Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

Haha just watched this and CN is absolutely hilarious really

Having failed spectacularly to get him to slip up, she is reduced to trying to make him out to be a lunatic with

Let me get this straight, you are saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of the lobsters.

Which yet again fails and instead just makes her look ridiculous

StillPissedoff ; “So it is women's fault when they befriend men who go on to abuse them? Bollocks to that. The men who choose to abuse are responsible for the abuse they perpetrate.”

Of course men who abuse women are responsible for their abuse. I suspect you’re picking up on my use of “aggressive.” Aggressive doesn’t have to mean physically aggressive – so for example Cathy Newman was aggressive in the interview. But even when we’re talking about physical aggression, there’ s a difference between male-male aggression and male-female aggression. The former has to do with competition in the male dominance hierarchy. The latter doesn’t. No woman wants a man to be aggressive towards her.

Of course there are male physical abusers up and down the social spectrum, but at the lower end of the social spectrum, the males who are at the top of the male dominance hierarchy aren’t likely to be there because of their knowledge of securities law, their skill at cinematography or their ability to do mental arithmetic on the fly during a business negotiation. In poorer areas, the dominant males are much more likely to be dominant because they are physically aggressive, willing to take risks and unwilling to take and s**t from anyone. These dominant males are much less likely to be discriminating in limiting their physical aggression to male-male.

Higher up the social spectrum, there will certainly be abusers of women, but the line between dominant male and physically aggressive male will be weaker, simply because higher up there are so many other possible routes to success than physical aggression and recklessness.

But that’s not quite the end of it. Apart from natural physical aggressiveness, another cause of male physical aggression is sexual jealousy – and that applies all the way up the spectrum. It’s also a cause of female physical aggression. And in fact in relationships female on male violence is considerably more frequent than male on female violence. The critical difference is that males being stronger do – when they lose control – far more damage to the woman, than the woman can do to the man.

LeeMoore, I may have misunderstood you here: but
"You could try to change that and try to persuade womankind that men who are kind, sensitive, non aggressive, meek, non dominant etc should get the highest evaluations."

So it is women's fault when they befriend men who go on to abuse them? Bollocks to that. The men who choose to abuse are responsible for the abuse they perpetrate.

ThisIsAStory : "I was more engaging at the social theory / feminism angle that if men and women are different, on average, in what they pursue, why do we still evaluate men as doing 'better' out of that because they earn more money, on average, over a lifetime and not consider that women have done 'better' on other scales. "

Well my answer to that is that there are 7 billion different evaluators on the planet and each of them is perfectly entitled to evaluate their own life (or the lives of other people) however they like. If "society" chooses to try to compute an aggregate view of the best evaluation scheme, in reality that's just the view of the Daily Mail or the BBC or the National Life Evaluation Committee. Who cares what these people think ?

But, reverting to biology and psychology, the question of who is winning in the male dominance hierarchy is slightly different. There are obviously three and a half billion different evaluators (the women) and they might all have completely different views. But in practice they don't. On average - and yes there will be different tastes - more women will give a high evaluation to successful (in the sense of winning competitive things whether that be sports or business or entertainment or arts or war) high status, articulate, healthy, self confident men than other flavours. You could try to change that and try to persuade womankind that men who are kind, sensitive, non aggressive, meek, non dominant etc should get the highest evaluations. And something along those lines has been attempted in a rather lacklustre fashion by some feminists. But it would be hard to claim that it has been very successful. Still the good news for women is that that biology absolutely confirms that women are the unappealable judges on the court that decides who's won the male dominance hierarchy. Men don't get any say in this AT ALL.

NotDavidTennant : “Only if you assume an efficient market in which everyone is a perfectly rational actor”

Not really. Markets don't need to be anything like perfect to be useful. Rational actors do better in the market than irrational ones, consequently prices set on the basis of irrational superstitions present huge opportunities for people who can see through the superstitions. So even a fairly inefficient market will eventually discover market clearing prices. How eventual eventually is depends on information flow of course, But markets contain within them the algorithm to discover useful information. “I think we’ll hold on to our sales if we put the price up 20%” is a testable proposition. The market will tell you if you’re right.

The idea of free markets isn’t that all the actors magically know the right price first up; it’s that the market is an algorithm - if the current price is wrong, the market tells the actors and they have an incentive to adjust.

The main drag on the working of markets is coercion not irrational actors.

*note that “rational” actors doesn’t mean “actors I agree with” – people can rationally have totally different subjective views on the value of the same thing.

