The temptation to say "short course, was it?" is almost overwhelming, but I presume that would be rather missing the point. Actually what the hell, presumably three other fellers have made the same joke while I was typing this in.
You can spend an awful lot of time discussing the implications of "How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?"
And an even longer time discussing the implications of "How many feminists does it take to screw in a student union toilet?"
The lab work is what's really timeconsuming on that one.
In answer to the original question, the imbalance can be chalked up to the male tendency to want to say something just for the sake of fucking making a noise, whether or not there is anything worth expressing in their fucking heads (viz, 1, 3, and whatever number this one ends up being).
As I had to explain in a meeting when someone noted that I was fond of the sound of my own voice, you fuckers don't understand - it may be a rather nasal and slightly effeminate Northern whine to you lot, but inside my head it is Richard Burton, slowly singing Kindertotenlieder.
Haaaa.
Pretty much all the incessant punners I've ever met have been male. My best friend does this compulsively. About 15% are funny, and the rest either something you smile politely at or smile politely at while shaking your head. He knows this, and I laugh because I love him (although I'm starting to think that this positive feedback has not always been helpful to his first date skills).
I don't usually go in for verbal trickery (trickery, I say!), if only because it's not usually what I find funny. Some threads here have been delightful, but for the most part, I like to imagine funny scenarios. That's what I do in my head. I mean, I still like to think about that douchey Vows column couple who ditched their first SOs for each other doing a little douche end zone dance, because I imagine them as this couple when I do. I don't know why, but stuff like that makes me giggle more than wordplay.
And that is why I don't make more jokes. Sorry, heebs.
Making the same point from the other end, I think women tend to be socialized to avoid derailing someone else's conversational goals, and cracking jokes will do that. I'm as prone to gazing lovingly at myself in the mirror as anyone, and I sound like Tallulah Bankhead with Dorothy Parker as her gag-writer. Nonetheless, if I make a wisecrack in real life, after the laughter dies down (or the puzzled stares fade), I'll often end up restating the last thing the last speaker said because I don't want to have pulled the conversation away from whatever point they were trying to make.
I'll often end up restating the last thing the last speaker said because I don't want to have pulled the conversation away from whatever point they were trying to make
how on earth are you going to establish social dominance over someone else that way? And compete for mates. On the veldt.
Christopher Hitchens: Why Women Aren't Funny
I think it's really just two people here who write about 10 puns an hour.
Some jokes derail, and in person I also find myself doing LB's restate the last point thing. But other times, there is a pithy, funny way of making the point you're trying to make that's extra-effective.
how on earth are you going to establish social dominance over someone else that way
Very, very slowly. It's like tunneling out of the Chateau D'If with a butterknife.
It does tend to be men who tell the better jokes, at least among people I know, but that doesn't mean the funniest people I know are mostly men, because jokes aren't the sine qua non of funny.
And puns can fuck off.
As I taught a class this weekend, I was feeling very pleased with myself when an attractive young woman giggled at every witty comment I made.
Then, I realized that I wasnt really that witty and she was probably just high.
I'll tell you what's funny: YOU GUYS! And I know from funny!
I bet Chris Hitchens can't even tell what's really funny.
18: Chris Hitchens has Ogged's mom, asshole.
I like making jokes, and I don't really care about derailing conversations (here or in real life). But I only like to make FUNNY jokes, so this is probably what separates me from the rest of these clowns.
Chris Hitchen's has Ogged's mom's asshole?
I think we cannot definitely say that men writes more funny things than women do or vice versa. IT depends on the situation. We all are born the same. We have the capacity to laugh, joke, cry, get angry and be sad. Therefore, men and women can do things at the same level.
23 is surprisingly on-topic spam.
I may have way too much love for the pretend-to-misunderstand style joke, especially when it accuses the other person of being racist/sexist/violating all sorts of societal conventions.
24: That's got to be human -- some poor sap spamming manually.
I sort of feel like there's too much that's serious and really important going on in the world right now for me to just be making jokes on the internet.
