There’s some meme I’ve seen many times on X where Mr. Rational Man says “men are taller than women on average” and Miss Dumb-Dumb Woman replies “but [that’s not true because] I’m tall” or something like that.
Many here in the comments are clearly are not comprehending what you’re saying, and the way they think could be captured in another meme: Normal Woman states a true fact that “I’m 5’11’’” and Mr. 5’10’’ Red Pill Man says to the tall woman immediately in front of him “that’s not true because men are taller on average, so I am taller than you.” Well, not as catchy but…
More concisely, they are so focused on the average (a “first-order moment” for you stats-letes), the fixation on mean differences has led to them very nearly denying the existence of any variance (a “second-order moment”). @Helen Roy has used the term “flattened” which I understood to mean un-nuanced thinking like this. So apt.
Alongside all of this, there’s a lot of stolen valor-lite woven in. For instance, these men will say that the most brutal 3% of occupations are 90% male. Therefore he, a man who sells insurance for a living, is actually building civilization. Just all really flawed thinking, in service of their egos.
"Many here in the comments are clearly are not comprehending what you’re saying, and the way they think could be captured in another meme: Normal Woman states a true fact that “I’m 5’11’’” and Mr. 5’10’’ Red Pill Man says to the tall woman immediately in front of him “that’s not true because men are taller on average, so I am taller than you.” Well, not as catchy but…"
No one says this. Every red pill guy is aware of the WNBA and it's population of women over 6' tall. You're just trying to make up a strawman to show equivalence between men and women (who are clearly statistically retarded, even the intelligent ones). Men are just much better at understanding the world quantitatively, just like women are much better at multitasking. And it's not close, especially when you compare men and women of the same IQ.
"For instance, these men will say that the most brutal 3% of occupations are 90% male. Therefore he, a man who sells insurance for a living, is actually building civilization. Just all really flawed thinking, in service of their egos."
No one thinks this. They merely point out the obvious fact that women would starve and freeze almost immediately if men disappeared, while men would basically get along fine until everyone died if women disappeared. This is almost always in response to the notion that feminists hold that men are basically useless.
"The way forward... is to hold two thoughts simultaneously: patterns exist at the population level, but individuals exist in glorious variation."
This is and should be so painfully obvious to everyone with an ounce of sense, and yet the need to say it illustrates that, sadly, lots of people lack an ounce of sense. I think the social retardation (and I mean that term in its original intent, as "having been slowed") of the younger generations due to time spent online, and due to their coddling, as Haidt put it, is probably the most pressing factor as to why young people today can't figure out these simple truths. Young men in particular just have no experience with women at all, and so they treat them like another species.
The impact of sex differences on society is all about the differences in means, not about differences in the outliers. For example, the fact that women have come to dominate the educational establishment in most countries means that the schools have increasingly valued "safety" over risk taking, and it hasn't mattered that there are a minority of exceptions. This dichotomy has hardened over time as the majority has increased. The net effect of this trend over the past 50 years has been the feminization of boys and the confusion (and rising mental illness) among girls. Against this backdrop, it will be interesting to see how the sex differences evolve going forward. We should learn something about how much of the difference is genetic and how much is socially constructed.
"The war between stereotype enjoyers and deniers isn't about statistics - it's about power."
Yes, indeed. Giving women power, denying that stereotypes are a pretty useful heuristic, has been a catastrophic mistake. Let both sides be erroneous: I will take the error that doesn't sacrifice civilisation on the altar of political correctness.
We are living through the dismantling of civilization.
The irony of this post is that your entire argument rests on a misunderstanding of statistics.
“Women are irrational” is not an equivalent statement to “men are predators”. One is a reasonable stereotype, based on population averages. The other is not valid, because the majority of men aren’t predators. Women (on average, of course) can’t seem to differentiate between “most men are predators” and “most predators are men”.
This doesn’t even address that the implications of being irrational are completely different and much more benign than the implications of being predators.
The evidence shows time and again that women on average are “flexible” in every aspect. They place less value on the truth, objectivity, physical reality, etc. This doesn’t mean that women shouldn’t be treated with human dignity, but denying reality only leads to destruction.
Planes falling out of the sky, countries experimenting with no borders, empathy weaponized by sexual predators, jail time for decades old gossip, journalistic objectivity viewed as oppression… these things are not compatible with civilization.
I think a lot of it is a reaction to the 'all differences are socially constructed' party line everyone gets fed in school thanks to leftists running the primary/secondary and higher educational establishments. Then when you discover the truth you over-index on it. If everyone tells you X doesn't exist, and then you discover on your own that X does, there's the tendency to believe that X explains *everything*.
Also, even with overlapping means you get differences at the extremes--the tallest person is always going to be a man, and most people over 6'4" or whatever are going to be male. That winds up making a difference in terms of who billionaires and school shooters are.
I disagree with the idea that more knowledge is harmful. What we have now as the dominant discourse is straight-out Lysenkoism, a Lamarckist doctrine that humans are shaped by their environment alone. Lysenkoism did not work out well for the Soviet Union, and it's what is causing the trouble in the West today.
The thing that is truly harmful is the "noble lie", the idea that there are some goals that transcend truth.
Europe and its colonies have progressed by combating misunderstanding with more information, not less. Less information is the way of Communism, or Islam, or totalitarianism more generally.
I'm not advocating less information, but that information without context, wisdom, and the increasingly rare thing that is life experience can be disastrous on an individual level.
We have the dominant discourse masquerading as information: that is worse than no information, to me. The {red,black}-pill stuff is an alternative framework that helps, on balance, to me.
As it happens I too wrote on this theme in my most recent post a few days ago:
A few excerpts:
"The 20th c. saw a radical transformation in social mores about the respective roles of men and women in society. This transformation can in part be explained in terms of technology-driven economic change and in part by sustained pressure coming from the activist/intellectual movement that we call Feminism. Thanks to this economic/feminist nexus, the principle of equality of the sexes is now (rightly in my view) an unchallenged Liberal axiom. Where there is profound disagreement, of course, is whether this cultural shift still has a way to go or whether it has overshot. The degree to which such things are susceptible to a virtuous circle of civilising social mores and how intractably hard-wired into the nature of the human animal is a complex ongoing debate. Females will always play the central part in childbirth and child-rearing (and will always be at a disadvantagein respect of sexual violence and compulsion). Males will always do more of what one might broadly call the physical heavy lifting. What, in any case, do we mean by ‘equal’? Do we mean equal as in equivalent or equal as in homogenised?…that (as someone famously said) is the question. In this essay I argue that there have in fact been two profound cultural shape-shifts on what one might term the masculine/feminine axis in Western society....ones that need to be considered separately:
The first of them is *Feminisation*; the idea that the zeitgeist has seen a marked shift towards the feminine over the course of the last half century or so. This too has, in recent times, become axiomatic in journalistic discourse right across the political spectrum. We are talking of a phenomenon that has had huge consequences for the way we live now but one that – as mentioned previously - is at least as much a story of economic and technological change as it is a story of intellectual trends. The question of whether this feminisation of advanced industrial societies should be viewed as a good thing, a bad thing or somewhere in between is very much up for debate.
The second great shape shift is one which I am going to label the *Androgynisation* of our culture and this one is my subject in this essay...In the late 1980s, the Chatteringclassosphere began to buzz with a new fashionable groupthink. The gist of it went something like this: the difference between men and women is not so much a case of their different biological and animal natures as something that is “socially constructed”. What’s more, these “socially constructed” “gender roles” are both unnecessary and undesirable....and impediments to ‘Progress’...........
1 child (or even less) is the choice of women across the developed world so why should they retain their privileges that only exist because of child bearing capacity?
Reduced opportunity for real-life interactions with the opposite sex has to be one of the big factors reinforcing these rigid (and harmful) sex stereotypes. The more time you spend face-to-face, with real humans, the faster those stereotypes take a background role as the qualities of that *specific individual* come into focus.
Group differences are important for high scale political agents,not for individuals in their everyday life. Most of the people won't benefit from knowing about evolutionary psychology, but if people are given millions to improve 'women college students participation in stem related classes', it is important their data is accurate so they spen the money efficiently
Why would understanding goup differences not be useful for all sorts of reasons? In practice everybody uses stereotypes to inform their behaviour. Nobody treats everybody they meet exactly the same.
About the red-pillers and their approach to evolution bio - it seems that there is one little error in their methods. Generally, when they talk about human instinctive/inborn behavior, they seem to assume that in this regard, human behavior is mostly uniform and can be described as being somewhat between baboon and chimp behavior, which works in some situations until it suddenly doesn't. Because it is not exactly the case, humans display a significantly larger variation in their built-in programs than any other primate species in particular and may even switch between different modes of behavior mid-life.
