Manipulation, fragility, and being wrong ‘cause feminism
Sunday Shorts (25W4): 20250126
It was a fairly productive week, given the right amount of pain and pleasure 😂. I also had lots of thoughts, many to do with dating (explained in “Things I did”)… I will perhaps write about more serious topics in the future. Perhaps.
Things I’ve consumed
Um, I guess welcome back? And oh, hello Elon. This is why I love the modern Internet.
I found a new AI eval benchmark (lol).
Speaking of AI, since I am in a very male-dominated and rationality-led field, I often don’t know about the average female intuitive experience, so I watched this very hands-wavy video about intuition from the POV of I think a random representative young, female girl on the Internet.
I undertook a transaction with my friend (podcast4podcast 🙄) and listened to an episode of After the Orgy. By the way, that same friend sent me this study published in the International Urogynecology Journal. Anyway, the podcast talked about modern dating culture from the perspective of women and feminism. They talked about how it’s taboo for a woman to say she’s becoming attached after sleeping with a man even though she’s biologically wired to do so, how it’s unfashionable to want a relationship or to be attached at all. They thought we’re a generation of emotionally stunted people who have no model of romance, where women whose needs for love have been pathologized become “crazy” because they were conditioned by f*ckbois (some of whom were at the “bottom of the barrel”) who rejected them. And much more. I’m surprised to say this, but wow, that really hit.
Around 43:05 on the How I Built This podcast about Resy, the founder Ben Leventhal claims that “one of the superpowers of entrepreneurs is you can convince yourself of anything”. I can attest this is true. Unrelatedly, Ben also mentions that people did not like variable pricing at restaurants. I’ve noticed that people have such personal relationships with money. Money makes things quite weird in many situations, like within friendships. As in, I’d willingly help a friend with their side project for free, but if they offer to pay me for an occasional thing, I kinda wouldn’t want to help. The problem also extends to dining, which I’ve come to realize is apparently seen as an intimate act, given the percentage of heterosexual men I’ve queried who refuse to dine one-on-one with stranger men except when there’s a career advancement angle.
Speaking of career advancement, I read this article on the life lessons from the first half-century of this guy’s career which came at an opportune moment1. On advice, I read this letter on finding purpose from a 22-year-old Hunter S. Thompson in 1958. I suppose people lived shorter lives back in the day, and I wondered if they matured faster then, or if we somehow still mature at the same pace today and the average society back then was simply much more immature.
Things I did
There are people who make my mind race – in a good way. I met with many such inspiring individuals this week, but we mainly discussed Eleven (not a dating app) and dating. Hence, the many thoughts this week on the topic of dating, as these Sunday Shorts often contain a synthesis of my thought-provoking or controversial or confusing2 conversations with friends.
Despite what a friend recommended, I did *not* (and will not!) write a dating doc, because I don’t believe in spelling out every detail that I want, many of which could change in the future. It feels pointless to me, since I merely want to be seen, heard, and understood. Plus, I only have two criteria: (1) attractive to me and (2) [able to be] my best friend. Simpler said than done.
Speaking of change, Facebook notified me of this cringe post 15 years ago. Aha, middle school me… Hopefully I’ve evolved since puberty.3 😅
And to conclude on the topic of change, I reevaluated my philosophy of honesty based on conversations with many friends. I expect this to sound extremely unrelatable. In seventh grade, I made a promise to myself to always be truthful. I defined “truthful” as (1) only saying verifiably true statements, as in truth-y, and (2) important for the other party to know, as in no lies by omission. Obviously, nothing is black or white, so I can exercise some discretion to my self-imposed norm. One gray area was being “strategic”: maximizing the chances of getting what I wanted by saying the right things at the right time, telling anecdotes in which I was the flawless hero, or really doing anything for my benefit. I felt so guilty, since “strategic” sounded at best like a euphemism for and at worst like an excuse for being manipulative. It sounds ridiculous, but I became afraid of being “strategic”. So since middle school, I purposely placed myself in an unnecessarily inferior position in personal situations. When I want something from someone, I start the discussion at a time that is suboptimal for me and leave out information that would help my case. When telling anecdotes, I’m the villain in my own story. Sure, I am neither perfect nor a saint, so I am sometimes accidentally “manipulative”. But despite abiding by a strict moral code for myself to be convincing through rationality, I rarely received the benefit of the doubt when I required it most. I feel quite damaged by the few people who have repeatedly abused my openness and morality and vulnerability. And as a result, lately I've been so drained. So, I guess this week, I realized that being truthful is different from putting my worst foot forward.
On being fragile
I read a Paul Graham essay on being a noob, which can be summarized as “it feels unpleasant to do something new, but this is a good feeling”. I’ve previously mentioned that the moat of low status is commonplace advice amongst successful people. And it reminded me of this picture I saw this week on Twitter:
I am a proponent of lifelong learning, and my take is that most people learn new skills when they are young, but when they’re older, they forget the pain of the process, and society makes them feel inadequate for expected and natural mistakes or for being silly. How unfortunate.
