> Female vervet monkeys manipulate males into fighting battles by lavishing attention on brave soldiers while giving noncombatants the cold shoulder, researchers said on Wednesday.
Title is basically the first sentence of the article.
Is this really manipulation or is it just sexual selection for bravery/aggression/dominance? Are the female monkeys being disingenuous with their attentions or are they sincere? When I read some of the criteria for manipulation on Wikipedia [0] it seems to me like a pretty high bar to show these sorts of behaviours in monkeys.
Species and individual are human classifications; they have no ultimate biological significance. If I reproduce successfully, then my genes benefit by becoming more common. If I die before reproducing successfully but manage to assist those who are closely related to me in reproduction, I still score a partial victory by having my genes become more common. The only way in which I truly lose is when my whole tribe gets wiped out.
Just by being more common in the short term doesn't mean success in the long term, though.
It's funny to even try and think what success means, given that success only has meaning in the future. I sometimes think of life as a very long proposed logical proof where each step depends on a a step later then it by one tick of the clock. And as time goes by it's continually reduced, a step at time, and eventually we will come to reveal its basis, somewhere out in the future, which is probably is logical false, and will unravel the original proposition, like it never existed in the first place (ie we all die in the end).
Maybe that's all we are, anyway, pieces of a logical computation, which trying to determine something, some solution to a problem that was proposed at the beginning of life on this planet...
Sexual selection for traits that otherwise have no discernible survival benefit or even harm survival happens all over the animal kingdom. Selection for bravery/aggression/dominance at least has the potential benefit of defense. Calling this sort of selection 'manipulation' on the part of female monkeys is making an unwarranted and human biased value judgement.
There's fighting to survive against a predator, there's fighting competitors for mating access, and then there's fighting between groups of the same animals.
They mean that it's the third option that is rare among animals.
Willingness to fight seems to be a successful genetic trait for them. If you don't fight, your troop starves. I don't think "manipulation" has anything to do with it... if the troop doesn't pass on successful genes, the troop dies. So of course the fighters are the ones that mate!
Well, shunning fighting is also a successful trait or else the male monkeys wouldn't be doing it. A good strategy for them is perhaps to appears as if they are a great fighters but in reality back down from most dangerous fights.
Fonzie was famous for (almost) never fighting while cultivating a reputation for a fierce fighter. Throughout the show, almost without exception, people would simply back down. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A-DCWlLfOQ
And i thought that the alpha monkey gets to do all the mating. The linked article implies that this is not the case. Are monkeys more egalitarian than apes?
I think by removing the word "monkey" you have opened yourself up to a charge of inaccuracy. After all, I'm going to hazard a guess that this is not true of all males of all species.
Now some cynical people might think that you removed the word monkey in order to map this research onto humans, in order to make a point. While I'm sure that's not the case, I think it's worthwhile to recall many other evolved qualities human beings have, such as:
cannibalism
child molestation
incest
murder
organised genocide
disorganised genocide
So I think we can all agree that our ability, however occasional, to transcend our evolved behaviours is a positive and that people who advocate for further improvements are to be respected.
The joke is we're primates too, and human females do this all of the time, you can see this in the motif of two heros(one "good" and the other "bad") fighting for a female, "golddigger" being most of the time attributed to the female, to the psychological game called "Rapo" where a female entices a particular male's attention so that another male would fight the first male, and so an and so on.
The joke is believing all of the "Women are wonderful" effect, that there's a "rape culture", vilifying men and pedestalizing women, and all of the PC crap that dictates males and females think/feel and behave the same way and disregarding all of the obvious evolutionary and logical conclusions that males are predisposed to violence and females to manipulation in order to get what they want.
You don't have to believe all women are "wonderful" in order to find distasteful the notion that women evolved to manipulate men.
Why not "men evolved to be dumb as rocks on the topic of what they put their penises into?" Equally applicable and evidence backed, no? Equally irrelevant to the topic at hand?
But instead men are simultaneously superior and somehow at the mercy of these "manipulative women."
I would say that "dumb" has nothing to do about the topic in question since reproduction is probably one of the first goals of a male (non-human) and they will do whatever is needed to reach that goal. It isn't practically a choice for them.
Yeah, we got that part from the original. To qualify as a joke I would have thought there needs to be a punchline that allows it to transcend lazy stereotyping. "Ha he means gold diggers" isn't adding that.
You know I could be tricksy but I'll answer you straight. Even if I thoroughly believed the rather reductive propositions you make about male/female biology, I would still disagree with your conclusions.
You seem to want it both ways: you assert men are naturally violent, women are naturally manipulative, therefore we should accept this state of affairs and not be dishonest about it. At the same time you want us to reject the idea of rape culture, even though inherent in your assessment of men is an acceptance of exactly that.