I'm currently writing a series on Red Pill. In the first essay I criticize their reductionism to biology. I posted it to reddit and people had a difficult time understanding that I wasn't criticizing evopsych. I explicitly said that evopsych was an important discipline, but simply criticism biological reductionism was enough to convince some readers that I was against evopsych altogether. As with any hot button issue it becomes difficult to make nuanced arguments.
I attended a private university with a legendary engineering reputation from 1973-78. There were few women in the programs, but they were all exceptionally capable. Those females willing to pursue those studies did not observe any gender obstructions whatsoever, in my opinion. I believe that the fact they received no advantages nor harbored any grievances gave them the confidence to excel without being distracted by "gender" issues. They may have been perceived as being on the masculine end of gender traits, but seemed accepting of their status. They were not all lesbians, either.
We're one species, two sexes, and eight billion individuals. Evolutionary stereotypists all but deny the first, blank-slatists deny the second, and one major problem with stereotypes is that they deny the third—they are two-sizes-fit-all. The other major problem with stereotypes is that they truncate everyone's humanity by assigning/confining certain universal human characteristics (e.g., reason and emotion) to one sex or the other, such that a man who cries is a pussy, and a woman who thinks is strapping on a mental dildo. (Carl Jung with his "anima" and "animus" bears a lot of blame for perpetuating this). Living in a sexed body is like a photographic filter that strongly colors human experience (especially during the reproductive years) without distorting it beyond recognition. Sex stereotypes crop the picture.
Yes, but the stereotypes are useful mental shortcuts. In general women are going to act more of a certain way than men are. Humans developed those mental shortcuts because they are often good enough to mostly right
Great piece.
There’s some meme I’ve seen many times on X where Mr. Rational Man says “men are taller than women on average” and Miss Dumb-Dumb Woman replies “but [that’s not true because] I’m tall” or something like that.
Many here in the comments are clearly are not comprehending what you’re saying, and the way they think could be captured in another meme: Normal Woman states a true fact that “I’m 5’11’’” and Mr. 5’10’’ Red Pill Man says to the tall woman immediately in front of him “that’s not true because men are taller on average, so I am taller than you.” Well, not as catchy but…
More concisely, they are so focused on the average (a “first-order moment” for you stats-letes), the fixation on mean differences has led to them very nearly denying the existence of any variance (a “second-order moment”). @Helen Roy has used the term “flattened” which I understood to mean un-nuanced thinking like this. So apt.
Alongside all of this, there’s a lot of stolen valor-lite woven in. For instance, these men will say that the most brutal 3% of occupations are 90% male. Therefore he, a man who sells insurance for a living, is actually building civilization. Just all really flawed thinking, in service of their egos.
"Many here in the comments are clearly are not comprehending what you’re saying, and the way they think could be captured in another meme: Normal Woman states a true fact that “I’m 5’11’’” and Mr. 5’10’’ Red Pill Man says to the tall woman immediately in front of him “that’s not true because men are taller on average, so I am taller than you.” Well, not as catchy but…"
No one says this. Every red pill guy is aware of the WNBA and it's population of women over 6' tall. You're just trying to make up a strawman to show equivalence between men and women (who are clearly statistically retarded, even the intelligent ones). Men are just much better at understanding the world quantitatively, just like women are much better at multitasking. And it's not close, especially when you compare men and women of the same IQ.
"For instance, these men will say that the most brutal 3% of occupations are 90% male. Therefore he, a man who sells insurance for a living, is actually building civilization. Just all really flawed thinking, in service of their egos."
No one thinks this. They merely point out the obvious fact that women would starve and freeze almost immediately if men disappeared, while men would basically get along fine until everyone died if women disappeared. This is almost always in response to the notion that feminists hold that men are basically useless.
"The way forward... is to hold two thoughts simultaneously: patterns exist at the population level, but individuals exist in glorious variation."
This is and should be so painfully obvious to everyone with an ounce of sense, and yet the need to say it illustrates that, sadly, lots of people lack an ounce of sense. I think the social retardation (and I mean that term in its original intent, as "having been slowed") of the younger generations due to time spent online, and due to their coddling, as Haidt put it, is probably the most pressing factor as to why young people today can't figure out these simple truths. Young men in particular just have no experience with women at all, and so they treat them like another species.