28: So I'm writing them on bathroom walls, like the Founding Fathers did. FREEDOM!
I spent the first 15 years of my life carefully developing a reputation as the mildest, most inoffensive and good-natured person you could possibly know. Which built up a huge reserve of goodwill that I was later able to leverage into hilariously offensive jokes. I could be a complete asshole, and it was just funny, because everyone knew I wasn't really an asshole.
But it turns out that doesn't work as well when you venture beyond an immediate circle of longstanding friendships. To some people, if you're functionally indistinguishable from an asshole, you actually are an asshole. Now, a better person might just call those people humorless and move on, but it eventually started bothering me that I was genuinely upsetting a lot of people. So now I'm not funny at all. And then I found $5.
OT: What percentage of law professors quoted in the the media are complete morons? It has to be above 50%, right?
Let me tell you all this fantastic joke I came up with recently.
Your mom is like a well seasoned cast-iron wok: neither should be exposed to powerful detergents.
Your mom is like a non-drive side pedal: if she weren't reverse-threaded she'd eventually work loose by precession.
Your mother is like the BBB-rated tranche of Carina RMBS Finance Corp Series IV-3: she's got nothing except the tips of Las Vegas cocktail waitresses supporting her.
Comedy is not pretty.
If tragedy is about empathy, terror and pity, comedy is about inflicting pain, on others or oneself, or watching pain and finding pleasure there. The pain can be as small (or large) as the cognitive dissonance or offense to meaning in a mild pun, or as great in cruelty as a public burning.
We can kid ourselves that we laugh because Wile Coyote doesn't really die at the bottom of the cliff, but it is a lie.
Comedy is cruelty, the expression of despair, the opposite of hope and love. It always says, to the extent it is comedy, that it all doesn't matter.
36 isn't funny, and therefore proves itself wrong.
Here's another one for which I cannot take sole credit despite having expended a week's fevered thought on getting the form precisely right:
Jones: Did you hear about the explosion at the cheese factory?
Smith: No, what happened?
Jones: Several workers were killed and more were seriously injured.
39 in the context of the thread, following 36, is very funny.
40: True!
38: I hoped it might have that effect on someone.
If tragedy is about empathy, terror and pity, comedy is about inflicting pain, on others or oneself, or watching pain and finding pleasure there
I spent the weekend chuckling with my eighteen month old daughter at the Teletubbies. I was unaware at the time at the vast depths of existential horror which lurked behind her seemingly blameless blue eyes.
39:
Jones: Did you hear the one about the sausage factory?
Smith: Is that where there was the terrible accident and people died?
Jones: No, that was the cheese factory.
There actually are several puns in 39, but I have elected, for theoretical purposes to be explored later in a post at my personal blog, not stated them.
43 is supposed to be funny but I have seen the Teletubbies and I can tell you it is plainly naive. That baby in the sky mocks us all.
I tried stand-up a couple of times late last year to no particularly instructive results. My wife told her sister who said "That's going to be hard. He's not angry enough."
I think the joke in 39 is at the thread's expense, at those expecting an easy joke.
The comedy of the Colosseum is inexplicable except as generated by carelessness, and thus explains all comedy.
Most comedy, like watching starving Chaplin eating his shoe, is relatively harmless, and a cruelty that makes us stronger and more resilient. Harder times in the past perhaps needed a more intense exercise of indifference.
Perhaps women care too much, or are socialized against many forms of public cruelty.
"that's my argument", said Milligan, "black boots don't show the dirt, brown boots don't show the dust, and a good pair of green boots won't show the grass".
"But what about when you were wearing white boots?", said Murphy
"Well, they didn't show my feet"
o! misere!
(in all seriousness folks, I used to believe in the pain/aggression theory of comedy. But then I had kids, and babies, who have no concept of other people as able to feel pain, giggle all the time. It's just a surprise reaction).
42:There are other kinds and sources of laughter than comedy, like joy or wonder. It is a different laughter, if you listen. It is not what comedy is about.
