The animal cruelty index seems... unhelpful to me.
The "best" countries are countries like India, Nigeria, Kenya. They rate well simply because they are poor, consume little meat, and don't do a lot of animal farming (relative to population of course). Their laws and cultural attitudes are all worse than average. Because they do well on 2/3 dimensions (produce, consume, attitudes), they score well. It seem unreasonable to score countries as considerate of animals simply because they are poor.
The other category of country that does pretty well is Austria, Sweden, Switzerland (and Germany, to a slightly lesser extent). They score well because they do have excellent standards in their own animal farming, and strong cultural and legal consideration for animals. But they import and consume lots of high-cruelty animal products. Again, they score well on 2/3 dimensions. But again this seems a bit unfair. These countries are contributing to quite a lot of animal cruelty- their "consume" rating is average or worse.
Are there any countries you think do particularly well on all metrics? Seems like consumption levels and welfare levels are likely to be correlated for reasons you mention so every country is going to do badly on one metric or another. The report/index suggests that India's high score isn't simply because they're poor but largely because of religious restrictions on eating beef, which sounds likely to be true.
I think my main comment would be that trying to combine the three ratings is silly (and it makes no sense to make the sum the headline figure). Individually, they're probably OK.
It's perhaps worth thinking about whether the "consume" rating could be fairly adjusted to reflect wealth, also.
Interesting one on India. Yes, generally they don't eat beef. But beef is, at least according to most authorities, the "best" meat you can eat from a cruelty point of view (it's pretty terrible for greenhouse gas impact obviously), partly because cows really are treated rather better than most farmed animals in general, but also simply because cows are big, so you get a lot of food out of one individual. So I'd actually expect not eating beef to make India look bad. And it doesn't look bad, at least not very. So it's quite possible the ratings really are capturing something surprising and postive about India. But of course it is relatively poor as well.
With respects to 2. didn't Natália Coelho Mendonça, debunk this and the various other things relating to the contamination theory. Wasn't the lesson that SMTM couldn't be trusted, I haven't followed the issue closely so it's possible something could have happened in the previous months that I missed.
Does anyone know the name of the genre of AI art in 5? I've been struggling to Google it for lack of terms. Are the methods of prompting required secret?
Some of the claims in the feminist study appear not so straightforward as presented in the abstract. To make the claim "misandry is a myth" (and not merely that perceptions of misandry are larger than measured in their surveys) they focus on the composite explicit attitudes score, which is a sum of several different kinds of questions (including "warmth" they also highlight, but also liking/trust and emotional reactions). If one looks at the results on "liking/trust", they seem kinda support a possible alternative angle of "feminists tend to like men less than non-feminists, radical feminists super dislike men, though results are noisy".
In study one, in the main text the authors highlight how the feminist and non-feminist hold no statistically significant differences in "warmth toward men"; the significant difference in "liking and trust of men" is left unmentioned in supplemental table S2. In study 2, "liking" is still a negative (differences in dislike and trust not observable). Only in study 3 the effect sign is positive, though it is also the smallest study. In the main results to study 4, they note that the composite association is negatively associated and especially so for radical / cultural feminists, and in supplements effects for components are negatively signed (most of them also significant) with continuous measure of feminism.
In the study 5, they focus on their hypotheses regarding warmth, threat, similarity, collective anger etc and meta-perception; and the meta-analysis study 6 reports only meta-analytic results for composite outcome.
Measuring feelings of "warmth toward men" seems weird considering they have an explicit "like/dislike" questions. Maybe it is the language barrier but I couldn't even answer.
Kudos for the authors including the detailed results in the supplements, nevertheless.
Regarding 19: I haven't really consumed news for about 5 years. I have tried a few times to write about why in a way that would make sense to my friends, but my attempts weren't great. Thanks to this post, I've listened to the podcast and read the book mentioned in it which has spurred me on to finish a thing and post it.
I initially agreed with your point that if hte time is otherwise spent on Reddit/Tiktok that you're probably better off with news. Now I'm not so sure regarding reddit, probably still true regarding Tiktok. The reasoning comes from the book "Stop Reading the News" regarding the way your brain changes when you're accustomed to short form things. Sam I would guess (without much data) that you are fine reading longer things and really getting into a topic, so possibly you're not experiencing attention reduction downsides. The book differentiates between news journalism and investigative and explanatory journalism and is specific about news being the problem.
If you dig into the study on feminist attitudes towards men it's not very convincing. Conclusion is plausible (but plausibly false too) but the study just doesn't add much.
I bet I could produce a similar result showing most racists don't dislike black people -- they'd say they don't dislike them just have accurate beliefs about .... No one thinks of themselves as being motivated by dislike even when they are. This is only made worse by fact that being a feminist usually means objecting to gender based stereotypes and you're basically asking: hey are you really just being biased against men. (they did find, unsurprisingly, correlation w/ threat from men
Not to mention that age may confound the issue (eg if younger ppl are both less disdainful of men and more likely to feminist identify).
Ohh and the benevolence question is somehow listed as asking about men taking risks.
I would bet that you *couldn't* do this with people who identify are racist as identified by some clear and objective measure. I think it's extremely likely that if you asked 'how warm/favourable do you feel towards [race] in general?' there would be a meaningful difference in the mean response between the racist and the non-racist group.
That seems correct on warmth. I meant on liking but I agree warmth would go the other way.
But given that feminism has a core component of not making gender based stereotypes plus awareness of this stereotype createa pressure not to give a low warmth answer too.
Given that the two implosions involved Sams, extra caution is advised for you next November.
The animal cruelty index seems... unhelpful to me.
