Monday, June 01, 2020

Female social skills do not scale

Baumeister and Vohs write:
The large institutions have almost all been created by men. The notion that women were deliberately oppressed by being excluded from these institutions requires an artful, selective, and motivated way of looking at them. Even today, the women’s movement has been a story of women demanding places and preferential treatment in the organizational and institutional structures that men create, rather than women creating organizations and institutions themselves. Almost certainly, this reflects one of the basic motivational differences between men and women, which is that female sociality is focused heavily on one-to-one relationships, whereas male sociality extends to larger groups networks of shallower relationships (e.g., Baumeister and Sommer 1997; Baumeister 2010). Crudely put, women hardly ever create large organizations or social systems. That fact can explain most of the history of gender relations, in which the gender near equality of prehistorical societies was gradually replaced by progressive inequality — not because men banded together to oppress women, but because cultural progress arose from the men’s sphere with its large networks of shallow relationships, while the women’s sphere remained stagnant because its social structure emphasized intense one-to-one relationships to the near exclusion of all else (see Baumeister 2010). All over the world and throughout history (and prehistory), the contribution of large groups of women to cultural progress has been vanishingly small.
The above link also has some contrary opinions.

In other words, female social skills do not scale.

One of them has coauthored a new paper saying this:
The prescriptive values of highly educated groups (such as secularism, but also libertarianism, criminal justice reform, and unrestricted sociosexuality, among others) may work for groups that are highly cognitively sophisticated and self-controlled, but they may be injurious to groups with lower self-control and cognitive ability. Highly educated societies with global esteem have more influence over global trends, and so the prescriptive values promulgated by these groups are likely to influence others who may not share their other cognitive characteristics. Perhaps then highly educated and intelligent groups should be humble about promoting the unique and relatively novel values that thrive among them and perhaps should be cautious about mocking certain cultural narratives and norms that are perceived as having little value in their own society.
A statistician blogger suggests that the left-wing journal only published this because the editors did not understand the political implications.

As I write this, the city of San Jose California has announced a curfew this week from 8:30pm to 5:00am. Apparently they don't want their stores and police stations burned to the ground.

If our laws could discriminate better, the curfew would be aimed at the sub-population with low IQ and low self-control.

Between COVID-19 and the race riots, we could be headed towards a new social order.

News:
Nike have denounced racism by switching their slogan to support protests in the US over the death of George Floyd, a black man killed at the hands of police.
So what happened? The Chicago Nike store was trashed and looted.

No comments: