you know, it occurs to me that I've lived a pretty full and varied life so far, yet nothing has brought me close to feminist ideals like engaging in the comment section of this market 😂

@shankypanky Since you posted this and voted Yes, I'm assuming you mostly agree with it.

But someone wise told me recently, "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."

So... how about it? ;-)

I'm open to being convinced. But my first thought was that no one (male or female) enjoys being told what to do by someone incompetent.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 well first of all, that does sound like something a wise person would say. but let's start with clearing a couple of things up?

- I've posted stuff here I don't agree with (mostly, at all, or otherwise)
- this isn't a survey or a poll or a limited study and I didn't make the statement to begin with ;)

- I actually don't feel so attached to this (hence my little token bet I guess) so I won't argue as fervently as some other topics. happy to go into it, though! you know me... lol

perhaps most importantly:
- the tweet doesn't say that men like always to be told what to do by anyone, including someone incompetent so I think your last sentence is somewhat irrelevant. it simply says they like being told what to do more than women do (leaving aside, for now, the point about gendered disparity.) I can't tell if you wholly disagree with that or if you disagree because you've taken some liberties with the interpretation.

@shankypanky Thanks, understood!

I wasn't sure exactly what the original tweet even means, but the follow-up clarifies things a bit: "Men really love authority and consensus derived processes and natural hierarchies and women don't like any of that shit."

So I started coming up with specific examples. One organization that's built around a natural hierarchy is the military, which is predominantly male. So that's one point in favor of the tweet, and maybe that's the kind of thing the author had in mind.

But as an opposite example, I suspect people who flout COVID mask mandates are also predominantly male (e.g., Bryan Caplan: Reflections on Japan - by Bryan Caplan - Bet On It).

Bryan is also strongly libertarian, which I think is generally driven by a strong distrust of government authority. And twice as many men as women self-identify as libertarian: In search of libertarians | Pew Research Center.

That's why I brought up "being told what to do by someone incompetent". My own hypothesis is that men are much more willing than women to accept a competent authority, but also much more likely to rebel against someone who's incompetent.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 oh, good! we're wandering back into my favourite territory: men do things that are just and make sense, whereas women are more likely to be subservient to the incompetent (and presumably this again relates to who is more 'truth-seeking'?). and here I was worried we left this line of thinking behind in the last thread!

I'll think this through and respond more fully later when I can devote more of my attention to it. (I appreciate you taking a moment to respond). stay tuned.

@shankypanky Oops, maybe that didn't come out right.

To start with, I don't think rebelling against COVID mask mandates is "just and makes sense" - I think it's incredibly anti-social at best.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 I'm referring to this:
My own hypothesis is that men are much more willing than women to accept a competent authority, but also much more likely to rebel against someone who's incompetent.

it went pretty quickly from a general statement about obeying authority to drawing the line between men obeying competent authority and women being more likely to fall in line with an incompetent one.

@shankypanky Yeah, I didn't mean to claim that one way is "just and makes sense" though.

Following competent people can be a terrible thing to do, and rebelling against incompetent people can also be terrible. It depends on the context.

@shankypanky Maybe competence is a misleading word. Let me try another example - Melinda Gates has said that when Bill was the CEO at Microsoft, the company culture was that you could get away with being a huge asshole as long as you were also the smartest person in the room.

I take that as an example of how a hierarchy based on competence can also be dysfunctional. And I think it's not a coincidence that kind of problem generally happens in an organization that's predominantly male.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 okay, well, scratch that phrasing I used, then, if you're stuck on that part. I'll take it back as it's true that you didn't specifically say that the competent authority is the one with the more justifiable position. (perhaps you want to define competent and incompetent for the sake of your statement, then?)

the point is that making generalisations based on a niche political affiliation means you're leaning on a pretty small snapshot of the population.

and I think it's really strange to just take the guess that men would relent to "competent" authority and women would relent to "incompetent" authority in higher proportions. making a statement like that isn't really counterbalanced with "oh, but that doesn't mean those are good or bad things, respectively!"

@TimothyJohnson5c16 I'll wait until you define competence because it's not synonymous with "smartest person in the room" lol

@shankypanky Well, first, I'd like to adjust my original statement to perceived competence: "men are more likely to follow someone they perceive as competent, and less likely to follow someone they perceive as incompetent". Maybe that's a big difference from what I said first, in which case I apologize. But I think it's clear that what matters is the perception, not the reality.

In the context of a tech company, perceived competence is based on a few factors. I believe the main ones are intelligence (hence "smartest person in the room") and experience.

In an unhealthy culture, stating one's opinions forcefully, even to the point of being an asshole, also generally leads to being perceived as more competent. A healthier culture rewards taking time to listen to other people and answer their concerns instead. Either way, formal authority ranks relatively low, which is why I disagree with the tweet.

In a more general context, perceived competence is closely related to "believability". The term comes from Ray Dalio, but my favorite explanation of it is here: Believability - Commoncog:
"Believable people are people who have 1) a record of at least three relevant successes and 2) have great explanations of their approach when probed."

The main reason some people stopped trusting public health authorities during COVID is that they were no longer believable. The perception (fair or not) was that they frequently changed their advice when it failed, and then they tried to censor people who pointed that out instead of explaining why.

Also, I understand I'm generalizing wildly from a small number of examples, so I'm only proposing this as a hypothesis. I don't claim high confidence yet. But if you disagree, I'd appreciate a counterexample of where you think my hypothesis goes wrong.

@shankypanky Well, men are more likely to do extremely stupid things like get in a duel and kill each other over petty nonsense.

Maybe the best solution to this is actually traditional marriage?

It's basically like the story that Noah tells, but without the breakup at the end to make things difficult.

follow up tweet lol

@shankypanky I'm a long way from 50, but I hope my wife and I will be doing more interesting things then...

This is a decent take by itself but the rest of the thread is pretty bad takes.

The meat and veggies are too dilute. Imagine filling a bowl with water and then sprinkling in a few crumb-sized pieces of meat and vegetables and calling it soup. that's basically what the ocean is.

"both parties have some bad ideas", sure absolutely. But they're not the same bad ideas.

And have furries fully become part of the culture war??? Absolutely not

@Marnix solution: just have both parties run a furry in the same race.

I think this is the kind of thread the tweet is responding to: https://t.co/8BP0EBbWzL.

I don't hate him, but he spent more time critiquing fashion in this one thread than I'll ever spend in my entire life.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 I can never get past a couple posts in a thread of his, but he's a good follow and has had some killer comebacks