Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

I think Petersons'arguements are quite compelling. He looked at Sweden where equality was most pushed and there are fewer women in STEM and more in caring. His explanation is that the more free choice there is the more people will choose gender stereotyped jobs.Which I don;t think he thinks is a good thing for society in general for obvious reasons. He says in poorer countries more women choose engineering for example because they HAVE to go for best pay. His analysis is based on statistical methods and hes not saying all men are this and all women that. I've always agreed with Germains view- fuck equality- which seems to imply we have to accept the world as it is rather than reshape it. Men and women are different biologically why shouldn;t we be different in other ways. I used to accept the patriarchy ideology but these transactivists have made me question some long held views. He does have a big MRA following. But what hes telling them is very positive- to be responsible and see to their duties and to develop their character. We wouldn't have many problems as women with the men if they did that! And its a message these spoiled brat trans like Liam could do with hearing. I.ve left the labour party because of this issue. It seems socialism has a serious problem with free speech. I didn't want that to be true.

I would imagine that everything about our brains and bodies generally is due to evolution.

It's more fodder for people who want to justify discrimination against women, sadly.

Interesting article about innate neurological differences coukd be due to evolution?
www.bps.org.uk/news-and-policy/sex-differences-human-brain-structure-are-already-apparent-one-month-age

2+7 = 9 - but only in the realm of rational numbers.

huh? when is that not true?

protons, neutrons and electrons are not the smallest particles of the universe- we now have quarks.

people and scientists can be wrong, and I don't know the history of science, but I imagine it was never claimed that protons are the smallest possible particles.

I’ve watched half the interview so far and all I can think of is Cathy Newman going, “so you’re saying...”

I have yet to be convinced that, and I have watched the interview, that Cathy performed poorly.

she was constructing strawmen frequently. She would frequently make claims that JP said something that he didn't say. She would also seemingly summarise some of his points, but then completely change his point. I think she simply tried to caricature his positions, while JP would frequently answer that's not my position. That makes for a poor interview, and certainly (at least in my head) doesn't further her goal of asking tough questions and locating where his positions are weak. When the opportunities to ask hard questions presented themselves, she didn't use them.

Makeourfuture, I agree that Newman's boring technique is the norm today but I hope we may be seeing a pushback (see also John Bolton taking Burley to task on Sky, though he blundered in calling her a munchkin.."lightweight" would have worked.)

I now turn off the majority of interviews, R 4 Today is the weathervane for me: I hardly listen any more. If I learn nothing by the end it's a waste of time.

It's the wonder of YouTubing isn't it.

In the politics subsection it's modern pamphleteering.

When did all of this rhetorical analysis come about? It's like hundreds of John Maddens out there, just without the magic marker.

Regarding this particular person's critique - she outs herself pretty early on doesn't she? I have yet to be convinced that, and I have watched the interview, that Cathy performed poorly. It just is what it is today.

The technique is easy, there is no great skill required - you rephrase the other person's statement, and on the other side, you answer a different question from what was asked. But good lord the punditry.

Tsk tsk, Lee.

So what you are saying is that you are happy to overlook Nazism if a Youtuber agrees with you..😉

I find Peterson not that interesting apart from his flinty, rather Albertan, refusal to have his language restricted by authority. He seems to talk a lot about Jung and quests and such like, interesting to a younger generation perhaps but no longer my cup of tea.

In an attempt to dig a little into the question of why Peterson seems to appeal more to men than women, I’ve been on the lookout for female commentary on YouTube on the Cathy Newman interview. Some seem to want to say that the boy done good and praise his performance, and some obviously have a weeny crush on him. But I found this one which was more analytical and which attempted the lese majeste of pointing out where Peterson could have said something different, and better. I don’t say that I agree with everything she says but she does make a few interesting points. Including the interesting point that some of her post match “improvements” of what Peterson could have said would have been much easier for a woman to get away with saying than a man. (They would probably also have taken a lot longer to explain.)

