
Address to the American Psychological Association on Men (2007) - JumpCrisscross
http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
======
cperciva
I find the case of Larry Summers and Harvard very interesting, given a
conversation I had with a Harvard researcher a few years back: I mentioned
that at my university, females comprised 55% of the student population but had
received 65% of the major entrance scholarships, and was immediately told
"that makes sense; girls are smarter than boys". The fact that she had spent
her life fighting against people who _made exactly the same argument_ to
justify women receiving fewer university places and fewer scholarships didn't
seem to occur to her.

(Incidentally, last year we still had a 55% female student population, but 85%
of major entrance scholarships went to women. I suppose the argument would now
be that girls have gotten that much smarter in the past three years...)

~~~
jacobolus
I was a Harvard undergraduate at the time, and talked to numerous people
involved in Faculty politics.

Absolutely nobody who was even tangentially involved thought Summers was
forced out primarily for his comments (though many were offended by them, as
many were offended by his similarly inartful comments earlier in his career
along the lines of “maybe some countries have too little pollution”).

Summers was forced out because he made a long list of enemies picking
political fights with numerous people at the university, without first doing
the work to understand the status quo, the stakes, or other people’s
positions. He fired popular staff members, unilaterally drove big shifts in
budget, issued weird ultimatums, rudely disparaged people in public,
interjected himself into academic departments’ internal decisions, and so on.
In short, Summers lacked the patience, discretion, empathy, humility, and good
judgment to be an effective leader in a context like the Harvard Faculty where
everyone is at the top of their field and big egos abound.

The comments about women in science were just a convenient public excuse to
dump him.

The narrative that Harvard Faculty just couldn’t handle Summers speaking truth
to feminist power, or whatever, is a caricature.

------
tajen
> One unfortunate legacy of feminism has been the idea that men and women are
> basically ennemies

I couldn't agree more. If we could drop the idea of helping a category of
people based on their gender, and rather help a category of people based on
the specific criteria, that would be great.

> Why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and
> sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done
> such things?

Moreover, I keep seeing so many newspapers and articles stating the qualities
of women as a gender. I'd like, from time to time, to see more articles about
men being recognized as useful as a gender. I don't know whether it's a
consequence of feminism, but I indeed identify to a gender that's dumb,
violent, rapists than to anything positive.

To wit:
[https://github.com/confcodeofconduct/confcodeofconduct.com](https://github.com/confcodeofconduct/confcodeofconduct.com)
should be reevaluated as depicting a prejudice about programmers more than
solving problems (which are already forbidden by law).

------
manmal
The article mirrors my beliefs quite well; but on a meta level, I can't
believe we are still having this conversation. Why can we describe sub-atomic
particles, but not settle this cultural divide with conclusions based on data
that we have abundantly gathered? Is it because results are forged? Or are
metrics (e.g. IQ Tests) unstable (not reproducible)? Are we pulling
conclusions out of thin air? All these gender studies should be put under
review.

~~~
darfs
I think the discussion will occur for ever, if we continue searching for
arguments for "why are these men so {dumb,angry,bad}?/ Why are these womans so
{plastic, Feminine,dumb}".

I think we should stop thinking in that categories and Start thinking:"this
One (Wo)men is so dumb!". Categories for humans(behavior) where never a good
idea.

EDIT: It may be easy, but easy isn't good anytime. Just take a look at
programming. Writing the good old "jump" was easy. Was it a nice idea?

~~~
laichzeit0
Are you saying that testosterone and estrogen levels play no part whatsoever
in a persons behavior? Because one could argue that there are biological
differences between men and woman which might result in behaviors that are to
some degree "different". Perhaps it even justifies certain generalizations.

~~~
Radim
There's no question about it!

If you take OPs argument of "only consider the individual, never groups of
people" one step further, there is no such thing as "one woman" either. She's
a collection of trillions of cells. And each cell... trillions of jiggling
atoms! The horror.

