Tag: mailvox

Stay away from career women II

Yesterday a few working wives took exception to the logic which suggests that because working wives tend to have more affairs than non-working wives, it is wise for the man who is interested in marrying to eliminate career-oriented women from his list of prospective mates. This was entirely unsurprising, but not entirely unamusing.

On a seemingly unrelated note, I have been reading Umberto Eco’s On Literature this past week, and one passage in particular will surely remind the Dread Ilk of why I regard him as a writer worthy of a regard that comes perilously close to idolatry. (Bear with me, this will all make sense soon.)  “Our only commitment is, by serious and continued work, without giving in to any blackmail, to humiliate those who are our inferiors.”

Thus spake Umberto. And as an Award-Winning Cruelty Artist and Internet Superintelligence, I have little choice but to heed the Zarathustranesque call. Hier steh ich, ich kann nicht anders, weil es ist mein Los.

So. With that in mind, let us now consider the claims made by a few of the various female critics yesterday. Connie asserted: “The percentage of men who cheat on women still outnumbers the percentage of women who cheat on men by at least double.”

This is simply wrong; as I correctly concluded on the mere basis of her sex and passive-aggression. Connie is a statistical illiterate. The most recent figures I have seen report that 20% of married men and 15% of married women have been unfaithful. This means that men are 33% more likely to cheat than women, which is significantly less than “more than 100%.” But more relevant given the context of the post is the fact that men between the ages of 25 and 44, (the age range in which most marriage and marital unfaithfulness occurs), are also 21% more likely to be a participant in the labor force. This tends to support the reported link between increased female labor force participation and increased female unfaithfulness.

This link is further bolstered by a 2005 report which shows:

1. “Working women are more than three times more likely to be divorced than their stay-at-home counterparts.”

2. “The longer hours women work, the more likely they are to be divorced.”

3. “Compared to non-working women, those with a full-time job have a 29 per cent higher odds of divorce.”

Now, obviously not all divorces are the result of extramarital affairs, let alone affairs by the wife. But the statistics are conclusive and clear. If a man elects to pursue a relationship with a woman who intends to continue working full-time, he will significantly increase the chances that his wife will be unfaithful to him and that he will eventually end up divorced. Furthermore, he should also know that if his marriage survives, his wife will make for an inferior mother, as his children will be 23% less likely to pass college entrance exams, 29% more likely to be unemployed, and will weigh an average of four pounds more at age 11 than children whose mothers care enough about them to stay at home and raise them.

(For the Nth time, this should not be taken as criticism of single mothers who have no choice but to work and provide for their children. One cannot condemn a nonexistent choice. However, most working mothers who are married do not have to work, they have instead made a lifestyle choice that happens to place a priority on other things than personally raising their children. While it is their right to make such a choice, it is not their right to pretend they have not made it.)

BJ attempted to respond by relying upon the always humorous, but logically invalid Appeal to Individual Nonexistent Hearsay approach, as she wrote: “Sorry, but my husband has yet to tell me that a co-worker hit on him, but rather a customer (i.e., stay at home moms who are good wives and superior mothers).”

BJ’s argument is based on four central assumptions:

1. BJ’s husband as likely to report being hit on by a co-worker, who would be a regular threat to their marriage, than a customer with whom he spends far less, if indeed any, time. This may be true, but it is by no means certain.  And BJ is not a reliable determinant of her husband’s inclination to keep her informed on the subject.

2. BJ’s husband is equally attractive to his co-workers as his customers. This is questionable. Since his work brings him into regular contact with stay-at-home wives, his employment status is probably relatively low, an observation supported by our knowledge that BJ herself works and supplements the marital income.

3. BJ’s husband has a similar number of female co-workers and customers. This is unknown, but unlikely. But it’s an important assumption, because even if he had been hit on 10 times more often by stay-at-home wives than by his female co-workers, the logic would still remain relevant if he had 100 female clients and two female co-workers. While 10>1, 10%<50%.

