I've actually found it works a lot better if both people just allow the contentious statements. Just let each person say, "Oh that's ridiculous because..." and the other replies with "You're totally missing this point..." Even if people raise their voice or scoff, it's fine. The key is to just keep going.
If you go on long enough, the points do start sinking in.
Too many people assume that acrimony means that the discussion must end immediately. But that's not true at all. It's exceptionally hard, sometimes, to meet clashing beliefs with entirely soft voices and polite manners. You don't have to suppress everything you want to say. You can let it out. So can the other person. It's good. (Obviously it shouldn't raise to a degree where people are screaming continuously or acting violent).
Maturity doesn't just mean always speaking softly. It can also mean being able to make and reject points forcefully, and not wilt like a delicate flower if the other person does the same.
The real key is that people need to not be so delicate. Accept the natural difficulties of clashing belief systems. Just stick in there, let the acrimony happen, don't give up. Eventually - 10 or 20 or 30 minutes later - you'll get to something meaningful simply because there's no way to talk that long without both people having a lot of time to make real points.
I hit "vouch" here as your post was marked as "Dead" even though it was pretty reasonable. I don't necessarily agree that people should be so eager to lock horns on contentious issues, but you're certainly not saying anything that should be hidden or censored or anything.
It's pretty trivial to apply these signals to nearly any collectivist social movement.
1. Action for action's sake - Black Lives Matter protests to block highways.
2. Exploit the fear of difference - Those horrible racist uneducated people are nothing like us, we can't let them take the country! This is basic tribalism and it applies to every major social movement.
3. Rewritten: "To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Anti-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be good, moral egalitarians. This is the origin of anti-fascism."
Here I've applied them to Western progressivism, but if you deny the basic assumptions of any collectivist social movement you could apply them. Scientology, communism, socialism, fascism. Switch a few unimportant words and there you are with the same meaningless parallels.
The human mind is a great pattern matching machine but has a problem with false positives.
EDIT: It's important to remember when comparing Trump to old fascists that the people who defeated those fascists enacted Trump's policies. For example, in 1945, immigration policy in all western countries was effectively, "whites only".
So if you're gonna notice parallels between Trump and Hitler, you have to notice even closer parallels between Trump and the people who defeated Hitler. You should also notice the differences: Trump is an isolationist who wants to start wars less than Hillary - a lot like pre-WW2 America.
I agree: "The human mind is a great pattern matching machine but has a problem with false positives."
But, I think you have stripped the context from the quotes you offer, and in so doing, made them applicable to anything.
For instance, regarding point (1), you're stereotyping the BLM protests. Read their website and it's all about intersectionality and inclusion and a bunch of other academic buzzwords. It's not really about protest for protest's sake: specific demands have been given. And it's not anti-intellectual, which is the context you removed from point 1.
You have done a similar thing with the next point. The original point is about fear of intruders from outside the nation
I would agree that there are parallels of certain parts of, say, the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests) with this synopsis of fascism. A lot of that was action for action's sake: dress up in black and break store windows.
But take, on the other hand, the OWS protests. It was partly because of the authoritarian tendencies of other protest movements that OWS adopted various egalitarian habits - not addressing crowds with bullhorns, the consensus process, etc. (For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street#Main_organi...).
In sum, I think you're not being careful about your reasoning, and you are reasoning backward from the answer you want ("a pox on both their houses"). We're not talking about mere groupthink, smug activists, or misguided protesters. We're talking about actual fascism.
1. I won't speak for BLM, but protesting in a visible way is not action for action's sake.
2. this is just an old joke. No, those who oppose racism don't think racists are an inferior race. Also, they oppose racism, not racists.
3. Anti-fascists lacked many things, but identity was rarely one of them. Anti-fascists were communists, anarchists, catholics, jews, monarchists... I don't think that there ever was such a thing as an "anti-fascist identity" during the relevant years, and even now, I don't know of anybody who identifies themselves purely as anti-fascist without other connotations.
> 1. Action for action's sake - Black Lives Matter protests to block highways.
But that isn't "action for action's sake," it's action that is derived from one particular theory of change. BLM blocks highways because they believe that by doing so they can effectively draw attention to both their issues and their movement. The action is deliberately chosen to advance decided-upon strategic goals, not simply a reflexive flexing of muscle.
Eco also highlights part of "action for action's sake" as a deliberate repudiation of intellectualism, which is an odd thing to say about a movement like BLM which emerged in large part from universities. Intellectuals can find a role to play in BLM that they could never find in a fascist movement.
You're missing the central point of the article, which is that Ur-Fascism is not an ideology or even a set of policies. It's a method of discourse and a political aesthetic.
Every political party and movement has supporters who feel this way. The problem is when they control the party.
BLM certainly emphasizes action for its own sake, but they don't run the Democratic party. Likewise, individual liberals might speak to a fear of "horrible racist uneducated people are nothing like us," but if you watched the DNC the message is one of unity: reach out to those people, don't drive them away.
You can dispute and justify all you want, but there's a reason that apolitical historians are coming out to point out current fascist threat.
Your points are valid, but that kind misses the major thrust of the argument... which is that facism isn't based on a shared set of common principles or political thought, facism is in the authors opinion not linked to specific beliefs...
as for trump being a facist, i think the primary reason he wouldnt be a facist is he doesnt really seem to have any strong interest in athoratarian centralized power... in fact if anything unless kaisich is actually just flat out lying, he is pretty open about wanting to minimize his day to day control and be more of a symbol for the movement... thats extremely un-facist
Actually, the Kasich offer makes his fascist tendencies clearer to me. Trump is not interested in actually governing or implementing policies, he's interested in having a massive adoring audience.
Like historical fascists, he doesn't care what policies get him that power and adoration. He'd be happy running an isolationist government, but just as happy militantly dropping nuclear bombs in the Middle East.
The one consistent in Trump's political "career" is a worship of power. He's obsessed with winners and losers, and if you're winning he likes you. If you criticize him, he hates you and will try to destroy you, whether it's legal or not. I don't think he could, as president, tolerate a free press.
Another article was posted in one of these threads about phases or stages of fascism. Authoritarian/dictatorial regimes are one of them. The nationalism, xenophobism, and other traits of the Trump campaign have fascist elements. That doesn't mean he would be a fascist leader but it paves the way for it down the road.
1. White people commit racism and violence against blacks
causes
2. White people flee to the suburbs
causes
3. Urban centers to deteriorate.
Let's examine:
1->2 So white people were fleeing... their own violence against blacks?
