Luke Burgis: evaluation

Transcript context

…Women are more left-wing, but as you know, measured sex seems to be going down; certainly, childbearing, which we measure pretty well, is going down. Marriage is a more complicated story, but for some socioeconomic groups, it’s down. There’s just much less dating. Everyone claims the dating apps are broken. There was a piece in New Statesman about, in Britain, angry young women are very upset at the men that they encounter. It just seems to be worse than usual, the gap between men and women? Yes. I think technology is largely to blame for that, the way that it sorts things that it thinks men should see versus things that women should see. It increases the political polarization for everybody, but in particular, between the genders, I think that it plays a huge role. I think that the way that men and women even meet each other, the way that dating works, is very, very different than the way that it used to be. We often sort based on what we think our preferences are before we’ve had a chance to encounter a flesh and human person of the opposite sex, and perceptions are formed, often wrongly. The woman that I eventually married, I never would have found her if I was using a dating app, for instance. I think technology has exacerbated some of the false perceptions that we have about the opposite sex and what people believe. That’s especially true when it comes to men and women because the algorithms, the way that the social contagion works, it knows that we are different. We are men and women, and it exacerbates all of the differences and doesn’t do much to promote common understanding. I believe that men and women are complementary, different but complementary, and that’s not necessarily a very popular view anymore. At what point does being anti-mimetic itself become a mimetic identity, and do you see some signs of that in Silicon Valley? Everyone’s supposed to be contrarian. There’s a kind of false contrarianism. You don’t even know anymore what’s a contrarian point of view. Are we at that stage with Girardianism?…

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