Not being a dipshit is not the same thing as "bending to people's demands."

I wish I had the confidence in life to genuinely think anyone who thought or spoke differently to me was just a dipshit.

That's not what he said, and I doubt it's what he meant. Many people who disagree with me are not dipshits, but the ones who are seem to take positive joy in being disagreeable.

>most people stuck in unhappy marriages are men

That is wildly untrue. The research on whether men or women are more satisfied in their marriages shows that they have about the same levels of satisfaction.

For example: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12077

Not really sure why the demographics of philosophers effects the impact of the statement. Most philosophers are white, would it have been more impactful if the statement had brought race into it?

If you could bring race into it somehow then yes the statement might seem more based in historical precedence, rather than some idealistic fantasy world of hyper diversity, assuming most unhappily married men are also white.

I don't really get why any of that matters though. Can't you just appreciate the sentiment regardless of how it is phrased? Seems like your trying to make it political when it just isn't.

Maybe you should think about who is actually making it political, i.e. the people trying to transform the phrase into something politically correct.

Idk man sounds like they’re just taking a phrase and phrasing it slightly differently so that it applies to more people. You’re the one who was offended by that

Just a side remark, but "most philosophers are white" should probably be "most philosophers you heard about"

It’s true that only a minority of philosophers are white, and people are far less likely to be aware of philosophers outside their culture.

But there are less aggressive ways to say it.

I felt that they offered a helpful correction

My intention was not to be aggressive at all, sorry!

You’re absolutely right

> most people stuck in unhappy marriages are men

If we are counting only heterosexual and 2 people marriages, wouldn't the number of people stuck in unhappy marriages be exactly 50% men and 50% women?

The [perceived] consequences of ending a marriage seem to provide more of a disincentive to men, so they are more likely to persist in a marriage that they feel they would be unable to leave (and then have to support multiple households, etc.). The fact that women (in the USA) are more than twice as likely to initiate a divorce seems to bear this out.

"Women divorce men more often than the other way around, seems to bear out that men are more dissatisfied in marriage" seems like a stretch to me.

At any rate, it reminds me of the classic physics joke:

> An experimental physicist comes running excitedly to a theorist's office, waving a graph taken off his latest experiment. "Hmmm", says the theorist, "that's exactly where you'd expect to see that peak. Here is the reason." A long logical explanation follows. In the middle of it, the experimentalist says "Wait a minute", studies the chart for a second and says "Oops, this is upside down." He fixes it. "Hmmm," says the theorist, "you'd expect to see a dip in exactly that position. Here is the reason..."

That's an interesting thesis, but it wasn't one that I was putting forward; rather I was saying that the reality of divorce for men tends to be such that they are significantly less likely to seek divorce when their marriage is unhappy compared to women at a similar level of unhappiness.

> most people stuck in unhappy marriages are men

I would assume that the overwhelming majority of unhappy marriages are symmetrically unhappy. Though maybe it's just a failure of imagination on my part because I can't see how I could be happy about my marriage if my partner were unhappy.

I could believe that your statement is true only as a derivative of "most people in marriages are men," which is plausible since some studies have found a higher occurrence of homosexuality in men than in women.

Language is lovely because you can find so many ways to express creativity! I don't think

"Those happily married make great partners, while those unhappily married make great philosophers!"

is any less colorful than the original.

It’s bland, safe, and lifeless. The statement has no bite.

The original statement will be read by men and some men will connect to it right away, because rather than envision some abstract person, they are made to immediately picture a man, and in that image they may recognize themselves, like looking at a mirror.

> The original statement will be read by men and some men will connect to it right away, because rather than envision some abstract person, they are made to immediately picture a man, and in that image they may recognize themselves, like looking at a mirror.

Sorry, are you saying that the audience of the statement is on purpose only men? If so, how could you possibly support any claim that it's not misogynistic?

It's quite possible to target a statement at a male audience without a disclaimer and yet still not be guilty of misogyny.

The statement was made in a discussion about working in tech, not at a free masons lodge

Most people here are men. The content will reflect that. Get over it.

Is that not part of why this industry has a problem?

In isolation, it is innocuous, and has the caveat emptor. Though, if you get slapped with, you can't be a great philosopher (for what are happily or unhappily married women other than just spouses), you can't be police, fire fighter, coder, CEO.. it's just another slap in a series if many that occur daily. So, the idea is stop with the isolated examples, and perhaps the bombardment will lessen

> Sorry, are you saying that the audience of the statement is on purpose only men?

Isn't it?

Wasn't Socrates replying to a question from a young man when he (allegedly) said that?

Since the origin of that quote is directly in response to a man, isn't it aimed at ... men?

[1] https://www.quora.com/Did-Socrates-really-say-if-you-get-a-b...

I really want to take your argument as a reason why it's 100% ok to phrase it exclusionary, but then I get a response like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376163 and am reminded how that general tone will keep women away from our industry rather than attract them.

> that general tone will keep women away from our industry rather than attract them.

I don't "tones" have anything to do with it; in the 80s, Law, Accounting and Medicine[1] was absolutely dominated by men. If you think that introverted nerds are sexist, they have nothing on how doctors, lawyers and accountants were, nor how sexist the purchasers of those services were (often assuming that the men would be more competent).

And yet, today those professions have as many (if not more) females than males.

It's a stretch to think that general tone of an industry was responsible for females leaving the profession filled with introverted IT nerds and moving to high-powered and high-status executive professions.

[1] Other than nurses, in which men are still only a rounding error.

A long time ago this industry was built on women, the first programmers were women. It was a female dominated field. So what happened? The women stopped giving a fuck and the men took over.

The industry has plenty of attractive qualities for any sex: Good money, good jobs. These far outweigh the occasional toxic male who is easily put down these days. If women aren’t signing up, then maybe they just don’t care about computers as badly as people want them to.

Yes, but, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what he said and not reason to correct anything.

Leaning into society's stereotypes is one way to bend to people's implicit demands to change your writing (and quite possibly thinking).

But sure, if the metric you're optimizing is raw views and smiles and laughs, then yeah, probably the way to go is leaning into that stuff. But there's a reason those views and smiles and laughs are called "cheap".