2->3 So when those violent people left, this cause the areas to get... worse?
Apparently you believe white people being present is a problem, and white people leaving is a problem. Their presence hurts blacks, and when they leave it hurts blacks too. So literally everything is the fault of white people, whether they're coming or going, here or there.
Even more surreal - these blacks voluntarily moved towards the whites. Then the whites moved to escape the blacks. And the bad guys here are... the whites! The ones who blacks want to live around, and who are trying to flee them.
It really is remarkable the rationalizations a mind is capable of.
You've been using HN exclusively to fight political battles. That's an abuse of this site. We asked you repeatedly to stop, but you've continued doing exactly the same thing, so I'm banning your account.
This community has a single guiding value: intellectual curiosity. That is profoundly incompatible with single-purpose ideological participation. If HN is to survive in its intended form, we need to get clearer about differentiating these two. I'm sure there are other internet communities where people can fight their wars-by-other-means.
> It really is remarkable the rationalizations a mind is capable of.
This kind of incivility is particularly unwelcome here.
However, some historians have challenged the phrase "white flight" as a misnomer whose use should be reconsidered. In her study of Chicago's West Side during the post-war era, historian Amanda Seligman argues that the phrase misleadingly suggests that whites immediately departed when blacks moved into the neighborhood, when in fact, many whites defended their space with violence, intimidation, or legal tactics.
The business practices of redlining, mortgage discrimination, and racially restrictive covenants contributed to the overcrowding and physical deterioration of areas where minorities chose to congregate. Such conditions are considered to have contributed to the emigration of other populations. The limited facilities for banking and insurance, due to a perceived lack of profitability, and other social services, and extra fees meant to hedge against perceived profit issues increased their cost to residents in predominantly non-white suburbs and city neighborhoods. According to the environmental geographer Laura Pulido, the historical processes of suburbanization and urban decentralization contribute to contemporary environmental racism.
A quick thing that can be easily dispelled: minority groups didn't voluntarily move anywhere from '34 to '68 [1], because the FHA policy of redlining prevented them from getting a mortgage in predominately white neighborhoods. Shockingly or not, the higher quality property was reserved for whites.
'68 was the end of formal, legal requirements to disapprove of mortgages in heterogeneous communities (for lack of a better term). There's plenty of evidence that the practice continues even to this day, informally. [2]
We're at least two or three generations away from any of this. Hell, slavery's been abolished for five generations. Five generations ago, my family was poor-as-a-churchmouse country bumpkins (still are, by and large). They didn't have any education, and they got drafted to fight in a war they didn't give a tinker's damn about to fight and die on Little Round Top and a dozen other places in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, and many of them died.
My Grandmother's Grandmother was a slave and my Grandparents fled the segregated South where lynchings were common.
Ever see any of that horrifying Civil Rights Movement footage? A lot of those people are still alive. The victims and the perpetrators. All those people protesting the integration of schools, throwing things at harmless black children? Still alive.
So what should white people have done/what should they do, to not be guilty of these terrible social sins that appear to be their fault no matter what actions they take?
In a larger sense: they should recognize that the entire American society was splintered a long time ago by racism and it never un-splintered. A metric fuck-ton of work needs to be done to rehabilitate the communities and whole socioeconomic strata that have been affected by this. It will probably take 20-50 years to undo, just because so many people have this "It's not my fault, so fuck it, I don't need to do anything" attitude.
I don't know about you, but I am responsible for my own actions. I don't need a hug from Whitey or anyone else to know the difference between right and wrong, or hard work versus sloth. If you do, I feel bad for you son. I choose the action, I choose the consequence, same as pretty much anything else on this planet.
When you chose to leave Michigan, were you faced with endemic discrimination while looking for a place to live? While buying a home? While shopping? While walking around town doing nothing wrong? While driving while black?
It's not that Black people's choices are bad, it's the racist responses to those choices that are the problem.
Endemic discrimination while renting an apartment? Nope.
Owning a house? Haven't achieved that yet, but I haven't exactly been trying.
While shopping? Nope.
Walking around town? Nope.
Driving? If I'm speeding and/or driving like an idiot, I get attention from the cops. My driving record isn't exactly squeaky clean, but each infraction is because I was making the choice to not follow the rules of the road.
Sorry if my experience doesn't fit a different narrative, but in my experience if I'm looking/acting like an idiot I get treated as such. Nothing that is outside of my control though.
Are you uninterested in familiarizing yourself with the data that show that people of color have an unfairly different, damaging, and too often deadly experience?
I'd like a source for that, since my understanding was the opposite.[1]
Quoting from the abstract:
"In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. ... Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent."
I would argue that it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was great and necessary when women really were disadvantaged. But now that they are generally "equal", it's detrimental to them. I.e. It's entirely plausible that society is self-correcting against the unfairly-claimed bias by...being biased. One can "factually" be certain that men are not "favoured", therefore they can treat men exactly as they see it. They take their degrees, their experience, their work at face-value. However, they can not honestly do so with women because they know that there is a claimed bias against them. Therefore all work, degrees, experience, etc, of women is suspect as there is no way to know which items were "embellished" to promote the "equality" of women.
I dunno. I work for a pretty liberal company, that definitely tries to avoid -isms and what not. I've also seen the same ideas from men vs women given far more credibility when presented by a male speaker. I find it somewhat disturbing. That allied with a lot of the scientific evidence of bias (look at the IAT studies, all 12mn of them) leads me to believe that this is still a problem.
I have also seen the same ideas from some men given far more credibility when presented by other men. In fact, it happens all the time. I have seen men ignored even when presenting solid evidence, because a higher-up had made up their mind. This happens. All. The. Time.
I find the IAT somewhat ridiculous. For example, it asked whether I associate black with "sports". Well, I do, but there is nothing "implicit" or "biased" about it. It is my lived experience as a high-school sprinter.
In addition, stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. It's not "wrong". What would be wrong is not adjusting for the individual once you get to know them, but AFAIK that same research also shows that most people drop the stereotypes quickly once they actually get to know an individual.
And yes, there are people who don't. In other news, stupid people exist and earth still round.
But now that they are generally "equal", it's detrimental
to them. I.e. It's entirely plausible that society is self-
correcting against the unfairly-claimed bias by...being
biased
To say women and men are generally "equal" right now is failing to recognize ways they continue to struggle and the pervasive ways sexism continues to affect women. There's a lot of unconscious bias in society + strong evidence of it. And I'd find it dubious to claim tech is some exception.