4. BJ’s husband’s experience is statistically relevant. Since we are dealing with a sample size of one, it is obvious that her entire objection is completely spurious. In my own anecdotal and equally statistically invalid experience, I have never been hit on by a stay-at-home wife while I have been the recipient of definite indicators of sexual interest from working wives on many occasions. Of course, I have always been of relatively high employment status and my work seldom brings me into contact with stay-at-home wives, so it should come as no surprise that my experience would significantly diverge from that of BJ’s husband.

Connie next attempted to appeal to studies that equate women’s “equality” with national “happiness”. “The happiest societies on earth, those that were surveyed quantitatively on quality of life across a variety of factors, correlate strongly with the societies having the most equality for women.”  This is partially true, but as you might correctly conclude, it depends entirely upon how “happiness” is defined. Given that Egypt and Saudi Arabia were rated the 12th and 13th happiest nations on Earth by the New Economics Foundation, (the famously equalitarian nation of Sweden was ranked 53rd), her assertion is as dubious as it is irrelevant to the subject of whether working women are a reasonable bet to make good wives. Most “happiness” metrics are little more than a measure of societal wealth, and since only wealthy societies can afford the economic and societal ills of equalitarianism, (even if only for a few decades before the inevitable structural collapse), it should come as no surprise that the correlation is mistaken for causation by the illogical and statistically illiterate.

But without question my favorite response was the quintessentially feminine one from Betty, who apparently takes an ad hominem approach to ascertaining the truth of any and all things. “After reading vox’s blog about women in the workplace (talk about painting a “Scarlet S” with a wide brush) I can’t in good conscience buy the argument [the column on Herman Cain] above. Being a member of MENSA doesn’t make him unequivocally correct.”

It is absolutely true that my daunting superintelligence is no guarantee that I am correct on any given matter, it merely indicates that those of lesser intelligence, a subset of humanity which includes approximately 6.92 billion people if one rounds up from the nearest hundredth, should at least be open to the possibility that they are wrong when their opinion diverges dramatically from my own. However, neither the vastness of my intellect nor my statistically sound conclusions have anything at all to do with the wisdom of electing a former Federal Reserve executive to fix a problem that was primarily caused by the Federal Reserve, still less a Fed official who believes that the Fed has done nothing questionable, let along wrong.

Mailvox: a leader in spite of herself

Anon writes about the structure of her marriage and wonders how she can modify it:

We are a mix of #3 and #4. My husband has always joked that he “got married so he wouldn’t have to make” certain decisions. Several years later my career blossomed, we moved out of state for my job, and I now make 50% more than he does. I believe that may be the root of his non-committal behavior. Early in our relationship he was very much “in charge” and VD’s post made me realize how much I miss that.

Last year we lost our first child – she was stillborn. Since then he just does whatever I want or ask. I don’t take advantage (seriously), but his lack of leadership is astounding. I can usually get him to make decisions on big ticket purchases, but not much else.

I fully admit that I am a control freak at times – feel I must care for the house, the husband, the pets, and my career. With our recent tragedy I truly want to simplify my life and allow him to take a much larger role in the running of our lives. How??

First, condolences, etc. Miscarriages and stillbirths can be emotionally difficult, but they do happen and should not dissuade a couple from trying again. Second, as the issues this raises are arguably more relevant to Alpha Game, I have responded to it there.

Mailvox: When x is merely x

One of the things that often amuses me about genuinely knowledgeable experts is the way they walk around dragging their well-credentialed hammers behind them, desperately searching for an opportunity to show off their ability to hit nails, regardless of whether the nail needs hitting, or, as happens to be the case here, even exists in the first place.

The Staggering Height of the Logic Midget wrote:

Let X be a logical statement; that is, X is a statement considered to be either true or false, but not both.

Assume X is true. By basic rules of logic, not-X is false. Is a truth table needed?

It could be that you are not requiring X to be a logical statement. But no, because you use standard logic notation such as X and Not-X, X must be a logical statement as I described above.

It could be that you are thinking of a more complicated scenario in which logic quantifiers are involved. For example, if there exists a divine statement that’s true, that doesn’t prove that every divine statement is true.