Has it ever occurred to you that Political Correctness acts as training wheels for people who are exhibiting bad natural behaviours? And that this might be a good thing? We teach our children to have good manners, to share and to curb their violence. Of course, no adult wants to be treated as a child, but if there is a social consensus that somebody is infantile, then it seems appropriate to have a mechanism to put manners on them. That consensus is far from punitive. For the most part it doesn't restrict individual liberty.
Many contrarians and "rugged individualists" I know seem to fear that we will fall into a kind of group-think if we allow PC ideas to develop. This it seems to me is just the despair of autocrats. It's our social consensus. We get to form it together. But just saying "PC Crap" doesn't work. We live in a big complex society. It's going to just get more complex.
Many smart people are bored and repelled by these arbitrary social rules - I get that. But your natural repulsion is overcoming your judgement. These are systems. They can work well or badly. Contribute to them to support your values.
> Has it ever occurred to you that Political Correctness acts as training wheels for people who are exhibiting bad natural behaviours?
I get your points, but I disagree on this one. How people adapt to be perceived by others on the surface - I couldn't care less about that. When they are rotten deep inside, broken and shattered to pieces - no matter how many correctness masks they put on, they are still same piece of s__t. I'll rather know straight upfront who I am dealing with, life is much easier.
So yeah, PC is evil for me. Noble goals for sure, worst possible implementation how to get there.
Well I don't want to sound more cynical than the OP, but the surface is actually what matters in the broader social context. Without shame, human society would be a violent anarchy. Some people have relatively good natures, but many do not. That is not even a criticism. After all, one cannot be ashamed of nature - only of the inability to control it.
Absence of shame is like power: it corrupts.
So whatever we call PC, we need something like it. That is my view.
In the animal kingdom you have uncommon scenarios such as seahorses where the male caries the fertilized eggs or spiders where many times the male is just eaten by the female.
In which sense is this "obvious", hubert123? I am really interested in what the comment meant by "restricted to humans". Try to be explicit in explaining.
I made the original comment in this thread, let me attempt to clarify.
The person you replied to thought that I was referring to humans exclusively (Close enough, I had not only humans but most primates in mind), while a comment above that level the person thought that I was referring very broadly to animal kingdom.
If he means that human females evolved to extract resources from males it is also reductionist. Females were not hunters, but they were harvesters and growers.
I think he is implying that females could not get resources because they took care of the offspring and the male got them. This is also wrong, evidence of early human settlements point that females took care of the offspring while harvesting and growing crops.
You are implying that we mostly evolved eating meat, which is wrong. We evolved being omnivores and we ate everything we could get, mussels, large insects, fruit, tubercules... Make no mistake, humans were hunters but that was only one part of the picture.
I think you are mixing two different (although very related) terms.
We did evolve by eating meat. The archeological and even biological evidence for that is quite strong. Eating meat (more specifically fish) allowed for the necessary proteins for brain increase.
But we seem to have evolved to eat as much as possible, thereby, we evolved to be omnivorous.
The difference here is between by what diet we did evolve and to what diet we evolved to. But the by part is purely biological in nature, the to part is also a sociologic one, since it depends, amongst other factors, on the use of fire to cook.
(Getting the 'You're submitting too fast message' so I have to do this over Tor with a throwaway)
Do you geniuses know that it's possible to make more than one account on HN? I'm going to dig up older accounts to prove it. I make throwaways constantly here, though I've never used them deceptively.
Unfortunately the oldest I could find is 4 years old and I can't log into it. However, it contains posts about living in Phnom Penh (which if I haven't alluded to with this account, I can prove) and linguistics-related stuff, which I recently mentioned studying in college:
I did find some other less old accounts that I can log into (12-4, ooooo00000, trill1, o0o0_ooo, dcacaac), and I will now proceed to login and reply with each one to this post.
He won't. He is very afraid that his perception is indeed skewed and that he may actually learn something. Just like some other commenters in this branch.
Males also have evolved to extract resources from tech males, though sacrificing some self-safety in war ops, etc. Maybe because geeks always make fun of them in tech field. "Oh, those strong males are so stupid, they can only take taxes and play with their tanks." They have no chance to get smart and enter the club.
In order for you to make such a statement, you have to believe what the parent said was completely false or that it is true but shouldn't be said.
If number one: Human evolution did not start 50 years ago. How do you think humans used to live for thousands of years, or how primitive tribes live right now? (Spoiler: it is not a feminist's dream) Are human males not more capable of gathering resources due to their inherent traits? Does evolution not select those most capable of reproduction? It does not take a degree in anthropology to put two and two together.
If number two: If basic evolutionary biology is too hurtful, perhaps it is time to consider whether the ideology that led you to feel inadequate is the social construct that needs to be done away with, rather than commonly agreed upon facts.
When individual comments on Reddit or HN get voted up, they cease to be sample bias and become a reflection of the community's opinion. That's what these sites do.
