Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

[AssignedPuuurfectAtBirth]

Just on. He was saying that people are different due to ' agreeableness, women being more likely to be so; men less so, hence the gender gap

It's the first time I have ever seen Cathy Newman angry. And he was spluttering a bit, first time for him too, for me, I think.

Watch it on + 1

I agree with some of Petersen's views but he didn't come off at all well here

[LeeMoore]

Seer - here's that link

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

[makeourfuture]

This guy wants to shut down social science.

[LeeMoore]

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 ☺

[LeeMoore]

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.

[Seer]

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!

[WiseDad]

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.

[LeeMoore]

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.

[makeourfuture]

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?

[LeeMoore]

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

[AssassinatedBeauty]

What made the experiment brilliant?

[LeeMoore]

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.

[Rufustherenegadereindeer1]

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

[makeourfuture]

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?

[LeeMoore]

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.

[makeourfuture]

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.

[LeeMoore]

Smart girl.

Both very scary things.

[WiseDad]

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.

[NickSharratsFeltTip]

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

[Dissimilitude]

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.

[ThisIsAStory]

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.

[LeeMoore]

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.

[makeourfuture]

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]

LeeMoore

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

[LeeMoore]

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.