I liked her take at two points particularly. At about 7.45 into the clip she raises her eyebrows at Cathy Newman’s question :

“what’s in it for women ?’

and wonders what Cathy would have made of that sort of response with the roles and sexes reversed – ie a discussion in which she was pointing out difficulties that young women had in life, and that something needed to be done about it and if Peterson had responded with “what’s in it for men ?”

and then at about 12.55 she discusses the exchange where CN says :

“so you’re saying that women have some sort of duty to help fix the crisis of masculinity”

and Peterson answers it by ignoring the suggestion of women’s “duty” and emphasizing women’s “interest” - as a partner "do you want an overgrown child ?" It's a perfectly reasonable response but it appeals to the selfish interest of a woman seeking a partner. I think the reviewer makes a good point that the right answer to whether women have a duty is not to reframe the question in terms of “interest” but just to say “Yes !” to duty.

No idea who this YouTuber is, and no I have not undertaken exhaustive research to check that she isn’t a Nazi. But se doesn’t seem like one on the evidence of this clip.

LeeMoore

Ah, hadn’t realised there was a fee. The paper is free for me when accessed from work.

when phrases like 'a pipe-wielding human bleach stain' are part of the polemic. When are the left going to realise that #nodebate has exhausted the patience of people who are trying to understand.

I think that slur weakened the article, yes.

But I didn't see a call for no debate.

Dissimilitude

$5 is too steep for me, I'm afraid.

"For example, in traditional families where the mother works very little compared to the father, their daughter incurs a larger child penalty
when she eventually becomes a mother herself. Our findings are consistent with an influence of nurture in the formation of women’s preferences over family and career"

Yes. But it's also consistent with :

(a) preference for family over career being heritable to some extent (perhaps as a consequence of personality) and
(b) mothers in rich families who don't need to work begetting daughters who are more likely to finish up in another rich family and not needing to work
(c) all of the above

In principle you ought to be able to tease something out from the statistics. eg if daughter follows mother into high child penalty is not correlated with personality, nurture is going to loom larger than heritability. And if daughter follows mother into high child penalty is not correlated with parental income then (c) becomes less likely.

I'd also be wondering whether if nurture is the guilty party, the moving force might come from the modern direction rather than the traditional one, ie mums who value their careers nurturing their daughters into thinking that valuing your career is a good thing; rather than mums who value family over career discouraging their daughters from pursuing a career.

Nick thanks for the article link. I think I'd sum that up with the phrase 'that's a slur, not an argument'.

There was some stuff about the classic sociologists that I've followed up elsewhere but I couldn't be bothered to read more on Viewpoint when phrases like 'a pipe-wielding human bleach stain' are part of the polemic. When are the left going to realise that #nodebate has exhausted the patience of people who are trying to understand.

On the pay gap, interesting paper published just this month that looks at the gap in Denmark, and determines that the remaining gap is largely accounted for by the 'child penalty', and that this child penalty has grown in importance as a factor of the overall gap from 40% to 80% since 1980 (I interpret this as other factors gradually declining until the child penalty is by far the most important unaddressed element of the gap).

www.nber.org/papers/w24219.pdf

Interesting paper. It shows that the child penalty impacts women roughly equally in 3 ways - labour force participation (women stop working), hours of work (they go part time), and wage rate (their earnings stop growing at the same rate after child birth, they are less likely to achieve a managment position after having kids).

One really interesting bit was that the paper finds statistical evidence that 'child penalties are transmitted through generations'.

"We find that female child penalties are strongly related
to the labor supply history of the maternal grandparents, but not the paternal grandparents, even
after controlling for a rich set of family characteristics. For example, in traditional families where
the mother works very little compared to the father, their daughter incurs a larger child penalty
when she eventually becomes a mother herself. Our findings are consistent with an influence of
nurture in the formation of women’s preferences over family and career"

So, if you were born into a traditional household where the woman prioritizes children over career, you're likely to make the same choices.

The real question, for me, is how much you ascribe this to the free choices of women who want to sacrifice some earnings for family life, versus an undesirable and socially-pressured limiting of women's options based on inflexible notions of a woman's role and unhelpful structures for fairly distributing the 'child penalty'. I don't think this paper sheds much light on that, but it's an interesting look at the numbers, regardless.

If JP knows as little about psychology as he does about Marxism and Poststructuralism, I would be taking his claims with massive pinches of salt. Good pull down of him in Viewpoint currently, for those who have the inclination to get away from this anecdotal cod stuff.