I guarantee you'd never see a comment like that voted up on r/2xc.
It's a clear indication of a problem with the community, and there's no way you don't see that...?
That's still sample bias: plenty of such comments also get downvoted, and plenty of opposite comments also get upvoted. Drawing general conclusions about the community in this way is projection.
I'll refer you to this book by a female writer, it is a light read and she presents the point that I made far more eloquently and persuasively than I could in the limited space of a HN comment: https://dontmarry.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/the_manipulate...
Loool ok, not that for the longest time society has dictated that women shouldn't work outside of the home and should be housewives that depend on their husbands.
Hahaha, you triggered some feminists and sensitive political correctness people. And here I thought Hackernews had become one of those disgusting safe spaces where you cannot say anything that could possibly offend a human on planet earth.
That's a misinterpretation of how HN works. We don't care about being political, we care about not being stupid. This thread is the stupidest one I've seen in months and, considering which months, that is impressive.
The rest of the internet has the opposite priority, so you don't lack for other places to post like this. Please don't do it here.
Low-substance comments about inflammatory topics, like this one, end up triggering flamewars, like this one. We're trying to avoid those on HN. They're boring—alternately flippant and nasty—and if the term 'stupid' has a local definition, this would be it.
There are other places on the internet where you can ply that art if you want to. If you want to continue to post to HN, please behold the damage you wrought and refrain from doing it again here.
When I posted the comment the title of this posting was quite different and it made more sense in that context.
If you wished to ask me to substantiate the comment - you could have done exactly that, no need for threats.
EDIT: I've read the thread in it's entirety.
You're right, it's not the level of discussion I had hoped for.
But I will still maintain that I acted with intellectual integrity and if people have collectively steered towards the lowest common denominator - that is just the way people are.
A sign of times perhaps, but so was this US presidential election. I subscribe to Marcus Aurelius' philosophy of stoicism: "All men are made one for another: either then teach them better, or bear with them."
Please resist making comments about being downvoted. It never does any good, and makes boring reading. Also, avoid baiting users by announcing that you expect to be downvoted.
This is completely off the subject but are you trying to indicate that he is somehow "man-splaining".
Educating readers as to the code of conduct of the site is required otherwise you would be downvoted without understanding why and just blaming it on "them bloody MRA's".
This is also completely off the subject, but I expect that in few minutes all my comments disappear as [flagged]. I am -20 from my score before the few comments in this thread now.
The OP's strongly offensive statement is still one of the top comments for this article.
Maybe there is something in here to "learn" for you guys.
Don't worry tomorrow it will be forgotten and we'll have another thread lamenting that the main problem of today's society is the evil tech giants that promote opinion bubbles.
I made a statement about HN's worrying MRA hive that doesn't appear to see any problem with this top comment, but with mine (btw, you prove my point too).
I know that plenty of these people exist. But the anti-fem crowd outweighs them right now, once more. At least when looking at these votes. This is worrying since, after all, this shapes the discussion, the atmosphere here and the minds of people with yet to stabilize opinions.
I, probably like a lot of others, took this post as a tongue-in-cheek joke. I think we're all mature enough to handle it, as the humour comes from how offensive the joke is and not from some universal truth behind the statement.
If it actually was meant as a serious comment and is being upvoted, then that's truly fucked up and would make me seriously question this forum. But I'm giving benefit of the doubt.
It's a factual statement, not baiting, to observe that her comment was [flagged] instantly for containing a passing "downvoting" remark, while the original comment is still one of the highest voted comments in this thread.
This confirms that, indeed, the HN audience does not see any serious problems with the statement: "Females have evolved to extract resources from males.", which is exemplified by your request to state what the problem with it is.
The HN audience likely sees a number of potential readings in context and is interested in which particular one you and GP have chosen to reify. It's unlikely (as shown by negative comments) that the community approves or agrees with all of them.
I requested nothing. If you care to offer you opinions do so, but do just that rather than speculate - the lack of down-votes for the above post confirms nothing, you are speculating; whereas challenging the content of the post directly might reveal more.
That comment was directly at odds with HN's guidelines:
"Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
And when Colin Percival, a widely respected member of community quoted exactly that excerpt, that person got combative and doubled down, throwing baseless accusations of some kind of MRA conspiracy.
Frankly, I am disturbed by a display of such callousness, not giving people the benefit of the doubt.
The problem is obvious and needs no explanation. The post in question extrapolates that all women are gold diggers from a single study that purports to have found manipulative behavior in a few groups of monkeys.
Yes, it was a bad comment with predictable effects. Still, breaking the site guidelines further is not a good way to reply. This comment (and others you posted) broke the site guidelines by being unsubstantive, calling names, complaining about downvoting, and baiting users into downvoting you. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Any large, optionally anonymous forum such as HN will include comments that hit any reader unpleasantly (it certainly does me) as well as genuinely nasty stuff. Any trend that exists in society at large is going to show up here. Or rather, societies, since many participate and their values don't all agree. That is a major factor here and perhaps the least understood.