But regardless, no matter how complicated the statement X is, if X is true, then not-X is false. If X is false, then not-X is true.

It could be that you’re thinking of the common mistake of a person claiming that (A implies B) proves (not-A implies not-B).

But regardless, no matter the form of statement X, if X is true, then not-X is false.

What Logic Midget failed to recognize is that not all discussions of logical conclusions involve formal philosophical logic notation. His increasingly deranged argument with Markku was more than a little amusing; it’s as if an economist overheard a woman say that a certain individual was a GDP, then leaped in and started telling her that she obviously didn’t know anything about trade balances and deflators, little realizing that the acronym simply stood for a divinely doomed bastard. This isn’t merely a failure of an assumption, it’s a failure of basic contextual comprehension.

Logic Midget was referring to a statement that I made in summarizing the example of divine promises cited earlier in the comment thread.

“My position is one of volipotence, which means that God can lie or not lie as it suits Him… But I’ve noticed that very few people who discuss theology are capable of grasping implications… It’s as if they can’t see the negative space that always surrounds the positive assertion. X does not absolutely require Not-X, but it does tend to suggest its existence.”

What I was referring to here was the existence of divine promises in the context of the question of God’s perfect truthfulness. The point I made was that the fact God has explicitly assured that specific statements he has made are true tends to imply that other statements he has made will are not. If we like, we can put it this way: X = divine statement guaranteed to be true and Not X = divine statement not guaranteed to be true. Insofar as the formal logic applies in that way, Logic Midget is correct. But only trivially so, because we’re obviously not talking about a single divine statement here, we’re talking about a comparison between different divine statements, in fact, we’re actually talking about the set of all divine statements and two distinct subsets within it.

(I should note that I was not using X in any formal sense here. X simply served as a variable representing any word with a specific meaning that is limited in a manner that carries intrinsic implications. For example, “afternoon” implies the existence of both “noon” and “before noon” just as saying “what I tell you now is true” implies “what I told you then may not be true”. In this case, when X = afternoon and Not-X = before noon, then obviously X and Not-X both simultaneously exist, the rules of formal logical notation notwithstanding, given that afternoon is not before noon.)

In his myopic focus on the tree of formal logic, Logic Midget has completely failed to notice the forest of the actual subject at hand. Because it is not the logical distinction between the truth or falsehood of a single divine statement that is relevant here, but rather the semantic implication of statements that are promises and statements that are not promises. The two points I was making were as follows:

1. There are implications behind the use of certain specific terms. If God’s promises are guaranteed to be true, then His non-promises are not necessarily guaranteed to be true. Insofar as God makes statements that are not promises, there is an implication that those statements are not guaranteed to be true, as well as a further implication that God makes statements that are not true.

2. On the other hand, the implication that these statements are not guaranteed to be true does not make them untrue, it merely allows for the possibility that they may not be true.

Logic Midget really should have known better, but he was too eager to strike an educated pose. And since I am his logical superior despite knowing far less about formal notation, it’s not hard for me to find his two logical errors, both at the beginning and right here: “It could be that you are not requiring X to be a logical statement. But no, because you use standard logic notation such as X and Not-X, X must be a logical statement as I described above.”

His first error was his assumption that X “is a statement considered to be either true or false, but not both”. He compounded this with his second error in which he stated that “Not-X” is standard logic notation. It is not, as he should have noted that I did not use (¬P), (~P), or even (-P). In fact, if I had been making use of formal logic notation, I wouldn’t have used any of them anyhow, but rather (P –> Q). Sometimes X is just a variable. Note that Logic Midget didn’t bother to ask what X represented, nor did he even comprehend which part of the statement was the logically relevant one here.

So, once more, we see the wisdom inherent in asking a few preliminary questions rather than making assumptions and thereby leaping to incorrect conclusions. But there are few people so predictably prone to making asses of themselves as well-educated individuals eager to exhibit their hard-won educations.

