#given birth or something? and just now i saw a tweet of someone replying (not actually replying. i don't know what it's called.

[theophagie-remade]

Twitter terfs have been having a field day lately with going full "conspiracy theorists who see "lizard people" everywhere" and insinuating that any random cis woman is akchually a man (but ~they can always tell~). Like, it has always been a thing, but in light of what's happening in the US it is really reaching absurd heights

[rachelthompsonauthor]

What is social proof? It’s a marketing concept that we are all inadvertently, unknowingly contributing to every time we click on, retweet, like, reply or comment, and share any kind of social media, article, or blog post on the net. Technically, social proof, as defined by Sprout Social is:

The concept that people will follow the actions of the masses. The idea is that since so many other people behave in a certain way, it must be the correct behavior.

Social Proof and Me

As an author, social media is a hugely important part of my author platform, as it is for any writer or blogger. This is how we connect with readers now, even before the pandemic. Virtual, online events are now the norm. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube Live video discussions are the new book signings. Twitter chats are weekly on any number of topics; I have two of my own, in fact, #SexAbuseChat every Tuesday at 6 pm pst/9 pm est and #BookMarketingChat every Wednesday at 6 pm pst/9 pm est.

All important for visibility, branding, and most importantly, connection.

However…there’s a limit. I reached my limit over the course of this past year. It didn’t come all at once. It came, little by little, reaching a peak this past month or so.

Why? How? Me, the so-called social media expert?

Access. Like many people, I have issues with the incredible level of access Facebook gives people once we friend them without our consent. PMs (private messages) are automatic, now with the ability for people to call, voice, and video message us, with no option to shut these options to OFF unless we unfriend the person (we can, however, mute a specific conversation). Technically, we do give them consent in the legal mumbo jumbo we all agreed to when we joined back in the 2010s.

I am not okay with this. And Facebook doesn’t care. Nobody cares. You’re probably thinking, “Geez, Karen. Shut up, already. Stop your whining, white lady.” I get it. I do. First-world problems.

I counter with: I hear you. It’s also part of my business. A huge part. Here’s why:

As someone who manages over 70+ various social media accounts as part of my BadRedhead Media business, plus my own accounts as well, Facebook requires I have a personal account in order to manage all those other Pages. I do understand why, particularly with all the ridiculousness of the past four years with the abundance of fake accounts, fake news, and such.

As a survivor of sexual abuse and stalking, this is ultra-concerning to me. So, what happened this past month or so? Suffice it to say, one person repeatedly tried calling me. I never pick up Facebook calls, especially if I don’t know you. Another left me a few voice messages saying they were offended by something.

Yet another left me another message in ALL SHOUTY CAPS that she didn’t find what I posted inspirational enough and she expected better from someone who is “supposedly on the side of authors.”

Oh, and there is the one lady who started replying on ALL my posts to the kind people who did comment that she didn’t think I replied often enough or to her satisfaction.

Well. I’ve been criticized before. You should read some of my 1-star reviews. There’s plenty!

But, for whatever reason, this struck a chord. I got up in my feels. I cried. I talked with one of them and we worked it out because we like and respect each other’s work in the mental health space. The others I blocked. It’s darn frustrating to donate hours of my time each week to helping writers solely because I want to, only to be told it’s not enough. Like, seriously? Fuck off.

My blood raged. My heart sank. Understandable, right?

But what really made me angry is that I put myself in that position by being available. I accepted that ‘it is what it is.’ This is what the social media platforms have given us, so that’s what I have to work within.

I’m too available. It’s too easy to leave me shitty messages. This is why people hire people like me – to handle this crap for them! So they don’t have to read these ridiculous criticisms from judgy people who apparently have nothing better to do or are having a bad day.

And I get bad days. It’s a damn pandemic. We’re all struggling. Where’s the damn compassion for one another?

I have a dislike/hate relationship with Facebook anyway, since about ten or so years ago when I discovered that a past love had died by suicide by going to his personal profile and seeing, “RIP dude,” messages there. We had spoken early that day. It still haunts me.

