I see where we're at the point where MRA shit is now getting whitewashed as 'interesting' and we still got Gish Gallopers doing their thing.
Now that I'm not being forced to sit through a fifty minute long video, I can actually respond to this in context in a reasonable fashion! Let's see if they actually talk about any specific examples of these gender differences, or just hand wave about how it's important that someone talks about this without actually talking about it in any real capacity.
[00:04:42] And yet you laid out a very elaborate document and I reviewed it. And as far as I can tell your opinions are well-supported by the relevant psychological science and I think what all do is a description of this video when I link it is are the references so that people can decide for themselves. I want to put up with age about gender differences in general but I'll try to get the highlights for this particular document.
Alright, let's see if they actually get to presenting some of that relevant psychological science, or am I going to have to dive into the methodology at a later date and help further the Replication Crisis?
[00:08:59] Yes. I was doing it like throughout my free time. I and I just wanted to clarify my thoughts on this and I really just wanted to be proven wrong because you know if what I was saying was right then something bad is happening. And so.
A valid point, but I'd advise for the future that you consult people privately before posting a flawed manifesto that you've written with the intent that other people tear it apart. Or just clarify somewhere that you're steelmanning.
[00:12:15]So the official case was that I was perpetuating gender stereotypes that you were perpetuating gender stereotypes.
Remember when the author of the manifesto complained multiple times about the inflexibility of the male gender role? I guess Google listened to his complaint.
[00:13:38] Yeah. Well I suspect I'm shocked. I'm virtually certain that you have a majority viewpoint is just that the people who hold the alternative perspective which are the radical social constructionist types insist that everything is a consequence of socialization. They're a little bit more organized politically but they're clearly wrong scientific when they're wrong. Actually the wrong ethically for now. So. So you probably have more support than you say and it would be very interesting to see how that turns out. So so what do you think about having greatness or meaning now in your life is going to be turned upside down and for quite a while I suspect. I mean so you get yourself out of line doing this. So what do you think about that.
Can't wait until the part where we actually talk about nature versus nurture arguments instead of referencing them.
[00:16:38] You showed exactly what happens if you have announced I don't know what you'd call it curiosity and courage I suppose but but mostly curiosity to lay out what you think. For discussion we need to open this conversation. You said that you know you weren't jumping up and down and insisting you were right. You were trying to lay out what you understood from doing a bit of reading and ends and make the case that the facts the facts about the differences between men and women in employment choice and payment and all that aren't being discussed and they're not being discussed. I mean we know for example in our book The citation in description has been very difficult for the Swedes for example to flatten out the gender distribution for engineers in Sweden and in the Scandinavian countries in general despite their advanced social engineering let's call it and they can get male nurses.
Perhaps if you feel the topic is not being discussed enough, you could try discussing it. During this fifty minute video that came highly recommended.
[00:17:40] You know I think it's four or five nurses in Scandinavia if I remember correctly or the reverse number or our engineers or male and you know that seems to be associated with this quite well-founded scientific observation that women tilt towards interesting people and men tilt towards interesting things and that's associated with testosterone exposure in utero. This is science you know and I think anybody being an ideological Trump because most of the people I would say that most of the people who are publishing this would have been even happier had it turned out the other way you know the findings actually run contrary to their biases because academia is generally full of people whose biases are less and now and then you know scientific findings emerge to dispute an ideological proposition. That's certainly the case with the role of biology versus society in establishing gender differences so the science is very credible. It doesn't mean it's completely beyond dispute but that's not the point either because your survey was actually a pretty decent survey of the current state of affairs with regards to individual differences. That doesn't mean it's right.
Testosterone! That's a science word! I would have appreciated a description a bit more detailed than "tilt toward" - is he referencing something along the Langlois study on infant facial preference? Is that why there's a correlation there with neonatal testosterone?
Also, Trump invocation. For some reason?
[00:21:15] You know I mean I would say my experiences with the press is that the first thing that happens that will happen is that you'll get jumped on by people who call you the sorts of epithets that would be appropriate if you were a bad guy and you should just shut up and go away. That's already happened. But I think you're going to get it out real quick because I went through your your writings which are not history by the way and are certainly not in diversities three way writing some. And I can't see anything there that identifies you as the sort of person that can be easily and permanently tarred with a hateful epithet. But you know it's logical for the public let's say including the media to jump on someone like you when they blow a whistle because the first thing that you might presume if someone's causing trouble is that there's something wrong with them. Then you have to sort of beat them a while with the idea that there's something wrong with them to see what happens. And so the first thing is you have to withstand that. But there don't seem to be any smoking pistols in your background. So for example you heard an ideal Google employee well that protects you a lot and you don't have a history of this of any sort of troublemaking and you have a solid educational background and you're clearly a reasonable person. And so the first thing is it's just to steal yourself to get through that and then out.
Okay, now we're talking about the press. Calling people hateful epithets is indeed rude.
