In this episode, Simone and the host delve into a controversial discussion on the impact of women and feminist movements on society. The conversation heavily references a piece by Arctotherium titled 'Progress Studies and Feminization', which argues that the rise of women in politics, the labor force, and academia has led to a decline in societal progress and optimism. The host presents various graphs and statistics to support this narrative, highlighting trends in energy consumption, publication rates, and language use from the 1960s onwards. They discuss the role of rationality, reason, and scientific progress, contrasting the forward-looking optimism of past decades with contemporary societal anxieties. The episode also touches on the gendered differences in attitudes towards technology, housing, and environmental issues, suggesting that the increasing influence of women in cultural and political spheres has had a conservative effect on societal progress.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00 ] Hello Simone. Today we are going to be discussing how women destroyed society. And because of

Simone Collins: course they did.

Malcolm Collins: Of course they did. No, actually, so people, they go on our podcast and they might think we're gonna do one of our sort of bait and switch things here, or I'm like, well, women caused some problems, you know?

No. And, and especially, no, you're like, but

Simone Collins: actually no, seriously my

Malcolm Collins: words, I'm gonna be going over somebody else's piece. So no one attribute this to me. I'm not saying, I'm just saying it's worth talking about this piece. You're just asking a questions lot of, and statistics. Shows how society began to fall apart with the rise of the feminist movement and women participating in politics in the labor force.

Mm. And usually I'm not like particularly compelled by these sorts of cases if people know me. Mm. In this instance, I found it. But what's interesting is the entire piece, if you didn't like Wade through the first part, which I'm not gonna share with you guys 'cause it's boring. Thanks. [00:01:00 ] You and, and the title, you wouldn't know that that's what the piece is.

The piece is progress Studies and feminization. Okay. And, and then the subtitle is, you Can't Undo just one part of the 1960s, and it's by our favorite, one of our favorite writers for this show is Arc Ethereum. Oh, he's fun.

Simone Collins: Oh, and he also, yeah, no, he's definitely, it's Women's Fault. So, okay.

Yeah. Okay. Ardo fine. Let's hear your Ethereum.

Malcolm Collins: No. Yeah, and, and the broader thing is, and I, and, and I'll note here, I'm not saying all women are a danger to society. I'm just saying non-autistic women are a danger to society. Thanks, Malcolm. Like, women, like my wife are fine. You're, you're a sweetheart.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, just, just to do basic female functions, I have to take the same amount of hormones as a trans woman, so. Can we really call me female,

Malcolm Collins: right? Yeah. So here I'm gonna pop on screen a graph that was in this first rambling bit he did which is the Henry Adams curve of energy consumption.

And it's supposed to go up [00:02:00 ] logarithmically, but actually what we can see here is around the 1960s it stopped, and if anything started declining while before, perfectly fitting to the curve. Then if we go down to this next study here we can look at total pages published in the federal Register, thousands of pages per year.

We can also see a logarithmic curve going up until we hit around 1975, and then it basically stops. Okay. Now to go into the piece where it starts getting interesting. We live in a age that has lost its optimism. Polls show that people think the world is getting worse and not better. Children fear dying from environmental catastrophe before they reach old age.

Technologists are as likely to be told that they are ruining society as they are bettering it. Da da da. And then he is right. This change is quantifiable books written in English, French and German. The Fri three major languages of the modern West showed a continuous rise in the number of terms relating to progress [00:03:00 ] and the future from around 1600 to 1970 when things suddenly took a turn for the worse.

And here I will put on a screen, a graph here, and what you can see here is. Going into the 19 hundreds basically until you get to around the 1970s. Two things happened in the English language. People stop using terms that stand for progress or the future, like moving forwards. Oh, and they start using more words that are associated with caution, worry, and risk.

Oh. So society basically became worried about the future getting better. And if you go, and we talked about this in our episode nationalism saves. Countries, and it's not just nationalism, it's retro futuristic nationalism where if you go to the 1950s sci-fi, it's just very forward looking. Very excited about the future.

You know, it's all, you know, rocket ships and exploration and, and utopian colonies. When that stuff is incredibly rare in modern sci-fi, you see very, very little utopian sci-fi anymore. And even. Sci-fi that used to have, I, I think Star Trek's a bit of a [00:04:00 ] dystopia, but it's at least written as a Di Utopia Watch.

Our Star Trek episode, one of my favorites. But the utopian nature has left Modern Star Trek where it's written much more dystopian. Now, if you look at something like, you know, lower decks or you look at the new like Picard show and stuff like that. And the larger piece, just so you know, that he is, he sort of views feminism as an antagonist to what he refers to as progress studies or like research into progress.

Now I actually think this framing is stupid when what he's actually talking about is human progress more broadly. But if you're wondering what progress studies is that's like what Tyler Cohen, like Mercer does, that sort of stuff.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Or I guess aporia more broadly does that, which is where this piece was written.

One of the biggest drivers. One works

Simone Collins: in progress too, right? Based outta the uk.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay, so then back to this piece, one of the biggest drivers of progress is rationality. Progress depends on the belief that the world is rational to begin with and can be understood, and therefore intentionally [00:05:00 ] changed for the better.

I would agree with that. Anton Howes, the historian behind the age of invention, calls this the quote unquote improvers mentality and observe that it is historically rare, only arising in a handful of cultures. This is not an intuitive belief. Exclamation mark. Muslim scholar Al Gali famously argued that as everything occurs the way Allah wills it, rather than according to predictable laws, science was impossible.

The idea of. Progress that sustained improvement is most possible and desirable is a fleeting one. And here, I'll note here, we've talked about when Islam began to fail and became sort of a religion of the dark ages, because there was a period when it was one of the greatest religions of progress out there.

So much so that when Western writers would write scientific works, they would often write under Arab pen names because people wouldn't take them seriously. So that's, that is how far ahead of us they were in the sciences. Right. And Al Gza comes along and basically everything begins to fall apart.

He's like, we need to become [00:06:00 ] mystical. We need to stop this, this progress

Simone Collins: stuff. Oh, no. Basically, oh, no.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Yeah. Not great. And I don't think it's, it's great for a lot of modern Jewish stuff because we are seeing this in modern Jewish religious traditions with the Habad movement, for example, moving them more towards mysticism and normalizing mysticism, which I see as sort of a Jewish version of Alga. Sufi mystics.

Speaker 4: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Even more importantly, reason allows people to stand on the shoulders of giants. Scientific. And, and I'll note here what mysticism, the reason why mysticism doesn't allow that is because mysticism says that the subjective experiences you, you have whether it's from corrupt in middle states like drugs or spinning, or just your own intuition, take precedence over subjective rationality that can be tested in sort of the court of, of the real world, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: which means you can't stand on giant shoulders anymore because now you're just speculating on somebody else's speculation, which never had anybody really confirm its authenticity except for whoever was a popular idea [00:07:00 ] person at the time. Scientific and technological progress are driven by exceptional individuals, but reason makes it possible to reliably build on the past or to debunk them when they're wrong, which allows the collective brain to improve over time rather than running in circles.

With that in mind, the English purpose shows a steady rise in reason related words, a corresponding fall in intuition related words from 1850 to 1975. In here he shows a chart where you can see principle component words, sentiment intention related words, and rationality related words in four major language groups.

Here you've got English all you've got Spanish, you've got English fiction, and you've got English. Excel fiction. I don't know what that stands