I think "overcorrection" is a valid concern (if people begin devaluing women's opinions thinking they're diversity hires or somehow hired at a lower bar), but I for one haven't observed us being there yet. There's still this yawning divide between being a man vs a woman in both society and in the smaller sphere of tech. There are many things we take for granted as men: e.g people don't assume I, a man, work in marketing despite sitting with other engineers -- these sorts of things negatively affect women who are otherwise fully / more than qualified to do their jobs.
Anecdotally, a number of women in my life who worked in tech have since left the industry citing aggressions of varying levels. This is concerning :(
While I absolutely wish that any person felt welcome in tech regardless of race, gender or other choices like orientation, I'm not convinced this is a good approach. It's an explicit statement that they are desperate for diversity, and as a result it calls in to question the justification for those hires. How much did the candidates diversity factor in vs. their competence?
They claim that non-minorities won't be disadvantaged by them and I believe they are being honest here, but it still sends a very mixed message.
I would like to see the studies you're referencing. However, taking what you're saying as truth (a thing I am reluctant to do), I still find it a big leap to claim that the reason that there are fewer women in tech is that fewer women are interested in tech, and I would still be inclined to believe that women in tech are at a disadvantage. Proving lack of interest seems difficult, at best - for instance, is it that women are inherently just not interested, or is it that women are left to feel like being interested is not "womanly" or that they should feel ashamed for being interested? There's a lot of confounding factors, and many of them reveal potential disenfranchisement of women before they even enter the tech world.
Here's why I believe that women are disadvantaged in tech: Women in tech are part of an out-group, just by being in the minority. This necessarily puts them at a disadvantage. We know that women make less than men in most environments. Acquiring a job more easily is one thing - sure, if I assume you're telling the truth, women get more callbacks. But consider the prospects after initial employment. It is not as simple as "women are more employable in the tech industry" - it needs to also be the case that women are making equal pay, given equal opportunity to advance their careers, and are expected to do equal work.
I guess what I mean to say is that it feels like you're doing exactly what we should not do with complex social issues: oversimplifying.
> Women in tech are part of an out-group, just by being in the minority.
A key insight I also saw in a study about gender equality in the teaching profession (done by the Swedish institute for higher education). If you are a male student entering a profession with 80% women, you are naturally going to doubt and question that decision. If you pass that first wave of doubt, you get hit by a second wave as soon the first road bump hits (like a failed exam). Male students (studying to be a teacher) are much more likely to ask: "Should I be doing this?" compared to female students in the same class. Then third wave hits when the person is entering the working profession and has to work in a culture that has integrated gender identity.
The big question should be how we can fix this problem in a general way. Based on Swedish statistics, only about 10% of women and men work in a profession with equal gender distribution, and about similar number for people who work in a profession with a dominated gender of opposite gender. About 80% of the work force, both women and men, work in a profession where their gender is the dominating gender. The trend from the last 30 years has been steadily in the wrong direction, with more gender separation in the work force.
> The trend from the last 30 years has been steadily in the wrong direction, with more gender separation in the work force
Interestingly this has been a trend most strongly observed in the most free, socially egalitarian and rich countries. In other words when men are women are most free to pick a career path they naturally self segregate. In countries that are less free and have more pressure to pick economically efficient career paths (i.e. social/financial risk of career failure is severe) there is a more even spread of genders. So I'm not sure that increased gender separation can be easily characterised as the "wrong" direction...
I am inclined to agree that it's not necessarily "wrong" - but mainly because I don't believe it to be a black and white issue. Self-segregation is beneficial to the individual - they feel like part of the group, and that reduces stress. But it certainly feels like there may be societal factors that force people to make that choice, and those may be negative. Likewise, diversity seems to me like something to be sought out. If I am only surrounded by people who are very much like me, I tend to only see problems from one perspective, or have my own personal biases reinforced.
As with most things, it is not as simple as "this is wrong." There's a lot to consider, and to me, it isn't the self-segregation that we should fight, but rather, it might be the case that we should fight the root cause of the desire to self-segregate.
I think the statement that on average women are less likely to be interested in tech careers is likely reasonable. For example, take veterinary science ... this is a rigorous and demanding area of study previously dominated by men, but now dominated by women. You can Google about this yourself, but here's an article I just found [1].
So why has this happened in the veterinary sciences, but not tech? One answer could be that somehow male computer scientists turn out to be horribly sexist compared to male vets. A more plausible explanation could be that with meaningful swathes of societal gender discrimination against women removed they are perfectly capable of moving into and dominating a technical field when that chimes with some aspect of female nature. In the case of veterinary science that synergy would come from the female predilection towards caring and nurturing. I'm not saying every woman cares about things like that, but on average more do than men. The male predilection towards abstract and systematic thinking could in my opinion go a long way to explain their over-representation in the tech industry. I think those are uncontroversial statements, although sadly after 30 years of sub-standard echo chamber research in the social sciences that may not be a popularly held opinion.
The benefit of this way of looking at things is that it doesn't paint women as somehow deficient and needing of special treatment. Rather than bombarding them with negative messaging it recognises that women are perfectly capable of reaching out and taking what they want from society. A more empowering feminist message, no? And indeed neither does it paint an entire industry as systematically sexist - which sounds to me like the sort of oversimplification you take objection to? But there's big social media capital and real world rewards propagating sexism in tech memes.
> We know that women make less than men in most environments ...
> ... it needs to also be the case that women are making equal pay
I'm not sure it's fair to start these sorts of statements with "We know that..." - the most charitable depiction would be to characterise such statements as debatable. In the UK women under 30 now earn more than similarly aged men, in other words they have reversed the pay gap for that age group [2]. Again this suggests to me that until biological imperatives take hold women are more than capable of competing with men in the workplace. What happens post 30 is down to life choices. As a whole women are more likely to value family life and make life choices based on that, whereas men are more likely to devote their energies to their careers. It's not a zero sum game, there are sacrifices on both sides there. And again, that doesn't hold true for every woman and every man, but to claim entrenched massive systematic discrimination seems to me at best tenuous.
> perfectly capable of moving into and dominating a technical field when that chimes with some aspect of female nature.
It doesn't have to be female nature. It could just as easily be culturally encouraged nature, or a combination of the two (a culturally encouraged aspect that was originally developed from human nature, in a self reinforcing loop).