So…what to do? I’m claiming my time. I’m not posting to my personal Facebook profile right now. I’m ignoring it. I am checking my Pages and of course, my client Pages. When I feel like I can face it again, I will cull my ‘friends’ down from *checks real quick* 4385 people to maybe, I don’t know, the few hundred in my groups, many of whom I do know and treasure.

Social Proof and You

If you’re a writer, social proof matters. This is the world we live in. Publishing is not only writing.

You need to be ‘findable,’ not only on Google, but also on each individual social platform, so your readers can learn more about you and hopefully, buy your books. If you go the traditional route, publishers and agents want to know how many followers you have (easily upped by buying fake followers or likes from Fiverr or wherever). I suggest not doing that, because:

1) fake followers don’t buy books 

2) it’s usually pretty obvious when you have fake followers because they’re all foreign names, have questionable bios, and no tweets

3) do you really want to start your publishing career with a lie? 

They also want to know what you post, how often, and what your branding is. If you’re an indie author, honestly, the same applies. Social proof is about connection, building relationships, and authenticity. I’ve believed that since I started my business and writing career way back in 2011, and I stand by it now. Start slow, grow slow. It’s not a race.

I’m the furthest thing you’ll even find from a conspiracy theorist – I don’t believe in chemtrails, pizza parlor cabals, or that the earth is flat. However, I am a realist. Watch The Social Dilemma sometime. These huge tech companies share our data without our knowledge or consent (Cambridge Analytics, anyone?). Younger generations are so used to this, they don’t really care – ask them.

(My kids think having a chip implanted in their hands with all their data is a fabulous idea. “So much easier than having to talk and repeat everything over and over. Just scan me and be done with it,” says my daughter Anya (21). “Agree,” grunts my son, Lukas (15). Buy stuff, go to the doctor, whatever. Scan and go. Talk with any GenZ kid, you’ll likely get a similar answer. They’ve been tracked since birth everywhere. They don’t know life without a computer, tablet, or phone in their hands.)

Know that whatever we do, it’s all part of each platforms’ AI, and they share data, which is why that darling pair of shoes you just saw on Amazon is now showing up on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and every website you visit going forward. It’s all about the money, and they all get a piece of that affiliate link.

Every bit of every click is recorded, even when you’re watching videos on YouTube, or a subscription service like Netflix, or perusing goods on Amazon. It’s all connected. I’m not shocked or surprised by any of this, are you?

It’s Not Personal

What people say to us and about us is ultimately incredibly revealing about them. We know this, at an intellectual, psychological, and emotional level. Still, when people say mean things, it hurts. We’re human.

Does it matter in the overall scope of our lives? Who can say. It matters at that moment. It can matter when it comes to overall visibility when you’re marketing your book(s) or trying to get that book contract or interview. Only you can say if it matters to you.

Already a longtime fan of THE FOUR AGREEMENTS by Don Miguel Ruiz, I took a moment to reorient myself with this one agreement: Don’t take anything personally. I also stumbled across an excellent short and entertaining TEDTalk by Frederick Imbo. His main message to stop taking things personally is two-fold;

It’s not about me. Look at the other person’s intention and

It IS about me. Give yourself some empathy. Speak up. Ask questions. Pay attention to how you feel and be vulnerable with your needs.

I’m glad I was able to, inadvertently, employ point #2 and work out some issues with one of the people by telling him what he said made me cry. He apologized. I apologized. We talked it through and we’re still friends.

Ultimately, social media is what we contribute to it. What we make it. How much we allow of it into our lives. Social proof is going along with the tide. I’ve been in this space since 2008. Being connected to others is a big part of the work I do to help and support not only other writers, but also other childhood sexual abuse survivors. However, I’ve reached that point. I knew it was coming.

I’m not shutting my doors. I’m just adding a screen. With a strong lock.

***

Read more about Rachel’s experiences in the award-winning book, Broken Pieces.