All life evolved to operate by perceiving the world through efficient
abstractions. Photons as shapes, chemicals as smells, cells as individuals,
individuals as species, people as societies, whatever. These are all leaky and
ultimately unfair generalizations!

But the "exact" alternatives are typically outcompeted by more efficient
approximations. It's just too tedious to consider everything in its
uniqueness.

Internalizing the right abstractions -- concrete enough to be useful but not
too raw to be overwhelming -- is a fine energy-balancing act. There's no
reason why the abstraction ladder should suddenly stop at the level of
"trillions of cells". That would be very suspicious indeed.

To suggest that the (evolved, leaky) abstractions along the line of sex are
suddenly not useful IN ANY WAY is... preposterous.

~~~
darfs
Taking that joke, look at yourself.

Do you take yourself as unique or a general version of a men/woman, that
follows only the one path that everyone else takes and you feel in every
situation as every other human, and you dont even try to be different in your
behavior, and your neurons are trained like everyone else?

Ff you look at my point, I want to stop the generalization about behaviors in
sexes context. Everyone can be dumb. That doesn't need an abstraction to the
sexes. As you can obviously see, that doesn't say that you have to stop the
abstraction at cells. :P

And: I didn't call "ANY WAY". I called the context BEHAVIOR.(EDIT: as you
pointed out yourself :-))

------
darawk
This is a very interesting theory, and dovetails nicely with the fact that
women tend to trade stocks less than men (and therefore earn better returns)
when they invest, a random fact I recently learned.

It comports extremely well with my experience of the world. Women are risk
averse, and their intelligence distribution is compressed. Most of the
brilliant people I know are men, and so are most of the idiots.

It'd be interesting to see this studied in more detail, because it really
seems to explain quite a bit in a nice way.

~~~
Godel_unicode
> and therefore earn better returns

On average :)

~~~
darawk
Yes of course. Should have remembered that given the context.

------
Gammarays
Clickbait to the max. Here's the summary at the end:

 _To summarize my main points: A few lucky men are at the top of society and
enjoy the culture’s best rewards. Others, less fortunate, have their lives
chewed up by it. Culture uses both men and women, but most cultures use them
in somewhat different ways. Most cultures see individual men as more
expendable than individual women, and this difference is probably based on
nature, in whose reproductive competition some men are the big losers and
other men are the biggest winners. Hence it uses men for the many risky jobs
it has._

~~~
facepalm
How is that clickbait? You mean just the title?

~~~
Gammarays
Looks like the HN title was edited. The original HN title was: "Is There
Anything Good About Men?"

------
thro32
I feel time for such discussion has long time passed. The question today is
not _" are men good?"_ but _" why should men bother?"_

Traditional carrots used in history can not compete with modern forms of
entertainment. In past it took major war to shake things down, but thats not
possible today.

Feminism was great for liberating men. No more self-sacrifice, disposability,
gallantry and marriage.

------
MrBuddyCasino
I think he lays out his arguments well, though more sources for the data he
cited would have been nice.

One thing is missing though, imho: in the past, men have actively hindered
women to pursue "male" activities, like getting an education or joining the
armed forces, against the women's will.

The reason behind that could be that the competing large groups of men
required soldiers, and lots of 'em. Less soldiers meant your neighboring
tribes could defeat you, or you couldn't conquer the world. So instead of
allowing women to become independent, study and possibly bear less children,
they enacted policies to ensure "maximum womb utilization".

This is and was oppressive, and should not be forgotten.

~~~
exo762
You should probably expand on this. In particular, tribe men prevented tribe
women from getting education in what universities? Some stories of women
trying and being prevented from joining military forces of the tribe? Please
name some of those tribes what were using writing and warring with neighbors
while dreaming about world domination. Maybe examples of those policies?
Places, dating, document texts?

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
Fine, replace tribe with nation then, and my point still stands. If you want
it more concrete, I'm willing to narrow it down to: most european nations
until the 20th century disallowed women from joining the armed forces or
attend university.

I'm not aware that other regions handled things very differently, apart from a
few outliers, but happy to learn about them.