If you generalize about HN based on the worst that stands out, in effect you contribute to worsening it, since it contributes to a view of the site as dominated by the long tail of shit, when this is not true. What's true is that HN is divided on controversial issues, just like the rest of the world is. But the vast majority of the userbase is here for civil, substantive discussion and hates this sort of trainwreck as much as you do and we do.
It takes time for the system to correct itself: flamewars flare up, and abusive commments pile up, very quickly. The counterweights—downvotes and flags by thoughtful users, and moderator intervention—take longer. There's not much we can do about this time discrepancy, because reflexive behaviors are always quicker than reflective ones.
No need for fiction Colin, I'm sure you've heard of the Sabine women:
"[They], from the outrage on whom the war originated, with hair dishevelled and garments rent, the timidity of their sex being overcome by such dreadful scenes, had the courage to throw themselves amid the flying weapons, and making a rush across, to part the incensed armies, and assuage their fury; imploring their fathers on the one side, their husbands on the other, 'that as fathers-in-law and sons-in-law they would not contaminate each other with impious blood, nor stain their offspring with parricide, the one their grandchildren, the other their children. If you are dissatisfied with the affinity between you, if with our marriages, turn your resentment against us; we are the cause of war, we of wounds and of bloodshed to our husbands and parents. It were better that we perish than live widowed or fatherless without one or other of you.' "
That's a story of women as peacemakers, to be sure (although I'm not entirely sure how much of it is history and how much is legend). Unlike the Greek story (which is not necessarily entirely fictional) the Sabine women weren't specifically using sex as a weapon of peace, though.
It's really just staggering how little anybody understood about what they were really getting themselves into with WW1. All of the horrors of modern, industrial warfare unleashing themselves on a culture still steeped in Victorian attitudes, and general staffs that had absorbed the lessons of Sedan, rather than Petersburg or Mukden.
> (...) once again stated that she was related to the two boys simultaneously and that at one point she told the murderer that his sexual performance was inferior to that of the victim.
If you can read portuguese, or is willing to try some online translation, you can go to:
They're both examples of social pressure, but the vervet monkeys presumably weren't subject to propaganda from military leaders, and the human woman certainly didn't have any kind of feather-presenting instinct.
I think the gender angle is not as interesting as the cultural one.
This is anecdotal: girl I know had a guy push her after a bad joke in a group while everyone was drinking. I don't think the guy meant any harm by it, he didn't cause her any harm. He should keep his hands to himself but it was clearly not done with ill intent nor was it hard enough to hurt her.
She later said that was 'violent,' then it turned into, that was 'rape.' Really.
She tried badmouthing about that guy to some other drunk guys at a bar to do her bidding to get revenge. Nothing came of it, except some mean comments towards that guy.
The next day I asked her about it and she was quite belligerent in discussing it. So I didn't continue. When getting up to leave she was joking about how in the past at a night club she had gotten two guys to beat up another guy because she didn't like that guy.
Anyways, I feel like this might happen a lot more than is reported. The guy who this happened to said he 'just didn't want any more trouble' so he wasn't going to follow up on it and report her or do anything else.
That girl even made some comment about how 'guys are rapists.' WTF
...and crows can push cats into a fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANZBs8Za0Q, which I find more spectacular. (There are more such videos, it's not a singular case.)
Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others)
You can't attack people personally here, no matter wrong they are. When encountering a trainwreck of a thread, like this one, please resist the temptation to make it worse.
If you see an egregious comment, you can flag it by clicking on its timestamp to go to its page, then clicking 'flag' at the top.
I think a big difference between the sexes in humans is male aggression has the potential for violence while female aggression usually doesn't.
So female aggression is more likely a social aggression, a more civilized agression that is also perhaps sometimes expressed into violence via their male counterparts.
But this seems to be rare as humans females across the world are in general not aggressive. On the contrary they have been victims of extreme male aggression for thousands of years. Human males are extremely aggressive and violent towards others males, females and the world.
Accusing him of being a sock-puppet and I'm going to assume the "armor" bit is either an allusion to "White Knighting" (Which is completely inaccurate here) or "Social Justice Warrior" which is an easy way for you to dismiss his views.
That's a personal attack as well, and you've posted many other comments that break the HN guidelines. We ban users who do that, so please clean up your act.
This is a trope of the serial troll. If you don't want to be banned from HN for trolling, please communicate in better faith.
I don't believe 75j is a sock-puppet account. I think it's the primary account that user is currently using. They need to do a better job of following the site guidelines, and I've chided them about that in this thread, but it doesn't mean that what you've done is ok. Your vendetta is not only uncivil to a fellow user you're tweaking the nose of, but is the worst sort of procedural droning-on. No more of this, please, starting now.
