tripu @tripu@qoto.org

A todos los que están promoviendo en 🇪🇸 España el Día Internacional de la Mujer y la Niña en la Ciencia quiero recordarles, este año otra vez, que en #España,

• según Eurostat, hace dos años ya había más mujeres que hombres «empleadas en ciencia y tecnología», que
• según el INE, hace dos años las mujeres ya representaban el 54% de todas las personas «empleadas en ciencia y tecnología», y que,
• también según el INE, hace como mínimo seis años que las mujeres ya son mayoría entre los estudiantes matriculados, y entre los que obtienen titulaciones, en todas las áreas de estudio, y eso incluye «ciencias» y «ciencias de la salud» (única excepción: «ingeniería y arquitectura»).

#InternationalWomenInScienceDay #DiaDeLaMujerYLaNinaEnLaCiencia #11febrero #WomenInScience #IDWGS2023

I heard a mention of #ConorMcGregor, so I went to read a bit about him, and watched a few minutes of a couple #UFC fights — including that knockout 13 seconds into the match.

Change my mind: if you enjoy watching #MMA, there’s something wrong with you.

It is brutal. Am I too sensitive?

“At the same time as events such as those currently occurring in #Turkey and #Syria, other ‘silent’ catastrophes are taking place worldwide. […] They have always been there. […] One of these silent #catastrophes is the young children dying daily from preventable diseases. More than 1,300 children die every day from #malaria alone, which can be prevented by providing simple interventions like mosquito nets. These deaths are like an #earthquake occurring every day. And because this suffering goes largely unnoticed by the world, donations in fields like this are low — even though the life of a child can be saved here with just a few thousand dollars, and many more children can be saved from pain and suffering.”

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/turkey-syria-earthquake-donation-advice

#EffectiveAltruism

@amyvdh

“People who are anti-nationalist, progressive etc are just as passionate about their beliefs.”

Exactly.

So we have very passionate people experiencing very specific and strong emotions on both sides of every issue.

But it can’t be that emotions so diametrically opposed are both well calibrated, useful, constructive.

Therefore, emotions can’t be trusted.

So: we have to confront objective data, reasons and arguments.

@amyvdh

“Nationalism. That’s not an issue of emotions but one of learned or accepted bias.”

That right there is your bias, you see? Nationalism may seem like a bias for you. But a nationalist would counter that it is your globalist or nihilistic bias what blinds you to the necessity and the virtues of nationalism.

And again: when I read/hear from/about nationalists, racists, people who oppose abortion under any circumstances, homophobes, religious fanatics… I see a lot of emotion in them. They seem genuinely outraged, concerned, worried, disgusted.

Either we value all feelings and emotions and give them weight in the political discussion, or we dismiss all emotions. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t use the feelings of the Apache or any other group as your “exhibit A”, and at the same time dismiss the feelings of a Nationalist or some other group as mere “bias”.

@amyvdh

“If you dismiss emotions or personal experience how can you be making fully informed decisions about human well-being and cultural issues?”

Emotions are instinctive and subjective, almost by definition. They exist solely for evolutionary reasons. They aren’t designed to disentangle complex ethical issues with fairness. They are designed to keep us alive and breed, above anything else. They are very useful heuristics in day-to-day life, but we can’t base morals or politics on them.

Our “personal experience” can’t be but a sliver of what happens in the world. If I were to rely on “personal experience” I couldn’t have an opinion on almost anything. For most important subjects, I am not a member of that group, I don’t have that problem, I’m not in that tax bracket, I didn’t commit that crime, I don’t use that product — and no-one or almost no-one I know does. Also, we all live in bubbles, so our “personal experience” is hugely biased and not at all representative of what is statistically true out there.

That’s why we have maths, statistics, surveys, simulations, logic, rationality, biology, psychology, sociology, the scientific method, peer review, philosophy, thought experiments, natural experiments in History. I trust all that much more to “make fully informed decisions about human well-being”.

@amyvdh

I think we are converging, actually :)

Splitting my answer for brevity and to facilitate threads:

@yangwenli That’s a likely explanation, yes.

One may be tempted to brush aside any positive correlation between conservatism and health and happiness as a side-effect of some strong positive correlation between conservatism and income/wealth (“well, no wonder conservatives are happier and healthier and start more families: they just have more money!”).

Except… there is no such strong correlation. Today, in countries like the US and Spain, income “has for all practical purposes zero discernible effect” in voting attitudes, or the effect is very weak.

So there has to be something else going on.

WDYT?

⑤ Mutual understanding:

“We tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. […] One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a ‘typical liberal’ would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a ‘typical conservative’ would respond. […] The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as ‘very liberal’.”

— https://www.businessinsider.com/whos-better-at-pretending-to-be-the-other-side-conservatives-or-liberals-2012-5

④ #Tolerance:

“Liberals are in their personal lives more intolerant of conservatives than vice versa across numerous dimensions in the US and the UK. Those on the left are more likely to block someone on social media over their views, be upset if their child marries someone from the other side, and find it hard to be friends with or date someone they disagree with politically.”

— https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal

Sources here, with lots of interesting surveys and charts: https://noahcarl.medium.com/who-doesnt-want-to-hear-the-other-side-s-view-9a7cdf3ad702

③ #Happiness (and mental health again):

“Political conservatives are happier than liberals. We proposed that this happiness gap is accounted for by specific attitude and personality differences associated with positive adjustment and mental health. […] In four studies, […] differences accounted for the happiness gap. These patterns are consistent with the positive adjustment explanation.”

— https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S009265661100170X

Possible flaw: “conservatives, who are described as fearful, defensive, and low in self-esteem, will rationalize away social inequalities in order to justify the status quo (system justification)” (same source).

② Mental #health:

“White (and especially ‘very’) liberals are far more likely than all other ideological-racial subgroups to report being diagnosed with a mental health condition.”

— https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1248823825317363714

Possible flaw: “it’s possible that the disparities in self-reported diagnosis are simply or partly a function of white liberals being more likely to seek mental health evaluations”.

① #Marriage and family life:

“Conservatives are more likely than liberals to be happily married, simply because they’re more likely to be married in the first place. […] Ideology predicts marital status among Americans about as well as income or education.”

— https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-than-money-the-liberal-conservative-divide-in-marriage/

Possible flaw: I suspect age correlates with both probability of being married and with probability of leaning right, so when you look at who’s married today, some of those (happily) married who declare to be conservatives would have been singles who identified as liberals two or three decades earlier. In other words: perhaps it’s not that being a liberal makes you less likely to marry, but that being married and having children moves you closer to conservatism!

Recently I have stumbled upon several studies that seem to suggest that (at least in the US) #conservatives are happier and healthier than #liberals, that they are more tolerant of different points of view, and that they understand the ideas of their adversaries better than they are understood.

👇 Putting it all here, plus some comments where I think results may be biased or distorted.