

Is There Anything Good About Men? - jyrzyk
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

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geebee
I enjoyed the talk, and I agree with some of what he says. My real problem
with the talk is that isn't testable - it makes an observation, then goes back
into the facts to justify it. I'm not seeing enough of the hypothesis-testing
approach that is the cornerstone of real science.

I don't want to seem like I'm being too hard on the guy. After all, some
questions just can't be approached this way. We can measure the effectiveness
of a new drug on blood pressure through hypothesis and testing, but it would
be very difficult, maybe impossible, to use this approach to determine why the
first world war was fought. Sometimes you just have to go back through the
facts and construct a plausable case. But it isn't science anymore.

Aside from that, I agree (for what it's worth) with much of what he has to
say, but I still think he has understated the degree of exclusion women have
experienced from male networks. It's really damaging.

Suppose that it's true, as the author stated, that men are more likely than
women to be wired for risk. Sounds reasonable enough. But that might still
mean that for every 5 people with the ability and inclination do do something
risky (say, found a startup), 4 are male and one is female. But the way males
form networks often excludes the women - even in the modern day. I don't think
it's on purpose, and there's rarely any malice, but it's just as damaging.

You generally pick friends for your startup. The people you get drunk with,
stay up all night completing the compiler class with, cram into a hotel room
in vegas with... and you tend to do these things with close friends who are
almost always other guys. If 4/5 are guys, then the odds that a man will find
like-minded buddies is much higher than it is for women.

I double majored in Math and English. It was a trip. I'd count the ratio of
men to women in each class, and it was usuall between 5:1 and 10:1. And in the
math class (sorry to say it), many of the women were planning on becoming math
teachers.

This means that the women with the ability and inclination to do startups have
to break into the boys club or they'll be left in the cold. So far, they're
usually left in the cold. If this weren't the case, I have no doubt we'd see
far more women in fields that require a high degree of risk, creativity, and
collaboration.

~~~
jsnx
A cornerstone of the male networks the author describes are put downs, and in
my conversations with women who have technical degrees, they often say they
couldn't handle the culture not because of the work but because of the
constant jockeying for status.

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mynameishere
I remember reading an article by a woman (I believe it was an early 1950s
style feminist, ie, a pre-feminist) who laid out the problem very simply:
Every field, even fields such as dressmaking, dancing, and interior design,
have men at the top producing the greatest work. There are no female-dominated
endeavors [1]. I think the (also ironic) title of the essay was "Woman is a
failed sex" or something like that.

[1] No longer true. A few things, such as the book publishing business are
almost completely ruled by women. Not that "rulership" is necessarily
"achievement".

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jsnx
The author overstates some of his claims. For example, European women made
excellent contributions to herbal medicine -- the only medicine around --
until the rise of 'scientific' medicine, which caused as much as harm as good
for much of its early history. The author claims that medicine was all men's
doing.

This tendency to overstatement manifests as a pervasive one cause fallacy.
There are many reasons for womens' and mens' relative different status -- some
long term and unchanging (the politics of birth), some short term and
malleable (prejudices relating to relative intellectual capacities), many in
between these extremes. The author acknowledges the manifold causes of gender
differences only to dismiss them -- and the motivating factors for women's
cultural creation are left unexplored.

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motoko
Is this supposed to be irony? What is this poorly written rambling doing on
"Hacker News?"

~~~
jyrzyk
"What seems to have worked best for cultures is to play off the men against
each other, competing for respect and other rewards that end up distributed
very unequally. Men have to prove themselves by producing things the society
values."

=

"Make something people want."

~~~
leoc
It also happens to tie in well with the WSJ article about Draper. (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146> )

~~~
jsnx
Yeah, work really hard, innovate and get nowhere!

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AdamG
I'm surprised no one caught the rather bad statistics mistake:

"Today's human population is descended from twice as many women as men... To
get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the
entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men
reproduced. "

If you really had only half as many men reproducing as women, you'd get the
twice-as-many-women-descendants after a _single_ generation. For the ratio to
be 2:1 over the whole of human history implies that it was a _much_ milder,
but still systemic, bias. It may or may not be anything evolutionary, though.

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bz
This article is more informative for what it implies about the writer/audience
than its actual contents. It dabbles in a mess of pseudoscience (plus a
generous dose of bolds and underlines) and ends up drawing an absurd amount of
conclusions out of paragraphs smaller than a fist.

If anything, this article just plays on the what we already know/read to
pander some trite preconceptions.

~~~
leoc
> It dabbles in a mess of pseudoscience

Given that this was an invited address given this year to the American
Psychological Association, that seems a bold claim to make.

~~~
bz
I don't mean to imply that I think all the points the article makes are bogus
because there are some insightful things that are said, especially near the
conclusion.

I do think the format is extremely poor, granted that it's an opening speech,
and not a real paper. My only concern is that when people just see the
abbreviated version (like what we have here), it can breed as much haywire
logic as something blatantly false.

Also, in my shameless defense, here is a (not/credible) blurb about the value
of psychology, which is a separate topic.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#Controversy_as_a_sci...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#Controversy_as_a_science)

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awt
Good stuff.

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daniel-cussen
Harrowing.