She goes into more detail about living with PTSD and realizing the effects of how being a survivor affected her life in

Broken Places, available in print everywhere!

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via Rachel Thompson

[inbonobo]

this person is #fun, @JordanBPeterson | ContraPoints #philosophy #debating #postmodernism #skepticism

the other criticism I got from the AMA:

besttrousers 856 points 4 hours ago*

Professor Peterson,

Thanks for joining us today!

I’m a behavioral economist who works on labor issues, and I’ve been reading some of your work, such as the Self-Authoring Suite, with interest. It’s helping me think about potential interventions to help unemployed people rejoin the labor force. Thanks for putting it out there!

However, I’ve also been very frustrated to hear some of the claims you’ve made about economics, many of which been inaccurate.

It’s important to be precise in your speech, so I’ll give you two examples, before my question (I apologize for the length, but I thought it was important to provide the original quotes, and a brief summary of why they were incorrect):

Example 1

Here’s an excerpt from your recent interview with Cathy Newman:

Newman: Okay. Sure. But I want to put to you that here in the UK, for example, let’s take that as an example. The gender pay gap stands at just over 9%. You’ve got women at the BBC recently saying that the broadcaster is illegally paying them less than men to do the same job. You’ve got only seven women running the top FTSE 100 companies!

Peterson: Yeah.

Newman: So it seems to a lot of women, that they are still being “dominated and excluded”, to quote your words back to you.

Peterson: It does seem that way, but multivariate analysis of the pay gap indicate that it doesn’t exist.

Newman: But that is not true, is it? I mean, that nine percent pay gap! That’s a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women!

Peterson: Yeah, but there’s multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender, but it’s not the only reason. If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis. Like you say, well women in aggregate are paid less than men. Okay, well then we break it down by age, we break it down by occupation, we break it down by interest, we break it down by personality.

Your claim that “multivariate analysis of the pay gap indicate that it doesn’t exist.” Is incorrect. For an overview of research in this area, you can see Blau and Kahn’s 2017 review of the literature.

I suspect that you are looking at analyses that include occupational controls (based on what you said in the interview, and tweets like this one).

However, using occupational controls in this way is actually leads to a flawed analysis, as women choose what occupation to pursue. If women are being discriminated against in a given field, you would expect them to be less likely to pursue a career in that field. Including occupational controls will therefor lead to a biased estimate. It’s what statisticians call “collider bias”.

(For details, see the discussion of this issue on page 74 of Causal Inference, or the /r/economics FAQ)

Example 2

In one of your lectures, you said the following:

Because women have access to the birth control pill now and can compete in the same domains as men roughly speaking there is a real practical problem here. It's partly an economic problem now because when I was roughly your age, it was still possible for a one-income family to exist. Well you know that wages have been flat except in the upper 1% since 1973. Why? Well, it's easy. What happens when you double the labor force? What happens? You halve the value of the labor. So now we're in a situation where it takes two people to make as much as one did before. So we went from a situation where women's career opportunities were relatively limited to where there they were relatively unlimited and there were two incomes (and so women could work) to a situation where women have to work and they only make half as much as they would have otherwise.

There’s a lot that incorrect here – wages have not been stagnant since 1973 (I suspect you are thinking of household income, which has been more-or-less constant due to compositional changes due to later marriages), doubling the labor force would not halve the value of labor (the economy is not a fixed pie, more workers in the labor force grow the economy).

Most importantly, the premise is wrong. It’s not the case that it used to be possible for households to have one earner, and now it is not. Instead, what happened was we saw dramatic increases in the effectiveness of “household production” (think: laundry machines, clothes that need less frequent repair, microwave dinners). In 1965, the average women spent 32 hours/week on housework, and 10 hours a week on childcare – a full time job!

We aren’t poorer than we used to be, or working more. Instead, we’ve seen people effectively move from one industry (domestic labor) to another (firm labor).