I watched a billion women stand-up comedians on YouTube last week, while "working". They were funny almost exactly in proportion to the extent they radiated hostility.
Orange you glad I didn't say Bio-Dome? HA HA HA HA HA!
But I only like to make FUNNY jokes
Lazy and self-limiting.
Speaking of which, I've been working on the lyrics to "Welcome Home Planetarium" and "Aeschylus (Movement of Jah People)" for like a year now and I'm getting nowhere.
I find it very funny that people so deny their inner sadists while playing their parts in this theatre of cruelty. A little deviltry won't stain the soul. I think.
Nothing that is human is foreign to me.
49: I think it's a "I don't know what to do with this" reaction. That applies to absurd things, new things, unexpected things, painful things, and profound existential despair. Etc. I guess what you choose to focus on is up to you.
54: Perhaps "a sense of proportion"?
Nothing foreign is human to me.
I think it also goes along with a willingness to put yourself on display publically. My wife is incredibly funny. She make a smaller number of jokes/goofs than I do but they are hillarious to amusing to awkward in roughly the same proportion. However, she tends to do this just around me or a handful of friends who match up with our sensibility, whereas I am more likely to make the joke even if the audience isn't exactly the best one for it. So, OK, it also goes back to the thing of being willing to risk making people feel uncomfortable for the sake of the joke.
My experience has been that people who don't like joking around experience it as a form of hostility, when it's really a form of play hostility. Since hostility is funny.
59 was me, but man, I'm going to have to finish drinking this coffee before judging myself competent to edit my own comments.
60:Smile when you say that, pardner.
59 is true of a number of couples I know. Jokey husband, funny wife.
39: Critchley has a whole bunch of these sort of doubly-betrayed expectations jokes in his humo(u)r book.
Q: What's worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm?
A: The holocaust.
Q: What's so sad about 4 (insert ethnic description here) guys in a convertible driving off a cliff?
A: They were my friends.
Anecdata 1: I'm funnier in real life than online.
Anecdata 2: The two funniest I've ever known are women, and I've known a lot of goddamn funny people in my life.
Q.E.D.
And the bartender says, ever since he swallowed that cue ball, he always checks them for size first! HA HA HA HA HA!
Come on, guys. I know I'm funny. Mom says so.
Most of the things people laugh at are not jokes.
It is easy to get people to laugh if you are high status, like a teacher, but not easy to get people to laugh if you are low status. I have been in situations where I have misread my status, told jokes and no one finds it funny.
Okay, that's it. I'm telling my mom that you're all a bunch of mean old meanies that made me cry. Moooooom! Moooooom! Unfogged is being mean to me again!
64 reminds me of Sarah Silverman's bit in The Aristocrats. Sort of.
69: It is easy to get people to laugh if you are high status, like a teacher, but not easy to get people to laugh if you are low status.
Class clowns the world over would be very surprised at this news. It is, however, easier to get people to pretend to find your jokes funny if you're high status. (They actually have to be funny if you're not.)
The two funniest I've ever known are women, and I've known a lot of goddamn funny people in my life.
So the third funniest person you know is a man, right honey?
Funny and affectionate, largely by playing off a tradition of stylized open aggression.
39: Critchley has a whole bunch of these sort of doubly-betrayed expectations jokes in his humo(u)r book.
Well, the thing about 39 is that, although nothing in the joke as recounted would let you know this, the reason that the employees who were killed or wounded were killed or wounded is that they were crushed by de brie, and the whole thing could only happen because the safety inspector wasn't very gouda her job. But I prefer to let these things go unstated. If Longfellow wrote of "the elder days of art" when "builders wrought with greatest care / each minute and unseen part", I look to an art in which builders work with greatest care only the unseen parts. Compare this earlier thought.
74: And you are mighty funny-looking.
Speaking of which, I've been working on the lyrics to "Welcome Home Planetarium" and "Aeschylus (Movement of Jah People)" for like a year now and I'm getting nowhere.
Maybe try photoshopping your face onto the lyric sheet?
And maybe I should try putting my pseud into the box thingy when I comment.
I should try putting my pseud into the box thingy when I comment
I suspect you'll find that live-blogging it tends to ruin intercourse.
Back to the original post, anyone else see the article in the NYT this morning: Women don't contribute to Wikipedia? It seems like something that's plausibly connected to not telling jokes.
84: Because Wikipedia is really funny.
53:
Out in space there is no air
Can not breathe when I'm out there
Fat guy walks in with a cane
Black overcoat, there is no rain
He thinks he's cool, plays D&D
Wears a hat and sits to pee
Mountain dew, it makes him swell
Pre-diabetic, can't you tell
Lights go down, brownies go in
Watch out damnit, room will spin
Laser light show, I see it well
Fat guy's so baked he casts a spell
Planetarium, I can see
Planetarium, that's strong weed
Planetarium
86 is very good but I wonder how many of the Unfoggetariat know the original song.
It's Metallica's reenvisioning of "Goodnight, Moon", right?
Back to the original post, anyone else see the article in the NYT this morning: Women don't contribute to Wikipedia?
That's a surprisingly interesting article.
It seems like something that's plausibly connected to not telling jokes.
Via the mechanism described in 5?
Something like that. I feel as though I should go edit a Wikipedia article, but I can't think of what.
I should check out what they have on NY civil procedure. Maybe there's something I can add or clarify.
You could add the Ogged back to the list of confidence tricks page.
I feel as though I should go edit a Wikipedia article, but I can't think of what.
I feel as though I should go edit a Wikipedia article, but I can't think of what.
I think there's more that could be said on this topic.
I edited the Wikipedia article on the subject of my dissertation a few times, but then someone else came in and changed the whole page and I lost interest.
My first, uncharitable reaction to that headline was something like, 'maybe women don't feel like doing lots of uncredited behind-the-scenes work in yet ANOTHER realm.'
My favorite thing about Wikipedia is when you see an article that's about ten times as long as you expected, is probably based on a book report about the person's biography, but why bother cutting it? For example
A wikipedia article that is much longer than it needs to be. Plus bonus cat picture.
96 brings new depth to the idea that some people have too much time on their hands.
97: So does that twitter feed about people's bowel movements.
However, intelligent examination of subjects like these on a well-trafficked blog is another thing altogether.
||
I just passed someone on the street advocating for peace in Afghanistan. The weird thing is, he had this very jerk-conservative vibe -- twenty-something white male, well dressed, vaguely confrontational -- the kind of person I associate with pro-life causes and the NRA. Very weird.
|>
92: You're still wrong on that. Just so you know.
||
Jesus. I just found out that a friend's husband has been spying on her online activities. At what point do you stop being a supportive listener and start actively urging someone to leave?
|>
103: How spying is spying? Like, reading her email, or lurking in 'public' contexts? The first is a big deal, the second, while indicative of tension, doesn't seem like a big offense.
Well, that's fucked up. Without more detail, I don't know that I'd be advising her to run, but I'd certainly be cranky as anything.
Maybe the husband was worried that the wife was one of SEK's friends, and was only trying to protect her from a ghastly mistake.
106: That's precisely my quandary. I don't have enough detail to say "GET OUT NOW", but my anxiety level surrounding the whole thing is starting to rise.
195: Hmm, they're should be some well-worded e-mail to your friend that might be able "help" in some way.
109 is not a very good idea. I don't actually think it was a serious suggestion, but still feel compelled to say: if this is a possibly dangerous situation, even a little bit...don't do that.
Um, what does your friend say about this?
(Sorry to get all buzzkill there, but it's a buzzkill-y kinda thing.)
I'm also feeling a bit guilty because she voiced her concerns about him spying on her and I suggested that the things she thought were evidence of it might just be coincidence.
Um, what does your friend say about this?
Besides "I walked into a door," that is.
110: She seems resigned to the whole situation rather than concerned, but then again she's several thousand miles away and I don't talk to her that often.
35: for a real laugh though you'd have to read the prospectus.
But more seriously, I think we'd want to define out the different types of humor before answering the question. As to why men might make jokes more frequently generally than women in conversation, perhaps the answer is simple: women tend to take conversations and direct forms of verbal communication more seriously and more comfortably, whereas men prefer indirect forms of communication and are frequently uncomfortable with a variety of types of direct verbal communication. Thus men will have more practice and comfort bonding in a group indirectly, by making jokes and laughing at them.
I offer that purely as a possibility, and not to endorse, reinforce, amplify, or reference any negative gender stereotype. If the reader happens to find any of those things, the responsibility rests solely with him. Or her.
The answer to the OP is easy: Male banter consists of jokes, mild insults, and arm-punching. Female banter consists of affirmation, sympathetic expression, subtle undermining, and lingerie pillow fights.
I just descended from the veldt and boy is my butt sore.
110: Yes, 109 was mostly in jest--although there might be situations where it could be appropriate. In that case, you could send a big "reveal" of a supposed secret of your own with " but don't tell [asshole q. snoopifer]", just to fuck with his head.
Resigned to the situation? That seems....what? I don't even know. I mean, I understand what all those words mean individually, but...
To be somewhat serious, reading your spouse's email without permission is definitely wrong, and I'm really not trying to minimize it, but I'm a little surprised at the extreme shock. I'll bet this kind of thing happens all the time in coupled relationships; in fact, given some other information, I would be pretty surprised if my ex hadn't occasionally snooped in my email. That very definitely doesn't mean that it's OK, but, absent a whole lot of other circumstances and factors, I'm not sure that snooping per se amongst a married couple qualifies as a horrifying, as opposed to merely bad, offense.
It probably depends on the details. If they shared a computer and she left herself logged in and there was a subject line saying "Your husband doesn't get home until 7, Right?"....
Well, do we know if this is a casual email snoop, or, like, a keystroke logging program?
Yeah, my degree of horror somewhat depends on how much effort the spouse had to expend to snoop, which is in itself an indirect measure of how many boundaries s/he had to cross. And, really, it's the boundaries at issue, bc one boundary is as good as another, and if an asshole is fine with violating one...
But it's all kind of moot if the victim of the snooping doesn't care.
Well, not moot. But more indicative that you might be staring at giant quicksand patch of suck.
and there was a subject line saying "Your husband doesn't get home until 7, Right?" "He'd kill us if he got the chance"
Im a little surprised about the shock of the spouse spying on her online activities.
It isnt necessary good. And I agree with DQ about my opinion being impacted about how much effort he went to. Transparency is pretty good in a relationship.
Also, given that you dont talk with her that much, maybe you dont know all of the story...
I don't think it is a big deal unless the partner has other, overtly problematic behaviors.
But I may be peculiar in this opinion, so everyones mileage may vary.
Oh, clarification: it's not moot bc it doesn't matter, or bc it's not indicative of future badness, but bc if the victim doesn't give a shit, there's not much you can do.
If your joint account is suddenly empty and your spouse buys a t-shirt saying "Meth Rules," I think maybe you'd be curious.
bc one boundary is as good as another
Do you really believe this?
131: Well, yeah, because the joint account is for joints, not meth.
132: No, it was a big over simplification. But I said it bc I think there's some truth to it, enough for it to have predictive value, particularly in situations with a big downside. If there's a general lack of respect for boundaries - and if the violation of privacy mentioned involved violating a bunch of em, it seems to suggest a general willingness to violate - I'd say there's cause for concern.
Without going into great detail, I can say that he had to go to a fair amount of effort (on the level of 123.last) and that she definitely cares, but not to the point of expressing or even implying fear for her own safety. And I definitely know enough to be aware that I don't know the whole story.
135: Hmmm. I mean, you're limited by what she'll accept, and what she wants. That's about it. You can ask a bunch of questions for your own benefit, and you can ask a bunch of skillfully leading questions for her benefit. But in the end...up to her.
