Erebus

“Do you know who’s here?  Do you know who saw you do that?  Do you know who saw you do that?  This man is from Rolling Stone magazine.  Do you know what kind of publicity you’re going to get?”

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)

"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.

White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.

Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.

A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

Justin Trudeau walks into a Royal Bank to cash a cheque.

As he approaches the cashier he says, "Good morning, Ma'am, could you please cash this cheque for me?"

Cashier: "It would be my pleasure sir. Could you please show me your ID?"

Trudeau: "Truthfully, I did not bring my ID with me as I didn't think there was any need to. I am Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada!!!!"

Cashier: "Yes sir, I know who you are, but with all the regulations and monitoring of the banks because of impostors and forgers and requirements of the CIDC legislation, etc., I must insist on seeing ID."

Trudeau: "Just ask anyone here at the bank who I am and they will tell you. Everybody knows who I am."

Cashier: "I am sorry, Mr. Trudeau, but these are the bank rules and I must follow them."

Trudeau:" Mon dieu. I am urging you, please, to cash this cheque."

Cashier: "Look Mr. Trudeau , here is an example of what we can do. One day, Tiger Woods came into the bank without ID. To prove he was Tiger Woods he pulled out his putter and made a beautiful shot across the bank into a cup. With that shot we knew him to be Tiger Woods and cashed his cheque.

Another time, Andre Agassi came in without ID. He pulled out his tennis racket and made a fabulous shot whereas the tennis ball landed in my cup. With that shot we cashed his cheque.

So, Mr. Trudeau, what can you do to prove that it is you, and only you?"

Trudeau stands there thinking, and thinking, and finally says, "Honestly, my mind is a total blank, I have absolutely no idea what to do, I don't have a clue."

No you didn't. That's impossible. You were in the voting booth alone. No one saw what bubble you filled on the ballot. So it's not possible for that to be the reason someone stopped being your friend.

You didn't just vote for Trump. You openly celebrate his victory. You laugh in the face of anyone who's upset about it. Your friend spent years begging you to realize how traumatizing a Trump presidency would be, and you're openly bragging about it.

Have you been on Facebook recently? Probably not. Because it's unusable. Dead internet theory has become dead internet reality there, and it's uncanny. AI generated images are commented on and have interaction generated with AI generated comments on blank bot accounts. If there's human interaction somewhere in the mix, it's hard to find. There's enormous amounts of vapid statements that are all same-y, and all have that distinct AI cadence to them.

I noticed that something similar seemed to be happening with YouTube. In ye olden days, YouTube comments were notorious for being moronic as hell. But it's different now. Where once home grown stupidity roamed freely, there were now grammatically correct, but extremely valid statements that often repeated similar sentence structures and even seem like mad libs. YouTube comments are filled with "this reminds me of [noun]" "I liked the moment when [thing that happened in video]" "this makes me feel [emotion][emoji]" etc etc etc. Just kind of shallow observations about the videos.

I don't pay much attention to YouTube comments at all, but based on the glances I saw, I just kinda assumed YouTube was going the way of Facebook, and the bots were taking over. This is a change that's happened within the past year or so, so I assumed that the recent AI boom just resulted in more bots than YouTube can handle and didn't pay attention.

Today I noticed something though. I was listening to some music that isn't easy to find on my usual streaming service, and I briefly noticed the comment box.

It's prompting me, a human, to write a comment in one of those formats. Idk how long this has been there, but this is the first time I've noticed this little prompt, giving me a prewritten sentence structures to work with. So idk how long this has been there, or if this is all old news.

So YouTube is prompting very specific, yet very dumb comments. Interesting. Already has implications for the death of organic human interaction online, but eh, not that big a deal.

But the KINDS of sentences that they're promoting are definitely of note. Because from what I can tell, they're prompting users to generate content tags en masse to train AI.

"This reminds me of other media" -> helps decide what ads to provide on these kinds of videos

"This makes me feel emotion" -> genre tag for recommendation algorithms

"I liked the part where things happened" -> engagement analytics, and also providing written descriptions for moments in the video to train video recognition.

And of course, lots of the training done isn't reducible to direct "this type of comment trains this", but ends up a lot more black boxy. Google also explicit asks you to tag things sometimes, but that gets FAR less engagement than making people think they're just leaving their innocent little thoughts around.

and even creepier, they added a feature for youtubers to reply to comments with AI generated replies, being obviously trained on your previous replies