Stating admissions of fact is trolling. Gorgeous. Such intellectual honesty.
He admitted he uses batches of accounts to circumvent throttling due to down-voting.
Please ban my account! I won't be coming back anyway.
I have no interest in dealing with moderators that value beliefs ("I don't believe 75j is a sock-puppet account", "I think it's the primary account that user is currently using") over facts.
Thank you for the benefit of the doubt. I am not a sock puppet -- if you look at all those accounts you'll see that absolutely none have any overlap chronologically in terms of posting (well, until last night) or voting.
Sorry dang. But, I got deeply offended by being called a liar. I've posted projects on this current account that link to my real identity, so it was important I guess for me to clear my name. I'm also petty like that, but not normally to the extent that it causes problems. I think I've gotten one prior and much milder warning from you over the course of my time on HN. I'll go back to lurking for a while for now.
We've banned this account for breaking the HN guidelines and will continue to ban your other ones if you don't start abiding by the rules.
It's also an abuse of this site to create batches of accounts to break the guidelines with. If you've been on HN for years, you ought to know these things.
'Apparently' how? Because you're being downvoted? I doubt, even if it is a sockpuppet account (which incidentally has amassed four times the karma you have), that they are the only one downvoting you.
He's saying that because the person who says they've been here for 8 years registered 16 days ago. As if, in 8 years of Inflammatory HN commentary, only just now did they decide to stop lurking. And only just now did they become so vocal about what matters to them.
That's my interpretation. It could also mean the more obvious, "I've been here for 8 years but under a different name."
> It could also mean the more obvious, "I've been here for 8 years but under a different name."
Bingo. Why didn't you start with the more obvious interpretation?
I've been here in my estimation for 7-8 years, with maybe the first 2 years of that being lurking. Check that 4 year old 'ledge' account too and you'll see that all the facts and stylometric features line up.
When the 'submitting too fast' limitation (which ironically is because you people were downvoting me) is lifted on my current account, I'll be happy to angrily post from there again too.
And I'm not using any of these other accounts to downvote anyone, or do anything deceptive. But how else could I prove that my current account being 16 days old is meaningless? I have made probably 30+ accounts on HN, and I wish I could find one of the 5-6 year old ones and log into it to really drive it home that you're wrong.
Whatever. I'm not going to stand by and let you two call me a liar, a sock puppet, a white knight, etc. This will be my last post until I can resume posting under my normal account too.
Does this mean gay monkeys are more likely to be non-violent?
I don't particularly like the PC hype these days, but I think this could be a way to separate this from the gender domain and map it on the scarcity domain...
And I am also 75j. My 75j account is getting a 'You're submitting too fast' message, so I'm doing all this on Tor.
If you can't see the message from '75j__throwaway' that I posted initially to explain this, change your showdead setting to 'yes'. If you need any more proof that I'm not Danielle, then I'll do what I can. But you're wrong, and a bit of a prick.
EDIT: Here it is actually, the message that I posted as '75j__throwaway' a few minutes before these 5 other replies:
Do you geniuses know that it's possible to make more than one account on HN? I'm going to dig up older accounts to prove it. I make throwaways constantly here, though I've never used them deceptively.
Unfortunately the oldest I could find is 4 years old and I can't log into it. However, it contains posts about living in Phnom Penh (which if I haven't alluded to with this account, I can prove) and linguistics-related stuff, which I recently mentioned studying in college:
I did find some other less old accounts that I can log into (12-4, ooooo00000, trill1, o0o0_ooo, dcacaac), and I will now proceed to login and reply with each one to this post.
So you think 5 accounts, the newest of which was created 203 days ago, all came together randomly to trick you into believing my (75j's) story?
Again, these are not sock-puppets, they are just older accounts. I'm not using them to do anything deceptive, or downvote you. But how else am I supposed to prove my point that I've been here longer than 16 days?
I would be posting this from my current account but apparently HN locks you out for a long time when you get downvoted heavily and post a lot.
162 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadTitle is basically the first sentence of the article.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_manipulation
Manipulation is changing other's behavior, especially against their own self-interest.
It's funny to even try and think what success means, given that success only has meaning in the future. I sometimes think of life as a very long proposed logical proof where each step depends on a a step later then it by one tick of the clock. And as time goes by it's continually reduced, a step at time, and eventually we will come to reveal its basis, somewhere out in the future, which is probably is logical false, and will unravel the original proposition, like it never existed in the first place (ie we all die in the end).
Maybe that's all we are, anyway, pieces of a logical computation, which trying to determine something, some solution to a problem that was proposed at the beginning of life on this planet...
What's the difference?
Does that count?
I'd say yes.
Birds, ants, killer-whales are but a few I can immediately think of.