The "best" countries are countries like India, Nigeria, Kenya. They rate well simply because they are poor, consume little meat, and don't do a lot of animal farming (relative to population of course). Their laws and cultural attitudes are all worse than average. Because they do well on 2/3 dimensions (produce, consume, attitudes), they score well. It seem unreasonable to score countries as considerate of animals simply because they are poor.
The other category of country that does pretty well is Austria, Sweden, Switzerland (and Germany, to a slightly lesser extent). They score well because they do have excellent standards in their own animal farming, and strong cultural and legal consideration for animals. But they import and consume lots of high-cruelty animal products. Again, they score well on 2/3 dimensions. But again this seems a bit unfair. These countries are contributing to quite a lot of animal cruelty- their "consume" rating is average or worse.
Are there any countries you think do particularly well on all metrics? Seems like consumption levels and welfare levels are likely to be correlated for reasons you mention so every country is going to do badly on one metric or another. The report/index suggests that India's high score isn't simply because they're poor but largely because of religious restrictions on eating beef, which sounds likely to be true.
I think my main comment would be that trying to combine the three ratings is silly (and it makes no sense to make the sum the headline figure). Individually, they're probably OK.
It's perhaps worth thinking about whether the "consume" rating could be fairly adjusted to reflect wealth, also.
Interesting one on India. Yes, generally they don't eat beef. But beef is, at least according to most authorities, the "best" meat you can eat from a cruelty point of view (it's pretty terrible for greenhouse gas impact obviously), partly because cows really are treated rather better than most farmed animals in general, but also simply because cows are big, so you get a lot of food out of one individual. So I'd actually expect not eating beef to make India look bad. And it doesn't look bad, at least not very. So it's quite possible the ratings really are capturing something surprising and postive about India. But of course it is relatively poor as well.
The link to the Bordieu piece didn’t get attached in the post: https://open.substack.com/pub/dynomight/p/bourdieu?r=50n3&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Thanks, fixed.
I wrote something criticising Goff’s position about the multiverse committing the inverse gambler’s fallacy. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-multiverse-and-inverse-gamblers
Hadn’t seen, thanks
With respects to 2. didn't Natália Coelho Mendonça, debunk this and the various other things relating to the contamination theory. Wasn't the lesson that SMTM couldn't be trusted, I haven't followed the issue closely so it's possible something could have happened in the previous months that I missed.
Always a pleasure reading this!
Thanks for reading!
5 is good. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.
Does anyone know the name of the genre of AI art in 5? I've been struggling to Google it for lack of terms. Are the methods of prompting required secret?
Good question, I’d like to know too.
Some of the claims in the feminist study appear not so straightforward as presented in the abstract. To make the claim "misandry is a myth" (and not merely that perceptions of misandry are larger than measured in their surveys) they focus on the composite explicit attitudes score, which is a sum of several different kinds of questions (including "warmth" they also highlight, but also liking/trust and emotional reactions). If one looks at the results on "liking/trust", they seem kinda support a possible alternative angle of "feminists tend to like men less than non-feminists, radical feminists super dislike men, though results are noisy".
In study one, in the main text the authors highlight how the feminist and non-feminist hold no statistically significant differences in "warmth toward men"; the significant difference in "liking and trust of men" is left unmentioned in supplemental table S2. In study 2, "liking" is still a negative (differences in dislike and trust not observable). Only in study 3 the effect sign is positive, though it is also the smallest study. In the main results to study 4, they note that the composite association is negatively associated and especially so for radical / cultural feminists, and in supplements effects for components are negatively signed (most of them also significant) with continuous measure of feminism.
In the study 5, they focus on their hypotheses regarding warmth, threat, similarity, collective anger etc and meta-perception; and the meta-analysis study 6 reports only meta-analytic results for composite outcome.
Measuring feelings of "warmth toward men" seems weird considering they have an explicit "like/dislike" questions. Maybe it is the language barrier but I couldn't even answer.
Kudos for the authors including the detailed results in the supplements, nevertheless.
Regarding 19: I haven't really consumed news for about 5 years. I have tried a few times to write about why in a way that would make sense to my friends, but my attempts weren't great. Thanks to this post, I've listened to the podcast and read the book mentioned in it which has spurred me on to finish a thing and post it.
I initially agreed with your point that if hte time is otherwise spent on Reddit/Tiktok that you're probably better off with news. Now I'm not so sure regarding reddit, probably still true regarding Tiktok. The reasoning comes from the book "Stop Reading the News" regarding the way your brain changes when you're accustomed to short form things. Sam I would guess (without much data) that you are fine reading longer things and really getting into a topic, so possibly you're not experiencing attention reduction downsides. The book differentiates between news journalism and investigative and explanatory journalism and is specific about news being the problem.
What I wrote: https://fourofalltrades.substack.com/p/news-is-entertainment
If you dig into the study on feminist attitudes towards men it's not very convincing. Conclusion is plausible (but plausibly false too) but the study just doesn't add much.
I bet I could produce a similar result showing most racists don't dislike black people -- they'd say they don't dislike them just have accurate beliefs about .... No one thinks of themselves as being motivated by dislike even when they are. This is only made worse by fact that being a feminist usually means objecting to gender based stereotypes and you're basically asking: hey are you really just being biased against men. (they did find, unsurprisingly, correlation w/ threat from men
Not to mention that age may confound the issue (eg if younger ppl are both less disdainful of men and more likely to feminist identify).
Ohh and the benevolence question is somehow listed as asking about men taking risks.
I would bet that you *couldn't* do this with people who identify are racist as identified by some clear and objective measure. I think it's extremely likely that if you asked 'how warm/favourable do you feel towards [race] in general?' there would be a meaningful difference in the mean response between the racist and the non-racist group.
That seems correct on warmth. I meant on liking but I agree warmth would go the other way.
But given that feminism has a core component of not making gender based stereotypes plus awareness of this stereotype createa pressure not to give a low warmth answer too.