> The male predilection towards abstract and systematic thinking could in my opinion go a long way to explain their over-representation in the tech industry. I think those are uncontroversial statements...
They should be uncontroversial. It's obvious there are actual differences between male and female minds, and plenty of studies have shown physiological differences. Unfortunately, bringing science of this nature into a discussion about equality is often immediately vilified. On the other hand, this information can be used for the basis of some fairly horrendous reasoning, so it's easy to see why people are quick to discount it.
Since all people aren't created equal, we shouldn't strive for equality, since some people are clearly better than others, so let's embrace that.
Since we aren't all physically or mentally equal, and some people are clearly "better" with respect to some aspect X that we/I/some group I'm part of has classified as important, those people are more worthy than others.
Etc.
There are arguments that can be logically made for a society based on those, but not if you want a society like we enjoy and promote in western civilization (not no imply a specific difference in other cultures, I'm just not qualified to comment on them). I think the world is a better place in many, many ways because we've promoted values of inclusion, equality, happiness and life. I'm happy to discuss alternate societies with different values and how what that might be like as a thought experiment (some of the best science fiction is in thus vein), but I'm not really interested in that when discussing problems our society currently faces. We should be able to agree on those core values I mentioned earlier, and taking time in each discussion to reassert and prove that those are important to everyone involved just detracts from useful conversation.
In other words, it's entirely possible that in some instances negative steroetyping based on race, sex, nationality or any number of other attributes is actually somewhat accurate, but we've decided as culture that the downsides are fairly bad, so for the most part we shouldn't do that. I agree with this.
The point when you transition from "X and Y are different" to "X is better than Y".
It commonly takes the even more pernicious form of going from "X and Y are different on average" to "any given X is better than any given Y". If you're lucky, this last statement at least has a "until proved otherwise" caveat.
Unfortunately, history is rife with this sort of reasoning. People slip into it _really_ easily. It doesn't help that there is a natural tendency to perceive your in-group as better than out-groups, so to the extent that X above ends up feeling like someone's in-group and Y ends up feeling like an out-group, the "X is better than Y" conclusion is very hard to avoid.
>In the case of veterinary science that synergy would come from the female predilection towards caring and nurturing. I'm not saying every woman cares about things like that, but on average more do than men.
I think that's BS. From what I've seen throughout my life, women are much more likely to be cold, uncaring parents than men. Notice how you always hear horror stories about mothers-in-law, but you almost never hear anything bad about fathers-in-law. I think we as a society have somehow gotten the idea that women are nurturing and caring, because we want them to be, but it's entirely wrong for the most part.
Except women frequently are a majority, not a minority. In the US, 60% of college students now are female. They just don't go into technical professions.
From what I've gathered from being around different women and talking to them, I think all this talk about being "disadvantaged" is missing the real root causes. They actually are disadvantaged, but the problem isn't the workforce, fellow college students, etc., nearly as much as it is their own upbringing, and their very own parents.
If you really want to fix the problem with women in tech, you need to take all female children away from their parents and raise them in state-run facilities where they're taught that they actually can do math and play with toys that aren't dolls and pursue careers in these fields. Somehow, I doubt this suggestion will be seriously considered....
In short, our very own culture is to blame here. That's not something that's easy to change, because now you're advocating having the state usurp the power of the parents to parent their children.
> If you really want to fix the problem with women in tech, you need to take all female children away from their parents and raise them in state-run facilities where they're taught that they actually can do math and play with toys that aren't dolls and pursue careers in these fields. Somehow, I doubt this suggestion will be seriously considered....
Been tried throughout history. It almost never works and is as horrific as it sounds humanitarian wise.
Yeah, I hope it was obvious that I wasn't seriously advocating that. I'm just pointing out how this stuff is embedded into our society, and it's hard to root out without taking extreme measures (which will likely have even worse unintended effects).
Also, it doesn't help that most of our kids seem to be raised by people who are either uneducated and poor (and thus don't pass on to girls the idea that they can get an education too and be good at math), or by people who are conservative and/or religious (and who actively discourage girls from doing well in math and science because of their traditional sexist values). The people who do have liberal values about this stuff aren't having kids (or not very many), so we just have this almost religious belief that our liberal values will somehow pass to these kids through societal conditioning (which they do to a certain extent thanks to the media and internet).
I've seen more people than I thought possible advocating against democracy, for coups, for segregation, and other crazy things I thought humanity had moved passed. I no longer know what's serious and what isn't anymore.
While I agree with the premise that our culture is (at least partially) to blame, I want to clarify something about my post. When I use the word minority, I do not mean "there are fewer women. Rather, I mean it in the way that the census bureau would mean it: women are underrepresented in our society. There are fewer women in politics, and positions of power, than there are men. Women may outnumber us, but if they are not in positions of influence, where their needs and concerns are being represented, they still qualify as a minority. Minority is not exactly the best word to use, because it conjures that image of a small group standing up to a big group, but it is the common parlance term for the idea of a group that is underrepresented in our society, unfortunately.
Fewer women are interested because they don't want to work, go to school, and socialize in sexist environments. While I'm sure that not all "tech environments" are sexist, enough of them are to convince women not to pursue careers in this field.
That's a disadvantage, especially because tech careers are luxury careers these days.
I spent a lot of my teenage years hunched over a Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide. The "environment" was me and a computer that didn't care about my sex. Certainly nobody encouraged me, least of all my friends and family. Where were the teenage girls who shared my obsession? For that matter, where are the women who hack for fun and ignore the shit the industry is up to?
A notable conversation with my mother: Why don't you call your female friends more? maybe sit & talk on the phone with them like you're supposed to? we're a little worried that you're a girl who just wants to read and play with computers.
This concern didn't last too long & I got plenty of eventual encouragement on the STEM side, but my mom was worried I was abnormal and would never have a happy, successful female life because I was playing with computers instead of people. Women are supposed to socialize and be caring and nurturing.
So where were the girls like you? Hiding from their parents.
> Where were the teenage girls who shared my obsession?
We were around. I spent my teenage years hunched over computers in my garage too (TRS-80 and IBM XT for me). As it happens, I didn't get into the BBS scene -- my parents wouldn't have looked kindly on tying up the phone -- and knowing how girls get treated in chatrooms, it's a good thing for my career that I didn't.
Why do you feel the need to rationalize away the fact that getting involved in tech is something that was easier for you because you're a dude? It seems like there's this sense in which people like you believe that by admitting to being privileged will somehow diminish your accomplishments. I've got news for ya: it won't. You seem to feel as though there's a zero sum game, where raising the accessibility of what we've achieved to people who aren't like us will somehow harm you. Again, it won't. Where does this fear come from? Why not love?
