Does Bryan Caplan Even Think Before He Writes?
The evidence says sometimes not
I write too much about Bryan Caplan, but the simple fact is that he fascinates me. He wrote one of the most important books I’ve ever read, The Myth of the Rational Voter, and it’s deep and evidence of someone who’s very intelligent and can think subtly. And then there’s his blogging, which reveals someone who seems to mostly substitute smug assurance in the brilliance of whatever pops into his mind for making the effort to actually think. And in this vein, his latest substack post almost made me literally laugh out loud.
The subject is why Wikipedia has so many fewer women editors than men, and Wikipedia’s page on the topic suggests some reasons.
A lack of user-friendliness in the editing interface.
Not having enough free time.
A lack of self-confidence.
Aversion to conflict and an unwillingness to participate in lengthy edit wars.
Belief that their contributions are too likely to be reverted or deleted.
Some find its overall atmosphere misogynistic.
Wikipedia culture is sexual in ways they find off-putting.
Being addressed as male is off-putting to women whose primary language has grammatical gender.
Fewer opportunities for social relationships and a welcoming tone compared to other sites.
OK, those all seem plausible. And Caplan doesn’t try to rebut them. Instead, he suggests there’s a simpler explanation.
Conspicuously absent from the list of possible causes is the default explanation, also known as the “obvious explanation” and the “common-sense explanation.” Namely: On average, men enjoy editing Wikipedia much more than women do
It’s as though he didn’t read the list, or, having skimmed it, gave no thought to whether any of the suggested causes relate to enjoyment. Let’s look at a few of them. (Note: This argument operates on the assumption that there is truth to the specific claims. Whether or not you think there are, what’s important here is that Caplan does not dispute them, but implicitly accepts them at face value.)
Aversion to conflict and an unwillingness to participate in lengthy edit wars: If women are, on average, more averse to conflict than men, then the conflict of edit wars would be less enjoyable to women than men.
Belief that their contributions are too likely to be reverted or deleted: Believing that one’s effort will not be fruitful is likely to make that effort less enjoyable.
Some find its overall atmosphere misogynistic: Leave it to Bryan Caplan to not grasp how women would find a misogynistic atmosphere less enjoyable than some men would.
Fewer opportunities for social relationships and a welcoming tone compared to other sites: In other words, putting in effort on other sites is more enjoyable for women than putting in effort on Wiki.
What’s hilarious here is that Caplan thinks he’s dug down deeper o a core explanation, but in fact he’s only made a general explanation, a rather superficial one, and these complaints are the specific causes of lower enjoyment for women (and some of the others can be connected to enjoyment, too, these are just the most obvious).
Now, I don’t want to be accused of overlooking his more specific argument, so here it is.
On average, men enjoy editing Wikipedia much more than women do. While the vast majority of both genders would find editing Wikipedia boring, the small minority of males who like creating and correcting articles on technical topics for free vastly outnumbers the even smaller minority of women who like creating and correcting articles on technical topics for free.
Certainly that could also be part of the cause in differential enjoyment. But it doesn’t function as a replacement for the specific complaints listed above. Take that small minority of women who like creating and correcting articles on technical topics for free, and 1) increase the conflict level beyond what they like, even as testosterone-fueled men get high on the fighting, 2) simply delete or revert their work at a disproportionate rate, 3) subject them to a misogynistic culture, and 4) structure the site so it’s unwelcoming to them and makes it harder for them to develop good relationships and what happens to their enjoyment level?
In short, Caplan pretends to have an alternative, better, and more fundamental explanation, but all he has really is the same general explanation with an additional specific reason, and apparently a wholesale incapacity to understand how a misogynistic culture could affect a woman’s enjoyment of a place.