[00:24:17] Yeah well I won't. Because God only knows what's going to happen to you in the next few weeks and it's going to be a real rollercoaster. And you know the other thing that you might consider is that it's possible that this will turn out extraordinarily positive for you. You know there's going to be it's going to be a rough ride but to the degree that you are accurate in your observations then you know it's not that easy to. It's not that easy for the opponents of truth to have a battle with truth. It's not about being real you know. Let's go over some of the things that he said and so that we can discuss. Yes sir. Right so I'm going to take a look here. So you started with a pretty good solid statement I would say. Google's political bias because he equated the freedom from health with psychological safety put shaving into silence is the antithesis of cycling safe. Well that seems even more relevant now usage with the science has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed. Well you can check that one off too. Right right right. That certainly seems to indicate that was the case the lack of discussion for just the most extreme northern tier and elements of this ideology some of the extreme strangeness all disparities in representation or oppression. That's a good one right. That's a very. Very very simple minded. And then the authoritarian element you defined as the idea we should discriminate to correct for this oppression.
Yes, we get that these ideas aren't being talked about enough. It's been twenty-five minutes, are you going to start talking about them in any detail yet?
[00:25:52] And then you make a claim just difference distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we only have 50 percent representation of women in tech and leadership discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair and divisive and bad for business. OK so that's your thesis and then you go along and try to justify it. So the first thing you do is talk about left wing versus right wing biases. And I should point out that you don't concentrate on the left biases or on the right as if you're completely evenhanded with regards to laying out the pros and cons. So the last passion for the week disparities are really injustices. Humans are inherently offer that change is good slash unstable open and idealistic. Fair enough man. Dead on with regards to the relevant psychological literature. Where are we seeing that political correctness is motivated by agreeableness and that liberalism is fundamentally predated by openness and the right biases respect for authority. Disparities are natural and just humans are inherently competitive. Change is dangerous. Stable. That would be high conscientiousness low openness and they're closed rather than open and pragmatic rather than idealist. Yeah well I don't think any reasonable person could read that column and say that you were coming down hard on the side of either part of the political spectrum.
What is the difference in distribution of traits? Are we just citing the Big Five personality traits, a rather old - if still useful for more localized discussions of individual personalities - paradigm that has since its inception been heavily criticized for its limited scope, confounding effects due to connotational differences of the semantic handles for different traits, and methodological shortcomings. I already wrote posts about that, imagine if I spent twenty-six minutes waiting for that.
[00:27:18] Dr. Peterson can I jump in with a question. It appears from my interactions with many people that they are projecting words that were not written onto the paper. And would you be able to elaborate on the schemas that people develop and how they classify information in their minds. Because this is very much a stereotype form I would think is kind of just grouping a bunch of disparate but semi related people or things together and then projecting an idea that may or may not pertain to that.
Woah, it's schema theory! One of my personal favorite topics. And also a topic about social construction. Referencing this is actually undermining the manifesto, the sentence "I would think is kind of just grouping a bunch of disparate but semi related people or things together and then projecting an idea that may or may not pertain to that" is heavily applicable to the way schematic representations of binary genders are constructed.
[00:28:15] Because misogynists and bigots will hold viewpoints that are anti-female and racist. And so it's a lot easier just to paint someone with a broad brush especially if they're violating the tenets of your implicit temperament. Let's say that you need to dive into the details where real thought occurs and I think one of the sins that James committed was that he actually dared to make this about details rather than about vague hand-waving idiology. That's very annoying to people who don't want to think in order to analyze his claims.
Please give me some details. It's been almost a half an hour according to these nice timestamps.
[00:30:07] OK this site has rules and checks against encroaching extremists and that's where policies aren't. I Google who regularly told that implicit unconscious and explicit Barss are holding women back in tech leadership. Of course men and women experience bias and workplace differently than we should be cognizant of. But it's far from the whole story. On average men and women are biologically different in many ways. These are just socially constructed because they're are universal across cultures clear by logical and causes linked to prenatal testosterone biological males jouster birth and race as females often still identify and act like males. The underlying traits are highly heritable and they are exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective. No I'm not saying that all men differ from women in all ways or that these differences are just. And then you put in a nice chart indicating that the amount of overlap between men and women per trait is greater than the amount of difference. Wrong in so you state that directly boxtops perfect that's a very good way of defending your thesis and also of not overstating the case then you do a nice job of of also graphically indicating what happens if the distribution is ignored and people are just treated as if they're human coler representatives of a given group which is kind of what they've done with the people who are predicating the push for diversity on gender and race are assuming right which is really so funny because it's really a biologically essentialist organ much much greater than that.
Can you please actually HOW men and women experience bias differently? And what all these highly heritable traits ARE?
At least he mentioned testosterone again. Wait a second, if babies
born and
raised female don't embody the prescribed feminine gender role because of hormonal differences, isn't that an argument in favor of the existence and validity of transgender people? "Acting like males" is a vague phrase and could just be a result of an inability to see except through the lenses of pre-existing schema that the author developed through social learning.
I'm not one to argue that humanity is 100% nurture 0% nature. I just think that conforming to gender roles is better explained as adhering to social pressures and that the biology underlying a person can express itself in far more nuanced ways than a simple binary choice.
