Scott Alexander finds Bryan Caplan irritating; Aaron Renn questions secular conservatives; Freddie deBoer compares AI maximalism to late Victorian-era science hubris
The essential problem with Caplan's argument, which he doesn't even really try to address, is that psychotic disorders hijack the mind - they present it with flatly incorrect information (in the forms of delusions or, more rarely, hallucinations) which then prompts bad decisions. If I enter into a contract with you, but I'm doing so by misleading you about key information in the deal, that contract is legally unenforceable; if that wasn't the case, no one could ever confidently do business. And it's the same principle here. To say that people with psychotic disorders are merely expressing unusual preferences requires the belief that those "preferences" are the product of a rational process of reasoning. But you can't rationally process anything if your brain is convincing you that things that aren't true are true!
Caplan specifically discusses also delusions and hallucinations (i.e., cognitive phenomena) in his article, "The Economics of Szasz," and in his numerous blogposts and podcasts about 'mental illness.' Here are two links:
“But you can't rationally process anything if your brain is convincing you that things that aren't true are true!”
I’m not convinced by Caplan’s arguments, but I think the above statement and Scott Alexander’s argument potentially takes human agency out of the equation, and probably represents a core concern that Caplan may not be articulating.
Unless you don’t believe in free will, I think there is a burden on advocates of the mental illness side to identify when human agency ceases.
To say that my brain is convincing me that I need to eat this cookie, or that I’m too depressed to go to work, or I like men rather than woman, is a bit question begging. In some cases my brain convincing me is really just my preference, and in others it is bad or different wiring. Which is it and when?
Freddie, great posts lately, and an important view on mental illness, that it is not a rational preference when your brain processes are messed up. Yet if you’ve taken LSD like Peter Green did, and it messed up his mind and even his guitar playing, his chosen preferences is why he had so many problems.
This is true even when the probability of such a bad outcome is low. It seems you and Caplan both avoid much talk of uncertainty and how it dominates reality.
I’m starting to wonder if a swirling complex of arguments - mental illness, drug legalization, homelessness, protests and riots - are all driven by us struggling with what kind of coercion is ok, and what is necessary, for a city to thrive.
My instinct (hypothesis?) is that what really bothers people today about these vices is that they are visible on the street - they make me feel icky and afraid. And, especially, they make my customers feel icky and afraid. Enough of these icky and afraid feelings add up to a sense of collapse and disorder, and we go back to wanting the visible hand to fix the problems.
So now I wonder at why it’s gotten hard for us to impose order in our cities. You could blame US legal rulings about access to public spaces, but why are Lisbon and Porto seeing a push to recriminalize drug use (see WaPo article yesterday)? You could blame unassimilated immigrants in Paris, but then why Portland? You could blame nimbyism and zoning, but…
This is a hard problem for libertarians, and especially those founding new cities.
Caplan has indeed been irritating on this particular hobbyhorse, and Scott is correct in pointing out that on this particular subject Caplan is conspicuously intransigent and operating at a much lower level of rigor than normal with his debates with his obtuse reliance on philosophical semantics. He is stubbornly refusing to engage with that meta-level criticism along with many object-level substantial points, such that it hardly qualifies as a debate at all.
My impression is that the main problem is that Caplan is operating in a framework of various metaphysical (and also inescapably ideological, often illusory) conceptual constructs that cultures use in widely different ways as mere linguistic conventions in the necessarily desperate, loose, and crude - but socially vital! - attempts to describe and communicate various mental states.
The thing is, none of those constructs and conventions actually map well to the empirical reality of the complicated human neurological system and psychological condition. These concepts - like 'individual', 'preference', 'willpower', 'consciousness', etc. aren't even 'models' really in the "predictive, falsifiable" sense of, "All models are wrong, some are useful."
I'll leave spiritual and supernatural matters to the side for the time being and use the perspective of eliminative materialism for the convenience of discussion. But from that perspective, the real model would be some kind of "LLM"-style unfathomably complicated electro-biochemical set of trillions of statistical patterns and parameters running chains of causality from quantum effects on atoms and molecules to geneteics and RNA strands of mysterious function, to neurotransmitters and receptors of all kinds, to neurons and multifaceted brain anatomy and interactions with a constant stream of high-bandwidth environmental stimuli.