Postmodernism Did Not Take Place: On Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life
Shuja Haider January 23, 2018

But what makes her insanely jealous is if he forms a close friendship with another woman
It would be interesting to parse Mumsnet relationship threads for evidence of this. I seem to recall a few in my aimless reading that would clearly support this point. Lots of people worried their partners have made a new female friend who they talk about a lot. However as we don't have threads from all the men who don't mind their partners having close female friends the sample would be a tad biased.

Smart girl.

Both very scary things.

It's a metaphor, like Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. And since you ask, no there isn't a hand either.

You know, when I introduced my daughter to Smith, she had a nightmare about an invisible hand. It put her off economics for a while. That and Gordon Brown's grin.

makeourfuture : "do you think evolution has a purpose?"

Of course not.

It's a metaphor, like Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. And since you ask, no there isn't a hand either.

"I was turning purple"

Admirably gender neutral.

You know I have made peace with myself about you - I had to, I was turning purple.

May I ask, this may just be they way you are phrasing things, which is fine on a forum - but do you think evolution has a purpose?

I definitely use landmarks... especially as i dont know how you would use the ordination thingy

Dh uses landmarks to direct me to places...but i dont know whether he uses them or has just got used to looking for them for me

Having said that you could drop both of us off in a strange town or city and i will find my way around and he wont

But again that's probably down to landmarks...most things are in the same place if that makes sense

Interesting post lee

AssassinatedB: "What made the experiment brilliant?"

Oh all right then. It was just a really clever hypothesis and a really clever experiment to test it. On average, men are better at spatial rotation, orientation etc than women. And although both sexes can use either method for navigation, men seem to prefer to use a coordinate system / orientation heavy method for navigation, whereas women more often use landmarks. This sort of difference is also observed in rat experiments. A female psychologist (to my shame I cannot recall her name) got rather fed up by being reminded by her male colleagues that men had an advantage in spatial skills. So she reasoned thus :

1. if males do have an advantage in spatial skills, why would that arise from natural selection ?

Well, in plenty of species males have a larger range than females and so if they were relying on landmarks, they'd need to remember more of them. Hence a different approach might be useful. Also if you imagine a hunter gatherer society with men doing the hunting and women doing the gathering, you can see why it would be advantageous for the men to use a coordinate system / orientation approach to navigation. When you've tracked and chased a prey animal all day and finally killed it, you want to drag it straight back home. You don't want to retrace all your zigzag steps, following the landmarks you noted while you were hunting

1. OK she thought. If that's true for men, would the women be developing different spatial skills in their gathering ? So she thought - remembering where the patch of this plant was in relation to the big tree, and where the mushrooms tended to grow, and so on would be useful to female gatherers. So maybe women would have evolved better skills than men in recognising and remembering patterns and where objects were in relation to each other.

1. So she then designed an experiment. Psychology experiments are done in college by getting student volunteers. So she advertised for volunteers for a psychology study, and had them come at set times one at a time, waiting in a small office before being called in for the test.

1. And when they were called in for the test, the test was simply - state the objects you remember seeing on the desk in the waiting room (office) and how the objects were placed on the desk.

1. The students had not been told to look at the desk and remember things, but the only chair in the waiting room was at the desk, so that's where they'd have to sit. And she hypothesised that the women would simply absorb the information better than the men, without even consciously trying. They would naturally pay more attention than the men.

1. And she was right. As with all these things there was an overlapping distribution, ie some men did better than some women, but overall the women did far better. I forget the details but I think the difference was pretty large, say a whole standard deviation.

This does not prove her hypothesis right. She made a speculation, thought of what it would imply and then thought of a way to test whether what it would imply corresponded to experiment. And it did. So even if her hypothesis is wrong, she still discovered a particular type of spatial superiority in women that no one had suspected before. Which in my opinion is pretty damn clever.

The reason this has stuck in my mind is that as well as it being damn clever, I happened to see a TV programme at about the same time, about Allied bombing of Germany during WW2. This involved photo reconnaissance to look for targets, and photo damage evaluation afterwards - ie poring over the detail of photographs and spotting subtle features. Turned out that on average women were better at that than men.

What made the experiment brilliant?