I lost count of the number of times she said "so you're saying...". That was her entire approach, don't engage with the positions presented, convert them into strawpeople and then have a go.

Yep, in a nutshell. It was frankly embarrassing

"I lost count of the number of times she said "so you're saying..."

36 times. source:

I'd rather pay attention to someone who says some things that really provoke me to think, even if I don't agree with them all, than with someone who is a multi-faceted mirror to reflect what is thought to be correct by liberal-thinking people.

Careful with that kind of open minded thinking around here!

Following the discussion on this thread I thought I'd have a better sense of the interview if I watched the entire thing.

That was a really inferior performance by CN. JP had a logical whole that he'd clearly thought deeply about and CN was just sniping from all over the place.

I lost count of the number of times she said "so you're saying...". That was her entire approach, don't engage with the positions presented, convert them into strawpeople and then have a go.

I'd rather pay attention to someone who says some things that really provoke me to think, even if I don't agree with them all, than with someone who is a multi-faceted mirror to reflect what is thought to be correct by liberal-thinking people.

These wages are set by the market. If power companies could find some way to get their power lines mended in the wind and rain by paying their men (because they are men) the same as they pay their women (eg secretaries) they’d do it in minus 20 seconds.

Only if you assume an efficient market in which everyone is a perfectly rational actor.

Thanks Lee. Economists are pretty terrible at measuring happiness too (hence the recent debate over 'wellbeing index' measurement rather than GDP for international comparison.

I can see JP's logic. I was more engaging at the social theory / feminism angle that if men and women are different, on average, in what they pursue, why do we still evaluate men as doing 'better' out of that because they earn more money, on average, over a lifetime and not consider that women have done 'better' on other scales.

In other words, if men, on average, succeed by spending more time at the office, why is the cliche only on the deathbed that it's understood to be less than all-fulfilling?

ThisIsAStory : “One of the things I thought JP helpfully raised around the high 'value' jobs is that only a few men pursue and achieve those either and that depending on the time horizon over which you measure, this may or may not bring happiness or fulfilment and may come at quite high cost relationally etc”

JP isn’t an economist (though I don’t think he’s ignorant about it) but I suspect his answer would be psychological rather than economic. He’s very big (and IMHO pretty convincing) on the importance of dominance hierarchies (or if you prefer competence hierarchies.) Male social animals ALWAYS have a dominance hierarchy. In some animals being top of the male dominance hierarchy gives you preferential access to females, by force (eg elephant seals.) You chase the other guys away and the females don’t get a choice of who to mate with. In other animals, including humans, females get to choose who to mate with. And they tend to choose males who are equal in status or higher in status than themselves. So they watch the males battle it out in the male dominance hierarchy, and pick from the top. On average of course. So males at the top of the dominance hierarchy get lots more mating opportunities than males lower down. Thus Hollywood starlet Gretchen marries music producer Carl. Not mailman Alvin. On average. And if Gretchen cheats on Carl, she cheats with movie star Darren, not with grocery clerk Juan.

So human males get a mating reward for being higher in the dominance hierarchy. I believe that statistics bear out the theory – higher status males get more sexual partners than lower status males. So for a male, the reward for working like a maniac to become a partner in a law firm isn’t happiness, it’s nookie. And, for evolutionary purposes, more nookie with more females means more descendants.

But for women more nookie with more men does not mean more descendants. Hence there’s no real evolutionary driver to make women seek higher status. Which is why top women lawyers bail out of the top law firms when they hit 30 – what’s the point of the 80 hour work week ? Surely there must be more to life than this ? And there is. But not for the few guys who want to be No.1 lobster. (Note that the desire to be No.1 lobster doesn't have to involve any conscious calculation that it's going to net you more descendants. If being No.1 does help you net more descendants, then that desire is quite sufficient. After all, actual No.1 lobsters probably haven't studied evolutionary biology. They just fight to get to No.1, and the chicks fall in line.)

I guess that at least part of it is that she’s used to interviewing politicians who are often speaking complete shit, they know it, she knows it, we know it, but they’ve a party line to toe.

In this case, he’s a scientist and was talking about his own observations which is completely different.

Only just got around to viewing this.

CN completely fails to engage with Peterson’s argument. She manages to misrepresent or misunderstand almost everything he says. It reminds me a lot of the arguing on here.

You get the impression he was brought on as an easy target for Newman to knock down only to find that he did not take the bait and instead dictated the pace of the interview in a measured manner.