We've had the whole connectome for nature's simplest brains in microscopic roundworms and even throwing the world's best supercomputers at it for decades we are still nowhere close to accurate simluation constituting an "understanding" of how it works. We've just got the whole thing for the fruit fly, which is an achievement for sure, but which is orders of magnitude more complicated than the roundworm and so for the fly our reach exceeds our grasp all the more.
But even when we do, the syntax and terminology of any language that could be use to communicate about the truth of that understanding most likely cannot be reduced to any kind of good-enough shorthand that even elite human beings could use to discuss them in a meaningful and useful way. Human linguistic capability and flexibilty is incredible, but likely falls far, far short of what would be needed to deal with such informational structures. It will be the kind of things future mind-topic-discussing computers will be able to communicate about in terabyre-sized sentences to each other, and thus, not to us, because we can't handle that. Which is to say, it's certainly possible for it to be impossible for even our best brains to *really* understand themselves.
When one comes back down to earth re-normalized with this 30,000 parsec view and tries to grapple with the "disease or preference" question, one can see how incredibly absurd it is to approach the topic by making arguments based on the semantics of abstract terminology! You might say it's a little bit crazy.
Renn's attitude to male-female friendships strikes me as not just sadly constricted by ultra-traditionalist attitudes about sex, but also deeply emotionally and socially immature. Friendship is one of the greatest goods we have in life! The upside of making new friends, or deepening existing friendships, is not at all small, and the cost of cutting in half your pool of potential friends is very great, not least because friendships with people different from yourself broaden your horizons.
Of course asymmetric attraction can be a challenge. Laying aside the heteronormative assumption that it's only a problem with opposite-sex friendships: what about acknowledging that all relationships have challenges and frictions, often because people want different things from the relationship, and sometimes you work through them and sometimes you don't, and that's part of life? I've been on both sides of attraction asymmetries; sometimes the friendship survived the challenge of the asymmetry, sometimes it didn't, but in no case have I regretted having the friendship in the first place.
This is mostly well observed. If only you could have left out the "heteronormative" ref. This is one of those manipulative words invented by sexually dysphoric politico obsessives to backhandedly give voice to their rage against normal men and women for being..... Well not dysphoric. That 95% of men and women don't need a fancy pseudo-intellectual word to locate themselves in the sexual firmament. They are just (sexually) normal; it's as simple as that.
> Oy. I get that a man can become attracted to a woman, and that all these awkward results are possible. But good luck working in a modern organization and ruling out having any woman friends.
I think you are misreading him here. Aaron explicitly narrows his prohibition to close, personal, 1:1 friendships with the opposite sex. He explicitly mentions 1:1 *professional* friendships with women as OK (though in the post #MeToo world, men definitely still need to be careful). His section "My Rules on Opposite Sex Friendship" more clearly lay out what he means. I think his rule is sufficiently nuanced that I don't really think there is anything to criticize there.
I have some doubts about Caplan and preferences but suspect he is mostly right. That said, I don't think migraines are a particularly good counter example. They are probably mostly second order and not the preference.
- habits are preferences.
- habits we have, dislike, and would like to end but can't seem to are still preferences.
- the consequences of habits that we don't even recognize as consequences are still the result of preferences.
- if the consequences go wildly out of control, they are still the result of preferences. If I free climb a rock face, fall, and die would anyone say my preference wasn't actually free climbing? If I make a choice and have a horrible outcome, like migraines, due to some unforeseen or unforeseeable circumstance, does that make my original preference no longer valid? I don't think so.
While it is possible that there are diseases besides the lesions that Caplan mentions, (strokes? tumors and other pressures? electrical malfunction?) for most things labeled disease, mental illness, or mental disorder (Caplan equates them), including most or all migraines, there is no such known cause. Calling these a preference seems at least as accurate as calling them disorders.
Sometimes the reductio ad absurdum is appropriate and inappropriate at other times. I suspect Alexander's use here was inappropriate with regards to Caplan.
everyone knows that the term "elite" is ambiguous and refers either to the people with formal status OR to the chattering class OR to the unelected managerial class
(or some combination)
and yet keep using it without disambiguating first
this is annoying
also
any elite of the third kind (the bureaucrats) ALWAYS implements authoritarianism because they wouldn't be in managerial positions if they didn't deeply believe that they know best what is to be done
that is universally true regardless of which sub culture you recruit from
For anyone interested in the history of rock music, this podcast is a real treat. And the bonus episodes are well worth supporting the main podcast on Patreon, Andrew Hickey is a fabulous researcher and presenter.
Re: "Whether it’s more useful to think of any given situation as a preference or a constraint depends on things like whether you can easily satisfy the preference, whether the preference is ego-syntonic or ego-dystonic, and whether it seems normal by social standards."—Scott Alexander, essay linked in Arnold's post.
Yes, I will find it harder to to satisfy my desire, X, if, in order to do so, I must overcome:
• physical or economic forces and/or law enforcement
• my contrary desires (inner conflict)
• social pressure (norms)
The fact that there may be a gradient doesn't void the distinction between constraints and desires.
An exhausted runner may find a race too hard to finish. The runner, then, might learn to train more carefully, or to sign up for a shorter race.
A person who has had a drink might find it too hard to refrain from having a second, third, fourth, and fifth drink. The person, then, might learn not to have a first drink.
A person might choose indirect strategies in order to improve her chances of satisfying the hard desire. For example, a person who has (a) a myopic desire to lie in bed all day *and* (b) a farsighted desire to be productive might bootstrap through diet and exercise.
On the one hand, personality is destiny. On the other hand, a free society rests on modest confidence in most people's ability to reckon with problems of self-control.
Do medicalization of problems of living, and pessimism about self-governance, really help?
Scott Alexander focusses on hard cases, and thereby misses the forest for a fraction of the trees.
Perhaps worth pointing out that Barbara Tuchman among others has argued that chivalry in the realm of relations between the sexes was mostly an elevation of chaste but amorous relations between men and women who were married to other people. This sort of thing has been edged out of western culture in favor of depictions of romantic authenticity that must be consummated for both parties to remain true to themselves. You can still see depictions of chaste but warm banter in old movies, but it is totally absent from the current cultural scene.
So, this leaves many people in the contemporary world at the mercy of their impulses and afraid of the impulses of others. As in all times and places, there are potentially major consequences to the consummation of chaotic sexual impulses. There is no ideal of self-control and no notion that men and women can be charming to one another without pursuing temptation all the way to its conclusion. Relations then become stilted or overly professional. Contemporary people maintain that it is morally bad to repress your sexual impulses (it's being untrue to the mythical true self), but also that realizing those sexual impulses when not requited is an even more criminal evil. I suppose the funny solution that contemporary moralists have come to is that there is no such thing as men or women and that the impulse to express a gender identity opposite to your sex is an expression that must be held sacred, as a sort of "true love... of the self"; a goofy modification of the half-dead romantic ideal.
Freddie’s fantastic essay is one of his best, with substantial insights said very well, both clearly and with interesting prose. I’m sure he’s mostly correct about AI being yet another tool and NOT a realistic way to escape living In Real Life. With death as our final destination, as living humans.
I suspect he’ll be proven both right and somewhat wrong on education. Right that genes plus pre-natal plus baby environmental aspects sets an upper IQ limit, which nothing overcomes. Yet optimal Direct Instruction will help far more kids reach their top limits, which will mean in practice those kids who suffer in very low SES homes, yet have above avg IQ potential, like Rob Henderson, will more often learn more and test higher. But like 2-4% more kids in the lowest SES quintile. Good, but only barely significant.
Reading Renn's article on male/female friendships, I am thinking maybe it says more about Renn himself than the world in general. Particularly the line "Except in that one scenario, the positive payoffs for male-female friendship are pretty low because the benefits of most friendships today are pretty low generally," strikes me as very negative towards friendships in general. Renn apparently doesn't care much for friends? That's fine, to each their own, but I don't know that most people consider the benefits of friendships to be pretty low generally. I am also led to believe he must have had some really horrific female friends in his past, perhaps unusually so. When you rule is to NEVER have a 1:1 friendship with the opposite sex, because of "the bad things that happened in the past when I had tried to be friends with women. " I begin to wonder if maybe you just have a really bad social circle you are choosing from. Or maybe it is just you. But in either case, that seems like an outlier.
The essential problem with Caplan's argument, which he doesn't even really try to address, is that psychotic disorders hijack the mind - they present it with flatly incorrect information (in the forms of delusions or, more rarely, hallucinations) which then prompts bad decisions. If I enter into a contract with you, but I'm doing so by misleading you about key information in the deal, that contract is legally unenforceable; if that wasn't the case, no one could ever confidently do business. And it's the same principle here. To say that people with psychotic disorders are merely expressing unusual preferences requires the belief that those "preferences" are the product of a rational process of reasoning. But you can't rationally process anything if your brain is convincing you that things that aren't true are true!
