Whoa sorry, just realized you’re probably neurodiverse, me too in a non-autistic way, I’m not communicating in a way that makes sense to you. Trying again. What I was doing back there was using humor to disarm an opponent. Fell flat, I misjudged. Let me try this. Everyone’s ability to appreciate the truth is confined by our own imagination. It’s possible that you have met many men and few women who appreciate the truth in the way you do. But try just a small occasional thought experiment. What if there are many roads to truth? What if truth shows itself differently to different people? Or at different times? Were the ancient Greeks or Hebrews wrong and we’re right? Is there truth in music?

@nathanwei I don't like "truth seeking" here because it's affectively loaded (it sounds too obviously positive), while not being very descriptive. In general if we do observe broad differences in behavior between groups people we should expect them to be adaptive to different circumstances rather than one being better (there are exceptions, but I don't think this is one). And it's also just not a narow enough description that I can easily picture examples of people's behaviors that would qualify as more or less "truth seeking", which makes it a poor candidate for resolvable predictions.

@ClubmasterTransparent I mean, I do think that there is a real thing called truth. As for whether there is "truth" in music, perhaps, but not in the sense that I was using truth. I meant like, empirical predictions about what will happen in the future, or some statement about the natural world (science), or about ZFC (mathematics).

@ShakedKoplewitz That's true. But I mean it's OK to say that women are more peaceful and less violent than women even though this is loaded. I guess that this is more descriptive though. Right, it's not so narrow, as Clubmaster wrote, are there truths in music? I should have used something a little more precise and less loaded. Maybe "rationalist" but I wanted something a little more broad than that.

@ClubmasterTransparent
> So make a market on this assertion of yours, which you’ve addressed to another guy-presenting person after two people in the conversation have uncloacked as actual women

I'm having trouble judging the intended tone of this comment, but if the correct interpretation is to insinuate that I'm acting badly by not addressing either of the women in this conversation that seems unfair? I just didn't explicitly agree or disagree with any of it enough to form an opinion.

(I'm also not sure what "make a market of it" means - there's a bunch of existing research directionally showing men tend to lean more thing-oriented than women, but making a market on existing research is fairly meaningless, and I don't know how to come up with a non-studied resolvable question that would be a good proxy for this).

@ShakedKoplewitz Not mad. Nor a stranger to research, evidence, or quantitative stuff. I’d be surprised if such a resolvable question were found. If I got a couple people thinking about that, my work here is done, thanks.

@ClubmasterTransparent Yeah I feel that this exchange has been civil and good faith on all sides.

I still am of the opinion that among people who care about the truth much more than usual that most are male. But I’m thinking about how to operationalize this somewhat vague notion of caring about the truth and coming up with an empirical question.

whew okay I'm back online and caught up and there's certainly a lot I have responses to or questions about, but I know the discourse has come to a bit of a close. thanks everyone for the perspectives 🧡 I might come back to this later

@shankypanky I’m still open to continuing this discussion. Please reply with any interesting thoughts you have!

@ClubmasterTransparent Yeah I genuinely can't think of an experimental test? Also I'm not sure anyone actually disagrees with my (fairly weak) claim?

@ShakedKoplewitz I think you can only test whether someone "cares about truth" if you identify a specific scenario where choosing the truth competes with something else that people generally value.

Some scenarios simply involve curiosity:
1) If you read a claim that birds are technically dinosaurs, would you double-check the source before you shared it?

Some scenarios involve a willingness to seek out evidence of being wrong:
2) If you were volunteering for a political campaign to raise the minimum wage, and you saw a study that argued it would be detrimental to your community, would you investigate further?

And some scenarios involve questions of integrity:
3) If your boss praised your work and promised you a raise, but you knew that one of your coworkers actually deserved the credit, would you tell them?

I'm fairly certain that (1) is male-dominated, though it would vary somewhat by which topic you picked. And that could partly explain why, for example, Manifold has a significant gender imbalance.

I also suspect that (3) is female-dominated, and to me that's a much more important aspect of caring about truth. I'm not sure about (2).

@TimothyJohnson5c16 Right, I think all of these situations have so many complex incentives it's really hard to check for a general "cares about truth" factor.

I'm fairly certain that (1) is male-dominated, though it would vary somewhat by which topic you picked. And that could partly explain why, for example, Manifold has a significant gender imbalance.

I also suspect that (3) is female-dominated, and to me that's a much more important aspect of caring about truth. I'm not sure about (2).

what does this even mean? particularly in the case of the first one - you're saying that a males are more likely to verify information and check a source before sharing than women?? based on what? I assume your perspective on (3) is based on the idea that men are more competitive in the workplace? we've made a pretty far stretch from the original comment (which is also really far from the tweet itself) about there being a gender bias on 'truth seeking' to now profiling genders by their willingness/desire to be truthful as well and it all feels really absurd to me tbh - feel free to clear it up if you say I'm misreading this comment.

and while I'm asking, it fits with Nathan's earlier point:

I'd be willing to bet, for instance, that people who never lie are disproportionately male

to be honest, my knee-jerk reaction was "okay, tell me who hurt you" when I read this.

but in all seriousness and with all due respect, these just seem like general assumptions you're both making and not backing up with anything tangible. and I know how popular it is to post surveys or polls or limited studies to back up comments around here, but I'll need more than that when you're making such sweeping statements.

there's a ton of other stuff I disagree with in this thread and I'm still not sure whether it's worth my resurrecting for the sake of an asynchronous comment-based exchange.

I'm also laughing to myself (it's not the first time) when I see "I wonder why there aren't more women on this site?" in a comment thread about women being less interested in seeking truth, and women being less likely to invest in truthfulness if it requires any legwork.

@shankypanky I don't think women are not going to this site because there is a comment thread somewhere on it saying that there are fewer women because of XYZ.

OK, at least most people with Aspergers/autism are male, right?

@nathanwei lol

missed the entire point of my comment (or you don't feel like responding to it, which is fine) - what does your question have to do with anything I've said above? is this an attempt at changing tracks, or are you trying to establish a common ground, or some secret third option, or...?

@shankypanky I just responded to a small portion of the comment, as I could not think of anything terribly interesting to think about most of it.

@nathanwei fair enough. since prediction markets are indicative of truth seeking, I'll look forward to seeing any markets you can come up with that convert your ideas into something more tangible. I would happily fund them, even, when you decide how to operationalise these ideas.

@nathanwei overwhelming majority of both sexes usually don't care about truth in the objective sense. It's a tool rather than an end to most.

OK I think this was addressed already.

@RanaG I agree. My claim is that among the minority of those who do, most are male. Most weird people are male. But not all. 😂

Yeah it was a genuine comment. Though, you removed the "on average" from it which makes me look like a horrible misogynist. I should have expanded a bit more.

@nathanwei I was just reading back through the thread and noticed this line. this is an insincere statement, suggesting that I deliberately left something out to frame you in a bad light. in reality, you edited your comment after posting - which is fair, it often happens that on reflection it feels better to reframe a statement! - and after I quoted you to respond. it's there in the edit history, so please don't suggest I'm out of integrity.

@shankypanky Right, but I edited that significantly before you responded, which is why I was confused (but I guess not before you started drafting the response). Obviously I meant on average! Once has to be careful with this sort of statement. Not suggesting you are out of integrity. Was just noting that the discrepancy between what I wrote in the post and what you wrote in your quote. OK, actually that's not quite right. I certainly had the thought that you were just quoting the earlier version of the post, but I thought I had edited it in time so I was just confused and didn't really know what was happening.

For what it's worth, I am confident that you are very high on truth-seeking. 😂

@shankypanky I was just confused why the earlier version of the post was in what you quoted, because I edited it right after posting it and some time before your reply. So I was confused, and maybe thought that you had removed it. Mistake by me rather than an insincere statement, I think.

(Narrator: What does this mean for the average care about the truthiness of billions of men vs billions of women? Exercise left to the reader.)

Edit again: Looking again at the timelines, I think I posted it and immediately edited it, and like 10 minutes later you replied quoting the initial version, so I was rather confused. I think I had the thought that it seemed strange to me that it would take 10 minutes to draft a short message, but of course people have other windows open.

One should try not to make vastly general statements like "men are more truth-seeking than women" and should always insert the "on average" just so the audience knows you aren't saying all women blah or all men blah. I did which was bad but then I fixed it.

Anyway, for what it's worth @shankypanky I am sure you are very high on truth seeking, far higher than most men and women alike. Thanks for engaging in the discussion.

@shankypanky I decided to step away from this before I responded, but I'm back now.

First of all, I agree with Nathan that you're very high on truth seeking, and I appreciate that you called me out.

My comment was mainly intended to suggest some specific ways that "caring about truth" could be measured, and in particular that the comparison would change drastically based on how it's defined.

I don't have hard evidence to back up any of the chains that I made, so perhaps sharing my own speculation wasn't wise.

And actually, after stepping away from this for a bit, it seems like maybe this is not a very productive issue to debate?

I do care about how to be more truth-seeking on a personal level, but trying to prove that one gender somehow does/doesn't do that better than the other isn't very helpful for that.

For that reason, I don't intend to reply again on this thread, but you can take the last word if you want it.