[00:31:40] Then the argument that you're making which is that men and women and the members of different races are so different that in order for a full diversity of viewpoint to be achieved you have to pull in people by race and gender which which you implicitly states that the differences are so great that the distributions don't overlap. Yeah. You couldn't make it more racist and misjudging this statement than that. And it's also technically wrong because men and women are more alike than they are different. Maybe if you summed up all the differences you can absolutely differentiate between you know in all likelihood you're going but some of those differences are clearly irrelevant to the workplace. OK then you go through the personality difference literature and you're exactly right on now I see that the CEO took you to task for using the word neuroticism. However that is the technical term in the personality literature and there are historical reasons for that. A better word might be negative emotion but it's clearly the case that women are higher negative emotion than men and that means that they are on average less tolerant of uncertainty and stress they suffer more psychologically or for equivalent levels of uncertainty. Stress is also why cross-culturally women have more depressive disorders and anxiety. And the research on that is rock solid rock solid. Men have their own problems right. They're more likely to be anti-social they're much more likely to be in prison. They're more likely to have learning disabilities. So it's stating that there are differences in the rates and certain kinds of psychopathic Oleg's doesn't put any either gender into a position of relative in theory or so.
So men and women are more alike than they are different. That seems reasonable, we are of the same species after all. And yeah, many of these differences are irrelevant to the workplace or could just be codified as "ideological diversity" in terms of preferred communication style - which is also in a large part, but not entirely, socially constructed.
Oh no, now we're talking about hysteria. I already wrote about this too, where I said "women are more neurotic, therefore the stress of computer science turns them off" is a poor argument because of counterarguments such as "But not off of the medical field, where they have 60% of biology degrees? And have to experience the horrifying routine of hospital life, working among the scent of decaying flesh as the sense of helplessness bubbles up within you like bile?".
Women are diagnosed with more depressive disorders, but men commit suicide at a much higher rate and are tragically underdiagnosed. The strictness of the male gender role has stigmatized men suffering from mental health illnesses.
On an important side note, let's read about how this is a significant systemic problem.
[00:33:43] What what does what the researchers demonstrated was that as top come as countries move to flatten out the socioeconomic playing field and remove discrimination the differences between men and women are many of the differences between men and women maximize instead of minimizing and in Scandinavia you really see maximization of the difference in men and women with regards to interesting people versus interest in St. A major major issue men's hard drive for status. Yeah. Well we know that women are high Pergamos and that they choose men on the basis of their socioeconomic status. Right. Well documented in cross-culturally. And also just rational because women have to make themselves dependent when they are pregnant and when they have the answer that makes perfect sense for them to seek out the most confident person they can manage the most competent and generous person they can manage in order to help them bear the burden. So so no no no. Still there at least. No you're not diverting from the central tenets of evolutionary psychology and biology. People will say that is fine. But you know what. Conjuring this out of thin air. There's a nice solid scientific literature behind so. And you know it's also very interesting to look at the U.S. labor stance on gender differences in occupations you know because it's so funny to watch the radical feminists only go after the high status occupations like a hundred percent of bricklayers are men.
Wait, so we're arguing that men have a high drive to select for status... but then also arguing that women also have a high drive to select for status? I thought this was supposed to be about how men and women were different, and I'm not sure what mate selection behavior has to do with performance in the field of computer science.
[00:35:26] We don't hear not being being complained about. And of course men occupy most of the outside jobs. They move more and they will get more dangerous jobs as well. So so these are all factors that are relevant but completely undiscussed as far as I can tell by the sort of the ideological types that would be going after you.
You're on a podcast. You can talk about it. Give specifics besides complaining women aren't dating enough bricklayers.
[00:35:47] So women are on average more co-operative. Yes specially with members of their in-group whether they're more cooperative members of their own group is a different story. Right because agreeable people are in-group oriented and very hard on no group numbers which I think is partly why the PC types are so hard on their enemies because you know them as predators predators on instance essentially do something with women on average are more prone to anxiety. Yes that's true. Women on average look for more work life balance. That seems to be the case. I don't know if the literature on that is. You know but it's certainly the case that law firms for example how the hell they're keeping their women and in partnership positions because most of them don't want to work the 60 hour work week 60 to 80 hour work weeks that are necessary to performance out that extremely high level so Dr. Petersen for for anybody who might be new listening in.
Is the point trying to be made here that the reputation of computer science for having a poor work-life balance is why women don't go into the field? Maybe we can sell people on the idea of promoting more women in computer science because that apparently means less soul-crushing crunch time. Maybe women's apparently superior coordination skills can help enable that too. Sounds good to me.
He doesn't know the scientific literature, but is confused as to why there are so many women in law firms, because those also have a poor work-life balance. That, uh, suggests that women do work jobs with a poor work life balance - the medical field is another example, because working as a nurse sounds like hell in terms of shifts.
[00:36:48] You mentioned that a lot of women might not be you know interested in working those you know 60 to 80 hour work weeks.
This is why nursing is a male-dominated career. Yep, only men want to be nurses because the workweek is too long and women can't handle those 12 hour marches to the grave. (Nursing is not a male-dominated career, this argument seems remarkably flawed to me)
Stay tuned for part 2.