One interesting example is Israel, where women had serve in the army since the
foundation of the the state. Even more interesting when considering the huge
loss of life due to the holocaust.

------
UniversalBlue
I am not sure why the debate on whether or not men and women have the same
level of intelligence is still ongoing. It is obvious that men _are_ more
intelligent than women and the few studies that dared experiment on this
proved this right. Women have an advantage up until a certain age (I think 12
or 14 y/o). Afterwards men crush them.

Men also have a higher deviation. There are a lot of geniuses and a lot of
idiots among men. But in either case, as long as we live in today's society
filled with "feel-good" and "political correctness" ideas, you won't see any
definitive study being conducted because people in reality _don 't_ want to
know the results. Because the moment it's recognized that blacks are dumber
than whites or that women are dumber than men, this will change the society
profoundly and people are just not ready to accept "the ugly truth".

This is really keeping back all of us. Science should be above all this PC
bullshit... and yet, here we are...

~~~
bloomca
This is not only about PC, it will shake the whole society, so to publish such
results is simple dangerous and unacceptable – I feel the situation is close
to artificial keeping of some jobs, just to decrease unemployment.

Also, I think it doubles by the fact that mens are really encouraged (one can
even say "forced") to do extraordinary stuff, to get money, wife, respect and
other social approval. For women, they will literally never be ashamed for the
life outcome.

~~~
UniversalBlue
Could we say that a women's anatomy is some form of intelligence? It's
undeniable that women, due to their biological nature, have a higher "appeal"
and they don't really _need_ to do all the "dirty work" a man has to do to be
on the same level (get more money, get more power, always be improving...)

------
peteretep
Fundamentally, though, the problem with articles like this is that even if
he's _right_ , there are very few situations where knowledge of a difference
in distribution are that useful, and very very many where it is misused to
justify existing (and unjustifiable) bias.

If you knew that men were on average 5 IQ points lower than women (which is
not what he says, and probably not true, but whatever), it wouldn't be very
useful information for actually making choices. Male student underperforming
in class? That's 'cuz men are dumber. Emerging gender-skew in medical school
students towards women? That's 'cuz men are dumber. Etc etc.

~~~
alexandros
If someone told me that a certain truth is not useful, I would be inclined to
disbelieve them. The basis of your argument seems to be "I can't think of any
uses" but that can hardly be considered "the problem with articles like this".
I can think of quite a few applications, but in many cases I have experienced,
whenever relevant truths have been ignored, delusions have thrived.

~~~
elefanten
OP didn't say "not useful" \- it was couched more moderately, which I imagine
still allows for the possibility of unforeseen greater uses.

But the specific point made seems sound to me. The hypothetical 5 point
difference would not be a sufficient explanatory factor for most scenarios.

~~~
Godel_unicode
OP literally typed the words "wouldn't be very useful". He then goes on to
imply that average people would be confused by facts and should therefore not
seek/be given them. This is a bad idea.

------
olalonde
This has been posted a couple of times on HN:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Is%20There%20Anything%20Good%2...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Is%20There%20Anything%20Good%20About%20Men%3F&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

~~~
darfs
But is perfectly fine. Just only because the latest is 4 Months ago without
much attention.

