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thundara  ·  3140 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is There Anything Good About Men?

Calm down. I'm not getting hot under the collar. I'm not saying I'm uncomfortable with the argument, or that it's inappropriate, or accusing you of being a bad person in any aspect. I'm just saying that I don't buy the author's argument. I think it's searching for one explanation to a phenomenon that I consider highly complex and hard to ascribe to any one factor without mountains more evidence than what the article presented.

If a professor of social psychology is making observations of how things are, that's fine. If they want to get mechanistic and say X is the reason why things are that way, I'm going to put on my skeptic hat and ask: is that reasoning sound?

And my conclusion is that I don't think it's sound to use the historical prevalence of men in technical innovation as an argument for their innate tendency towards the edges of intelligence / creativity when all the while women were actively discouraged from doing those very things. And my most basic counterexample is that the trends of women involvement across different fields don't correlate with the attributes described by the author.

He could have made a non-PC appeal towards differences in abstract vs. concrete thinking ability and I would have taken it more seriously. But he argued from the perspective of motivation, sociability, and sexual reward and I gave the counterexample of CS vs. biology.

Past that, I largely agree with his argument that cultures put men to use at both of the extremes of the world and that men have a greater need to prove themselves to improve their chances of reproduction.