Very interesting. This exact phenomenon was discussed at an introduction to feminism class I took 10 years ago. The professor explained how society generally is tolerant and positive to women engaging in traditionally male activities, such as playing football and ice-hockey. On the other hand, men engaging in traditionally "female" activities (e.g. ballet) are often frowned upon. Further, they discussed how certain activities (such as teaching) lost prestige and value in society when they shifted from being male-dominated to being female-dominated.
Interesting to see similar biases appearing in LLMs. I think the use of LLMs as a means to understand attitudes in society is underexplored.
In my country you need a degree to be a teacher, in the old days, having a degree wasn't part of a normal person's lifecycle. It was prestigious. Now it's not much more impressive than a drivers license.
I will preface this by saying I think people should do whatever it is they want to do, physical limitations willing.
My (possibly contentious) question: Is this an OK thing to do?
Why are we allowing a vast minority of people to rewrite our social norms? I went to the Barbie film as a man nearing middle-aged and had the most young girls, mothers, teenage girls, and women in general I've ever seen in an audience at the cinema.
Is that a bad thing? Why can't girls and women enjoy the "stereotype" of Barbie? As long as we're giving them the option to do whatever they want and they're not forced to enjoy Barbie.
I don't know why we have to pretend that gender bias doesn't exist or try to "correct" for it. To me that is extremely condescending to girls and women who chose/want to live in a stereotypically feminine way.
I think there is a lot of evidence that using terms like "cis men" is the more poisonous attitude in the current day.
GNC folks are not the norm. The clue is in the name. It's all well and good to let people choose things for themselves but young people need guidance, not a divisive and inaccurate model of the world pushed on them.
It's really telling that you used the normative framing rather than talking about how common it is. I get it. We're abnormal, atypical freaks. Aberrations. Being redheaded is uncommon; being trans is abomination.
You're free to choose your words and framing as you wish. But don't pretend teaching people about sexuality, gender identity, and how society sorts humans into two boxes is the real division and inaccuracy.
The main problem with terms like "cis men" is it's based on the idea there are two categories of men: male men and female men.
The latter are, in fact, women who call themselves men. I don't see why the rest of us should be compelled to think of them as men. It's really toxic, as this implies that men need to behave in a certain way, present in a certain way, think in a certain way to be considered men. And that if a woman does that too, then she's a man.
I'm not accepting this sexist nonsense. There's nothing wrong with challenging and rejecting gender roles imposed upon us and it doesn't make any man less of a man or not a man for doing so. Same for women.
Plus I would argue that gender non-comformity actually is the norm. Hardly anyone is a walking gender stereotype, right? We all have differences from these imposed cultural ideals of, depending on your sex, men or women. Best guidance is be yourself and don't pay any heed to people trying to enforce gender roles.
> as this implies that men need to behave in a certain way, present in a certain way, think in a certain way to be considered men.
This gets brought up sometimes in terf talking points, but as a practical reality, it's nonsense. Every queer community I've interacted with has always been great about accepting gender non-conformity. The separation of "passing" from gender identity is an important part of recognizing that gender expression within a society is a social construct for good and for ill, and that a large part of gender presentation is play-acting in the way that society expects a man/woman to act.
"My gender is not how I act/present, it's what I am" is a common refrain in queer communities, as is the idea that you don't have to pass to be a gender, as is the idea that gender identity persists even when someone is in the closet.
In contrast, "we can always tell" is the 'gender-critical' talking point. To be very clear: it is not transgender people harassing butch lesbians for using women's bathrooms. It is the terfs doing that crap.
They phrase it as "my gender isn't whether or not I like pink" but in practice terf ideology usually ends up descending into biological essentialism and an omnipresent suspicion over whether or not women are "feminine" enough. In this very comment section, take a look at who is arguing that biological differences are sufficient to explain demographic differences and gender biases within LLMs. Hint: it's not the trans community :)
These men's internal gender identity is masculine. That's why they are calling themselves men.
This comment is actually kind of a really good example of what I was explaining up above. It's a very terf kind of thing to look at a comment saying "gender is complicated and individual and doesn't fit into a box and transgender communities understand that" and to immediately say, "gender does fit into a box, it's whether or not you have a penis, and if you don't have one then you're just 'pretending' to be a man."
And then to somehow claim that reducing and denigrating the experience of both manhood and womenhood to pure biology in this way is somehow "feminist."
The entire terf experience is looking at transgender people who are engaging with gender identity and gender expression in thoughtful, sophisticated, multi-faceted ways and saying, "haha, they're men, look they have an adams apple." Because there's nothing more feminist than critiquing people's bodies, apparently. /s
And it really just gets across why the "transgender people are the real sexists" argument is so ridiculous in the context of how these interactions play out in the real world. One group (the trans community) affirms your gender no matter how you express it, and the other group (the terf community) constantly demands to see what's in your pants and yells at anyone who looks masculine while wearing a dress. It's kind of obvious which group is reinforcing toxic gender norms.
> These men's internal gender identity is masculine. That's why they are calling themselves men.
Well then, that goes straight to the heart of my point. Men don't have to be masculine. And women don't have to be feminine. All you've done is swap "men must be masculine" for "anyone masculine is a man".
A woman calling herself a man because she feels she has masculine qualities is exactly the sort of sexist rubbish we should be challenging and rejecting. Just like men feeling that they're not "real men" because they don't conform to cultural stereotypes of masculinity. It's regressive, restrictive and ridiculous.
> constantly demands to see what's in your pants
What? This has nothing at all to do with what I'm saying. Have I demanded anyone open their underwear for inspection? No, of course not. Sorry but your prepackaged rants about "terfs" are irrelevant.
> All you've done is swap "men must be masculine" for "anyone masculine is a man".
No, very literally the opposite of that. I'm saying if someone calls themselves a man, I believe them. I don't care if they wear dresses or slacks, I don't care if they're muscular, I care what they tell me their identity is, because it's not my job to decide other people's gender. I'm not the gender police.
This is what's great about queer communities and why they tend to be so accepting of non-gender-conforming expressions. Because their criteria for gender isn't what your chromosomes are, or how you dress, or how you act, or what your presentation is, or what stereotypes you fit into -- their criteria is asking you your gender.
And it turns out that's a really supportive environment to be in if you're a man or a woman or any other gender identity and you aren't in total alignment with social expectations of that gender. It turns out that having people ask what your gender is and just saying "okay" regardless of how you present - is pretty great and goes a long way towards removing the pressure to present in a specific way or live up to social expectations for that gender.
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> A woman calling herself a man because she feels she has masculine qualities is exactly the sort of sexist rubbish we should be challenging and rejecting.
I love the gall of repeatedly misgendering trans people against their wishes, and then acting like you're defending their gender expression by doing that. If a man calls himself a man, just hecking believe them. You deciding for someone else what their gender is is not feminism, it's sexist prescriptivism. You looking at someone who tells you they're a man and saying, "well, you just feel that way because etc etc..." is not you breaking out of gender norms, it is you putting people into a box based on your personal criteria for what makes a man or a woman. It is you denying them agency to identify outside of that box.