They mean that it's the third option that is rare among animals.
have you not seen same animals fighting in groups against each other? Take your point though.
Females have evolved to extract resources from males.
Now some cynical people might think that you removed the word monkey in order to map this research onto humans, in order to make a point. While I'm sure that's not the case, I think it's worthwhile to recall many other evolved qualities human beings have, such as:
cannibalism
child molestation
incest
murder
organised genocide
disorganised genocide
So I think we can all agree that our ability, however occasional, to transcend our evolved behaviours is a positive and that people who advocate for further improvements are to be respected.
Why not "men evolved to be dumb as rocks on the topic of what they put their penises into?" Equally applicable and evidence backed, no? Equally irrelevant to the topic at hand?
But instead men are simultaneously superior and somehow at the mercy of these "manipulative women."
You seem to want it both ways: you assert men are naturally violent, women are naturally manipulative, therefore we should accept this state of affairs and not be dishonest about it. At the same time you want us to reject the idea of rape culture, even though inherent in your assessment of men is an acceptance of exactly that.
Has it ever occurred to you that Political Correctness acts as training wheels for people who are exhibiting bad natural behaviours? And that this might be a good thing? We teach our children to have good manners, to share and to curb their violence. Of course, no adult wants to be treated as a child, but if there is a social consensus that somebody is infantile, then it seems appropriate to have a mechanism to put manners on them. That consensus is far from punitive. For the most part it doesn't restrict individual liberty.
Many contrarians and "rugged individualists" I know seem to fear that we will fall into a kind of group-think if we allow PC ideas to develop. This it seems to me is just the despair of autocrats. It's our social consensus. We get to form it together. But just saying "PC Crap" doesn't work. We live in a big complex society. It's going to just get more complex.
Many smart people are bored and repelled by these arbitrary social rules - I get that. But your natural repulsion is overcoming your judgement. These are systems. They can work well or badly. Contribute to them to support your values.
I get your points, but I disagree on this one. How people adapt to be perceived by others on the surface - I couldn't care less about that. When they are rotten deep inside, broken and shattered to pieces - no matter how many correctness masks they put on, they are still same piece of s__t. I'll rather know straight upfront who I am dealing with, life is much easier.
So yeah, PC is evil for me. Noble goals for sure, worst possible implementation how to get there.
Absence of shame is like power: it corrupts.
So whatever we call PC, we need something like it. That is my view.
In the animal kingdom you have uncommon scenarios such as seahorses where the male caries the fertilized eggs or spiders where many times the male is just eaten by the female.
You should also have better manners than to presuppose "he" when speaking of a fellow user.
The person you replied to thought that I was referring to humans exclusively (Close enough, I had not only humans but most primates in mind), while a comment above that level the person thought that I was referring very broadly to animal kingdom.
They also performed the most dangerous activities because women are reproductively far more "valuable".
We did evolve by eating meat. The archeological and even biological evidence for that is quite strong. Eating meat (more specifically fish) allowed for the necessary proteins for brain increase.
But we seem to have evolved to eat as much as possible, thereby, we evolved to be omnivorous.
The difference here is between by what diet we did evolve and to what diet we evolved to. But the by part is purely biological in nature, the to part is also a sociologic one, since it depends, amongst other factors, on the use of fire to cook.
Screencapping this for when HN's users claim they don't make the tech space awful for women.
Do you geniuses know that it's possible to make more than one account on HN? I'm going to dig up older accounts to prove it. I make throwaways constantly here, though I've never used them deceptively.
Unfortunately the oldest I could find is 4 years old and I can't log into it. However, it contains posts about living in Phnom Penh (which if I haven't alluded to with this account, I can prove) and linguistics-related stuff, which I recently mentioned studying in college:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ledge
I did find some other less old accounts that I can log into (12-4, ooooo00000, trill1, o0o0_ooo, dcacaac), and I will now proceed to login and reply with each one to this post.
If number one: Human evolution did not start 50 years ago. How do you think humans used to live for thousands of years, or how primitive tribes live right now? (Spoiler: it is not a feminist's dream) Are human males not more capable of gathering resources due to their inherent traits? Does evolution not select those most capable of reproduction? It does not take a degree in anthropology to put two and two together.
If number two: If basic evolutionary biology is too hurtful, perhaps it is time to consider whether the ideology that led you to feel inadequate is the social construct that needs to be done away with, rather than commonly agreed upon facts.
Which is not to say that this thread isn't bullshit.
I guarantee you'd never see a comment like that voted up on r/2xc.
It's a clear indication of a problem with the community, and there's no way you don't see that...?
That's still sample bias: plenty of such comments also get downvoted, and plenty of opposite comments also get upvoted. Drawing general conclusions about the community in this way is projection.
Come on, now!
The rest of the internet has the opposite priority, so you don't lack for other places to post like this. Please don't do it here.
