I’m worried your subdivision misses a significant proportion of harms that don’t fall into either category. For instance, interactions that don’t involve malice or power dynamics and are innocuous in isolation but harmful when repeated. This repetition can be made more likely by imbalanced gender ratios.
I think being flirted with during the day at an EAG like Nathan discussed above is a good example of this. If you’re flirted with once over the weekend, perhaps it’s fine or even nice, especially if it’s from the person you found most interesting. But if you’re flirted with several times, you may start to feel uncomfortable.
Well if a conference has 3x more men than woman and 1-on-1s are matched uniformly at random, then women have 3x more cross-gender 1-on-1s than men. Assuming all people are equally likely to flirt with someone of a different gender than them, it’s very possible that the average man receives a comfortable amount of flirting while the average woman receives an uncomfortable amount.
And it probably gets worse when one considers that these are random variables and we don’t care about the average but rather about how many people exceed the uncomfortable threshold and to what degree. And perhaps worse again if certain “attractive” people are more likely to receive flirting.
Overall, my point is that behaviors and norms that would be fine with balanced gender ratios can be harmful with imbalanced ones. Unfortunately, we have imbalanced ones and we need to adapt accordingly.
Great post, James!
I’m curious if you have any sense of how the average conditions/welfare levels of farmed animals are expected to change on this default trajectory, or how they’ve changed in the last few decades. I imagine this is difficult to quantify, but seems important.
In particular, assuming market pressures stay as they are, how should we expect technological improvements to affect farmed animal welfare?
My uneducated guess: optimizing hard for (meat production / cost) generally leads to lower animal welfare. This seems roughly true of technological improvements in the past. For example:
I assume factory farming is much worse than early human farming/hunting.
Antibiotics allow animals to be kept in worse sanitary conditions than would otherwise be livable.
Artificial selection and growth hormones has created broiler chickens that grow too fast for good health, though it’s unclear to me whether slower growth would be net good (because it would probably lead to more total chicken-days spend living in factory farms, even after accounting for higher prices leading to fewer sales).