From: M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2020 07:01:44 +0000 (-0800) Subject: compiling notes for "Origins of Unfairness" review X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=8c3e8b7779f3823404626928d8567a7aa248f440;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git compiling notes for "Origins of Unfairness" review --- diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness.md b/content/drafts/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..adc499e --- /dev/null +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness.md @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +Title: Book Review: Cailin O'Connor's The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution +Date: 2020-01-20 +Category: commentary +Tags: categorization, game theory, review (book) +Status: draft + +[This is a _super-great book_](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-unfairness-9780198789970) about the cultural-evolutionary game theory of gender roles! I am _unreasonably excited_ about this book! + +A puzzle: every known culture has gender roles, but the details + +gender makes inequitable coordination equilibria possible in a way that isn't available in a uniform population—O'Connor gives an example about splitting a pizza, but my example: gay relationships have to coordinate anew + +If inequality emerges under minimal conditions without biases, then bias training can't help + +division of labor by sex is universal: big-game hunting, metal and woodworking, mining, and musical instruments are always male +spinning, laundering, cooking (esp. vegetables), dairying + +my example: Plow culture vs. hoe culture https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/hoe-cultures-a-type-of-non-patriarchal-society/ (O'Connor mentions this too in Chapter 2) + +correlative vs. complementary coordination problems + +Hawk-dove has two pure-strategy equilbria Hawk/Dove and Dove/Hawk. (The Hawk has no incentive to switch to Dove and settle for a lower payoff, but the Dove has no incentive to switch to Hawk and destroy the surplus fighting) + +division of labor is a coordination problem because specialization + +greetings are symmetric (both shake right hand), unless you have types (gentleman kisses lady's hand); everyone drives on the right + +types left you redescribe a complementary coordination problem and a correlative one (with a type-switch): types break the symmetry when many pairs of individuals have to solve the same problem + +types are not strategies: they're just tags with no significance ("drive on right" isn't a type) + +gradient markers: if type value is continuous (like age or skin color), you can use "If my tag value is greater" + +categories provide the extra information needed to break symmetry, but precisely because people can't switch roles + +need to specialize in a skill long before you actually pair up and start producing (Steven Goldberg also made this point) + +the coordination problem of how much parental leave to offer could be different payoffs to men and women even with equal treatment + +one coordination problem can affect the conventionality of another: childcare being incompatible with big game hunting, shrinks the basin of attraction for women hunting big game + +Without types, everyone gets the same payoff: that's what it means to be at equilibrium! (If one strategy did better, people would switch to it until it didn't) + +bargaining with the Nash demand game: fair demands are the only ESS, but it's possible for 4/6 equilibria to emerge + +threatpoints (or disagreement points): if bargaining fails, someone has a worse BATNA. If you have a high threatpoint, the difference between demanding Low and getting the threatpoint isn't a big deal, which makes less of an incentive to learn to demand Low and less risk to demanding High—and if they learn to demand High, that forces the other type to learn to demand Low + +(0 as disagremeent point isn't special) + +heterogeniety within a type doesn't matter much for bargaining norms: women with high earning power are still conventionally women + +"No bias in this model, no stereotype threat, not much psychology in general" + +[my dream about the use of maps](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#a-dream-about-the-use-of-maps) + +A sign of excellent high-integrity scholarship is when the positive _insights_ contained in a work can be appreciated independently of the author's normative agenda (if any). + +[Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) + +Judith Butler stereotype threat + +> "Since many jobs take time and effort to learn to do well, families could save time by dividing duties and encouraging individuals to specialize. Little girls could learn to do the labor expected of women, and little boys the labor expected of men" https://behavioralscientist.org/gendered-division-of-labor-served-a-purpose-to-make-progress-dont-erase-it-replace-it/ + +> "Even if [Larry Summers] was right, he ought to have kept his mouth shut." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/women-math-and-science_b_6573074