Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this actually true? This feels a bit like a post-facto generalization from specific situations. "I was a nerd and didn't go on dates. Being a nerd got me into software and now I make a lot of money. Therefore people who are on the path to high earning are not getting dates." My experience has been that a lot of the stereotypical jocks ended up in finance and are doing quite well and that software is no longer domi…
A lot of popular kids and jocks end up in management in tech while the loners and kids of immigrants are the ones actually creating the software.
The data are clear: The boys are not all right
941–950 of 1001 posts
Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right
#942Earlier quoted context omitted.
There have been more women than men in college in the US since the 80s. It varies from college to college and from subject to subject (e.g. STEM is much more male, MIT more male, humanities-focused colleges more female). A graph from a random internet search result: https://educationalpolicy.org/hello-world/
STEM is (barely) more female than male [0]. It only seems disproportionately male if you take the idea that 60%+ of people in a major should be female as a given, or if you pick very particular subfields in STEM and take them to represent all of STEM. [0] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/gender-gap-in-stem-women-are-...
Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right
#943I think a big part of the despair is the obvious difference between what children are taught is the american dream vs what the american reality is. We are told america is the best place on earth with all the doors open to you to be rich. That all other forms of government are flawed and we have excellence here everywhere you look. And then you look at reality and see something else. Sure there are pockets of excellen…
> We are told america is the best place on earth with all the doors open to you to be rich. That all other forms of government are flawed and we have excellence here everywhere you look. What other countries are great compared to America? With all its flaws America is the only country where you can dream of building spaceships, create multi billion dollar tech companies in less than a decade. Any ideology that forces…
--to be honest, the vast majority of people just don't care, because it is completely detached from any experience they have, and is in fact kind of obnoxious to them. To them, your evidence is a category error.
How do countries treat their poor->lower middle class, is more salient for a judge of societal excellence, for them. Is a country interested in raising the ceiling or the floor? America has always been focused on raising the ceiling.
Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right
#944Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case anyone doesn't know: > If you are in the Bay Area, you are at a distinct disadvantage. The male-female-ratio This is just true in the entire USA under age 35. If you're a man - you have a distinct disadvantage. More men (107:100) are born than women. This evens out around age 40 because men killed themselves at a much higher rate than women have. (Think about that - women kill themselves too but 7% of men hav…
Practically speaking, you're going feel the gender ratio of your geographical region/metropolitan area. Sure, men will be at a ratio disadvantage more often than not in the US, but there are definitely zones where the ratio is inverted. I spent half my 20s in NYC and half in SF and the wow was the difference glaring.
Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right
#945Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
>This is laughably wrong (I literally bursted our laughing). Tell it to the crusaders, to all the people who took part in pogroms for centuries all over the place, to the ethnic nationalists who are in power or close to post right now in Europe. Tell it to the refugees dying on boats in the Mediterranean as well... Modern western countries with christian historical traditions do indeed welcome people from different e…
Together with the idea that certain human rights are fundamental and inalienable, secularism has allowed quite a lot of states (not just Western ones) to progress, at least nominally, to a more inclusive and moral view of humanity.
GP mentioned that Christian (presumably secular majority Christian) states have an obsession with equality and are extraordinarily welcoming to other cultures. This is patently false. I provided a series of examples, both historical and current.
> What the crusaders and christians did centuries ago in the west is absurd as a criticism of TODAY'S western states
I addressed the claim that Christian (so not modern secular) states are extremely tolerant etc. For that historical examples are pertinent. Christianity, like all major religions, can be leveraged for good or bad, for tolerance or exclusion, for peace or war.
> Pointing to boats in the Mediterranean is a case of finding the worst, extreme examples when they don't even closely represent the whole
Tens of thousands of people have died in the Mediterranean in the past years, often with the complicity of EU or other national authorities [2] [3] [4]. Hardly isolated incidents.
> Take even a brief look at demographic information from nearly any western european state or any of the anglo/saxon countries in the world
Immigration, in reality, mostly has to do with the economic needs of the host country, not so much with their unimaginably charitable desire to allow everybody in.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_state
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_migrant_vessel_inciden...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/18/e...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/world/europe/frontex-migr...
Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right
#946>>Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. I wonder how much of this is because more women are joining the workforce. If men are leaving the workforce by their own free will because their wife is working and they are staying home with the kids, both of these facts could be true, but seems like a win in both gender equality ter…
Do many married men really want that kind of life though? It's one thing to be single and roaming the world carefree. But my observation has been that most men who are married, especially if with children, have some innate desire to provide for the family and not being able to do so (due to unemployment, underemployment, etc.) causes them stress even if the wife is earning more than enough. Those that don't seem to b…
Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right
#947Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the only country where you can dream of building spaceships, create multi billion dollar tech companies in less than a decade And all you need is hard work, persistence, and a couple tens of millions burning a hole in your back pocket... and a legion of people, like you, who don't have that kind of capital to do the heavy lifting.
What percent of top tech companies were funded by multiple millions in personal or family money? We're on YC's website, which invests $500k in startups ($125k until just recently). I thought most startups were venture funded.
Varies a lot but all the people I know who are relatively young and doing startups come from pretty wealthy families.
Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right
#948Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that 'cultural legacy' is completely different from 'organized religion'. Celebrating 'Christmas' as a family get-together is completely different from celebrating the arrival of the messiah and deriving your complete moral compass from that.
I think cultural legacy is more deeply intertwined with morals than people appreciate. It’s just hard to see it because you’re surrounded by it. It’s easier to notice when you compare between countries and across religious traditions. My dad was raised very religious (Muslim) in Bangladesh. His grandfather was an imam. He is non-religious and I grew up non-religious, but I joined a Christian church after I got marrie…
Even after the Reform, Christianity encouraged tight family groups, the wife's subservience to her husband, and similarly children's subservience to their father.
Equality only exists in Christian texts, it is not part of any common practice.
If you want to look for a historical source about modern ideas of equality between people that inspired the Enlightenment movement, then that source are the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee), whose society didn't have the same type of rigid hierarchies that all European societies at the time had.
Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right
#949Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Consider, for example, the obsession in Christian countries with equality. They almost fall over themselves to welcome people from different ethnic backgrounds. I suspect this has something to do with Christianity’s origins as a Jewish religion adopted by the Gentiles My experiences are almost the complete opposite to yours, I suspect there are major differences between congregations that can't be applied to the na…
Without trying to detract from your experience, I would suggest that your experience as a Black person in Bangladesh, India, or China would have been a whole lot worse. Heck, even though most Muslims aren’t Arab, it’s pretty darn clear that the Arabs think that is south Asians are second class citizens in the Muslim world. And unlike white southerners they’re not passive aggressive about it.
Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right
#950> Many boys are thus often growing up raised by single mothers, the share more than doubling between 1980 and 2019, from 18 percent to 40 percent. The study he sites at https://www.statista.com/statistics/276025/us-percentage-of-... is titled "Percentage of births to unmarried women in the United States from 1980 to 2019" I think it's quite dishonest to present this data as "2/5 men are raised without a father." I si…
I think they misinterpreted the statictics which they linked. According to a https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/single-parent-day.ht... it is 23%, assuming that the share between boys and girls is the same, which is still a lot but not 40%.
Further, some of those 23% are bound to be temporary situations. My initial gut reaction to your link just says "whenever this census was conducted 23% of minors had only one adult in the house."
Not trying to downplay the issue of single motherhood, but the statistics available just seem fuzzy.