That's not progressive, you're not helping them. You're imposing your social criteria for gender onto them, very openly against their wishes -- it is a denial of their agency. But oh of course, they don't know what they want, right? They're just confused, right? You can't trust them to know what their gender identity is, you have to treat them like children and talk about how they're being pressured into whatever decisions they're making. /s
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> What? This has nothing at all to do with what I'm saying. Have I demanded anyone open their underwear for inspection?
I'm curious, when you say that a "woman" calls themselves a "man" -- what criteria are you using to decide for them what their gender is? I mean, you're saying they're wrong. You're saying they're not men, so you must have some kind of test or standard that you're using to determine for them what their gender is, since you're so confident that they're wrong about themselves.
Is that test perhaps... what their chromosomes are? What genitalia they were born with? What's in their pants?
You can say you don't care what's in their pants, but you obviously do or else you wouldn't be misgendering them. You have a test you're using for whether they're a man or a woman, a test that they're not measuring up to, and I can pretty confidently guess that test is biological.
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Look, in the interest of being charitable here and trying to build bridges, I want to at least take the chance that you're saying all of this because you genuinely just don't understand how transgender identity works. Earlier, you said:
> this implies that men need to behave in a certain way, present in a certain way, think in a certain way to be considered men. And that if a woman does that too, then she's a man.
If transgender identities worked that way, it would be toxic and sexist. Calling someone a woman because they act in a certain way or wear dresses, or calling someone a man because they like football -- all of that would be extremely sexist.
To be very, very clear, transgender communities don't do that.
Transgender communities do not impose gender on anyone, your gender expression and presentation are not your gender identity. If you are a transgender man and you are still in the closet, and you act in a traditionally feminine way to everyone around you, transgender communities will... ask you what you want them to refer to you as.
There is no imposition here or expectation that you act in a stereotypical way. Trans theory rejects the notion that other people get to decide for you what your gender is -- regardless of what you wear, how you act, or how you think. If you're saying all of this because you legitimately believed that transgender people were going around saying, "sorry, but you wear a dress, that makes you a woman", the really good news is that nobody does that. You can be a man and wear a dress and act "feminine" however society defines "feminine", and you can still use he/him pronouns and you will be welcome in trans communities as a man. Trans communities are extremely supportive of this, this is not a group of people running around saying "if you act too feminine then you're a girl now, sorry we're just deciding that for you."
The only people who are deciding for you whether you're a man or a woman based on their own criteria -- are terfs and gender-critical movements.
How can you consolidate the facts that "man" and "woman" mean absolutely nothing, they don't describe how you act, express or present, but at the same time you can feel like a "man"(which doesn't feel any certain way) and demand to be called a "man" fully knowing that this does not mean anything? What is anyone going to do with that knowledge? Where does the need to be a certain gender arise when there's no meaning to it? Why not remove gender?
As a biological "man" i don't feel like a "man" or "woman". I simply am what i am. My language has no word for "gender" even. I don't understand what it means to feel a certain gender.
Doesn't the need to feel like a "man" imply that the person has an internal image of what a proper "man" is? Isn't that image based on the stereotypical presentation of a biological "man"?
You make it sound like the entire purpose of the trans movement is controlling what terms other people use for you. So gender is literally just a word, a combination of letters, nothing else. Why use the terms "man" and "woman"? Why not "sdia" and "sdp[asd", seeing as all these terms are the same? There's no qualities or requirements attached to them.
> You make it sound like the entire purpose of the trans movement is controlling what terms other people use for you.
It's not the entire purpose. That's part of it, the rest is about enabling abusive men to insert themselves into any place that women and girls have separate from men and boys. They won't accept that women have the right to say no. These men have a rapist mindset and the trans movement is their shield and sword.
Case in point of what I was talking about above, femoid's comment is what you're going to run into if you interact with terf spaces, and it regularly spills out to attacks on cisgender people as well. It's not uncommon for terfs to harass and attack cisgender women under the assumption that they think they might be trans (I am not joking with that, do some research into how bathroom bills have affected the harassment of butch women).
And so whenever anyone says that transgender groups are reinforcing gender norms I kind of have to shake my head, because it's difficult to find a group more obsessed with the idea of stereotypical gender norms than the supposedly "gender critical" crowd. And unsurprisingly, that leads to a lot of reinforcement of toxic gender stereotypes; both in the idea of men as an intrinsically, biologically distrustworthy group, and in the practical reality that they are constantly looking at other women and thinking, "is this person a spy, is this person a man in disguise, is this person feminine enough that I can trust them."
And it's just so omnipresent. The above is a comment by someone who looked at a thread about whether or not transgender communities reinforce gender norms, where both sides are reasonably trying to be compassionate, and they could have tried to present a picture of terfs as anything other than what I described them as above, they could have tried to dispute my characterization of gender critical communities -- but they just couldn't help themselves, they couldn't stop themselves from jumping into the conversation and claiming out of nowhere that transgender people all have "a rapist mindset."
So yeah, if you're gender non-conforming, or you don't like gender stereotypes, or you're pushing away from a socially defined set of rules for gender, unsurprisingly, the communities that accept you as you are are all going to be healthier for your development than the communities that are constantly one "she looks too muscular" take away from calling you a rapist.
And it's helpful that whenever I try to explain this to people and they seem doubtful, a terf will literally register a new account just to jump in and prove my point for me <3
> How can you consolidate the facts that "man" and "woman" mean absolutely nothing, they don't describe how you act, express or present, but at the same time you can feel like a "man"
We could have a long conversation about this, but the actual useful short answer here is, I don't. I don't call it. Anything.
Because it's not my job to decide for you your gender.
I want to keep on circling back to this point. You are still trying to come up with the rules about who is and isn't a man; what the criteria is that they have to meet. I reject those rules. If, as you are saying, gender impacts nothing and you have no concept of it, then there is no reason not to treat transgender people with respect, to gender them correctly.
If you're arguing that the word "man" and "woman" means nothing, then why are you out here saying that someone is mistakenly calling themselves a man or a woman? (note that if you are arguing that the words man and woman mean genitals or chromosomes and everything else must extend from there, I am going to call that out as biological essentialism, literally hundreds if not thousands of years of feminism exist that talk about the problems with that kind of reduction of male and female experience).
I do have theories about what gender is and how it works and what its limitations as a concept are. They might be right, they might be wrong. But what I really reject is the sexist notion that it is my job to determine for everyone else the limitations and rules of gender, pronouns, presentation, and especially identity.
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> My language has no word for "gender" even. I don't understand what it means to feel a certain gender.
And I want to keep hammering this point -- then why are you misgendering people? You have no concept of gender... but you're calling men women against their wishes.
I reject the notion that gender needs to be a prescriptive, socially-assigned identity. Not because I don't have my own opinions, but because I reject the sexist notion that this is my decision to make for other people.
I think that wrapped up in the need to understand why a transgender man or a transgender woman knows they are a man or a woman, is this instinct that has been hammered into all of us by society that people have to prove their gender to you. But they don't. It can be really interesting to talk about the why, and if you go into trans spaces where people feel really safe, they do talk about the why.
But the "why" is academic. The practical side is, "I don't have to prove to you that I am who I am. You are not in charge of my identity."
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> You make it sound like the entire purpose of the trans movement is controlling what terms other people use for you
To expand on the above, the entire point of the trans movement is social and legal rights. The point of the trans movement is equality for trans people.
Trans people themselves are not a movement, they're simply people who exist who have a gender identity (like many cis people who also have a gender identity and will also be very offended if you misgender them). The transgender movement is a response to oppression of transgender people, that's all that it is. It is not a demand that you think about gender in a certain way, it is a demand that groups like the GOP stop trying to oppress transgender people, drive them out of public society, and remove their bodily and social autonomy.
It is a small thing, but people respecting you enough to use the gender that you identify as when they refer to you is, I think, a pretty straightforward ask. People act like this is really weird, but try misgendering cisgender people for a day and see how mad they get. In this comment section you're seeing people get mad about the term cisgender. So let's not act like the transgender community has all of the fragile people here.
Again, this respect boils down to: do you feel like you're in charge of everyone's gender? Do you feel like their identity is your decision to make? Do you feel like their pronouns, their appearance, how they go through social spaces is your decision based on your criteria, or do you respect their understanding of their own identity?
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> So gender is literally just a word, a combination of letters, nothing else. Why use the terms "man" and "woman"? Why not "sdia" and "sdp[asd", seeing as all these terms are the same? There's no qualities or requirements attached to them.
Right here you're kind of close to vocalizing something very important. I would not say that gender means nothing, but I would say that (I personally believe) it is a social construct. And the question I ask is: if gender doesn't ultimately physically mean anything, if it is a set of categories that are socially defined, then why not play with it? What natural law or moral code is being violated by playing in that space, changing it up, exploring it, bending it, even rejecting it? The space is a social construct, we can do with it what we want.
And so there are transgender people who identify as agender and who are totally neutral on the concept. Some who are nonbinary. We have transgender people who are nongender who reject the notion of gender entirely (and not in the weak 'gender-critical' way where terfs are still very much embracing gender, just tying it harder to biology).
There are transgender people who go by "it". There are transgender people who use meta-pronouns. There are gender-fluid people.
And you might think that's silly, but it does have a really cool effect: if you're a self-conscious girl or boy who feels weird about gender norms and feels like society is constantly telling you that you need to act a certain way because you do or don't have a penis -- suddenly there's this community that could not give a darn about that. They aren't going to tell you that you have to act a certain way to be a man, they aren't going to tell you that you can't wear a dress, they aren't even going to tell you that you have to call yourself a man or a woman.
The cool thing about stripping away both the social rules and all of the "no, you don't understand yourself, you're just confused, let us tell you what you are" talk -- the cool thing is that when you strip that away, what you're left with is authentic, unburdened, honest expression. The kind of authenticity that doesn't require you to constantly prove your identity or perform for other people. You end up with a community that just... accepts you.
And I think that's a wildly positive thing if we're actually trying to push past gender stereotypes and to question the toxic patriarchal norms that society drills into our heads day after day about what manhood and womanhood mean. Maybe you think that agender people are silly. Or if you don't have an internal concept of gender, maybe it's the opposite and you think that agender or nongender people are the only non-silly ones! But it doesn't matter where you fall on that, these spaces are really positive grounds for people to question gender and to question their relationship with gender. Not only do I not see the harm, I see the benefits.
And then I look over at the gender-critical and the terf side and I see... bathroom bills, and people snorting about how they can "always tell", and book bannings, and denial of bodily agency even for transgender adults, and concern-trolling about fertility, and all of this toxic stuff that is so weirdly common in terf circles -- all bundled up into this general prescriptivism around manhood and womanhood that is so clearly not helping people or moving forward any kind of serious conversation about how a social construct impacts our lives and how we should react to it.
It doesn't mean anything to say that you're rejecting gender if you don't have the actions to back it up -- but the transgender community actually has the actions to back it up.
Specifically I am talking about the inaccurate model that there is no sex differences and the idea of male and female genders are socially constructed.
This is somewhat begging the question. It assumes that:
A) this is a unified model for how queer people talk about gender.
B) the term "cisgender" does anything at all to advance it. And
C) that it causes harm.
without providing any evidence for any of those claims.
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It also assumes:
D) that the multiple ideas being bundled up here are entirely incorrect, or that they are some kind of new idea.
Male and female genders are socially constructed, at the very least in presentation -- and that's not a new idea, it's an entirely uncontroversial understanding of gender that's been around for ages. Just as one example, pink used to be a manly color. Social stereotypes of women as innocent or highly sexual and wild also vary between cultures and time periods.
This has been a theory of gender for a long time, it's not a new idea. And it has nothing to do with sexual biological differences beyond expressing the (again, entirely uncontroversial and generally accepted) idea that not all social customs and attitudes are 100% biologically based.
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And you might have criticism of that model, just like you might have criticisms of gender essentialism. There is not uniformity on how to view gender even within queer communities. There is no singular model to debunk. Everyone (queer or not) has their own model of gender.
And that's the final problem to bring up, that you're also assuming:
E) that the statement "I'm not cisgender, I'm normal" doesn't have harmful effects, or that it doesn't push people towards a competing model of gender with its own flaws and inaccuracies that could be interrogated in the exact same way as other gender/sex models.
It's really pathetic that repeatedly this community cannot discuss gender without a handful of people protesting that trans people don't exist or that there's some cabal to damage children.
> Why are we allowing a vast minority of people to rewrite our social norms?
Any group has a small cluster of leaders that has control (often tiny, like generals in an army). They aren't necessarily in line with the opinions of the group (I'd speculate generals are probably more willing than the troops to send people to their deaths).
It is expected that a small minority of people will write the social norms. The only real question is which minority, and there is a constant scuffle between different minorities to be the ones with power. The ones presently with power think the situation is fine, and the ones without power think that changes is urgent!
One interesting thing to do is use a model directly like Llama and then query the next-token probability logits for "he" and "she" (assuming you set up the sentence in such a way).
For example:
"A doctor was examining the patient when ___"
What this makes apparent is that increasing model temperature will select the less stereotypical option more often.
IMO this is getting at a deeper truth that the use of a gender in language, and historically defaulting to "he", was not about creating a bias, but instead it was a pattern which maximises information density and minimises useless information. Randomising the gender as is done today packs useless information into it.
Which one is more respectful is a different question. The lowest entropy option would still be the most likely gender specific pronoun. This would depend on the language, of course.
> IMO this is getting at a deeper truth that the use of a gender in language, and historically defaulting to "he", was not about creating a bias, but instead it was a pattern which maximises information density and minimises useless information. Randomising the gender as is done today packs useless information into it.
Where can I read more about this "truth"? Where is this assertion coming from that gendered pronouns developed to minimize useless information? It seems far more plausible to me that pervasive defaulting to male experiences caused many (certainly not all) human languages to (1) develop gendered pronouns and (2) default to the male pronoun.