I guess that's fairly obvious. But you seem to be wondering, and ATMing, about what you should actually do. And under those circumstances, the best you can do is the leading questions business.
It's a whole bunch of quicksand, my friend. Wade in knowingly.
Not that this does anything to solve the larger issues, but Kaspersky's security software comes with a virtual keyboard that is supposed to be invisible to loggers.
Moby, what does Kapersky have against hardworking men and women in the forest management arts?
136: Unfortunately I've come to the same conclusion as you. I just hate the feeling of powerlessness.
I can't spell anti-virus software. I'll manage.
OT: The past tense of "to whet" is "whetted," not "whet," right? I'm not taking crazy pills?
84
I thought Kevin Drum had some sensible comments on the wikipedia gender article.
OED examples give 'whetted', can't find 'whet' as past tense.
as noun, the time between two whettings of a scythe.
Obsession is certainly discouraged in girls. It interferes with our social mandate to always be worrying about what other people think. (Or, on the veldt, our kids died while we were inventing weaving. Something.)
141: Nope. Crazy pills. Hope you brought enough for everybody.
OK, just kidding. Whetted is fine. You could have used Google to hone in on it faster though.
It isnt necessary good. And I agree with DQ about my opinion being impacted about how much effort he went to. Transparency is pretty good in a relationship.
While I'd agree that this isn't the sort of instant 'move out now' thing that some are suggesting, this kind of snooping seems to clearly fall into the 'bad' category. It would be a different story if he had simply typed in 'gmail' into the url bar, found himself in her e-mail, and scanned the subject headers or something like that. Then I'd say, not a problem at all.
You could have used Google to hone in on it faster though.
Grrrrrrr.*
* As an aside before one turns in, shall we consider the potential threat to the world's strategic metaphor reserves of the white-collaring of professions and the XBoxing of pastimes? I've lost count of the occasions when I have hurled a periodical aside (or closed an IE/Safari window) because a writer spoke of something "forged" in a manner that betrayed abject ignorance of blacksmithing and metalworking, for example. Cf. "a palpable hit."**
** I am become curmudgeonly , Destroyer of Dinner Table Conversations, before my complexion warrants it.
Oh man "hone in on" is seriously so perfectly correct. Let it go, you'll be happier.
Late to the thread, but I think the NYT article is not so good, myself.
First off, there's the sloppy editing:
About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia's contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University..
That bit reads as though the reason that women are underrepresented is because the contributors are young. Obviously not what they meant, but silly.
Then you have a claim:
"Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table," she said. "If they are not at the table, we don't benefit from their crumb."
And, with no commentary at all, a quick twist to a sweeping assertion:
With so many subjects represented -- most everything has an article on Wikipedia -- the gender disparity often shows up in terms of emphasis.
Uh, maybe it shows up that way as well. But you're not responding to the claim, which you apparently thought was important enough to quote. And you're making a totally insane claim of your own -- "most everything" has an article on Wikipedia? How could anyone possibly believe that statement? How could any right-thinking editor permit it to be printed?*
More fun comes as they acknowledge that it's about not ticking off the small but vocal subset of men who would get angry:
Kat Walsh, a policy analyst and longtime Wikipedia contributor who was elected to the Wikimedia board, agreed that indirect initiatives would cause less unease in the Wikipedia community than more overt efforts.
And then another out-of-nowhere and totally unsupported claim:
"The big problem is that the current Wikipedia community is what came about by letting things develop naturally -- trying to influence it in another direction is no longer the easiest path, and requires conscious effort to change."
Naturally, my left elbow.
For the record, the two major reasons I don't contribute more to Wikipedia are a) I find the interface clunky, and there seems to be little opportunity to contribute a crumb that isn't formatted properly and have someone else step up and format it, and b) the prohibition on primary sources/original research.