Question

I know you’ve found it frustrating when your research has been misrepresented in the media, so I’m sure you can understanding the frustrations economists have when reading or listening to you misrepresent economics. These are common mistakes (we catalog them all the time over at /r/badeconomics) but also would be pretty easy to correct by talking to an economist, or reading the relevant literature. It's also important not to make such mistakes. Many of your fans have read these and now incorrectly believe that their wages are lower because of women entering the workforce.

What is the mechanism you have been using to check the accuracy of the claims you make about economics – or other fields you are not an expert in? What can we economists (or other experts) do to help you better understand these fields?

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[–]decimated_napkin 179 points 3 hours ago

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I feel like not controlling for occupation when assessing pay differences is more disingenuous than controlling for it. Yes, it's possible that women are choosing to not go into certain fields due to prejudice, but it's also possible that they simply don't like those fields for other reasons. Who are we to say? Since we don't know which it is, it would make sense to me to exclude that division from consideration and go with the method that would generally make the most sense, which in this case would be controlling for occupation.

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[–]wumbotarian 17 points 3 hours ago

I'll note this is an issue for any wage regression. We know education impacts your wage. but how much education you got is a choice. We need to control for the control, which is hard to do!

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[–]wumbotarian 94 points 3 hours ago

When doing a regression, we examine the effects of an independent variable (controls or "right hand side" variables) on dependent variables ("left hand side" variables; in this case, wages).

It is very important that the independent variables are indeed independent. They're not caused by anything else. They're "exogenous". If an independent variable is itself dependent (called "endogenous"), we need to control for that dependent nature with its own independent variables. Otherwise we get fundamentally incorrect results.

Occupational choice is not independent (no choice variable is independent). We can see that the choice of a job would be dependent on preferences for, say, job time flexibility. Or the pay someone gets. If pay is unequal between men and women in a given industry, women will choose based on that pay gap.

Therefore, it is not disingenuous to leave out occupational choice (or other endogenous right hand side variables). You simply cannot do any accurate analysis with dependent right hand side variables. It's not slight of hand done by feminists or anything. It's akin to pointing out that 2 + 2 != 5.

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[–]kmmeerts 7 points 2 hours ago

It's still disingenuous to lump in occupational choice with all the other uncontrolled variables, and to ascribe it to discrimination. The right thing to do would be to control for occupational choice, and to find the effect size of it, just like for every other variable. Only then can you start making hypotheses and finding narratives.

I don't doubt occupational choice is influenced by discrimination, but we have the statistical tools to study it, there is no need to keep it uncontrolled.

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[–]wumbotarian 4 points an hour ago

It's still disingenuous to lump in occupational choice with all the other uncontrolled variables, and to ascribe it to discrimination.

So we have experimental evidence that discrimination exists. While this is not indicative of the wage gap existing due to discrimination, it should update your priors that discrimination is an issue in hiring.

The right thing to do would be to control for occupational choice, and to find the effect size of it, just like for every other variable.

Okay, but as I explained you can't "control for occupational choice". It's a dependent variable. You'd need an instrumental variable that itself is independent.

I don't doubt occupational choice is influenced by discrimination, but we have the statistical tools to study it, there is no need to keep it uncontrolled.

We have the tools but not the variables/data! That's the point.

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[–]Stagnolia 11 points 2 hours ago

This is so awesome, thank you so much for contributing this. I am a STEM student and I love love love science but so far in all of my classes we’ve never dived into the complexity of controlling for dependent variables like this. Your comment was super informative and I’m going to save it to have on hand!

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[–]SuperSharpShot2247 12 points 2 hours ago

Economics doesn't have the benefit of the perfectly controlled experiments hard science does. While there are economic experiments, they're limited to testing economic theory and behavioral trends. For things like gender wage gap, the effect of legalizing marijuana, the effect of education on income, etc, we need highly sophisticated statistical tools to block out the "noise".

This is probably why your STEM classes haven't gotten into this level of control! I'm an undergraduate in Economics and typically we don't even learn the Instrumental Variables (IV) method (I only know it from a special class)!