Unsurprisingly it's showing what's going . It's usually encouraged when female takes masculine roles but not same other way around if male want to take more of a caregiver role, because men are seen as sole bread earner.
In society females can be much more vocal about what they think and want but suffer little to no consequence.
Also there are huge efforts being made to move females into male spaces they are actively encouraged, but there are rarely anyone who is doing the same for young men or giving them male related advice.
> This phenomenon likely reflects that while initiatives to integrate women in traditionally masculine roles have gained momentum, the reverse movement remains relatively under developed.
Not really surprising IMHO.
Yes, there has been a huge focus on accepting women in the workplace and no, there has not really been a push accepting men as primary caregivers in the family.
This likely uncovers underlying motives for the feminist movements such as increasing the size of economies - the traditional feminine roles does not generate revenue, so why accept men into them?
It also fits into the larger societal trend of horribly underserving Zoomer and Alpha (maybe young Millennials too) young boys and men.
I've heard someone put it very succinctly: people like Andrew Tate are asking the right questions, but giving abominable answers.
I can drop some very simple statistics: women have been getting more bachelors degrees since the 80s. Most university gender ratios are 40/60 trending towards 30/70 [correction: 35/65]. And in the 20s-30s age bracket women have been outearning men. Yet all you see in high school is pushes for more women to attend university, posters, massive amounts of female-only scholarships. Or in terms of wage, constant talk of closing the gender wage gap for women. Etc. etc.
Its being talked about as an issue more and more, but it took more than 40 years for it being okay to speak of.
I am forever unsympathetic to feminism so long as it's about forcing the pendulum to the other end.
As someone who sincerely believes in gender equality, any argument (other than something stemming from unchangable facts of biology) that involves "men" or "women" specifically is hogwash. No, it should be for man as in mankind. Everyone deserves to be treated fairly and equally.
I have been discussing this topic many times, in various contexts.
Some argue that some groups are oppressed, and require "help", or "boost". Without it they will not be able to break through. It is true, that some groups were wrongly marginalized. It is also true that some groups do have not integrated well into workforce because of their life decisions. Not everybody has to be CEO of company. It is impossible to make everyone equal. As someone from past-soviet country I know well who wants to make everyone equal.
This topic often returns with actions of corporations, which try to fight inequalities. Corporations do not have morality, but they do have an image, and they want to have a good image. They need to have statistics that show that they are moral. They need equality programs. They need hiring quotas. All just to "appear" moral. It is all about perceived morality. PR.
It is also a difficult discussion that requires a lot knowledge, and requires knowledge about many nuances. People like to shoot comments as bullets, but often these are not their own ideas, but ideas of political parties they align to.
We may force, or bribe more women into work force. We may force, or bribe more marginalized social groups. I wonder how longer it will required, and what will happen if we stopped at some point.
It is also a question about equality and equity, and while the latter is often discussed as more fair, for me it is also a PR engineering. It is all about reaching the right stats to not be attacked by leftist mob, that you do not have the right amount of X group. If you decided to treat equally people, you would not be able to integrate marginalized groups. So that is also a little bit disappointing.
There is no easy answer in that. There need to be social programs to help people, but they should not harm our society. People need to be able to compete, and to do that you need environment based on abilities, not on gender, or skin color.
Equity, sometimes understood as total equality is a totalitarian nightmare. Not saying I don't favor a society where the bar for participation is lowered for all members of society. It should usually be a discussion in society itself, nobody can force any solidarity anyway.
For me these secondary discussions around fairness only showed me political parties as well as companies that probably should not be trusted. I do forgive populism in political campaigns, but the opportunism I saw here hints to something quite ugly.
In software I am thinking of a few companies here, mostly larger ones. They are very vocal about gender or racism issues and I believe it simply is a 100% hit rate to detect a very authoritarian leadership style. Most devs probably go there for the money, but it describes the opposite to a relaxed working environment and instead subjects to to some artificial and dogmatic way of thinking. Less of that please.
And you never will seem tolerant of minority opinions if you cannot even restrain yourself from trying to police language. The equation will never resolve itself sensibly.
I'd say we should strive for equal opportunity, not equal outcome. But a long as equal outcome is the goal, it is insanity that a 65/35 ratio is considered a societal emergency that billions of dollars have to be poured into to fix, but a 35/65 ratio is totally fine.
I do trend libertarian so I'd say, spend another few billions to correct the overcorrection of the past decades, so everyone is on the same starting line in the rat race. Then outlaw any gender discrimination in either direction. Remove regulations for equal distribution in boardrooms or politics or whatever. Let people choose what they want, even if you end up with skewed ratios. And if research shows that after a decade, women or men are disadvantaged, apply small corrective action so that opportunity remains the same.
That reminds me of the argument that feminism is for equality. Hell no, it isn't. Otherwise they'd advocate for mens issues as well, rather than taking any mens advocacy as being inherently misogynistic.
The problem is that a lot of the time, at least online, any ground you give to men's issues is almost immediately overtaken by bad faith misogyny with the original, meaningful discourse drowning in it :/
It could be argued that because the ability to discuss mens issues openly is only in few places, because in other places such discussions are almost immediately overtaken by talk about womens issues, often by accusing the original discussion of being misogynistic, it leads to a certain hostility towards discussing womens issues.
I have personally witnessed it multiple times when a discussion about mens issues was turned into a talk about womens issues via that very method. So I get why people turn hostile towards discussing womens issues at all, but I also get how that can come across as misogynistic.
Its a thinly veiled social powergrab .. and not very different to what came before it. There is always a parade, there is always a priest caste, there is always original sin and martyrs. The ideas claim to be different, but the outcome stays the very same. If you see the world in social contracts, all attempts to fix it become a religion. And this synthetic religion violates the Separation between church and state.
I’m interested what you saw here that I clearly missed when I read it. Were you keying into something with the contemporary effort to replace a lot of language with gender neutral terms?
Yes. "Man" and "mankind" are already low key deprecated terms, because they reinforce a very strong historical bias towards male being the "default" sex. In this worldview, society is made of men, and women are accessories. Modern language prefers more egalitarian terms like "humans" and "humanity". The parent was arguing for "egalitarianism" in favor of so-called "reverse sexism" - a point of view I am very sympathetic with - but went out of their way to avoid contemporary sexually neutral terminology in favor of outdated and overtly sexist terminology. Pushback against the overwhelming backlog of casual male-dominating sexism that they deliberately exemplified is the entire reason for the "pushing the pendulum the other way" that they attack. Hence their point was immediately undermined.
Given the overtness of the rhetorical maneuver and the response of the poster, I have to believe it was intentional and possibly bait.
Interestingly, the bias happened in the opposite direction from the one you're assuming.
We used to have the neutral "man" and masculine "wer-man" and feminine "wo-man". We still see that "wer-" prefix in the word "werewolf".
So it's not that we took the masculine word and started using it as the default, but rather that we took the neutral word and added an assumed masculinity. In that context I see less of an issue with trying to reclaim the neutral-ness of "man" and "mankind".
"late Middle English humaine, from Old French humain(e), from Latin humanus, from homo ‘man, human being’. The present spelling became usual in the 18th century; compare with humane."
and for man:
"Old English man(n), (plural) menn (noun), mannian (verb), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch man, German Mann, and Sanskrit manu ‘mankind’."
Interestingly enough, Manu was "the progenitor of mankind" and in Persian (which shares roots with Sanscrit) after Islam the equivalent "progenitor" Adam [aa-dam] is also commonly used to intend 'mankind'.
You know, that's an interesting question. "Newspeak" in 1984 describes two phenomena welded together: that language influences thought (Sapir-Worf), and that government has levers to influence language (which in the book look quite parochial compared to the modern information age). This casts language itself as a political battleground. Supposing we accept this perspective. Then surely it is imperative that we examine the language that we use very critically? Should we not fear the hidden mind-traps in Oldspeak as much as Newspeak? Might we already be unknowing slaves to some politically expedient worldview?
>In this worldview, society is made of men, and women are accessories.
>Pushback against the overwhelming backlog of casual male-dominating sexism that they deliberately exemplified is the entire reason for the "pushing the pendulum the other way" that they attack. Hence their point was immediately undermined.
The actual bigots are the ones crying bigot.
Also, what the sincere fuck. Please get your head out of the toilet bowl and get some fresh air.
> constant talk of closing the gender wage gap for women.
Which is mostly an artifact of bad statistics. As it is the average over all working men and women. Where men disproportionally take on dangerous but high paid jobs.
In addition to this, men value top line salary more than women relative to other benefits like PTO, medical, commute, etc. So in many cases men are actually taking worse jobs but get counted as increasing the wage gap.
I remember hearing over a decade ago that when correcting for that by comparing similar jobs, the gap actually flips - women out-earn men by a very small percent (like somewhere around 2-5%).
> I've heard someone put it very succinctly: people like Andrew Tate are asking the right questions, but giving abominable answers.
People like Andrew Tate are the only ones talking to men in those generations at all. As you said, we've left men behind in schooling which is a bad start in life. After that, we have a lot of programmes for women, both educational ("girls who code", etc.) to business things (women-owned businesses can get 3k eur to help them start in my country, many business-women awards, etc.), to healthcare (especially mental), economic (especially pensions, where up until recently men had to work more years and get lower pensions at same paychecks in my country... this has been fixed a bit recently, but men still live less on average but have to work the same years and get the same pensions even though they'll get them for less time). Also hollywood, where they replaced a lot of the traditional men roles with women (from superheroes to "fun nerds") while making men more and more incompetent (and that's not a new thing, just look at an average sitcom, especially from the 80s).... well, and lets not forget who has to die in wars, if the want to, or not.
So yeah... after all that, there are a few people who actually talk to those men (be it Tate, Milo, or whoever), and give them men-oriented advice (good, or bad), that doesn't revolve around women. ... no shit the kids will like the only fw people who talk to them.
Women often eventually discover they want children and are on a tight timeline. Men do too, but they are not on the timeline. They can start families at virtually any time in their life.
By biasing work income towards men it gives women a larger selection of men to choose from to start families with while they are fertile. It also incents them to move sooner rather than work their own career longer to achieve their lifestyle goals, which conflicts with their fertility timeline.
It's sad seeing my older female friends reaching the end of their fertility and realizing they don't want to live lives without children and families, but being at a disadvantage in the relationship market because the men they consider to be at their level are seeking younger women.
"Woke-ism" is looking more and more like the inversion of reality. It is the denial of fundamental realities in the service of highly questionable ideals.
In fact the ideals of "woke-ism" are so questionable that it only survives because they aren't allowed to be questioned.
They are questioned (often in bad faith) in almost literally every thread in here. Also reddit is full of this.
Being woke means being aware of prejudice, etc. What ideals are questionable to you and can you provide an overview as to why?
Also, please don't consider this an attack on you specifically, but I'm tired of seeing "I want to say something but I will only insinuate very vaguely and mention how this topic is censored". You can find real discussion of pretty much every social issue on here, nobody will "cancel" you.
Devil is in the details. Your source is about top universities, which are highly competitive. Any process that is highly competitive will trend male, which counterbiases for universities in general trending female for decades.
> Since 1980, the female-to-male ratio in two-year college enrollment continued to increase until it hit about 1.4 in 1995, stabilizing at that point. The relative female-to-male ratio in four-year college enrollment, however, increased steadily throughout this time period, reaching 1.3 in the fall of 2019.
> In Fall 2020, female students made up 58.6% of all postsecondary enrollment.
If you look at the EU, its generally 45/55 to 40/60. But it gets iffy because within the EU, countries' their student populations are quite different. For example, the East Bloc has an outsized ratio of female STEM students because this was very normal in the Soviet Union. This is in large part because scientist wasn't seen as a prestigious job, just like computer scientist was an administrative job in the US in the 60s. That's a different conversation though..
Asia I don't know enough about to speak to with enough accuracy. Especially with how countries there are also very different from each other (say Japan/Korea/Singapore vs China vs Thailand/Vietnam vs Indonesia)
In hindsight, "trending 35/65" would have been a more accurate statement. Thanks for checking me, I've added a correction to the OP :)
If you accept a couple of other facts its even worse.
Presuming you accept iq or related tests of cognitive ability as useful, (even if not capturing the entirety of human qualities) and you accept that males have higher variance in cognitive abilities, more around the extremes of low and high cognitive abilities, whereas women on average fall closer to the mean, then if higher education was based on ability you would expect to see more men in higher education.
This is if course, verboten speak. I think as a society we have a lot to unpack.
If you accept those priors, men would be over-represented when attending college was rare and would become less dominant (and eventually a minority) when attending college became vastly more common.
In the end, it was not mainly about empowering women, it was about doubling the worker pool.
And with all the money you now as a couple earn, you can pay someone else to care for and raise your children.
Then, we are all surprised that the bonds in the family aren't strong anymore, boys grow up without a father figure, and everybody feels they need to go to a therapist because they have nobody in the family and amongst friends they can trust.
I don't want to believe this but it actually almost is, we earn probably more than any generation before us but with inflation, lifestyle creep and social media we also need to keep up with our peers to go to the flashiest places and have the craziest experiences and buy all the cool things we are just on a grind were meanwhile we outsource things like taking care of our children and relatives like our old parents. Wow hits very close to home.
> In the end, it was not mainly about empowering women, it was about doubling the worker pool.
This is a cynical take. I'm unhappy with the situation we ended up with, but the primary factor was to give women a choice, not to force them to sit home by default and only pursue what they love if they put enormous effort to it.
I'd go as far as to say the failure of single-income household was unintended effect of several good changes that people fought for over decades. And I believe you're wrong about the lack of father figure because in the traditional model he was ever more absent as today - Cat's in the Cradle is 50 years old now.
I don't get the impression that's the underlying motivation of feminism.
