well a subset of males are are
biologically hyper-aggressive yeah and
identify them at two years of age and
they're the kids if you put a bunch of
two euros together there's a small
subset they're almost all males about
five percent of males who will kick hit
bite and steal okay so that's their
biological programming let's say but the
vast majority of them are socialized by
the time they're four years old so that
means yeah sure absolutely
I mean it is yeah absolutely yeah and
the thing about about boys like that is
that if you socialize them properly it's
quite a bit of work because they're very
calm about it my son was like that and
if you socialize them properly then they
can become unbelievably useful their
courageous their forthright their their
you know they're they're they're not
going to back down from a challenge
there's all sorts of massive utility in
that and that's this proper interplay
between the biological circuitry and the
socialization but you know and with
James d'amours memo you know he was he's
been accused of taking a biological
essentialist route which is not true one
of the things James said is look there's
credible evidence that there are
biologically mediated differences
between men and women at the level of
temperament and interest that are
actually large and profound and I would
say the science on that is sufficiently
settled so that someone can come out and
say that's scientifically credible now
that doesn't mean it's right because the
scientists could be wrong but what you
can't say is that what James d'amour
said was scientifically uninformed it
was scientifically informed but he also
said look let's make the assumption I'm
paraphrasing slightly but let's make the
assumption that we want to as a society
we want to extract maximum useful
economic value from talented people so
one of the things we want to do is if
some of those people are women and some
of them are men we want to understand
the actual differences between women and
men so that we can set up the workplace
so that both women and men can
contribute to the maximum economically
so that they can benefit as individuals
and everybody can benefit socially so
you can use the biological so I mean for
example one of the thing here's here's a
biological problem on average women are
more agreeable than men and I think
that's because agreeable people are
theirs
self-sacrificing and I think as a woman
you need to be wired to be
self-sacrificing or you won't be able to
tolerate taking care of infants that's
my sense of it okay now there's some
problems with that it's like let's say
that a huge part of female wiring is is
tilted in the direction of the necessity
of self-sacrifice for infant care okay
that doesn't equip women very well for
dealing with with aggressive met because
of aggressive men and infants are not
the same creatures so women play a pay a
price being optimized to some degree for
infant care they pay a price that
they're less what would you call
prepared that's one way of thinking
about it indeed with dealing with hyper
aggressive and competitive men well one
of the consequences of that is that
agreeable people don't make as much
money and the reason for that is to make
money you actually have to be
disagreeable because you have to go to
your boss and say give me some bloody
money or something you don't like will
happen to you you have to leave you have
to be able to fight for an idea - yeah
but so there's something that this is a
perfect test case so biologically
speaking there's a very good reason for
certain kinds of wisdom to be biased in
the direction of manifesting in females
females because they have the capacity
to have fewer offspring in a lifetime
than males are obligated as you say to
to care in a particular way and the fact
that care in human beings take so many
years has resulted in menopause emerging
and menopause essentially when a woman
is done producing new offspring her
interests in her evolutionary interest
which in this case I think are honorable
becomes synonymous with the lineage the
population because her offspring will
either do well or do poorly based on the
population that they're in so women have
a kind of farsightedness about lineage
and I don't think this has anything to
do with human women actually this is a
trait that we can see in females of
other species so it's an ancient thing
whereas males are high variance that is
to say a male can have many offspring in
a lifetime many males have no offspring
in a lifetime and that high variance
means that to the extent that there's
wisdom that surrounds
risk-taking that has traveled
historically along the male path now in
modern times there's no reason that we
can't look at these two kinds of wisdom
and democratize them both right the fact
is there's no reason if you're born
female that you can't tune into what has
historically been male biased wisdom and
take advantage of that and we should be
encouraging this there's no reason that
people have to continue with problem is
is that we can't actually have a
reasonable discussion about it because
you know the discussion is often far
stalled by the claim that while men and
women are exactly the same it's like
it's that's not a helpful discussion and
you know with the agreeableness issue I
don't know exactly what should be done
about that but one of the consequences
of it is is that there's many reasons
why why the pay there's pay differential
between men and women and the issue
itself is very complex but we do know
that agreeable people overall make less
money in the same positions and it's
because they don't negotiate on their
own behalf very well now it's
conceivable that you could have an
intelligent public policy or corporate
policy discussion about what to do about
that like maybe maybe the rule is
something like you review male salaries
once a year and female salaries every
eight months or something like that you
know and I'm not saying that's a good
idea I'm not saying that I'm saying that
if you if you take the facts on the
ground into account there are ways that
you might be able to use them so that
you could and I'm not going to say level
the playing field because I think that's
an appalling phrase but maximize the
possibility of economic contribution
across the genders which is obviously in
everyone's best interest
you
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