Caplan specifically discusses also delusions and hallucinations (i.e., cognitive phenomena) in his article, "The Economics of Szasz," and in his numerous blogposts and podcasts about 'mental illness.' Here are two links:
https://studylib.net/doc/7481342/economics-of-szasz---george-mason-university
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx7kIAAwe8M
(cue time: 52:53)
“But you can't rationally process anything if your brain is convincing you that things that aren't true are true!”
I’m not convinced by Caplan’s arguments, but I think the above statement and Scott Alexander’s argument potentially takes human agency out of the equation, and probably represents a core concern that Caplan may not be articulating.
Unless you don’t believe in free will, I think there is a burden on advocates of the mental illness side to identify when human agency ceases.
To say that my brain is convincing me that I need to eat this cookie, or that I’m too depressed to go to work, or I like men rather than woman, is a bit question begging. In some cases my brain convincing me is really just my preference, and in others it is bad or different wiring. Which is it and when?
Freddie, great posts lately, and an important view on mental illness, that it is not a rational preference when your brain processes are messed up. Yet if you’ve taken LSD like Peter Green did, and it messed up his mind and even his guitar playing, his chosen preferences is why he had so many problems.
This is true even when the probability of such a bad outcome is low. It seems you and Caplan both avoid much talk of uncertainty and how it dominates reality.
I think you've misinterpreted what Caplan means by preference.
I’m starting to wonder if a swirling complex of arguments - mental illness, drug legalization, homelessness, protests and riots - are all driven by us struggling with what kind of coercion is ok, and what is necessary, for a city to thrive.
My instinct (hypothesis?) is that what really bothers people today about these vices is that they are visible on the street - they make me feel icky and afraid. And, especially, they make my customers feel icky and afraid. Enough of these icky and afraid feelings add up to a sense of collapse and disorder, and we go back to wanting the visible hand to fix the problems.
So now I wonder at why it’s gotten hard for us to impose order in our cities. You could blame US legal rulings about access to public spaces, but why are Lisbon and Porto seeing a push to recriminalize drug use (see WaPo article yesterday)? You could blame unassimilated immigrants in Paris, but then why Portland? You could blame nimbyism and zoning, but…
This is a hard problem for libertarians, and especially those founding new cities.
Caplan has indeed been irritating on this particular hobbyhorse, and Scott is correct in pointing out that on this particular subject Caplan is conspicuously intransigent and operating at a much lower level of rigor than normal with his debates with his obtuse reliance on philosophical semantics. He is stubbornly refusing to engage with that meta-level criticism along with many object-level substantial points, such that it hardly qualifies as a debate at all.
My impression is that the main problem is that Caplan is operating in a framework of various metaphysical (and also inescapably ideological, often illusory) conceptual constructs that cultures use in widely different ways as mere linguistic conventions in the necessarily desperate, loose, and crude - but socially vital! - attempts to describe and communicate various mental states.
The thing is, none of those constructs and conventions actually map well to the empirical reality of the complicated human neurological system and psychological condition. These concepts - like 'individual', 'preference', 'willpower', 'consciousness', etc. aren't even 'models' really in the "predictive, falsifiable" sense of, "All models are wrong, some are useful."
I'll leave spiritual and supernatural matters to the side for the time being and use the perspective of eliminative materialism for the convenience of discussion. But from that perspective, the real model would be some kind of "LLM"-style unfathomably complicated electro-biochemical set of trillions of statistical patterns and parameters running chains of causality from quantum effects on atoms and molecules to geneteics and RNA strands of mysterious function, to neurotransmitters and receptors of all kinds, to neurons and multifaceted brain anatomy and interactions with a constant stream of high-bandwidth environmental stimuli.
We've had the whole connectome for nature's simplest brains in microscopic roundworms and even throwing the world's best supercomputers at it for decades we are still nowhere close to accurate simluation constituting an "understanding" of how it works. We've just got the whole thing for the fruit fly, which is an achievement for sure, but which is orders of magnitude more complicated than the roundworm and so for the fly our reach exceeds our grasp all the more.