Also, I see a degree of annoyance from women regarding how little men are able to take part in caregiving, as the current status quo is an expectation for women to simultaneously perform that role while also having a career — if I imagine myself in their shoes, the idea of going from one unpaid full-time role to two full time roles where only one gets paid, is perhaps a contributing factor as to why developed nations have smaller families or no families.
Lots of women resent modern feminism to some degree for this very reason. (I am a woman, and have many close female friends who discuss this).
Each and every one of us has never had an option not to have a Big Career. At a minimum, we've always had to fend for ourselves financially, and even in solid long term relationships/marriages with successful men, our income is both needed and expected.
Meanwhile, the caregiving / household maintenance expectations placed on your average Western woman haven't changed, she just has to do them on top of her day job now.
There's a lot of lecturing from "trad" guys online who think everyone should have stay at home wives and lots of kids, but even women who want this type of partnership often can't find men who are willing and able to actually financially support such an arrangement. Every woman I know has spent her whole 20s and 30s seeking wholesome, long term relationships with men who want marriage and kids, at least in an equal and respectful two income home, but they are pretty hard to find. If we can't find a guy in time or we get unlucky (bad breakup/divorce), we're blamed for being "too career oriented" to procreate. No one asks why so few men are serious about marrying us, though. I don't know any women who actually chose their career over having kids, but I do know plenty who figured, 'well, if I have to fend for myself while I look for a guy, I may as well do my best to take care of myself financially.'
I know it's hard for men too. But I don't think men realize the heavy implications that the latest waves of feminism have had in terms of what's expected of the modern young woman. And something has broken between the sexes that seems to make it harder than ever to form stable, loving families.
It is interesting to read, and I can sympathize with the views.
I think you are right that men don't realize how big the impact of feminism is for women, but I also think it is reasonable as feminism traditionally is about women's rights and usually put men in a position of being the problem (as is also latent in this comment: why don't men clean more, why don't men marry these women).
I am completely baffled by the talk about mental load and the expectation that women should clean. I have lived on my own for years and is more than capable of taking care of my own home. I have also been in relationships, where the woman felt this burden. However, she was not able to articulate what needed change. In consequence I have to dismiss that entire element as there is no empirics in my view - only ideas.
Which is also in line with what some of my female friends report, at least in their experience: They report that there are some, relatively closed, communities on Instagram and other SoMe where these ideas are circulated and re-enforced without being qualified in this exact instance.
Cleaning isn't the issue, and I'm speaking for the women I know here but it generally is more about parenting load than household chores.
Feminism is also very difficult to characterize broadly: first and second wave feminism was much more about seeking equality (before the law, in eligibility for education/jobs, in terms of pay for the same work, the right to have a credit card, an equal right to initiate divorce, etc.)
Later waves of feminism do often view men differently and perhaps more antagonistically. I and most women I know don't identify with those. But it's easy to conflate the two and ascribe malicious intent to men toward women that isn't there.
I see, I have yet to become a father, but I have setup dedicated savings that will allow me some years of reduced to no work I plan to use should I become lucky enough to become a parent.
In Denmark the parental leave is made largely symmetrical across the parents. I think this change will alleviate what you describe, and I celebrate that.
I fully agree on you points on the development of feminism, and as a man, it calms me to hear your reports.
Political movements are made up of many constituencies, often with different motivations. Some constituencies within feminism are very enthusiastic about the economy-growing aspects of it.
The treasury loves that working women increase the tax yield of a population and corporates love bigger customer bases. Universities like having a greater demand for education.
None of these constituencies really have an interest in men taking up caregiving activities.
> I don't get the impression that's the underlying motivation of feminism.
What do you think it is? The initial movements were surely about equality and human rights. But this seems to have been achieved decades ago. In the UK, for example, women have had equal rights to vote for almost 100 years. And note that this only happened 10 years after men got rights to vote (prior to this only some men had these rights).
There's something else going on now. The push to get everyone to work more is clear and some people are benefitting from this. The rest of us our suffering. To afford a reasonable quality of life most couples have to both work, leaving no time for childcare, cooking, cleaning, and, god forbid, relaxing.
The people benefitting from this (a few men mostly, oligarchs, "billionaires") are laughing while the lower echelons battle it out amongst themselves. You've now got generations of women fighting against "patriarchy" when they should be joining men and fighting against oligarchy.
> The initial movements were surely about equality and human rights. But this seems to have been achieved decades ago.
To me it feels like passing laws is one goal; changing social perceptions is a more fulfilling but trickier goal. Studies consistently show, for example, that women continue to take on a larger proportion of household chores and admin, despite both being in full time work.
Compare it to racism, or homophobia. Are there laws to prevent discrimination and to specifically prosecute hateful acts against these groups? Yes. Do we still have progress to make to remove racism and homophobia from society? Also yes. It seems like a lot of people would agree with these in those cases but not in the case of feminism. I think that partly this comes down to a sense of "but I don't hate women, I just think they're better placed doing the housework and child-rearing".
Sure, I agree, society and law are not often in sync. Sometimes the law changes first, other times society changes first.
Going back to the voting rights, prior to ~1830 no women had the right to vote, but nor did more than 90% of men. By 1928 all men and all women had the right to vote. So in that 100 year period men went from <10% to 100% and women from 0 to 100%.
We all know about women's suffrage, but nobody seems to mention that it took men about 100 years to achieve it. For women it came almost in one fell swoop starting in 1918 and ending in 1928.
So the assumption is that in the past 100 years men must have achieved "true" equality, but somehow women have not. I say that's rubbish. I think the natural order of things - the order that gave us the pre-1830 laws - has prevailed despite the law. That is to say, a few men have a vastly disproportionate amount of power. Everything else is trivia happening amongst the lower classes.
I'm in general agreement. But that doesn't mean that we should stop talking about feminism. Women's issues continue to be relevant, for example 1 in 4 women has been raped or sexually abused compared to 1 in 20 men. Men's issues are also relevant, for example suicide is three times more common in men than in women in the UK. But neither has to be a distraction from class struggle.
1 in 4 women report having been raped or sexually assaulted compared to 1 in 20 men. I'm not saying it's not a bigger problem for more women, I'm sure it is (after all, there is an entire section of men that get off on making people, especially women, feel vulnerable). But it's easy to get carried away with a subset of a larger problem.
I feel like a lot of feminism nowadays is confused with real issues (like what you mentioned) and the fake "patriarchy" shit which is a distraction from problems unrelated to feminism, namely oligarchy.
No doubt there are some feminists that focus on trivial things, and who get a lot of negative air time especially on TV shows that like to send up progressive ideas.
That said I think patriarchal gender norms are still an issue. It doesn't mean that all women suffer more than all men. But there are social expectations stemming from gender roles where men are perceived as leaders and providers, and women are seen as carers and sex objects. And men and women both suffer as a result. I suspect sexual assault against women is so prevalent precisely because of those patriarchal gender norms. Men are often not guided in how to process difficult emotions, and are conditioned to see sexual conquest as something that makes them powerful. On top of which, pornography consistenly associates sex with a certain level of violence and male dominance. The result is such an explosive cocktail of messages that it's almost predictable that sexual assault and domestic violence is an outcome.