Mailvox: Not so much

What we have here is a failure to comprehend a concept… MD asks about a potential equivalency:

On your thoughts about atheism (in your culture) being a syptom of social autism; presumably in my culture ceationism is also a symptom of social autism (given a tiny minority on the fringes of society hold these beliefs)?

My thought is that it simply doesn’t work like that. There are several problems with this attempt to construct an equivalency, beginning with the assumption that there is “an atheist culture” given the fact that atheists repeatedly avow that there is no such thing, indeed, that such a thing is not even possible. But unless you have reason to believe that creationists are prone to behaving badly according to the mores of the dominant non-creationist culture or that the creationists do not understand those mores or are believing as they do in a reaction to that culture, there is absolutely no basis on which to propose such an equivalency.

The social autism of atheists goes well beyond the mere fact of their failure to subscribe to theism. This should be obvious, given that agnostics too fail to subscribe to the dominant theistic beliefs and yet do not exhibit any signs of social autism.

Mailvox: this should be amusing

Like Sam Harris, DK claims to have solved the ought vs is problem:

I suspect you’re not interested in the fact that I’ve solved the ought-from-is problem,* but I figure I shouldn’t make the decision on your behalf. You call the project ‘futile’ which is to say you have some very good reasons to be uninterested in any particular instance of it. I would
like to know what those reasons are. Especially, is there some reason you shouldn’t be interested, even if I’m right?

As it is true I’ve solved the problem, I should be able to contradict these reasons, except possibly that last reason.

*(More precisely, there’s an irrefutable definition which, when called ‘ought,’ leads to system that looks like morality, based entirely on unmistakable facts like that people have preferences.)

Given the fact that DK wrongly derived “very good reasons to be uninterested” from “belief in futility, this doesn’t bode well for the likelihood that his solution is correct. But, as per my policy of giving everyone, however crazy, a shot, I emailed him back as follows.

I’m not interested because it hasn’t been solved. The solution isn’t a fact, it is simply your opinion at this point, and I doubt your opinion is any more founded in fact than Sam Harris’s opinion that he solved the problem. But if you wish me to dismantle whatever crackpot solution you’ve proposed and illustrate why it is incorrect, I will be happy to do so. Based on the weasel words in your description, I suspect you are simply playing the same sort of logically illegitimate semantic games that Harris does.

“If I irrefutably define “3” as “2”, then I have proven that 2+3=4!”

Brilliant stuff. Anyhow, go ahead and send me the link. I’ll take a look at it.

I’m sure you will all join me in eagerly awaiting our introduction to the first major philosophical breakthrough of the 21st century.

In which we are diminished

One of the old school Ilk has moved on to the next level. Longtime readers will recall Alex, the sharp-witted mother, outspoken Christian, and strong homeschooling advocate who seldom hesitated to share her opinions here. She wasn’t around as much the last two years, as she was increasingly occupied with battling the cancer that ultimately got the better of her last week. She was a fighter by nature, and it came as no surprise to learn that she lived longer than the doctors had anticipated. She and Spacebunny set up the original homeschooling group here together, so if you’re involved in the current one, spare a thought or two for her today.

She was fiercely proud of her son Jake, who by all accounts has grown into a fine young man worthy of his mother. She suffered no fools, gladly or otherwise, and I always admired her spirit. May she rest in peace and in the glory of her Heavenly Father.

Mailvox: on Socrates

F1 wonders why I think poorly of Socrates:

I’m interested in your take on Socrates given that you’ve said you’re inclined to despise him. He seems to me like a man that surpasses most, in authenticity at least, and any man who can simultaneously understand him and despise him would seem to me to really be taking a bold position. He might be annoying, and even describes himself as a “gadfly”, but I think the example he gave was really something extraordinary and admirable, so why do you “tend to despise him”?

I think that to understand Socrates is to despise him. If we assume that Plato’s portrait of the Athenian philosopher is accurate and his rendering of the dialogues is a reasonable facsimile of the historical conversations that took place, we are forced to conclude that Socrates is anything but authentic or admirable in a variety of ways. He was most certainly extraordinary and his intelligence was formidable, but his philosophy is essentially evil, self-serving, and juvenile. Over the centuries, we have not only seen The Republic serve as philosophical justification for both tyranny and self-appointed elitism, but we must note that the behavior of his prize pupil, Alcibiades, is entirely in keeping with the principles Socrates taught. If one judges a philosopher by his fruits, Socrates fares very ill indeed.

I have not gone through the various dialogues with the same close attention that I paid to Euthyphro, but as I demonstrated in my critique of it, Socrates demonstrates an astonishingly dishonest willingness to apply a false equivalency in order to complete his structurally illogical argument. Despite my regular use of the Socratic method to discredit and humiliate overmatched critics, I have little regard for it as a method to determine truth because it often relies upon artificially simplifying multi-faceted concepts into a single binary question. The Socratic method is far from useless, but I see it as being a rhetorical weapon than a philosophical device. Which, naturally, raises the question of why Socrates made such heavy use of it and for what purpose.

In summary, I see Socrates as a fraudulent philosophical trickster whose false modesty and respect for the gods is no more convincing than his illegitimate logic in Euthyphro. And if there is one thing I despise more than intellectual frauds, it is false modesty. Genuine humility is a virtue, whereas false modesty is one of the crudest conceivable insults to the observer’s intelligence.

While we’re on the subject of email, HM5 responded to my post on crushing women’s dreams over at Alpha Game:

As a woman, I find this discussion very enlightening. I don’t know what sort of women you know, but you don’t appear to respect them very much. Women do, as a whole, have a deep need to be mothers; its in our dna. However, the fact that you discuss treating women like they have no clue what they want is really astonishing. Perhaps it is what most men are truly thinking. Perhaps your women respect you too much to believe that this is really the way you feel. Perhaps if they read your comments they would see some part truth and some complete misunderstandings that are so far off base as to be funny.

I responded at Alpha Game, but suffice it to say that I think women should think very carefully about their historical statements before they demand men treat their words with full equalitarian respect.

Mailvox: on optimism

SN wonders why I am such a cheerful prophet of doom:

As Christendom falls in England and the march of the Sodomites continues unabated, it is easy to feel glum. In spite of Christianity maintaining some sort of respectability within philosophical circles, its status as a position of social and moral respectability is experiencing a precipitous decline. Hollywood, the media and the elite universities of western civilization are anti-Christian. Not to rely solely on personal anecdote, but I just had the unpleasant experience of applying to do a research PhD in Theology at [top university], only to discover while researching potential supervisors that more than half of the Theology faculty are atheists. Given Lewis’ social ostracism among the dons of his day, I suppose I should not have been surprised.

More to the point, does the decline of Christianity in the west ever get you down? We talk of Christianity’s growth among Africans and Chinese and cyclical periods of persecution that inspire a resurgence of the Church, but all evidence appears to indicate that things are going to get pretty rough. We’re heading into a Depression, the secular state is on the rise and totalitarianism lies on the horizon, if it is not here already.

How do you rise above it all, is what I am asking? What practical advice could you share with the average Christian who is trying to educate him/herself as much as possible about their Christian heritage, and as a result, is more aware of how bad the situation actually is?

You always seem clear eyed about the situation, yet optimistic. I look around, expecting to see jack boots come marching round the corner any second. Is that madness or informed paranoia?

First, it is informed paranoia. The jackboots are coming, just as they have done since they were hobnailed sandals. As to why that doesn’t get me down, well, the truth is that from time to time it does. But that probably does not show much because the emotion that the ongoing collapse of civilization primarily inspires in me is one of irritation that humanity can’t seem to learn the most elementary lessons from its own history. It’s hard to feel too sorry for an individual, a society, or a species that repeatedly insists on smashing its face into a brick wall with so little regard for what happened the last time it did that.

In other words, I see it more as comedic farce than tragedy because I don’t expect anything better from the mass of humanity or its arrogant, short-sighted, self-styled ruling elite. It is impossible to read history and reach any other conclusion. When I was a child, I read the Bible and marveled at the way the Israelites would willfully put themselves into danger by ignoring God’s commands, end up suffering through tremendous hardship, cry out to God and get rescued, then go on to repeat the process within a generation or three. I thought the Israelites were a remarkably stupid people and assumed that God made them His chosen people in much the same way we regard a child as being “special” today.