In fact, if someone wanted to write about why women are under-represented among Wikipedia contributors, they could do a lot worse than ask whether this "natural," "open" community is structurally biased against issues and topics that women might be better-qualified to contribute to, because those topics are less likely to be documented (and thus linkable) elsewhere.
*This is not faux outrage here; I've gone looking for probably dozen major stories on Wikipedia in the last six months and be amazed to find that there was nothing there. Not even a stub.
and the wonderful thing is that jesus loves us for no reason at all!
nosflow, have you ever done the scene selection to play the clips side by side and see if they change the emphasis by using a different recording? I assume so.
152: It's true! But I love nosflow a tiny bit extra at the moment for loving me for 126. And I think the emphasis is changed in the different clips.
In the film version, the first e-mail will be plain text while the second will be marked up.
The emphasis is definitely changed. I believe it's a matter of record—and previous discussion here!—that different recordings were used. Which is, of course, how it had to be, and is not, pace I think LB, cheating.
I think I am already on the record here as agreeing that the change is as it must be, and not a cheat.
I think I'm on record saying that I'd have a stronger opinion on the matter if I had actually liked the film.
Oh great. I killed the thread with my negativity and now no one will help me avoid work.
158: I've never seen the film, if that helps. (If it doesn't help, then I still haven't seen the film. But I tried.)
I can say that he had to go to a fair amount of effort (on the level of 123.last)
Were I in this situation I would take some countermeasure on the box concerned, not necessarily 100% effective, just obvious that I'd done it, and see what happened. If nothing, then I'd forget the whole thing. If it led to ructions or an arms race, then I'd be glad I'd done it.
149: Do you know what I do when Wikipedia doesn't have an article that I think it should have? I write the article.
While I've seen the "original research" ban misused, I think it's one of the secrets to Wikipedia's success, since it limits the damage the "neutral point of view" policy causes, since the neutral point of view has to refer to actual aspects of reality rather than someone's half-assed opinion, which you can label "original research".
142: I read the Drum post, and it was okay. The thing about gendered descriptions of behavior is that frequently if you observe the exact same behavior in the other gender, then the description will flip completely. For example, if it came out that women contributed to Wikipedia disproportiately, the explanation would be that women are more willing to do volunteer work, unpaid labor, blah, blah, blah.
Do you know what I do when Wikipedia doesn't have an article that I think it should have? I write the article.
Yeah, maybe I wasn't clear. That's my first instinct too. It's just that when I attempt to do so, I run smack into the formatting/clunkiness and linking problems described above.
And I agree that the original research prohibition has its upsides. It is just, itself, *not* neutral.
A secondary problem on the citation front is firewalls for local newspapers. I ran into an education-related disaster of a page on Wikipedia, and very quickly realized that although I have the relevant articles obsessively saved on my computer, I couldn't fix the Wikipedia piece because the citations couldn't be linked to anywhere that wasn't behind a paywall. Bah!
162
... For example, if it came out that women contributed to Wikipedia disproportiately, the explanation would be that women are more willing to do volunteer work, unpaid labor, blah, blah, blah.
I think it was pretty predictable in advance that men would contribute to wikipedia disproportionately. I would guess they also contribute disproportionately to free software projects.
163: Can't you cite to things that you can't link to, like books that aren't online? I'd think you'd just do the cite as if to the paper newspaper.
165: IME, people seem to flag it if you try.
That's really stupid -- it's supposed to be an encyclopedia, not an encyclopedia limited to only stuff that's available online. Now I feel as though I should start writing articles on NY civ pro just to get in arguments about them.
Now that I think about it, lawyers may well be just the right sort to stand up to the wikipedia geeks.
That definitely isn't anywhere in wikipedia's official citation policy, which seems to have no problem with offline citations.
I haven't ever edited Wikipedia much (I cleaned up something confused in a Samoa article once), but I've read that the wikipedia geeks x. mentions do get aggressively overenforcey about stuff, sometimes in ways that don't make sense.
aggressively overenforcey
More power to them. But they should be enforcing the actual rules of the website, not some arbitrary personal preferences (that happen to make no sense). The link in 169 is wikipedia's citation policies, which very clearly have no issue with citations to offline sources.