What people get wrong about me due to feminism
Last week, I wrote about the recent anti-wokeness movement I’ve begun witnessing, and at the beginning of the year, I defined my personal4 definition of “woke”.
People sometimes get confused when I say “woke”, since I don’t see it as an inherently left-wing practice. I define “wokeness” by its practice: the policing of thought in order to adhere to a particular ideology.
In a display of “great minds think alike”, I discovered that Paul Graham also wrote about wokeness this month. He defines “wokeness” in a much more widely accepted way:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
I’m unsure how factually accurate his history of wokeness is, but it appears political correctness has seen better days now that there are only two genders in America.
Anyway, this got me thinking about the social conceptions of femininity versus masculinity through the lens of feminism. I should disclaim that I am not familiar with feminism or gender studies, so we’ll go with the definition from Google that more or less tells me that feminism is the belief that all people, regardless of gender, should have full social, personal, economic, and political equality.
I’ve been told that feminism androgynizes both genders. But whether gender is binary, a spectrum, multidimensional, nonexistent, or something else, I am skeptical that total equality can exist at the poles of “female” versus “male”. Because due to current biological limitations, women are more fragile than men. Sure, nowadays there’s technology that can mitigate my intrinsic limitations, but as an example, no amount of steroids or training will make me stronger than my equivalent male counterpart. These differences are exactly what my guy friends get wrong about my femininity and my ambitions.
I’m not a man, so I don’t spend much time thinking about masculine ideals. However, I do have quite a few guy friends who’ve commented that once you turn into an adult, the world “treats you like sh*t”. All of a sudden, you experience the weight of societal expectations to perform – particularly professionally. I almost always forget that suicide is the leading cause of death among males below the age of 50, with higher incidences associated with unemployment. As much as I’d like to believe we exist in a society that’s evolved beyond our evolutionary histories, I still find it prevalent in heterosexual relationships that the man remains the primary breadwinner of the household.5
And as a woman, this gives me unexpected freedom. There’s that adage about how if you “find a job you love, you will never have to work a day in your life”. The statement paints an overly-romanticized view of careers, given the realities of practical or financial burdens. But I am grateful that without the societal pressure to be the main earner, I am afforded greater opportunities to do something I love.6
Social overfitting
Someone mentioned psychology studies this week. Obviously a fundamental problem with the reproducibility crisis of psychology is that studies deduce phenomena from small sample sizes or biased samples, among too many other experimental concerns. But I think a common failure mode is mistaking the predictability of a group for the predictability of an individual. That is, it’s generally much easier to describe the behavior of a group than it is to describe the behavior of an individual. A simple and incomplete example: the average height of women in Germany is 165 cm7, but you might be an outlier at 150 cm, even though most people are close to the average. On most social axes, I think there is enough variation in the population that what a person assumes about your actions tells you more about themselves than it does anything else. After all, your training data consists of limited experiences and your own thoughts, and it seems easy to overfit to individual quirks. Idk.
Random thoughts
There’s something quite motivating about writing each week’s Sunday Shorts when I see the week numbers listed out. It’s a good level of stress. For now. (It’s only Week 4 of 52.)
My parents were apparently very amused that the grass is green during London winters. They commented how when 薄熙来 (Bó Xīlái) was the Mayor of Dalian, he apparently imported European grass to the city so that the parks would stay green all year.
I generally encounter two preconceptions of PhD student schedules.
(1) PhD students can set their own schedules, meaning they have lots of free time.
(2) A PhD degree is very hard, so students are always busy.
As always, the answer is “it depends”. Unless you’re in an experimental discipline, PhD students basically set their own schedules. But just because you can whimsically be free at 3:27 pm on a Wednesday, doesn’t mean you have lots of free time. PhD degrees in STEM especially can in fact be quite difficult, and you’re always thinking about the problem you’re trying to solve. I get frustrated when society has trouble believing that two non-mutually-exclusive things can simultaneously be true, e.g. it is both bad to murder the CEO of a health insurance company and that the U.S. healthcare system is bad.For a society that values individualism, we really don’t respect unconventionality.
Thanks again to my best friend!
As in, an uncertain question with uncertain answers.
A meta point is that it’s also quite silly of me to highlight this pubescent, socially naïve post, but I suppose in the name of show not tell?
Ah yes, using words and phrases in the wrong context. My apologies. 😅
Obviously there are lots of confounding factors here, including the types of jobs chosen (men typically choose occupations that pay more) or age differences (men are typically older and more established in their careers) or physical practicalities (e.g. during late stages of pregnancy or maternity leave when women are especially fragile).
After all, I see the early stages of being an entrepreneur as a glorified housewife. I joke.