The impact of sex differences on society is all about the differences in means, not about differences in the outliers. For example, the fact that women have come to dominate the educational establishment in most countries means that the schools have increasingly valued "safety" over risk taking, and it hasn't mattered that there are a minority of exceptions. This dichotomy has hardened over time as the majority has increased. The net effect of this trend over the past 50 years has been the feminization of boys and the confusion (and rising mental illness) among girls. Against this backdrop, it will be interesting to see how the sex differences evolve going forward. We should learn something about how much of the difference is genetic and how much is socially constructed.
"The war between stereotype enjoyers and deniers isn't about statistics - it's about power."
Yes, indeed. Giving women power, denying that stereotypes are a pretty useful heuristic, has been a catastrophic mistake. Let both sides be erroneous: I will take the error that doesn't sacrifice civilisation on the altar of political correctness.
Industrialization and technology gave women power. Good luck in your project of dismantling civilization to save it.
There's plenty of countries with industry and technology without women having power. Perhaps the link is causal; however it is by no means inevitable.
They don't want to lose those privileges for having children that they don't actually have.
We are living through the dismantling of civilization.
The irony of this post is that your entire argument rests on a misunderstanding of statistics.
“Women are irrational” is not an equivalent statement to “men are predators”. One is a reasonable stereotype, based on population averages. The other is not valid, because the majority of men aren’t predators. Women (on average, of course) can’t seem to differentiate between “most men are predators” and “most predators are men”.
This doesn’t even address that the implications of being irrational are completely different and much more benign than the implications of being predators.
The evidence shows time and again that women on average are “flexible” in every aspect. They place less value on the truth, objectivity, physical reality, etc. This doesn’t mean that women shouldn’t be treated with human dignity, but denying reality only leads to destruction.
Planes falling out of the sky, countries experimenting with no borders, empathy weaponized by sexual predators, jail time for decades old gossip, journalistic objectivity viewed as oppression… these things are not compatible with civilization.
I think a lot of it is a reaction to the 'all differences are socially constructed' party line everyone gets fed in school thanks to leftists running the primary/secondary and higher educational establishments. Then when you discover the truth you over-index on it. If everyone tells you X doesn't exist, and then you discover on your own that X does, there's the tendency to believe that X explains *everything*.
Also, even with overlapping means you get differences at the extremes--the tallest person is always going to be a man, and most people over 6'4" or whatever are going to be male. That winds up making a difference in terms of who billionaires and school shooters are.
I disagree with the idea that more knowledge is harmful. What we have now as the dominant discourse is straight-out Lysenkoism, a Lamarckist doctrine that humans are shaped by their environment alone. Lysenkoism did not work out well for the Soviet Union, and it's what is causing the trouble in the West today.
The thing that is truly harmful is the "noble lie", the idea that there are some goals that transcend truth.
Europe and its colonies have progressed by combating misunderstanding with more information, not less. Less information is the way of Communism, or Islam, or totalitarianism more generally.
I'm not advocating less information, but that information without context, wisdom, and the increasingly rare thing that is life experience can be disastrous on an individual level.
We have the dominant discourse masquerading as information: that is worse than no information, to me. The {red,black}-pill stuff is an alternative framework that helps, on balance, to me.
Plus we are also ruled by neurotic men.
Because the feminization of society has shunned non-neurotic men from white collar professions.
As it happens I too wrote on this theme in my most recent post a few days ago:
A few excerpts:
"The 20th c. saw a radical transformation in social mores about the respective roles of men and women in society. This transformation can in part be explained in terms of technology-driven economic change and in part by sustained pressure coming from the activist/intellectual movement that we call Feminism. Thanks to this economic/feminist nexus, the principle of equality of the sexes is now (rightly in my view) an unchallenged Liberal axiom. Where there is profound disagreement, of course, is whether this cultural shift still has a way to go or whether it has overshot. The degree to which such things are susceptible to a virtuous circle of civilising social mores and how intractably hard-wired into the nature of the human animal is a complex ongoing debate. Females will always play the central part in childbirth and child-rearing (and will always be at a disadvantagein respect of sexual violence and compulsion). Males will always do more of what one might broadly call the physical heavy lifting. What, in any case, do we mean by ‘equal’? Do we mean equal as in equivalent or equal as in homogenised?…that (as someone famously said) is the question. In this essay I argue that there have in fact been two profound cultural shape-shifts on what one might term the masculine/feminine axis in Western society....ones that need to be considered separately:
The first of them is *Feminisation*; the idea that the zeitgeist has seen a marked shift towards the feminine over the course of the last half century or so. This too has, in recent times, become axiomatic in journalistic discourse right across the political spectrum. We are talking of a phenomenon that has had huge consequences for the way we live now but one that – as mentioned previously - is at least as much a story of economic and technological change as it is a story of intellectual trends. The question of whether this feminisation of advanced industrial societies should be viewed as a good thing, a bad thing or somewhere in between is very much up for debate.