I too spent a lot of time learning to code alone with my Macintosh Classic. However, nobody ever told me this was something boys didn't do. I had a bunch of (male) nerd friends who thought it was pretty cool. Rather importantly I didn't have a bunch of ugly, creepy girls slobbering over "that cuyuute nerd boy". When I took a (worthless) programming class in high school, everyone in the room was the same gender as me. When I took CS classes in college, almost everyone in the room was the same gender as me. It was a perfectly normal thing for a dude like me to be into. In the workplace, nobody remarks on my gender. I'm not a "diversity hire". I don't have anything to prove.
But my reaction to realizing this is that I fucking love my career, I love hacking, and I want to share what I love with everyone, to make it as easily available as it was to me. Why would anyone not want this?
In part I'm pointing out a problem with the frequent claim "girls are equally interested until school and work deters them", because they had years beforehand to exhibit the obsession.
In part I don't think we should encourage anyone to write software because it's damn near impossible to do well. The industry's salaries are already luring in entirely too many sloppy blub programmers who don't care about or even understand quality work. I would much prefer to only work with the minority who have always known this is what they have to do and could never have been deterred. Even if the industry were completely inhospitable for some reason, I would still be writing code as a hobby, and I see very little use for anyone who does not.
My issue with this is simply: what kind of profession is this if you have to decide you want to "join up" as a teenager or you're shut out for the rest of your adult life? I was pretty obsessed in my youth, and I didn't have nearly the toolset available to kids today, but we need to move past this teenage hacker stereotype if we want to attract more attention from serious, well-balanced adults on career day.
It's the kind that's nearly impossible to do well, even for the right kind of freak. Software engineering needs a hell of a lot of systematizing and simplification before it's well enough understood that well-balanced adults can begin to accomplish something useful after simply studying it. We're still in the bloodletting-and-leeches phase of the profession.
> Fewer women are interested because they don't want to work, go to school, and socialize in sexist environments
This is preposterous. The field of law was exclusively male not long ago, and is around parity now. Same with medicine. You think the first women in law school and med school were welcomed and supported? Do you think female doctors and lawyers a generation ago encountered less sexism than women in tech today?
The field of technology is undergoing exactly the same growing pains that law and medicine did some time ago.
I think in the next decade or two I think we will see women achieving the same kind of representation in tech that they have in law and medicine. And as this process takes place, haters will hate, pretend there isn't a problem, and spew various kinds of sexist nonsense, just like they did when women were entering the fields of law and medicine. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be doing the actual work to make it happen.
> Keep whining though. Maybe you'll be able to prevent the spread of the dreaded females into yet another bastion of male dominance.
I didn't say there was no problem; I said you were wrong about its cause. From that you conclude that I'm a sexist who is actively trying to keep women out of tech?
Jesus man, I know this is a contentious issue, but get a hold on yourself. I've hired and promoted female software engineers. When I left my last job, I spent nine months grooming a woman on my team to take over my job (not because she was a woman, or even because she was clearly the most qualified, but because she was the one who expressed interest in it and busted ass to learn it and took classes to improve in areas she was weak in.) I may be a sexist or I may not be, but you're not in a position to judge based on a comment in a forum you didn't like. Maybe take a breath and remember that there are real people behind these handles, eh?
At my daughter's high-school, there was a lot of societal pressure for girls to be interested in tech/science. Most of them remained uninterested in math/computers, though quite a few went into life-sciences.
Eventually, evolution will re-assert itself. The sub-populations who, for whatever reason, continue to grow in population will come to dominate the numbers, after the non-breeding groups die off.
E.g. in America, fertility is passing below replacement rates - on average. But the Amish population still doubles every 20 years. In 200 years, there will be hundreds of millions of Amish.
We could be looking at a world of Amish, Quiverfulls, poor tribalistic Africans, religious Muslims, and orthodox Jews. There will be very few left-liberals, the childfree movement will be gone (like the Shakers already are). Gays and other queer people may breed out of the gene pool if their modern freedom reduces the fertility of their genes.
Modernity may very well be self-defeating, because the future belongs to those who show up.
The "traditional" policies and politics that many people claim that are "backward" or "evil", came from eras where the most important thing was breed soldiers like there is no tomorrow to fight against other tribes, then cities, then countries...
The point of allowing men having multiple wives, but not women with multiple husbands, prohibiting homosexual relationships, virgin marriage, encouragement of marriage, prohibition of adultery, prohibition of divorce, militarism, and a long string of other policies, are geared to one simple thing: make women "pop out" babies that can pick up weapons and fight (as soon as 12 years old if needed) the fastest as possible.
Those that follow these rules, will on long term always win, out of sheer numbers and resiliency.
Likewise, having a population of 1-2B also introduces the risk of scaling beyond the food production capabilities of the land. Obviously an overpopulated country can (and likely will) take from an underpopulated country, but modern weapons create a new dynamic if an invading force attempting to occupation farm land or capture grain stores is viewed as mortal threat.
That's exactly it, and it creates a situation in which relatively poor, very densely populated countries fight with each other for resources, rather than attempting to take from an underpopulated country armed to the teeth. I think we've seen a preview in the Middle East and North Africa, and gotten a hint of how Western nations are going to respond to the inevitable influx of refugees.
My biggest concern is the direct correlation to the reproductive rates and lower education in virtually every culture. More than specific concerns about particular religions or ethnic origins, I fear for a world where the uneducated rules.
True in the technical sense that a person cannot just unilaterally decide to have children RIGHT NOW. But most people, over the course of their life, have the opportunity to have children. In the developed world, a huge portion of these people decide to have 0 or 1 child.
Consider that many countries have made the transition from high birth rates and low literacy to the opposite. There's no reason to think the remaining ones will never change.
OCP did not resolve the problem, per se. OCP bought them more time to allow the (delayed) effects of the increased standard of living to manifest themselves fully. They didn't really _need_ OCP - they would have ended up in the same place either way, OCP just made it a bit shorter, and reduced the strain on economy (and hence decrease in the standard of living) on the way there.
China has a long history of advanced (for the time) civilization and a high-IQ population (~105). They were backward for just a few centuries because of a series of bad ideologies - isolationism, followed by communism. For most of history China was the highest-tech civilization on Earth. All they had to do to achieve demographic transition was get back to their historical norm.
