* I just posted the WH guest list and suddenly recognized that the meaning of widespread Ms. usage (as a title at even the most high-level formal dinners in the country) is profoundly subversive of the patriarchy.<\/p>\n
The Ms. users are signaling availability to other males even though they are supposedly unavailable.<\/p>\n
Therefore Ms. as a title for all women = Social Cuckdom.<\/p>\n
* Spotted Toad<\/a>: Social science has two masks:<\/p>\n The Comedy mask looks for unheralded interventions, policy-relevant effects, the Little Thing that Will Make a Big Difference<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Tragedy mask collects boring, nationally representative, well-measured data, year after year, that says nothing works.<\/a><\/p>\n The Comedy mask is Michael LaCour, running a multi-wave randomized controlled trial for thousands of respondents on grants he won as a graduate student<\/a>, showing that a brief conversation with an out gay person totally transforms respondents’ opinions about gay marriage long afterwards.<\/a><\/p>\n The Tragedy mask says that opinions are generally stable, and that the data and the grants were both fake.<\/p>\n The Comedy mask says if we can just identify the greatest teachers and assign them to the kids who need them most<\/a>, we can erase the effects of poverty and the gaps in achievement between groups.<\/p>\n The Tragedy mask says that, when you correct for the unobserved differences among kids, teachers make relatively little difference in how much kids learn<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sometimes, the comedy is a bit dark, but it’s comedy all the same. When you say that highly religious Muslim immigrant kids underachieve because their moms fasted when they were pregnant<\/a>, or that massive waves of default in minority communities were due to “predatory lending” by rogue banks rather than massive government support<\/a>, you may think that you’re staring grim-faced into the injustice of the world.<\/p>\n But you’re not. You’re still insisting that the Right and Good can prevail and heal the wounded land.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life, said Aristotle. The Comedic approach to social science treats people as worse than they could<\/em> be, the Tragic approach says that people aren’t going to get much better than they already are.<\/p>\n Look, some things Make a Difference. Penicillin. Pesticides. Fluoride. The Haber-Bosch process for fixing ammonia. Using the right seeds. Rural electrification. Gas lines to your house. Shitting in toilets instead of on the ground.<\/p>\n And I tend to think that most of our current social arrangements-universal schooling in the first place, for instance-and even some of our goody-two-shoes poverty programs<\/a> aren’t doing much harm.<\/p>\n But as long as we keep asking social scientists to find ways to change the world instead of describing it,<\/a> we’ll keep getting a pocketful of lies.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Steve Sailer writes: “One thing that has changed is that topics for humor have narrowed, with men being the main safe choice left. For example, mother-in-law jokes were huge up into the 1970s (think Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield), but … Continue reading ![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/spottedtoad.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/03\/image2.jpeg?w=768\")
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