I think that we are partly presuming a value system that I want to question, namely that money defines value.

One of the things I thought JP helpfully raised around the high 'value' jobs is that only a few men pursue and achieve those either and that depending on the time horizon over which you measure, this may or may not bring happiness or fulfilment and may come at quite high cost relationally etc.

If women are measuring value differently, why are we so sure that restrictive value to the monetisation of the outcome is sufficient? Or is that just a 'masculine' assessment of value?

LeeMoore - I know! Not easy! Not to mention that many of those jobs working with people are public sector jobs, outside of natural markets (even when marketised under neoliberalism). And we know how public opinion hates public servants earning anything more than a pittance! Not trying to say it's easy. Nothing to do with dismantling patriarchy ever is, is it?!

LangCleg : “If it turns out that women are, by population average, different in some ways to men, the aim of feminism should be to force society to value those things more.”

The difficulty is how. And we need to start with how society currently values things. And it isn’t by a group of sinister middle aged men gathering together in a smoke filled room and agreeing “Haha – let’s arrange that secretaries get paid half what electrical power line repairers get paid. That’ll keep us chaps on top !”

These wages are set by the market. If power companies could find some way to get their power lines mended in the wind and rain by paying their men (because they are men) the same as they pay their women (eg secretaries) they’d do it in minus 20 seconds. Nobody has any interest in paying anyone any more than they have to. And correspondingly, if you need someone and they won’t work for you for less than £75,000 a year, you don’t say “Bah humbug, she’s a woman. I’m only going to offer £45,000 even if that means we don’t get her.”

So forcing society to value things in some way that you’d like better means departing from how the market values them. Now, of course, the market goes all over the place as things change. So once we get driverless trucks lots of reasonably well paid jobs that are currently done mostly by men will disappear. And the replacement jobs may be in offices where perhaps women have the advantage. So there’s no guarantee that the market will always pay jobs that men typically do more than jobs that women typically do. But if you want some deus ex machina to magically achieve this result without reference to the market, what is it ? And how are you going to use it without losing all the value of market price discovery ?

I mean campaign for, agitate for, base activism on.

Langcleg

Force society to value these things more

What do you mean by force?

Surely we can try and encourage society to value the roles that women traditionally fill more, but force? How? Do you mean pay them disproportionately more than they have traditionally received?

I think the measures of success of outcomes are too "male" at the moment

YES! Another thing about the Scandinavian research is that it shows women tend to favour working with people, while men tend to favour working with things. But society values the professions working with people (eg social work) as lesser - less money, less status too.

If it turns out that women are, by population average, different in some ways to men, the aim of feminism should be to force society to value those things more.

(And always remembering that population averages don't mean individuals. A 6ft 4in woman is still a woman, as is a woman who wants to work with things.)

"Peterson mentioned the Scandinavian paradox which is that those societies which have tried hardest and for longest to get rid of social and cultural sex biases, are the ones that have got the biggest occupational sex differences."

more about that here: nordicparadox.se/

For me, feminism is about liberating women from patriarchy. It doesn't really matter to me whether, if we ever achieve that, it turns out that men and women really are different from one another, or whether we are the same.

*So I don't feel threatened about some of these things that Petersen points out. I think they are quite exciting, actually!

Same. He said "equality of opportunity" (but not necessarily outcome). I agree with that. We DON'T have that opportunity now, and that is what I want.

(I think the measures of success of outcomes are too "male" at the moment though, eg valuing high risk, short term outcomes. I'd like to see success measured over the longer term before someone decides that women aren't as good at it)

I found out about the Scandinavian occupation differences via the Logical Marcus Twitter account we've mentioned before. I was flabbergasted and I also think it's really interesting.

For me, feminism is about liberating women from patriarchy. It doesn't really matter to me whether, if we ever achieve that, it turns out that men and women really are different from one another, or whether we are the same.

So I don't feel threatened about some of these things that Petersen points out. I think they are quite exciting, actually!

I first heard him speak on Monday, and have been catching up with his lectures since. I totally agree with you Lee and find it a shame that people seem so desperate to fit him into their preconceived boxes of what they think he is without bothering to listen to him. Rather like CM

Its also very difficult to interview anyone who speaks like this. It makes most styles of interview look weak.

Only if the interviewer had an agenda to make his or her guest look bad. I find that Channel 4 adopt this style a lot - endless attempts at building strawmen with "so what you're saying is..." etc. There are no flies on Peterson, so it just didn't work out the way they planned.