But the more history I read, the more I saw that the Israelites’ behavior is the normal pattern of human behavior. Man stands on the shoulders of giants and thinks himself tall, only to learn otherwise when he strides boldly forward. Perhaps that makes you cry, but it tends to make me laugh, even if it does sound a little hollow and sardonic even to me. But how can you not laugh, as atheists and pagans blithely assemble the infrastructure of the old slaughterhouse and call it progress, never imagining for a second that they will not only be its victims again, but will find themselves crying out to God for rescue from the destiny they so ardently desired.

As for the root of my optimism, it is three-fold. First is that in the grand historical scheme, I see the some of the darker elements prophesied in the Bible unfolding. This reinforces my confidence, (not that it was necessary) that this is only the first level of the game of life. The second is that I tend to live day-to-day. We can plan for tomorrow, but we can’t actually know what it will bring. And the third is that I do my best to find joy where it can be found, even if it is the bitter joy of seeing that one’s cynical take on events has once more been proven correct.

There is nothing new under the sun. We, and the generation before us, have enjoyed the lazy days of economic summer. And while it is a little hard to see the leaves turning brown and dying as winter approaches, we can steel ourselves by knowing that it is not the first one and that what our ancestors survived, we, too, can hope to survive. The prince of this world may be preparing his horsemen for another terrible ride, but God is still God and God is still good.

The shadows grow ever longer, but never forget that somewhere beyond the shadows there is light.

Mailvox: rage of the entitled elderly

Juddsnell reveals the entitlement mentality of those whose primary benefit to society consists of sitting on ice floes:

Suck it up if you are so freaking superior to the greatest generation or the boomers than fix it and quit making excuses. Until then you are all pathetic losers. Blame it on grandma and grampa and mommy and daddy. Cant believe how many of you whiners complain they didn’t leave you something. You deserve nothing you freaking credit card addicts. Save your money drive a ten year old car and be an example instead of a whiney pathetic class of overindulged wimps. Only mistake your boomer parents made was to listen to Dr Spock and not beat your ass when you got too lippy. Your self indulged youthful superiority complex makes me puke!

Juddsnell is doing nothing more than projecting here. Because he feels entitled to living off the generations that are paying for the Social Security, Medicare, and prescription drug entitlement handouts that vastly exceed the amount of money he paid in, he therefore assumes that Generation X and Y are whiners. But we’re not whining, we are merely noting the readily observable fact that since Grandpa and Grandma left nothing to Mommy and Daddy, there is not a chance in Hell that our Baby Boomer parents will leave behind anything but massive debts, a ruined economy, and a vibrantly disintegrating society.

Of course, because the Baby Boomers are far too self-centered a generation – did they ever mention that they changed the world? – to fix the giant Ponzi scheme that they mistakenly think will support them in retirement, they aren’t going to do anything until the system reaches the mathematically inevitable breakdown. This means that it is going to be those very “pathetic losers” and “credit card whiners” who will not have any choice but to fix the system.

And guess how it will be done? By ending all the debt-funded payments to the entitled elderly like Juddsnell, Mommy, and Daddy, who are responsible for digging this massive hole. It wasn’t the Grasshopper Generation that created the prescription drug entitlement during the Bush administration after all. The Baby Boomers may not have created the original problem, but they not only didn’t try to fix it, they blatantly exacerbated it. But Social Security is going to end, Medicare is going to end, and Medicaid are going to end, and they’re all going to shut down faster than anyone imagines at present.

And then, instead of decrying the younger generations for daring to spend money they don’t have on themselves, Juddsnell will be castigating them for refusing to spend it on his useless, wrinkled ass. And the vibrant peoples who were imported as substitutes for the missing millions of Generations X and Y aren’t going to argue with us and insist that they be taxed more to keep elderly gringos alive.