But even when we do, the syntax and terminology of any language that could be use to communicate about the truth of that understanding most likely cannot be reduced to any kind of good-enough shorthand that even elite human beings could use to discuss them in a meaningful and useful way. Human linguistic capability and flexibilty is incredible, but likely falls far, far short of what would be needed to deal with such informational structures. It will be the kind of things future mind-topic-discussing computers will be able to communicate about in terabyre-sized sentences to each other, and thus, not to us, because we can't handle that. Which is to say, it's certainly possible for it to be impossible for even our best brains to *really* understand themselves.
When one comes back down to earth re-normalized with this 30,000 parsec view and tries to grapple with the "disease or preference" question, one can see how incredibly absurd it is to approach the topic by making arguments based on the semantics of abstract terminology! You might say it's a little bit crazy.
Or, perhaps, Caplan just has a brain tumor.
Renn's attitude to male-female friendships strikes me as not just sadly constricted by ultra-traditionalist attitudes about sex, but also deeply emotionally and socially immature. Friendship is one of the greatest goods we have in life! The upside of making new friends, or deepening existing friendships, is not at all small, and the cost of cutting in half your pool of potential friends is very great, not least because friendships with people different from yourself broaden your horizons.
Of course asymmetric attraction can be a challenge. Laying aside the heteronormative assumption that it's only a problem with opposite-sex friendships: what about acknowledging that all relationships have challenges and frictions, often because people want different things from the relationship, and sometimes you work through them and sometimes you don't, and that's part of life? I've been on both sides of attraction asymmetries; sometimes the friendship survived the challenge of the asymmetry, sometimes it didn't, but in no case have I regretted having the friendship in the first place.
This is mostly well observed. If only you could have left out the "heteronormative" ref. This is one of those manipulative words invented by sexually dysphoric politico obsessives to backhandedly give voice to their rage against normal men and women for being..... Well not dysphoric. That 95% of men and women don't need a fancy pseudo-intellectual word to locate themselves in the sexual firmament. They are just (sexually) normal; it's as simple as that.
> Oy. I get that a man can become attracted to a woman, and that all these awkward results are possible. But good luck working in a modern organization and ruling out having any woman friends.
I think you are misreading him here. Aaron explicitly narrows his prohibition to close, personal, 1:1 friendships with the opposite sex. He explicitly mentions 1:1 *professional* friendships with women as OK (though in the post #MeToo world, men definitely still need to be careful). His section "My Rules on Opposite Sex Friendship" more clearly lay out what he means. I think his rule is sufficiently nuanced that I don't really think there is anything to criticize there.
I have some doubts about Caplan and preferences but suspect he is mostly right. That said, I don't think migraines are a particularly good counter example. They are probably mostly second order and not the preference.
- habits are preferences.
- habits we have, dislike, and would like to end but can't seem to are still preferences.
- the consequences of habits that we don't even recognize as consequences are still the result of preferences.
- if the consequences go wildly out of control, they are still the result of preferences. If I free climb a rock face, fall, and die would anyone say my preference wasn't actually free climbing? If I make a choice and have a horrible outcome, like migraines, due to some unforeseen or unforeseeable circumstance, does that make my original preference no longer valid? I don't think so.
While it is possible that there are diseases besides the lesions that Caplan mentions, (strokes? tumors and other pressures? electrical malfunction?) for most things labeled disease, mental illness, or mental disorder (Caplan equates them), including most or all migraines, there is no such known cause. Calling these a preference seems at least as accurate as calling them disorders.
Sometimes the reductio ad absurdum is appropriate and inappropriate at other times. I suspect Alexander's use here was inappropriate with regards to Caplan.
everyone knows that the term "elite" is ambiguous and refers either to the people with formal status OR to the chattering class OR to the unelected managerial class
(or some combination)
and yet keep using it without disambiguating first
this is annoying
also
any elite of the third kind (the bureaucrats) ALWAYS implements authoritarianism because they wouldn't be in managerial positions if they didn't deeply believe that they know best what is to be done
that is universally true regardless of which sub culture you recruit from
Well, we do have a couple of former mental diseases that are now famously considered fine and dandy, if not better.