There are other places on the internet where you can ply that art if you want to. If you want to continue to post to HN, please behold the damage you wrought and refrain from doing it again here.
Starting flamewars was not my intention.
When I posted the comment the title of this posting was quite different and it made more sense in that context.
If you wished to ask me to substantiate the comment - you could have done exactly that, no need for threats.
EDIT: I've read the thread in it's entirety.
You're right, it's not the level of discussion I had hoped for.
But I will still maintain that I acted with intellectual integrity and if people have collectively steered towards the lowest common denominator - that is just the way people are.
A sign of times perhaps, but so was this US presidential election. I subscribe to Marcus Aurelius' philosophy of stoicism: "All men are made one for another: either then teach them better, or bear with them."
(my reply gets MRA-downvoted in 3.. 2.. 1..)
Educating readers as to the code of conduct of the site is required otherwise you would be downvoted without understanding why and just blaming it on "them bloody MRA's".
The OP's strongly offensive statement is still one of the top comments for this article.
Maybe there is something in here to "learn" for you guys.
The rules of engagement so to speak.
Edit: The fact that your post got flagged faster than the OP on the other hand does reinforce your point and reflects very badly on HN.
If it actually was meant as a serious comment and is being upvoted, then that's truly fucked up and would make me seriously question this forum. But I'm giving benefit of the doubt.
This confirms that, indeed, the HN audience does not see any serious problems with the statement: "Females have evolved to extract resources from males.", which is exemplified by your request to state what the problem with it is.
I requested nothing. If you care to offer you opinions do so, but do just that rather than speculate - the lack of down-votes for the above post confirms nothing, you are speculating; whereas challenging the content of the post directly might reveal more.
"Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
And when Colin Percival, a widely respected member of community quoted exactly that excerpt, that person got combative and doubled down, throwing baseless accusations of some kind of MRA conspiracy.
Frankly, I am disturbed by a display of such callousness, not giving people the benefit of the doubt.
Any large, optionally anonymous forum such as HN will include comments that hit any reader unpleasantly (it certainly does me) as well as genuinely nasty stuff. Any trend that exists in society at large is going to show up here. Or rather, societies, since many participate and their values don't all agree. That is a major factor here and perhaps the least understood.
If you generalize about HN based on the worst that stands out, in effect you contribute to worsening it, since it contributes to a view of the site as dominated by the long tail of shit, when this is not true. What's true is that HN is divided on controversial issues, just like the rest of the world is. But the vast majority of the userbase is here for civil, substantive discussion and hates this sort of trainwreck as much as you do and we do.
It takes time for the system to correct itself: flamewars flare up, and abusive commments pile up, very quickly. The counterweights—downvotes and flags by thoughtful users, and moderator intervention—take longer. There's not much we can do about this time discrepancy, because reflexive behaviors are always quicker than reflective ones.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020973.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather#World_War_I
"[They], from the outrage on whom the war originated, with hair dishevelled and garments rent, the timidity of their sex being overcome by such dreadful scenes, had the courage to throw themselves amid the flying weapons, and making a rush across, to part the incensed armies, and assuage their fury; imploring their fathers on the one side, their husbands on the other, 'that as fathers-in-law and sons-in-law they would not contaminate each other with impious blood, nor stain their offspring with parricide, the one their grandchildren, the other their children. If you are dissatisfied with the affinity between you, if with our marriages, turn your resentment against us; we are the cause of war, we of wounds and of bloodshed to our husbands and parents. It were better that we perish than live widowed or fatherless without one or other of you.' "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women
"Dear husband, please take that chance to die. Love you, honey"
Many of those "men" were teens.
Harassing 15 year olds was not uncommon.
Harassing WWI veterans not in uniform was very common.
> (...) once again stated that she was related to the two boys simultaneously and that at one point she told the murderer that his sexual performance was inferior to that of the victim.
If you can read portuguese, or is willing to try some online translation, you can go to:
http://g1.globo.com/sp/santos-regiao/noticia/2016/10/pivo-da...
I think the gender angle is not as interesting as the cultural one.
She later said that was 'violent,' then it turned into, that was 'rape.' Really.
She tried badmouthing about that guy to some other drunk guys at a bar to do her bidding to get revenge. Nothing came of it, except some mean comments towards that guy.
The next day I asked her about it and she was quite belligerent in discussing it. So I didn't continue. When getting up to leave she was joking about how in the past at a night club she had gotten two guys to beat up another guy because she didn't like that guy.
Anyways, I feel like this might happen a lot more than is reported. The guy who this happened to said he 'just didn't want any more trouble' so he wasn't going to follow up on it and report her or do anything else.
That girl even made some comment about how 'guys are rapists.' WTF
The level of machiavellian intelligence these animals have is scary.
These crows go so far as to poke these cats mid-fight so as to entice them...