Africa has no history of advanced civilization and a low-IQ population (~75). There's reason to think they'll sustain higher birthrates than everyone else, indefinitely. To achieve demographic transition they'll have to do something they've never done before.
Given that IQ scores correlate pretty well with things like child nutrition, I'd wager that if you could actually go back and measure them for China back when they were "backward", you'd probably get similar results.
Not to mention that IQ is not an absolute metric - it's the median score of the entire population, and we're getting smarter as a whole, so 100 points today is "worth" more 100 years ago. Indeed, if you use the modern metrics, and apply them to the population of US - a well-developed industrialized country at the forefront of economic, scientific and technological advance - back in 1920, the average IQ would have been 80. So, if, as you claim, ~75 is such a low IQ that it would preclude these developments, then US should not exist as it is today.
For most of history whatever your sexuality, you married and had children. Period. You also did whatever else you did, and maybe you had a terrible marriage, but that probably wasn't unusual for straight people for most of history either.
Actually no, historically large percentages of the population (whatever their sexuality), especially the male population, did not marry as it was very expensive to start their own household. That's one reason why so many gifts were traditionally given for weddings. Though you do have a point WRT divorce being very uncommon.
Let me expand my objection, homosexuality not only exists in humans but in many other animals, many of which do not have social stigma of homosexuality.
He's not saying that they shouldn't exist today, just that their genes will never make it back into the collective gene pool, stopping their traits and characteristics from ever propagating forward.
But that's not how how genotypes and phenotypes work for recessive alleles. Homosexual genes will continue to live on and propagate in heterosexuals so long as they aren't eliminated by the gene therapy as seen in sci-fi horror/suspense Hollywood films.
It doesn't require a homosexual parent to have a homosexual kid.
'But that's not how how genotypes and phenotypes work for recessive alleles.'
Recessive alleles aren't immune to natural selection. It's just harder to purge them because they get exposed as phenotypes less often. As they become rarer and rarer (it'll manifest as a phenotype as the square of its frequency), selection weakens. Homosexuality, however, is common enough and the fitness penalty large enough that any recessives are exposed to a lot of selection, so it should be disappearing fast, but it isn't, which raises a lot of questions of what exactly causes homosexuality.
Exactly at the heart of the problem. IANAB (I am a physicist though) and from what I understand, it is a question currently being researched. I mean, great example is if it is so easy, why is there homosexuality in the animal kingdom where they don't have social push for heterosexual mating?
Yes, there is extensive research on this subject in ethology.
One hypothesis that seems to be fairly strong is that homosexuality is, essentially, just one manifestation of the broad altruism strategy.
Think about what makes altruism in general persist, despite it been seemingly harmful for its carriers long-term: they might not maximize the likelihood of survival of their own progeny, but in sacrificing that, they increase the likelihood of survival of progeny of people from the same family, tribe or larger community - which have a certain amount of shared genes. If you think of the natural selection game as fundamentally centered on the genes rather than their carriers ("selfish gene" etc), this strategy makes perfect sense - your altruism may result in a lot more people surviving and carrying genes shared with you, and down the line, the end result is that population in the future will be genetically more common with you than it has been otherwise - so your genes "win". If so, the tradeoff is in favor of altruism over selfishness, and altruism becomes a selected trait.
Now, homosexuality can be seen as an extreme example of that. Every homosexual pair that adopts children (and there are a lot!) is, essentially, forgoing spreading their genes directly, and spending the effort that would normally go into that on the genes of some other person. Now, in this day and age, children often get adopted across large distances; but historically, and obviously in nature, adoption would be from geographically and genetically close populations; so it's a form of altruism that can be favored by natural selection. If you unwind back even further, before family was a thing, any tribe members that don't have children of their own have more time to spend watching, feeding and protecting others' children.
Now, you might wonder, why homosexuality rather than asexuality, since the latter would produce the same result? Evolution, due to the mechanisms that drive it, generally takes the path of the least resistance at any given point, even if it results in a very long-winded trek long-term. And it's simpler, from an evolutionary perspective, to "neutralize" the sexual drive by changing its target, than it is to switch it off completely. On top of that, there are some benefits other than children to be derived from sexuality in social species - bonding and mutual assistance, facilitating communication (as e.g. bonobos often use sex) etc.
Exclusive homosexuality analogous to human homosexual relationships is rare in nature. There are animals that are extremely promiscuous and have sex with anything else regardless of its sex, and there are animals that form homosexual relationships in the absence of enough sexual partners, and revert to heterosexual behavior when partners become available.
From a scientific standpoint, there's been alot of theory about an Aunt/Uncle advantage which is similar to a Grandparent advantage as far as it being able to help improve survival through the family of any genes responsible even if it is at the cost of an individual.
Of course, there's also the strong possibility that it isn't purely genetic but a mix of certain genes, which may be linked to other important traits, with a certain environment (possibly even in utero).
The problem with the aunt/uncle theory is the math. A non-breeding sibling would have to enable their siblings to have two additional children (above and beyond the children they would have had anyway) for each child that the non-breeding sibling forgoes having themselves for the strategy to even hit break even, from a genetic point of view.
Because the number of siblings is close to number of children it actually comes to each breeding sibling to have extra two children survive into adulthood. This becomes even less steep if we remember that cousins can also be included in the math.
For example the gay person becomes a village healer and can spent time on that precisely because he/she doesn't have own children to look after.
The hypothesis I put forth (implicitly) is that homosexual genes are still around because of the massive social pressure to have children and to never admit being gay.
Now that this pressure is gone, we could see a huge drop in these traits over the next few centuries.
I don't know how that is supposed to work. What sort of social pressure could possibly produce near-zero fitness impact when it makes you not want to have sex with women, in an environment where the men who do want to have sex with women are like 95% of the population and will happily put enormous efforts into doing that and taking your place? In addition, as I said, given the apparent fitness impact and frequent childlessness of gay men, we should be able to see homosexuality rates plummeting over the past century, but as far as I know, there's no evidence. (Plus the wild animal thing, yeah.) There's something stranger going on. The 'gay germ' hypothesis, as unpopular as it may be, at least adequately reconciles all of the observations.
Maybe you're misunderstanding the parent (or I'm misunderstanding you!). I believe the parent is saying that the genes which predispose somebody to being gay remain in the population, despite their seemingly zero reproductive fitness, because gay people face enormous pressure from their relatives to not be gay and reproduce. And they face this pressure because their family members have a genetic interest in the gay person's offspring and so have evolved to coerce gay family members into having children.