Or am i wrong?

~~~
yoha
No, it is perfectly fine. But it is also useful to know there are previous
conversations to be read.

------
jdavis703
I don't think this article is that bad. The article was actually quite
moderate in its perspective and would lead to a (hopefully) insightful
discussion here.

------
Animats
His hypothesis: Dispersion is greater for women. That's testable. There should
be data sets for this.

This list of data sets [1] seemed promising. But a general-population data set
with standardized test results is needed. College student data sets have too
much pre-selection bias. The National Longitudinal Surveys data ought to be
useful, but is restricted.[2]

[1] [http://www.isironline.org/resources/collaboration-and-
data-s...](http://www.isironline.org/resources/collaboration-and-data-
sharing/) [2]
[http://www.bls.gov/nls/home.htm](http://www.bls.gov/nls/home.htm)

------
stared
Why did this post get flagged?

------
adamcharnock
I’m not going to address much of the article directly, but I would like to
address some of the undertones I’m perceiving in both the article and the
comments here. Additionally, I don’t hear this kind of thing said around here
much…

Firstly: Equality is not a zero-sum game, nor does it mean treating everyone
equally (yeah).

To address the first component of this – the effects of feminism for women do
not need result in a net-reduction of freedoms and happiness for men.
Patriarchy[1] screws both men and women, each in different ways.

Patriarchy is why for a long time I felt compelled to be the strong supportive
male and hide my weaknesses, despite the unhappiness these roles caused me. In
other men it can manifest differently, perhaps undirected anger at the world,
but not really knowing why. Or perhaps a numb feeling that you’re just doing
what you’re ‘supposed to do’.

I strongly feel that feminism and masculism (?) stand side-by-side. They are
different entities fighting mostly the same enemies. Sometimes they will need
to have talks and make compromises with each other, but it can still be a
cooperation.

I get the impression that much of the male disquiet with feminism is coming
for a place of, ‘yes, but what about me’. And this is totally reasonable.
However, the answer is not to criticise feminism. If you’re envious of your
neighbour’s new car, the rational response is not to attack it with a baseball
bat. Rather it is either a) deal with your feelings and be happy for your
neighbour, or b) work hard, earn some money, and get your own awesome car.

AFAIK we have nothing like option ‘b’ presented above[2], whereas women have
been on this for c. 150 years now.

If you want this, then get on it.

To address the second component of my opening statement: Equality does not
mean treating everyone equally.

This may sound pretty ridiculous at first glance, and it also somewhat goes
against the meritocratic principles often found in the tech world.

Rather than treating everyone equally, I feel that equality should mean we
strive to raise everyone to the same base level. To offer everyone the same
basic opportunities should they choose the pursue them. Yes there are limits
to our realistic capabilities in this regard [3], but most situations lie
within these limits. Should we offer jobs to those who are unqualified? No.
Should we allow people the opportunity to earn those qualifications? Probably.

Maybe it is true women have a bias towards doing X and men have a bias to
towards doing Y, maybe it is not. I don’t think I really care. If I – being
suitably qualified – want to be a primary school teacher I should be able to
do so without feeling I’m being given sideways glances for being male.
Likewise, a suitably qualified woman should be able to be a construction
worker without having to fight against harassment.

Moreover, my housemate[4] should also be able to go to our local corner shop
without a 90% chance of being harassed and a 25% chance of being followed home
(we have the data).

In my eyes, the original article has quite a lot of shaky logic and rather
dodgy assumptions. I strongly encourage people to read it critically (for
example, “But it has worked”? Maybe for the author, less so for my housemate
and billions like her).

However, I like that the article concludes that different motivations drive
different behaviours between the genders, and that this situation is not
necessarily moral or desirable. But I think this is only the start of the
story. Why do these different motivations still exist today? To what extent
are these motivations inherent, and to what extent are they socially received?
I strongly suspect they are mostly socially received, and we therefore have it
within our ability to offer change should it be desired.

[1] I do believe patriarchy is both a thing and a useful concept, but I do not
believe it is a conspiracy. Rather I believe it is systemic – an emergent
property of the social system we arrived at.

[2] The MRA is the baseball-bat-to-the-car approach, so not them.

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c)

[4] With her consent: She’s on here: hjfantaskis

EDIT: God damn, I spend an hour writing this and then the post gets flagged!

------
abpavel
isn't antimenism outlawed or something?

------
smegel
Is there anything good about leaving the stone age in the past?

------
staticelf
The title is enough for me not to bother to read it.

~~~
Godel_unicode
I would encourage you to reconsider, I found the article well written and
useful.

------
peteretep
This is a surprisingly well-thought-out and interesting article. Was expecting
dull male whining about being victimized, actually has something far more
interesting.

~~~
SticksAndBreaks
Its always dull, when you cant save the princess, just save a society from
beeing flung into abyss by a demographic that has nothing to lose.