Love it!
If you see an egregious comment, you can flag it by clicking on its timestamp to go to its page, then clicking 'flag' at the top.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020973 and marked it off-topic.
So female aggression is more likely a social aggression, a more civilized agression that is also perhaps sometimes expressed into violence via their male counterparts.
But this seems to be rare as humans females across the world are in general not aggressive. On the contrary they have been victims of extreme male aggression for thousands of years. Human males are extremely aggressive and violent towards others males, females and the world.
Hope your armor isn't impairing your movement too much.
Bravo.
It is a sock-puppet account.
He stated himself that he has created dozens of accounts and that uses them to post even when his accounts are throttled due to down-voting.
How is stating a fact a personal attack?
This is a trope of the serial troll. If you don't want to be banned from HN for trolling, please communicate in better faith.
I don't believe 75j is a sock-puppet account. I think it's the primary account that user is currently using. They need to do a better job of following the site guidelines, and I've chided them about that in this thread, but it doesn't mean that what you've done is ok. Your vendetta is not only uncivil to a fellow user you're tweaking the nose of, but is the worst sort of procedural droning-on. No more of this, please, starting now.
> This is a trope of the serial troll.
Stating admissions of fact is trolling. Gorgeous. Such intellectual honesty.
He admitted he uses batches of accounts to circumvent throttling due to down-voting.
Please ban my account! I won't be coming back anyway.
I have no interest in dealing with moderators that value beliefs ("I don't believe 75j is a sock-puppet account", "I think it's the primary account that user is currently using") over facts.
Bye.
Thank you for the benefit of the doubt. I am not a sock puppet -- if you look at all those accounts you'll see that absolutely none have any overlap chronologically in terms of posting (well, until last night) or voting.
Sorry dang. But, I got deeply offended by being called a liar. I've posted projects on this current account that link to my real identity, so it was important I guess for me to clear my name. I'm also petty like that, but not normally to the extent that it causes problems. I think I've gotten one prior and much milder warning from you over the course of my time on HN. I'll go back to lurking for a while for now.
Oh, and I don't need to white knight for anyone because I'm already married to an extremely attractive woman. How's life for you in that department?
It's also an abuse of this site to create batches of accounts to break the guidelines with. If you've been on HN for years, you ought to know these things.
curious because your profile says
> created: 16 days ago
Thank you for confirming you are using a sock-puppet account!
(Edit: While apparently using your main account to down-vote. Classy!)
That's my interpretation. It could also mean the more obvious, "I've been here for 8 years but under a different name."
Bingo. Why didn't you start with the more obvious interpretation?
I've been here in my estimation for 7-8 years, with maybe the first 2 years of that being lurking. Check that 4 year old 'ledge' account too and you'll see that all the facts and stylometric features line up.
When the 'submitting too fast' limitation (which ironically is because you people were downvoting me) is lifted on my current account, I'll be happy to angrily post from there again too.
And I'm not using any of these other accounts to downvote anyone, or do anything deceptive. But how else could I prove that my current account being 16 days old is meaningless? I have made probably 30+ accounts on HN, and I wish I could find one of the 5-6 year old ones and log into it to really drive it home that you're wrong.
You are admitting to using them to circumvent the site's posting policy.
You just keep on admitting nefarious behavior.
I'm going now. Good bye.
All the comments that were still possible to down-vote were down-voted but only a single time.
Plus he explicitly admitted to using sock-puppets to circumvent posting throttle.
Edit: So he made a script. Every new comment I make is immediately down-voted.
I don't particularly like the PC hype these days, but I think this could be a way to separate this from the gender domain and map it on the scarcity domain...
If you can't see the message from '75j__throwaway' that I posted initially to explain this, change your showdead setting to 'yes'. If you need any more proof that I'm not Danielle, then I'll do what I can. But you're wrong, and a bit of a prick.
EDIT: Here it is actually, the message that I posted as '75j__throwaway' a few minutes before these 5 other replies:
Do you geniuses know that it's possible to make more than one account on HN? I'm going to dig up older accounts to prove it. I make throwaways constantly here, though I've never used them deceptively.
Unfortunately the oldest I could find is 4 years old and I can't log into it. However, it contains posts about living in Phnom Penh (which if I haven't alluded to with this account, I can prove) and linguistics-related stuff, which I recently mentioned studying in college:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ledge
I did find some other less old accounts that I can log into (12-4, ooooo00000, trill1, o0o0_ooo, dcacaac), and I will now proceed to login and reply with each one to this post.
Again, these are not sock-puppets, they are just older accounts. I'm not using them to do anything deceptive, or downvote you. But how else am I supposed to prove my point that I've been here longer than 16 days?
I would be posting this from my current account but apparently HN locks you out for a long time when you get downvoted heavily and post a lot.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13021872 and marked it off-topic.