> It seems like a lot of people would agree with these in those cases but not in the case of feminism. I think that partly this comes down to a sense of "but I don't hate women, I just think they're better placed doing the housework and child-rearing".
I think it's a bit cynical take, (but what do I know, I'm from Scandinavia and I've rarely heard anyone say that anymore) behind why people have have some reluctance.
Most guys with reluctance towards that, from what I've compiled either comes down to two points:
1. Gender(women) is a significantly bigger proportion of society compared to a minority ethnic group, and you interact with this group way more heavily. Hence even marginal preferential treatment can have big noticeable effect on your surrounding.
2. Related to 1, but a sence of lack of reciprocal benefit from these policies. While policies and law changes have put more women in work, expectation (culture) on men haven't much changed. (we still see financially successful men as attractive) Equal share of housework and childrearing is high up in preferential personalities in partners among women, but what people feel attracted to have changed more slowly than the policies or realities.
It's easy for many to argue "well if they still judge me for my financial utility, why am I wrong for judging them for child rearing and housework utility? (so I can focus on my career)"
I think it's still about equality. Voting rights are obtained, as you say, but that is far from the only kind of equality. I occasionally see examples of people saying "women can't do X" for all kinds of X, from "wear trousers" to "why do you have a job instead of letting a man earn for you?" or "why did you bother with this degree, women can't code!"
> The people benefitting from this (a few men mostly, oligarchs, "billionaires") are laughing while the lower echelons battle it out amongst themselves. You've now got generations of women fighting against "patriarchy" when they should be joining men and fighting against oligarchy.
The benefits from the pain-point you're identifying there go to a much broader group: people like me, specifically "landlords".
My guess, even before accidentally falling into the "landlord" category thanks to Brexit making me leave the country and me not selling the apartment, is that the best way to fix that is for governments to take responsibility for nearly the majority of home construction, and to take that responsibility seriously.
> there has not really been a push accepting men as primary caregivers in the family
As a father of one year, I disagree with this. There's been steady progress towards giving men the opportunity to take on caregiving duties compared to a generation ago, for example:
* Plenty of US/UK companies now offer paternity leave of between 12 and 52 weeks.
* I know multiple recent fathers who've used their leave to be primary caregivers for blocks of 6 weeks.
* A surprising number of pubs/restaurants have baby-change tables in the men's toilets.
> the traditional feminine roles does not generate revenue, so why accept men into them?
There's still a struggle for men to take up places in traditionally "feminine" jobs such as midwifery and early childcare. I found a report on this here - https://ilostat.ilo.org/blog/where-women-work-female-dominat.... Some of the statistics are mindblowing - high 90's percentage points for women in midwifery positions. How much is that down to men's career preference vs difficulty of getting in or peer pressure towards more "manly" careers?
I feel it would be OK in the sense that my friends and family would accept and support me if that's what I chose to do in my life at this moment. It's definitely socially acceptable in my circles.
A classic example of this is the way parental leave is addressed in many countries.
The fact that, in many countries, women have much greater rights in terms of paid parental leave, means it's economically logical for employers to discriminate against them, plus women miss out dis proportionally on time building career.
The obvious way to solve this is to have equal parental leave rights - this then entirely removes the cost imbalance to the employer.[1]
However in many countries you don't see major campaigns for true equality - often you see campaigns to increase the inequality ( improve womens rights, but not mens ).
This is clearly driven by the worry about the cost of equalising the rights by giving men significant paid parental leave.
[1] Obviously there are biological differences - but if you widen the window during which parental leave can be taken to beyond just after birth, then both parents can participate equally - and there are working models in some Scandinavian countries.
I feel that parental leave is a strawman argument used in lieu of true issues. That is - I’ve heard radical feminists use it as a way of showing that they care about mens’ rights, while ignoring education/father/violence issues.
It's not really about 'mens rights' it's about whether you are interested in true quality above economic output. Sure you could paint the lack of engagement in true equality in this area as a sign of one-sided gender based campaigning - but I think the original poster is saying that what's really driving a lot of this are bigger economic factors - increasing the output by getting women into the workforce etc, while pretending it's about equality.
So for example, there was a big push for equal pay in the BBC in the UK ( quite right ) - however what tended to happened in practice was the higher paid men getting the push as oppose to bringing up female salaries to match.
This is because salaries for 'talent' are negotiated by agents based on perceived rarity - if it becomes more acceptable for women to be a presenter then you have doubled supply.
And in general people the lower end of pay is based on what they need to survive - so in a societal model where only one person in a family was working, then you needed to pay them X - if both are working you can afford to halve the salary without the workers not being able to live.
It takes a while for these effects to filter through as employers are loathed to generally out and out cut existing wages - but increased supply of labour will surely impact salaries over the long term.
Note none of the above is a reason to not pursue equality - it's just you have to have your eyes open to the bigger picture in terms of who's hands does the benefit of the increased economic output end up in....
What’s interesting to me is that (if I understand correctly) they’re using GPT as a source of information to make this claim. Usually you see conclusions like these being drawn from some sort of sociological study. But here they’re just talking to GPT and using its answers to determine things about the real world.
Not disputing the claims. But talking to GPT to get answers about the real world that have to do with value judgements is just weird. There’s a big difference between asking GPT to give you a recipe for a cake and asking GPT to help you understand the value the world places on different people.
The paper is about biases in GPT-4. They're not talking to GPT-4 to determine things about the real world. They're talking to GPT-4 to determine things about GPT-4.
> This phenomenon likely reflects that while initiatives to integrate women in traditionally masculine roles have gained momentum, the reverse movement remains relatively under developed.
Not challenging you. Maybe it’s just the phrasing. But that sentence to me reads as if they think the presence of the biases in GPT means that they exist in the real world. And again, not challenging that the biases do exist. Just noting the trend toward trusting GPT in increasingly subjective areas that have to do with moral judgement. To me it’s not too much different than drawing conclusions about the world from religious texts.
I read as suggesting that the underlying bias is contained in the text corpus that GPT-4 was trained on, which in turn suggests it was put there by the humans who authored the original corpus.
But GPT 'learns' from the world. GPT did not sit on the toilet and think about it out of the blue, GPT analyzed "the world" (well,... the written part on the internet) and came to these conclusions and biases.
> the traditional feminine roles does not generate revenue
This is not the whole story according to the divorce courts, with women often being awarded compensation for their contribution to their husband’s career, recognizing that they are a key enabling factor for the man - and why not? Men who don’t need to spend their time on childcare and household duties can dedicate that time to more work -> more pay.
That is a reasonable assessment. And there are two ways to counter that on a macro scale
1. Getting women in the same role as men - earning money.
2. Getting men in the same role as women - taking care of the family and enabling women.
Contemporary political discourse solely focuses on the first - and why wouldn't it? It doesn't seem right to setup a ministry to get men to work less (... In modern politics focused around economics).
Not really.. at least not over here in my small eu country.
