That's just like, anecdotal, man
The negation of judgment, selectively deployed.
This is a follow-up to last week’s essay on judgment. I don’t usually post on days other than Sunday, but I’m experimenting. Thank you for being with me, and I especially appreciate so many of you sharing my work, which has gotten me this far.
When a person asserts a conclusion that hasn’t been institutionally stamped with a study, the easiest, most pedestrian epistemic move is to say, ‘that’s just anecdotal. This is intellectual laziness coded as sophistication, and is one of the easiest straw man arguments.
Furthermore, intellectual authority asserted by a woman is read as a status threat to both men and women of any political persuasion. Feminists don’t actually address this — everything other than this, because asserting that intellectually dominant women exist would be to admit that there is a hierarchy of intelligence. And women’s society requires the pretense that we’re all the same, equally smart, equally beautiful.
So men unwittingly or knowingly perpetuate this paradigm because they, too, feel a status threat, and because men learn the same things about women’s social roles as I did. Women are criticized for tone, certitude in claims, and the assertion of intellectual independence, not their arguments.
A woman is primarily evaluated socially, even if she’s doing intellectual work.
Last week, I argued that judgment has been socially devalued at the very moment it is most needed, as LLMs complete the process of cognitive atrophy that the educated class has brought upon itself.
They’ve done so by socially punishing anyone daring to assert a principle without institutional approval; presumably, they require at least five citations to believe you. Nothing can be known without a study, and everything is anecdotal until a controlled experiment validates it.
Cosmetic procedures are for women to compete with women, not for men. Makeup is also largely for the same purpose. Nails, shoe collections, elaborate clothes, frozen muscles in the face: these are claimed as requirements to attract men, but they’re actually for intrasexual competition among women. Women judge each other’s appearances more harshly than men.
How do I know? 38 years of living in which I refused to do these things, and the marketplace, as it were, rewarded me for it. It truly is glorious to win by not actually trying — they mocked me relentlessly when I was younger so the satisfaction of having better skin is strong. And no, “natural makeup” also isn’t required. It’s a thing because the beauty industrial complex wants our money. And then we wonder why we have less money than men.
And so Ethan the Fake Hippie makes my point better than I could have.