I agree with your comment on recombination but disagree with your example - the superb podcast History of Rock Music in 500 Songs (https://500songs.com) had an episode on Like a Rolling Stone that gives a thorough account of what happened when Dylan started playing electric. It's not the story we're all used to. Episode here: https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-130-like-a-rolling-stone-by-bob-dylan/#more-861
For anyone interested in the history of rock music, this podcast is a real treat. And the bonus episodes are well worth supporting the main podcast on Patreon, Andrew Hickey is a fabulous researcher and presenter.
Re: "Whether it’s more useful to think of any given situation as a preference or a constraint depends on things like whether you can easily satisfy the preference, whether the preference is ego-syntonic or ego-dystonic, and whether it seems normal by social standards."—Scott Alexander, essay linked in Arnold's post.
Yes, I will find it harder to to satisfy my desire, X, if, in order to do so, I must overcome:
• physical or economic forces and/or law enforcement
• my contrary desires (inner conflict)
• social pressure (norms)
The fact that there may be a gradient doesn't void the distinction between constraints and desires.
An exhausted runner may find a race too hard to finish. The runner, then, might learn to train more carefully, or to sign up for a shorter race.
A person who has had a drink might find it too hard to refrain from having a second, third, fourth, and fifth drink. The person, then, might learn not to have a first drink.
A person might choose indirect strategies in order to improve her chances of satisfying the hard desire. For example, a person who has (a) a myopic desire to lie in bed all day *and* (b) a farsighted desire to be productive might bootstrap through diet and exercise.
On the one hand, personality is destiny. On the other hand, a free society rests on modest confidence in most people's ability to reckon with problems of self-control.
Do medicalization of problems of living, and pessimism about self-governance, really help?
Scott Alexander focusses on hard cases, and thereby misses the forest for a fraction of the trees.
Perhaps worth pointing out that Barbara Tuchman among others has argued that chivalry in the realm of relations between the sexes was mostly an elevation of chaste but amorous relations between men and women who were married to other people. This sort of thing has been edged out of western culture in favor of depictions of romantic authenticity that must be consummated for both parties to remain true to themselves. You can still see depictions of chaste but warm banter in old movies, but it is totally absent from the current cultural scene.
So, this leaves many people in the contemporary world at the mercy of their impulses and afraid of the impulses of others. As in all times and places, there are potentially major consequences to the consummation of chaotic sexual impulses. There is no ideal of self-control and no notion that men and women can be charming to one another without pursuing temptation all the way to its conclusion. Relations then become stilted or overly professional. Contemporary people maintain that it is morally bad to repress your sexual impulses (it's being untrue to the mythical true self), but also that realizing those sexual impulses when not requited is an even more criminal evil. I suppose the funny solution that contemporary moralists have come to is that there is no such thing as men or women and that the impulse to express a gender identity opposite to your sex is an expression that must be held sacred, as a sort of "true love... of the self"; a goofy modification of the half-dead romantic ideal.
Freddie’s fantastic essay is one of his best, with substantial insights said very well, both clearly and with interesting prose. I’m sure he’s mostly correct about AI being yet another tool and NOT a realistic way to escape living In Real Life. With death as our final destination, as living humans.
I suspect he’ll be proven both right and somewhat wrong on education. Right that genes plus pre-natal plus baby environmental aspects sets an upper IQ limit, which nothing overcomes. Yet optimal Direct Instruction will help far more kids reach their top limits, which will mean in practice those kids who suffer in very low SES homes, yet have above avg IQ potential, like Rob Henderson, will more often learn more and test higher. But like 2-4% more kids in the lowest SES quintile. Good, but only barely significant.
Reading Renn's article on male/female friendships, I am thinking maybe it says more about Renn himself than the world in general. Particularly the line "Except in that one scenario, the positive payoffs for male-female friendship are pretty low because the benefits of most friendships today are pretty low generally," strikes me as very negative towards friendships in general. Renn apparently doesn't care much for friends? That's fine, to each their own, but I don't know that most people consider the benefits of friendships to be pretty low generally. I am also led to believe he must have had some really horrific female friends in his past, perhaps unusually so. When you rule is to NEVER have a 1:1 friendship with the opposite sex, because of "the bad things that happened in the past when I had tried to be friends with women. " I begin to wonder if maybe you just have a really bad social circle you are choosing from. Or maybe it is just you. But in either case, that seems like an outlier.
"But good luck working in a modern organization and ruling out having any woman friends."
Well, remote work has been good for the Renn pov wrt to men-women.