There were talks about mandatory split in parental leave (the 'standard' is that the mother takes it all), and 'women' complained (politicians complained that women complained that this means that women will have to return to work earlier, complained about the bond with the kid, etc.)
"Revenue" in this sense strictly means increased profits for shareholders and increased tax revenue for the government. Not idiotic wastes of time, such as supporting a partner's career or raising children.
But, I don't think it's surprising. LLMs are trained in almost infinite volume of data. If that data has bias answers will have bias.
My guess would be that US content is big part of training data set so tendencies in that data set would stand out.
I am curious if the same bias is visible in other languages. E.g. if not using English, but French, or Chinese or Spanish. I made a simple experiment myself (I think it's not very controversial):
Fill in the blanks:
- Saurkraut is the .......... dish in the world
- Soured milk for dinner is .......... idea
- I .......... kefir
- I would .......... eat ham hock
- Pierogi? I .......... them
Responses:
- Sauerkraut is the sour dish in the world.
- Soured milk for dinner is a bad idea.
- I enjoy kefir.
- I would never eat ham hock.
- Pierogi? I love them.
This anectode tells me that it's 50% Slavic, and if, most likley female. Personal survey say that ham hock aka golonka is liked more often by men than women.
I always felt like this was an intentional additional filter that the data was ran through before giving the user the response. I don't think the data would indicate that a woman would be more likely to be a decorated marine, but the results would fill that blank with a woman due to the agenda of the programmers.
I've found this quite problematic in my language learning app.
For example, I have a sentence "Er überreicht ihm ein Geschenk" (He hands him a gift), then I ask GPT to create an image of that situation and it generates a girl giving a gift to a man. :(
Not really unhappy with corporate vanity killing their own AI products. They are in a position that they need to ensure their AI never does anything slightly controversial which makes sure their product will always be useless or at least severely impaired compared to more accessible alternatives.
The problem is the woke-nizer is implemented in a lazy way. It will make sure that all the characters are very "diverse", but ignore all other stereotypes. I'm collecting some of the fails here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/177vnF9aepBjB7qnU-It7.... It generated Hitler and "He is doing his work" sentence generated a muslim man planning a military attack.
Interesting but not surprising. The political bias is obvious and present in most GPT models made by Silicon Valley tech companies.
I'm guessing that over time the less castrated AI models will survive, after all I want the truest answer to my question - not the politically correct one.
In essence the bias in here - against men - is a lot like how the Google Gemini model was incapable of generating images of white families, but would happily to it for black ones.
> I understand you're looking for an image depicting happy families. However, I cannot create an image that focuses solely on "white" families.
> My purpose is to be helpful and inclusive. Focusing on one race exclusively can be interpreted as promoting bias and excluding the beautiful diversity of families worldwide.
> I hope these ideas help you visualize the image you are looking for:
> - Families of different races, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds.
> - Single-parent families, blended families, and multi-generational families.
Would anybody be surprised if the title was “Surprising gender biases in training data”? It’s not thinking, it’s reflecting. Fundamentally, if you want to remove the gender bias, you have to remove that part of humanity from it.
Look at us trying to build the perfect person. When we win we shall call it God.
its likely the result of explicit effort by OpenAI to counter steer the model in specific circumstances, not that the aggregate training data conveys those biases. The data is biased in the opposite direction.
What it shows is that this counter-steering only works in explicit cases and whatever OpenAI is doing isn't generalizing.
Looks to me like GPT is able to account for the predictable effects of testosterone in gender-based decision making.
I would be absolutely shocked if GPT came out with some kind of gender-based analysis that males and females are the same and moral choices around them make no consideration of their gender nature. GPT is based on a body of content sourced from reality. I'm not the least bit surprised that it took testosterone into account.
So are you. Your brain is just an lstodd simulator that it fine tuned initially to get food and positive attention as a baby and then the crucible of your adolescence.
What’s amazing is the way these human models can confabulate rationality when really it has no idea why it says things.
You do get free rein to generate tokens in your minds’ eye based on stimulus and memories which is a cool gimmick.
I personally don’t believe humans will ever achieve real general intelligence.
My first reaction to the misspelled sentence was to attribute it to men skewing more towards autism than women, and therefore being less tolerant of deviation from the rules in informal settings, and I would expect this to be reflected in the training data.
I think this is also a driving factor in the mansplaining problem. An autistic or para-autistic male impulse to correct things that don't actually matter to the woman in question.
> Phrases were designed to mimic the writing style of elementary school students, including typical spelling errors observed at that age (Quinn, 2020).
Well, the paper is from a university in Italy. The fact they're writing research papers in English is a benefit to English speakers everywhere, including us :)
In reality probably authors of
the papers understood that the OpenAI team artificially readjusted these biases through RLHF and that there is nothing to find there, except that it still works when the words are written with typos because no manual examples of “redressing biases” have been provided with such typos.
Playing around with chatgpt is now a reason to publish a paper?
These things have the sheen of scientism but would this be acceptable with any other commercial product?
It's decent journalism, but academic research?
Here's how I'd expect it to look: A survey of languages that treat gender differently, how that affects the presumptive gender norms, and how to extricate gender models from some family of languages to demonstrate the validity of the findings along with a proposal of how to train models with a gender intentionality as opposed to gender becoming an unmanaged artifact of a corpus (like race or offensive language sometimes become).
Linguistically, gender expresses itself in a variety of ways.
I believe in Hebrew and Arabic, for instance, the gender of the author can be inferred. In Russian, the first-person past-tense (I was) is gendered.
How does the various surfacings of gender affect the presumptions?
Also some languages, I believe Thai and Vietnamese, have social hierarchies built into them. It'd be interesting to see if whatever is proposed can be generalized or if it's not possible, why not?
The common sickness of our society. It's bizarre and it has to stop. Who in their right mind can consider all this trivialization of the fundamental concepts of a healthy society something that must be built based on the agenda of actors whose true intentions no one knows?
Yes, I will accept all the downvotes but I know for sure many more will agree with me.
I suppose if people actually want to change this [completely unsurprising] gender bias, then we'll have the go the way of the eerily accurate "Demolition Man" and start subconsciously training men to become seamstresses.
I feel like this is just what happens when you average out a large amount of the internet and train a system to pick the next word, and is not an issue inherent to LLMs. If you trained one exclusively on horrible, sexist data, you'd get a system that chooses horrible sexist words. If it was perfectly equal, it would pick gender norms essentially at random. Seeing as reddit was a source for a sizable proportion of GPT training data, and there are some parts of reddit that are less than savoury, it's understandable that in some situations, it can choose less than savoury results
There is a very good chance ( I imagine ) that these biases are put in place explicitly because unrestrained internet scraping and paper reading produces *wildly* sexist and awful material. See: what happened to Microsoft's old chatbot when let loose on Twitter.
It looks more like the refinement of the model contained views prominent in Silicon Valley that skewed the model to be anti-male/pro-female -- such as the examples relating to abuse. All abuse is bad regardless of gender, so the model should have treated them the equally.
Interesting to see similar biases appearing in LLMs. I think the use of LLMs as a means to understand attitudes in society is underexplored.