The second great shape shift is one which I am going to label the *Androgynisation* of our culture and this one is my subject in this essay...In the late 1980s, the Chatteringclassosphere began to buzz with a new fashionable groupthink. The gist of it went something like this: the difference between men and women is not so much a case of their different biological and animal natures as something that is “socially constructed”. What’s more, these “socially constructed” “gender roles” are both unnecessary and undesirable....and impediments to ‘Progress’...........
For some reason the edit function doesn't seem to be working so here is the link I wanted to attach: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-androgyny-syndrome
1 child (or even less) is the choice of women across the developed world so why should they retain their privileges that only exist because of child bearing capacity?
Reduced opportunity for real-life interactions with the opposite sex has to be one of the big factors reinforcing these rigid (and harmful) sex stereotypes. The more time you spend face-to-face, with real humans, the faster those stereotypes take a background role as the qualities of that *specific individual* come into focus.
Absolutely fantastic insight here!
Group differences are important for high scale political agents,not for individuals in their everyday life. Most of the people won't benefit from knowing about evolutionary psychology, but if people are given millions to improve 'women college students participation in stem related classes', it is important their data is accurate so they spen the money efficiently
Why would understanding goup differences not be useful for all sorts of reasons? In practice everybody uses stereotypes to inform their behaviour. Nobody treats everybody they meet exactly the same.
About the red-pillers and their approach to evolution bio - it seems that there is one little error in their methods. Generally, when they talk about human instinctive/inborn behavior, they seem to assume that in this regard, human behavior is mostly uniform and can be described as being somewhat between baboon and chimp behavior, which works in some situations until it suddenly doesn't. Because it is not exactly the case, humans display a significantly larger variation in their built-in programs than any other primate species in particular and may even switch between different modes of behavior mid-life.
I'm currently writing a series on Red Pill. In the first essay I criticize their reductionism to biology. I posted it to reddit and people had a difficult time understanding that I wasn't criticizing evopsych. I explicitly said that evopsych was an important discipline, but simply criticism biological reductionism was enough to convince some readers that I was against evopsych altogether. As with any hot button issue it becomes difficult to make nuanced arguments.
I attended a private university with a legendary engineering reputation from 1973-78. There were few women in the programs, but they were all exceptionally capable. Those females willing to pursue those studies did not observe any gender obstructions whatsoever, in my opinion. I believe that the fact they received no advantages nor harbored any grievances gave them the confidence to excel without being distracted by "gender" issues. They may have been perceived as being on the masculine end of gender traits, but seemed accepting of their status. They were not all lesbians, either.
We're one species, two sexes, and eight billion individuals. Evolutionary stereotypists all but deny the first, blank-slatists deny the second, and one major problem with stereotypes is that they deny the third—they are two-sizes-fit-all. The other major problem with stereotypes is that they truncate everyone's humanity by assigning/confining certain universal human characteristics (e.g., reason and emotion) to one sex or the other, such that a man who cries is a pussy, and a woman who thinks is strapping on a mental dildo. (Carl Jung with his "anima" and "animus" bears a lot of blame for perpetuating this). Living in a sexed body is like a photographic filter that strongly colors human experience (especially during the reproductive years) without distorting it beyond recognition. Sex stereotypes crop the picture.
Yes, but the stereotypes are useful mental shortcuts. In general women are going to act more of a certain way than men are. Humans developed those mental shortcuts because they are often good enough to mostly right
Just use AI, that's the ultimate mental shortcut for the whole human species.
I added your blog to my recommended ones, so that more readers can find you!
Thank you ❤️
Good Stuff this one! You've earned my subscription! Looking forward to where you go with this thread I am!