I understand what they're saying. My point is that it's highly unlikely: coercion just doesn't work that well when it comes to something extremely expensive and requiring a lifetime of work to maybe succeed, when the task is not just not pleasant but outright aversive. It's difficult to see how such coercion could be so extraordinarily successful as to reduce the average fitness penalty to something so tiny that homosexuality could still exist at current frequencies like 5%; it'd be like you'd have to have such pervasive and super-effective coercion that not a single gay man out of 100 fails to reach his quota, and this would have to obtain in all societies forever, effectively, or else eventually the coercion would slacken and the homosexuality genes would almost immediately vanish, permanently. This is pencil-balancing-on-its-point-for-millennia territory.
Right, I agree that if the genes which predispose somebody to being gay had no benefits whatsoever, then they could not even exist; they would have a purely negative effect on fitness. So they must have some positive effect on genetic fitness to even exist at all. And they must be relatively significant and intractable from the side effect that some of their carriers turn out gay, given how common gay people are.
But that is separate from whether or not pressure from relatives to reproduce can be used as a mitigating strategy for the cases where these genes do result in someone being gay. And this strategy, then, would lower the amount of fitness those genes would need to provide to be viable.
"So they must have some positive effect on genetic fitness to even exist at all."
That's not true. There's a number of ways variants can exist without being fit. They can be regularly created by mutation, or they can increase due to genetic drift, especially in a bottleneck scenario. And there's even more ways that a phenotype can persist while being highly unfit - if it's a side-effect of a co-evolving pathogen, being one of them, as then the human natural selection is constantly fighting it but the pathogen easily evolves even faster.
Genes can also come along with other stuff - like Neanderthal genes that (must have?) provided some benefit for living in Northern Europe, while also adding depression, alcoholism etc.
Poor eyesight has no adaptive benefit. Yet many, many people need glasses. I guess it's just 'difficult' for our genes to grow a sharp eye focusing system, so they often get it wrong.
The same may be true of homosexuality. So even if there's nothing adaptive about being gay, it keeps happening because sexual tuning in the brain is a hard target to hit.
Homophobia may be an adaptation to this. It makes parents force their children to act straight even if they're gay.
> Poor eyesight has no adaptive benefit. Yet many, many people need glasses.
Many people... in particular industrializing countries. Our genes have a great sharp eye focusing system. You won't find much myopia in a random tribe.
Many animal populations have non-reproductive members. It takes a village to raise a child. In such an extremely social animal as Homo Sapiens, many of our adaptations are social. E.g. it only takes a few men to guarantee another generation, yet 50% men are born in each. Another: we don't die the instant we give birth; we're there (and non-reproductive) for decades afterward, competing for resources. Its the social benefits that allow for this.
There's something called Fisher's principle that explains why the sex ratio of most species is 50:50. In short, if less than 50% of humans are men, then men must have more children on average than women and it becomes reproductively advantageous to have more make kids in order to take advantage of it.
Your hypothesis assumes that, historically, all human societies had a massive social pressure against homosexuality. But it contradicts what we know about our history - there were numerous societies that treated it ambivalently (e.g. China, Japan, Native Americans) - and it didn't seem to produce any noticeable effect.
But if the individuals who have the greatest expression or concentration of these genes are having children less frequently (because they are no longer pressured into having children by their relatives/community), then this will act as a siphon for those genes over many generations. That doesn't mean that they will completely disappear, but that these genes would become much less prevalent.
I think homophobia is the reason why non-straight genes are present in the gene pool. It is a strategy for parents and siblings to make sure that their non-straight relatives reproduce despite their natural inclinations.
Just a disclaimer though: this is not at all a justification for homophobia, in the same way that the (mostly) male impulse to violence is not a justification for said violence.
I was raised to always double down on an unpopular idea if I think there's something to it, so here goes:
From the point of view of genetic fitness, homosexuality is not adaptive. So you would think that the genes that contribute to homosexuality would be powerfully selected against, since the number of expected offspring from same sex intercourse is zero.
Yet gay people make up a sizable portion of the population, which is not at all what you would expect. Unless there is some mechanism by which homosexuals have historically had children despite their natural inclinations.
Given that some portion of anti-gay attitudes seem to be oriented toward getting them to "be more straight" (or whatever), it seems possible to me that homophobia (or at least a certain flavor of it) is an adaptation whose purpose is to get family members to pressure a gay person into having offspring, since they would have a genetic interest in those offspring.
But that is an argument about why a certain behavior might exist in humanity. It is not an argument that homophobia is okay or justified. It is not okay.
This is just myopic. The reason why many of those groups have more children is because in any agrarian household, more children = more free labor = more productivity. This can kick in at even a very young age.
In more urban centers, however, more children often means more cost for the family. It has next to nothing to do with religion, and in fact, most of the religious teachings that seem to encourage more fertility are probably just a case of putting the cart before the horse. Those teachings were emphasized because the households that listened to them already had a strong incentive to have more children.
The future, as far as anyone is able to predict, will still have much more urban, educated, and "liberal" people than not, even if those households have fewer children individually. And this will be true so long as we remain an urban rather than an agrarian society.
Why do we assume that non-majority sexualities are genetic? As society relaxes wrt sexuality, we may see that many more people who do not identify as gay per se may openly display flexible sexuality.
E.g. saying you're left-handed is no big deal anymore. One day one's sexuality may be equally irrelevant.
We don't assume it; we are still studying this extensively, and so far more evidence seems to be in favor of nature vs nurture.
If it were a matter of "relaxing", you'd expect that children raised in homosexual families would tend to be more open about flexible sexuality, and more would identify as gay, or at least as non-hetero - but that is not the case. The ratio of children becoming homosexual vs heterosexual is the same in both homosexual and heterosexual families, insofar as our studies can identify. At the same time, there have been some observed correlations between sexuality and specific genetic markers.
Really, the more interesting question at this point is whether it's mainly genetic, or mainly epigenetic.
You're extrapolating current trends as if they won't change in the future. Who is to say the Amish will continue to have as many children in the future? What if it turns out that reproduction is intrinsically tied to economic success, and the most successful groups of people always have declining birth rates?
My old hypothesis is that in a reasonably free society, families reach their "destination" socioeconomic status after 3 generations.
