I was surprised that a new comment was not accepted at "Matriarchal Blessing" on Substack even though I had liked the original post and said so. The reply rules told me not to be insulting. I didn't think I was.
The update is that at least some of my comments remain up and I have lots of people liking them. Go figure
Insulting is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteAre you going to tell us what the comment was?
ReplyDelete@Christopher and then we're supposed to imagine that the robot requires a human supervisor, who could be a woman and in fact could be pretty much anyone? That's not really women entering the trades, it's replacing a skilled / demanding job with a "you just need a pulse and will be paid accordingly" job.
DeleteYou probably noticed this already but SubStack has some new AI nanny screening comments. I haven't had a comment rejected that I know of but I have noticed comments that have been 'hidden' (i.e. flagged by the AI censor) and usually when reading them it's hard to tell why.
ReplyDeleteI scrolled over to Matriarchal Blessing and while I wasn't able to see your comment on the most recent post (if that's where it was) the 'hidden' comments on that one were uniformly unremarkable and would leave anybody scratching their head as to why they were excluded from view.
DeleteThe problem they're talking about there is an interesting one, but the comments don't seem to me to be very helpful. The thesis isn't silly; it's well supported that men leave fields that become predominantly female, which then become less well-paid.
DeleteWhy? Well, one reason is that a lot more people are now willing to do whatever it was than previously (~doubled supply) and it probably isn't in greater demand than previously (steady demand). Men are more likely to accept physically difficult careers like construction, or dangerous careers like oil rig work, and there they will be competing with fewer people for whatever price the demand sets.
The comments seem to be that men are doing it because their feelings are hurt. Most likely they weren't thinking about their feelings as a primary concern when they decided on an unpleasant or dangerous career. Pretty much anything you can do in air conditioning is now flooded with applicants, so fewer are choosing to go to a college preparation that points them that way. Makes rational sense to me.
Also, college is objectively worse than it used to be; education in general seems to be. At the same time as the quality has declined, the cost of going to college is much higher than once. That also seems like a rational cause that might be in play.
I expect that AI and advanced robotics are going to open more physically demanding trades to women. Imagine a humanoid robot capable of navigating in a house that does most of the heavy lifting and positioning.
DeleteI mean, the trades are open to women now. My strong sense is that the choices are pretty much being freely made, both by men and by women. Do you value working in air conditioning more or making money more? Do you value a safe working environment more, or the potential to earn the most you can given your circumstances? We know what we see on average; we also know that there are exceptional individuals who don't follow the mold more common to their sex.
DeleteEducation was supposed to change the circumstances, and for a long time it did. It's also subject to supply and demand, however, and increasingly the supply of educated labor who wants safe and comfortable working conditions is larger than the demand. Thus, we have a system whereby you are invited to take on large debts paid off in decades in return for admission -- not as once to a higher level of wage-earning -- to a heavily competitive field where AI and compute are driving wages down further.
@ George. I thought of it, but couldn't tell which one it was. There were comments much more insulting than anything I would ever say, so Christopher B's explanation is likely. There is AI managing the censoring, and in its current form it has a random/unexplainable tendency. Grim is correct that a lot of the explanation was that men's widdle feewings are huht because the females are doing better than them. I had an extended discussion with a woman who was a DI softball All-American who said that men quit when they saw her hit farther than them.
ReplyDeleteI saw one comment that included the word 'incel' which I suppose might have triggered something but I doubt the routine is so simple as a word filter. Not being an author over there I have no idea how it is controlled. If I recall correctly the announcement suggested the AI nanny would learn by watching what comments were flagged or rejected by the human author (dunno if that was per Substack or globally across the platform) which to me raises the possibility the randomness is the routine getting whipsawed by people waking up on the wrong side of the bed some days.
DeleteIn these comments, I found that I was getting my dander up by taking myself completely in the wrong direction upon reading "Pretty much anything you can do in air conditioning is now flooded with applicants, so fewer are choosing to go to a . . ."
ReplyDeleteThen it continued "college . . ." rather than "trade-school . . ." and I understood that what was written to mean "jobs that aren't outdoors or in hot factory spaces" I had misread as jobs requiring EPA Section 608 Certification