17 Comments

I just discovered your writing after reading one of your posts, the one on young female depression due to "No more roses for Becky." I was so impressed that I went back to read every post you've written on gender issues. You are currently the most interesting writer on gender issues I've run across recently. I find your tone to be much more reflective and objective than Louise Perry, who makes similar points in a much more polemical manner. I see you ultimately respecting the different choices that women (and men) make in a much more "live and let live" approach while grounding the realities of female sexuality in a plausible evolutionary psychology. I very much appreciate your openness about your personal experience combined with your more theoretical reflections.

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Thank you very much, I'm very happy to hear that! I have every reason to be reflective rather than polemical because I don't really know what I advocate. I can see that the current system technically doesn't work as intended, but except from greater awareness I'm unsure about exactly what remedies to suggest.

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I think that Jonathan spend a lot of time arguing that the technology behind social media heavily contributed to the polarization. On the whole I believe with some training and trying to focus on the truth we can converse safely

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Yes, he does, and I think he is right. If tech companies wanted to decrease polarization, a lot could be done about it.

I think that basically, the reason why people behave more civilizedly in real life is that they are afraid to get killed or hurt by those they upset. If we say something that really upsets someone in real life, we either apologize or get out of the place, because we don't want to die because of such a trivial argument. The really tough ones might prepare for a fist fight instead. In any case, the threat of physical violence puts a limit to what people dare to say to each other. Now that the internet lets people communicate without risk of immediate violence, people can go on and on with verbal aggression to a previously unknown of extent.

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Physical violence or exclusion from a group etc

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Yes! Everything except throwing insults at each other day after day, month after month.

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I’m wondering, are either of you neurodivergent? Maybe that’s why people think you write differently?

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Ha ha ha, please diagnose me from my writing!

I once took Simon Baron-Cohen's Autism Quotient Test: https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient

The median for females is 15. 80 percent of people who score a 32 or higher have an autism diagnosis. I scored a 25. So the test told me what I already knew: I'm halfway there.

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Does Anders score higher?

I took a 12 there. On similar tests I score less autistic than the ordinary person; Apple Pie is neurotypical.

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Anders scored 26. No wonder he and I are getting along well.

>Apple Pie is neurotypical

That surprises me a bit! But I might have thought differently about it if I had met you in real life.

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I scored 32, quite interesting. I would never have thought that I have autism

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That's probably rather average for people who go to an ACX meetup. Meeting other people with autism traits is part of the fun.

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Hello, Tove.

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Some of the 'liked by author' is really the author saying 'read by author'. We need better things to do with articles besides 'like' them. 'Well argued but I still think it is wrong' and 'funny' and 'made me think' are just the tip of the iceberg. God Fortsättning Tove och Anders!

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Anders had an idea: Ask an AI to make a picture of Auguste Rhodin's The Thinker in the shape of a cat.

Someone else must have thought of that already.

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We ought to be able to ask Dall-e to whip us up one of those. It doesn't seem to cost very much. https://openai.com/api/pricing/ so how hard would it be to get substack to include a 'make me an icon' feature?

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At first I saw before me how Substack adopted the whole army of smileys from Facebook with comments section littered by frogs in party hats, suns with sunglasses, jumping dolphins and 368 breeds of lol-cats. But when I think a bit about it, developing a new range of smileys for intellectual discussions might not be such a crazy idea. I never learnt to use conventional smileys, but if anyone develops a series of thoughtful cats I will be prepared to test them.

God fortsättning, nattuggla!

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