I would guess they also contribute disproportionately to free software projects.
Out of proportion to what population? Humans, or computer programmers?
Well, yeah, I don't know first hand at all, but the impression I'd gotten from somewhere is that wikipedia had a bit of a problem with people overenforcing rules that don't really exist, which might be what Witt was running into.
Walt, do you really think Drum was right about this?
I've long been convinced that this tendency toward obsession is one of the key differences between men and women. I don't know what causes it. I don't know if it helped primitive men kill more mastodons during the late Pleistocene. But it does seem to be real, and it doesn't seem to be something that's either culturally encouraged or discouraged in children of either gender.
174: It's not prima facie wrong. All the ridiculously good Korean Starcraft players are dudes. Britain's a more egalitarian society than most, but how many female trainspotters are there? If gendered geekdom is a cultural construct, it's a broadly shared one.
I'd say that that sort of obsessiveness tends to be male in the US and similar cultures, but that looking at a gender difference, thinking for a couple of minutes about it, and then saying "I don't see how socialization affects this, so it must be innate" is kind of goofy.
175: a broadly shared [construct] among well-connected first-world societies, using a definition that's significantly less than 100 years old.
176: Why are girls so obsessed with arguing about innate versus socialized differences? Is that how they passed the time gathering roots and berries on the veldt?
Well, I'm using a definition I just pulled out of my ass. I'm not making the claim, I'm just saying it's not inconsistent with observation.
The first footnote in 147 is absolutely on target. Make things, people! knit, saw, hack, solder, weave, glue, cast, cut, nail, turn, sew, and carve.
Not only is it personally enriching, it provides a useful skill for after The Collapse, so the roving gangs of absurdly accoutred scary weirdos will have a use for you other than as food. Plus you won't fuck up your metaphors and piss off Flippanter.
It's also not inconsistent with observation that males are more prone to geeky pursuits because of a mutation intentionally introduced into the toxoplasmosis genome by the US military in the '40s because they foresaw that defense cuts would eventually drive them into toy manufacture. It doesn't mean it's plausible.
scary weirdos will have a use for you other than as food
Oh, I'm afraid they already do.
There are gendered expectations about which things to geek out on. Fashion is the most obviously feminine-coded example, but fandom definitely has its female-dominant sides. Fanfiction communities tend to be heavily female, for example.
163: There is no such policy, and in fact offline citations are common. Obviously online citations are better, are not necessary. I could see a problem if it's hard to establish notability.
I think the mistake people make with Wikipedia is that in some sense no one is really in charge. (There are official mechanisms, but they are rarely activated.) So anyone can edit, anyone can claim something violates Wikipedia policy. anyone can flag something for deletion. It doesn't mean that they're right, and you are free to push back. It's like being in a really big anarchist collective, except with none of the sex.
174: I do think the first sentence you quite is right, in the sense that if you came up to me with a sealed envelope that said "In this envelope we have conclusive evidence as to whether men are innately more, less, or as obsessive as women, and you have to guess the right answer or we set fire to you right here," I would say that men are more obsessive. Since the effects of culture are so pervasive, I would never make any public policy on that basis.
178 is so awesome.
If you count obsession with other people, though, instead of the computer-games examples, girls and boys are about equally likely to fall.
It's this sentence that seems so obliviously, conveniently, infuriatingly wrong: it doesn't seem to be something that's either culturally encouraged or discouraged in children of either gender. Nonsense! The basic failing there is that boys are much more allowed to ignore other people than girls are, and girls failing at attentiveness disturb adults the way boys failing at dominance do. (I think there's a lot more damage by what adults feel is disgusting than by what they formally forbid or punish.)
like most of these differences, i think it comes down to hysteresis from small differences in sexual attraction
and those sort of feedback effects are pretty similar to the blindness to institutional effects taht conservatives don't understand (eg employer/employee bargaining)