Even if they immigrate as refugees on rusty boats, or lose everything in a holocaust or internment camps. Or, even if they win the lottery. After three generations, they hit their level, whether it's at the bottom or the top. And then they stay there.
It's IQ, an absence of stimulation-seeking behavior, a long mental time horizon, and a non-susceptibility to addictive chemicals or behaviors, and an absence of costly mental and physical diseases. It's genetic.
Correct me if I'm misreading, but I have a hard time seeing how the study supports your hypothesis. In the "Discussion" section, the authors state that their heritability estimate for educational attainment was 31%, and only 20% for SES. That still leaves the door open for significant social influence.
The authors summarize: "Our findings add weight to the view that genetic variation plays an important, but not exclusive, role in educational inequalities and social mobility, which is at variance with views, that still prevail in some quarters, that these are solely the product of social forces and environmental inequalities." In other words, they only take themselves to have refuted the strawman view that observed differences "are solely the product of social forces."
He makes a lot of points here, but the most important IMO is that many measurements are noisy, and the correlation between X and Y+noise is less than the correlation between X and Y.
> In the "Discussion" section, the authors state that their heritability estimate for educational attainment was 31%, and only 20% for SES. That still leaves the door open for significant social influence.
Families are not genetically stable. There is very little inbreeding in Western societies, so a grandparent and grandchild may not be genetically close.
A very important part of "long mental time horizon" is picking a good spouse and raising your children well, traits often absent in those who shoot to wealth in one generation.
Everything you described is simply ways that rich people avoid living around poor people. Yes, it generally excludes blacks, but that's incidental and only because blacks tend to be poor.
On the flipside, these policies keep out poor whites as much as poor blacks, for the exact same reasons.
Rich black basketball players, musicians, doctors and politicians have no problem living in mostly-white neighborhoods. Of course, rich Asians also have no trouble living in white neighborhoods, because there are no racial segregation policies.
I find it amazing how you attribute the simple dynamics of people sorting themselves by wealth, which have been very strong in all urban societies everywhere ever, and make them out as though they're some sort of racial targeting system. e.g. 19th century Paris was almost all white French and had the same wealth clustering patterns for the same fundamental reasons.
Black people being poor is not incidental, but the results of systematic oppression and discrimination, for work, credit, housing, and other resources.
Go look at the wikipedia article on redlining.
And this is not a past problem, banks were charging higher interest rates for loans to blacks than whites before the recent recession.
systemic racial injustice doesn't mean a racial targeting system. It doesn't even have to be conscious. It is the result of tiny acts of discrimination that add up to disadvantage people of color.
As for 19th century France, it wasn't until the 1840's that France outlawed slavery, and then it continued to discriminate against french colonial citizens of color, such as Algerians.
That's not to say that class and wealth have no role in affecting black people. But being discriminated against because one is black and being discriminated against because one is poor are not mutually exclusive; they are, if anything, mutually reinforced.
I'm not asking anyone to undo the injustices that have walled off generations of black families from wealth. I mean, you should, but I don't think y'all are up for it. What I'm asking is that you not pile injustices on top of each other.
"It's just economic segregation" is the worst excuse I've ever heard. Yes, some level of segregation is inevitable and acceptable. That's not what I'm talking about. Repeal our segregation laws. Repeal them! Stop forcing families with less money out of your neighborhoods by law! Stop pretending this isn't a terrible thing!
Rich black people actually do get discriminated against. I have no idea why you think people only discriminate against poor blacks.
Or are you trying to say that people just assume most blacks are poor, and that's why discrimination on the basis of skin color isn't actually based on skin color?
If there ever was a major war between civilized nuclear powers, and it didn't immediately go nuclear, we might end up with a weird sort of gentleman's agreement where it's accepted to fire nukes into your own country (at invading enemy forces) but not at another country.
I can see that being an evolutionarily stable strategy.
I would think that a cold war situation is far more likely. No reason to use nukes in your own territory, many very good reasons to not use nukes at all. So long as the early warning systems (i.e. satellites) are still in place we will probably assume that the other side would rather avoid irradiating their own territory and prefer other aggressive tactics.
My extremely boiled down version of the MAD calculus was that one was only required to use nuclear weapons if one's capability to use sufficient nuclear weapons at some future point in time were being lost.
Hence the Cuban missile crisis being such a big deal.
Those rates were basically fiction. All they led to (and the only reason they could be levied) was a huge system of fake on-paper money-losing schemes. People would arrange all sorts of business ventures and other schemes to appear to be losing money, and thus reduce their taxes.
The actual tax receipts as a percentage of income were very close to what they are today.
The main goal of the 1986 tax deal was simplification, eliminating tax shelters was inherent to the plan, not something traded for lower rates. If there was any exchange for lower top rates, it was raising corporate and capital gains taxes to keep the plan revenue neutral.
Wealthy people do not care about tax simplification, they care about how much in tax they have to pay. So the trade was lower tax rates overall in exchange for giving up the low tax rates that made tax shelters extremely attractive.
Your position underestimates how pervasive tax avoidance using shelters was at the time. The wealthy were never going to give that up for simplification, after all, they could have simplified their taxes anyway by not investing in shelters if that was their issue.
Was that 92% ever an effective rate of consequence? What kind of receipts did the treasury capture? Not that I'd be against that for the 2016 equiv in USD.
You're right. I had conflated GDP with disparity. GDP in the 1910s was more or less on par in Mexico, Finland, Portugal, Norway and Italy. That parity has dissolved and become disparity in the intervening years. On the other hand, in the age of the robber barons, you had the lower class and the wealthy, with little in between, so those not at the top were not as unequal as they are today. It's my impression it was more stratified (into two lobes). And given most people were rural and there were few in the professional class, I think it makes sense.
If you go on long enough, the points do start sinking in.
Too many people assume that acrimony means that the discussion must end immediately. But that's not true at all. It's exceptionally hard, sometimes, to meet clashing beliefs with entirely soft voices and polite manners. You don't have to suppress everything you want to say. You can let it out. So can the other person. It's good. (Obviously it shouldn't raise to a degree where people are screaming continuously or acting violent).
Maturity doesn't just mean always speaking softly. It can also mean being able to make and reject points forcefully, and not wilt like a delicate flower if the other person does the same.
The real key is that people need to not be so delicate. Accept the natural difficulties of clashing belief systems. Just stick in there, let the acrimony happen, don't give up. Eventually - 10 or 20 or 30 minutes later - you'll get to something meaningful simply because there's no way to talk that long without both people having a lot of time to make real points.