Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

makeourfuture : "does your book have an explanation for why women chatter about their feelings and men try to fix things?"

1. I do not recall, as I read it twenty years ago, and so I remember very little of the details, merely that
2. it was fascinating
3. there was a brilliant experiment on pattern recognition
4. it had a bright blue cover
5. it was a present from Mrs Moore who, for the avoidance of doubt, has never been heard to utter a single syllable about feelings and would break out into uncontrollable laughter at the suggestion that I might be able to fix something

Ok you are starting to make sense now.

But let me ask, does your book have an explanation for why women chatter about their feelings and men try to fix things?

Yippee : “But I have yet to hear anything from JP, or those who follow his work on this thread, about the structures developed possibly as a consequence of biological sex roles but whihc clearly and deliberately oppressed women.
Why is that???”

I see that I missed this interesting question from earlier in the thread. I’ll do a bit of a Cathy – so you’re asking, what is there about those parts of human culture and structures that deliberately oppress women, that seems to be derived from biological sex differences ?

I’ll offer the rather common cultural construct of society trying to control female reproductive freedom. (I don’t mean abortion, I mean mate choice, chastity, adultery etc.)

Taking humans as a species which relies on pair bonding as a stipulation, let’s look at the nature of the bargain. The female gets some sperm and some resources (food, protection etc for her and her children.) The male gets exclusive sexual access, ie some eggs and some services (household, childcare.) The partnership, if executed according to its terms, delivers both parties evolutionary benefits – a chance to pass on their genes to the next generation.

So what’s wrong with the deal ? Well, each party can cheat. But the cheating is asymmetrical. If Dad cheats (sexually) – what’s the cost for Mum ? Usually nothing. Dad isn’t going to run out of sperm. What matters to Mum is whether there’s any risk to the promised supply of resources. The sort of dad cheating that matters to Mum isn’t him playing away sexually, it’s him not providing resources. But whether or not the resources are delivered as promised is an open book. Mum knows whether Dad is keeping to the bargain. So does the community. A transgression is obvious. If Mum cheats – what’s the cost for Dad ? Everything. His entire life is a failure. He spends his life working and providing resources to get someone else’s genes into the next generation. Moreover Mum’s cheating is secret. It’s much harder to detect than Dad reneging on his promise to provide resources. And even if the cheating is detected, you still don’t know whether the baby is Dad’s or the other guy’s.

And people have done psychological experiments on jealousy (see the book at the end.) On average if Dad has a meaningless sexual fling, Mum gets a bit jealous. But what makes her insanely jealous is if he forms a close friendship with another woman. (Presumably because that represents a risk that he’ll break the existing pair bond and form a new one with the other woman.) Whereas if Mum has a meaningless sexual fling with another man, Dad gets insanely jealous. Whereas if she forms a close friendship with another man, Dad doesn’t mind at all, unless he fears that it might turn sexual.)

Mate guarding is ubiquitous both in pair bonding species and in species where one male gathers a harem and defends it against other males. For obvious reasons. So why would it be surprising that when one species develops a big enough brain to start developing a culture, and when the social group is dominated by men (see earlier comment on violence) - the cornerstone of the culture would be rules to police female chastity and to punish adultery. It’s mate guarding translated directly into culture.

If you’re interested in the join between biology and culture this :

www.goodreads.com/book/show/1056451.The_Adapted_Mind

The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture

is pretty much the foundational work of modern evolutionary psychology. It’s a bit out of date now, but still fascinating. Somebody earlier in the thread said that evolutionary psychology is “just so” stories. It isn’t, and some of the chapters describe very clever experiments in psychology. But there’s a bit of truth in the argument that these people sometimes take their inferences too far into the realm of speculation, so later workers in the field have reined in some of the claims. But it’s still a real eye opener. The experiment on sex differences in spatial awareness and pattern recognition is simply brilliant.

Best mumsnet thread ever. Thanks Lee and others for all the writing. I don't have time to contribute and can only read it occasionally.

Thanks so much, Lee. I score highly on open mindedness (94%) and low on neuroticism (21%) and agree that you're probably onto something there about needing the more close-minded folk to keep the debate interesting and to remind us of the boring old (but possibly correct) conventional wisdom!

makeourfuture : "This guy wants to shut down social science."

The current structures for teaching social science. Not social science.

He perceives that the vegetable patch is infested with slugs. He believes that the only way to get rid of the slugs is to dig up the whole patch and start again in a different - slug free - corner of the garden. This doesn't mean he wants to abolish vegetables.

This is just an example of the counter strategy to the long march through the institutions. After an institution has become infested it may be impossible to clean it out and return it to its original function. It may be necessary to raze it to the ground, and begin again elsewhere.

Yippee : “Lee those people have no business being on discussion forums on the internet!’

I disagree. When I claimed earlier that I wasn’t ornery, I was lying ☺

Folk from the not so open end of the spectrum can helpfully turn up on discussion forums to remind airy fairy folk like you of the conventional wisdom and the conventional arguments for it. You, being airy fairy, probably haven’t paid nearly enough attention to the conventional wisdom because you’ve been off chasing rainbows – so you probably need remedial instruction in the conventional wisdom. Remember the convention wisdom is sometimes right. Indeed it’s usually right, otherwise it wouldn’t be the conventional wisdom.

As Peterson said about his experience when he raised his pronoun complaints – I paraphrase –

“the initial reaction from most people was “He’s saying the communists are taking over the universities. This is Canada. Communists don’t take over universities in Canada. This guy must be a lunatic.” And that was EXACTLY THE RIGHT REACTION. Communists don’t take over universities in places like Canada. So you shouldn’t believe me until you are persuaded that I’m right – that absurd as it may seem, communists are taking over the universities in Canada (or at least the humanities departments.)”

Moreover it’s not just you that benefits from conventional folk posting on discussion boards, they benefit, and society benefits to the extent that they can encourage you not to be misled by charlatans with absurd new fangled notions. After all, charlatans are a bad thing; and most new fangled notions are nonsense.

PS I wouldn’t bother psyching yourself up too much for your online personality test. It only takes five minutes. But I raise a worried eyebrow about the idea of too much mother-son sharing. You might want to have a secret go at it first, to see how awful you are before sharing the results with your son. And vice versa ☺

This guy wants to shut down social science.

Seer - here's that link

quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/

Yippee "One thing I've heard JP say that this thread proves, is that in true debate you should really listen to the others views, and come from a standpoint of 'I may learn something, there might be some truth in what others are saying'. Doesn't mean you have to ultimately agree but always be open to that possibility."

Yes, but remember that "openness" is a personality trait with a distribution ranging from very open to very closed. Folk who like discussing and thinking about ideas that they haven't heard before are clustered at the open end. People from the other end find new ideas much less interesting and much more challenging. Debates are no fun if you're not interested in opposing ideas - unless you can just have a dominance fight rather than a real debate.

And sometimes the closed people are right. Sometimes it is time to stop chattering about new ideas, and get on with deciding on an actual course of action and implementing it. I'm sure anyone who has ever sat in a business meeting is familiar with that.

meddle with people's heads' - you mean bring to consciousness prejudices that they may not have examined. Oh the horror.

No, I mean being compulsorily subject to a discredited test that has no observable effect on outcomes. Oh, the horror.

www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html

Seer : "What do you see is the basis for determining the best investment? Reproductive health (ie beauty)? Something else?"

I'm not the judge of course, evolution is. In other words a male has made the right choice of investment in a female if she produces lots of healthy, good quality children for him who survive to the next round of the reproductive games. That does not mean, of course, that the male knows that that's what he's trying to achieve. Merely that evolution has shaped his instincts accordingly. And as I indicated above, not just his instincts. His mum's instincts, his grandma's instincts, his big sister's instincts, his aunts' instincts will all be pointing in the same direction. They will all be warning him against a tramp who sleeps around.

So that has traditionally boiled down to :

1. she's healthy (ie consistent with being able to get pregnant and support a pregnancy)
2. she's young (but post menarche obviously). Young enough to stay alive until her six kids are at least four years old, before she dies at age 30-35
3. physically attractive - ie symmetrical features and all the bits stuck on in roughly the right place, good body shape and distribution of body fat, and good skin and hair (markers of the absence of serious genetic defects and markers of good health)
4. chaste (if her children are not yours you've wasted your life - totally) NB contra 2, you may want to scoop her up shortly pre menarche to maximise the chastity angle, and bet that she's not worldly wise enough yet to dare an illicit encounter with another man
5. intelligent enough to do the household chores necessary to keep you and your kids fed and clothed while you go hunting bison. (Though if you have three wives, wife 2 and wife 3 only need to be intelligent enough to follow wife 1's instructions. So factor 5 is nothing like as important as the first 4 - because it can be outsourced.Though an intelligent wife may be able to help you in the male dominance hierarchy by picking up useful gossip.

Also if you could share a link to the longer piece I'd be grateful, Lee.

That's really interesting, Lee, thank you for digging that out. It certainly contrasts what I've heard on this topic before.

The comparison with Denmark's level equality was also interesting. I'm a bit distracted by children and dogs to think it through right now but I wonder if this has any relevance to the 'Scandinavian paradox' mentioned upthread (possibly not).

As to "ancestral indigenous" groups I'm sceptical about the lack of a dominance hierarchy.

I clipped this out of a much longer piece :

"But what about egalitarianism? In a 2004 study, Michael Gurven marshals an impressive amount of cross-cultural data and notes that hunters tend to keep more of their kill for themselves and their families than they share with others.12 While there is undeniably a great deal of sharing across hunter-gatherer societies, common notions of generalized equality are greatly overstated. Even in circumstances where hunters give away more of their meat than they end up receiving from others in return, good hunters tend to be accorded high status, and rewarded with more opportunities to reproduce everywhere the relationship has been studied.13 When taking into account ‘embodied wealth’ such as hunting returns and reproductive success, and ‘relational wealth’ such as the number of exchange and sharing partners, Alden Smith et al. calculated that hunter-gatherer societies have a ‘moderate’ level of inequality, roughly comparable to that of Denmark.14 While this is less inequality than most agricultural societies and nation states, it’s not quite the level of egalitarianism many have come to expect from hunter-gatherers.
In the realm of reproductive success, hunter-gatherers are even more unequal than modern industrialized populations, exhibiting what is called “greater reproductive skew,” with males having significantly larger variance in reproductive success than females.15 Among the Ache of Paraguay, males have over 4 times the variance in reproductive success that females do, which is one of the highest ratios recorded. This means some males end up having lots of children with different women, while a significant number of males end up having none at all. This is reflected in the fact that polygynous marriage is practiced in the majority of hunter-gatherer societies for which there are data. Across these societies, the average age at marriage for females is only 13.8, while the average age at marriage for males is 20.7.16 Rather than defending what would be considered child marriage in contemporary Western societies, anthropologists often omit mentioning this information entirely.
According to anthropologists Douglas Fry and Geneviève Souillac, “Nomadic forager data suggest a human predilection toward equality, including gender equality, in ethos and action,”17 yet the available data do not support this notion in the slightest. On the contrary, in 1978 Robert Tonkinson had found that, among the Mardu hunter-gatherers of Australia, “Mardu men accord themselves greater ritual responsibility, higher status, more power, and more rights than women. It is a society in which male interests generally prevail when rights are contested and in the centrally important arena of religious life.”18 Among the Hiwi of Venezuela, and the Ache of Paraguay, female infants and children are disproportionately victims of infanticide, neglect, and child homicide.19 20 It is in fact quite common in hunter-gatherer societies that are at war, or heavily reliant on male hunting for subsistence, for female infants to be habitually neglected or killed.21 22 In 1931, Knud Rasmussen recorded that, among the Netsilik Inuit, who were almost wholly reliant on male hunting and fishing, out of 96 births from parents he interviewed, 38 girls were killed (nearly 40 percent).23
It is also instructive to compare the homicide rates of hunter-gatherer societies with those of contemporary nation states. In a 2013 paper entitled “From the Peaceful to the Warlike,” anthropologist Robert Kelly provides homicide data for 15 hunter-gatherer societies.24

From 1920-1955 the !Kung had a homicide rate of 42/100,000 (about 8 times that of the US rate in 2016), however Kelly mentions that, “murders ceased after 1955 due to the presence of an outside police force.” "

@butwhowasreality are you disappointed by that?

Lee "So if a man has to put in resources, he's going to choose which woman (of those available) is the best investment."

What do you see is the basis for determining the best investment? Reproductive health (ie beauty)? Something else?

Also, from what I understand about people who are still living in ancestral indigenous ways (ie humans living in more 'natural' ways, not affected by patriarchal conditioning), it seems that there tends to be little in the way of a dominance hierarchy (e.g. most of the power being held by a few men at the top), instead communities tend to be egalitarian and based around individual sovereignty and group cooperation.

To be clear, I'm not saying there's no dominance behaviour, just that if it exists it seems to be far more nuanced than in lobsters.

I'm interested in your thoughts on this and also whether you believe that it's been taken into account in Peterson's theories.

So the radfems finally showed up, didn't address a single one of his arguments, questioned the intelligence of people agreeing with him, derailed the thread, and now we're debating whether or not numbers exist.

What a time to be alive.

Also,

Certain cultures or groups do have tendencies to have certain characteristics.

The fact that this is seen as a controversial or debatable statement shows how far the left has fallen into insanity.

These are the sorts of things that happen! Just like here, in that class, someone will say, "What about Newton?" And off you go.

Now how it applies to xx or xy......

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism