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Comment by jostmey | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to think society can truely embrace diversity instead of uniformity.

Sadly, racial and sex discrimination still exist leaving society stuck with imperfect solutions to deep rooted problems.

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The problem is that diversity, when encountered in nature, is often accompanied by selection. Some diversity confers no competitive advantage, while some does. In our social species, selection of some and not others is...controversial. The easiest way to avoid controversy is to demonstrate that there is no diversity, as was the consensus on cognitive differences between the sexes that this article challenges. Acknowledging biological differences is opening a door that many don't want to walk through.

^ this ^ so much. It makes me very sad to see male masculinity being shamed and female empathy mocked as a weakness. The important differences should be celebrated, not viewed as a superiority contest.

How are you going to do that in a way that isn't shitty to "feminine" men or "masculine" women?

How about not shaming anyone, male or female, for any traits that aren't harmful to other people?

You can't save everyone from feeling shitty. It's a similar argument overweight people have against ads showing fit and healthy people, they want those ads removed cause it makes them feel shitty about themselves. What they need to do is analyze why it makes them feel shitty, and if they don't like what they see, rather than try to change everyone else, they should look into changing themselves. If you accept who you are and are content with it, there is no reason to feel shitty in the first place.

Being a sensitive man, an ambitious/aggressive woman, etc. is not and should not be treated like obesity. Expecting conformity to these norms causes a great deal of real-world harm (for starters: repressed emotions creating mental health crises in manly men, timidity leading to poor career outcomes for feminine women), and it is right and proper that we ostracize and exclude people who are looking to do so.

We should celebrate people displaying traits that are well-adapted to the situation at hand, not the traits they "should" have based on some immutable identity bit.

What makes you think you can socially engineer people to appreciate sensitive men? The root of sensitivity is not a respect producing trait for men is because women do not find that sexually desirable on average. Properties that make men respected are the properties that women like: men compete physically (sports or physique), on social status, and on financial success. There is a reason why parents traditionally toughen up boys.

The same applies with the genders reversed.

We already have done the social engineering by creating communities where it's not socially acceptable to reinforce gender roles. Now we're talking about protecting them from you.

You can enforce political correctness but you cannot enforce respect or attraction.

Attraction is the last thing we're trying to engineer in the workplace.

This isn't just about the workplace. It is about behavior in general and where this behavior comes from. Even feminists have admitted to me and other feminists have written articles describing that they find the opposite of what they advocate attractive, and if they are unable to socially engineer themselves there is little chance with society in general. Gendered behaviour is incentivised that way. You find reinforcement of gendered behaviour problematic but forget the most powerful reinforcer.

People are adaptable. You don't need to behave the same way at work as you do in your dating life. We should not be enforcing standards of gendered behavior in a business context because they increase attractiveness.

In fact this is a common form of sexual harassment - telling women they ought to make themsleves more attractive to you (smile, dress a certain way, etc) when you are strangers or colleagues.

Who said anything about telling others at work to make themselves more attractive? We're talking about people making themselves more attractive, such as men who purposely avoid appearing sensitive, and why men do that.

You said:

> Being a sensitive man, an ambitious/aggressive woman, etc. is not and should not be treated like obesity.

My point is that being a sensitive man is treated like obesity, and I mentioned the most powerful driver behind men acting more stoic than they naturally would. Note that I have not made a single normative statement in this thread. I'll make the first one now: if you truly care about not reinforcing gender stereotypes, you should tackle the source not the symptom.

The problem may be, you perceive the other's celebration of masculinity as an attack on your persona.

One of my favorite movie scenes is from the Matrix, where Neo is told, "Confidence, it means know thyself." This should be read as knowing both your strengths and your weaknesses so vividly, you can predict your performance and emotional state given a situation.

Practically, if you accept that you are sensitive [nothing wrong with that, a lot of talented artists and musicians are] and that your self-value is defined elsewhere that typical masculinity, then this whole discussion becomes pointless because your validation will come from within. If you're looking to define self-expectations by society and others, you'll struggle forever to be happy or confident.

Why would stating that, on average, a certain group has certain characteristics make those that are further from the mean, or even complete outliers, feel shitty?

For example pointing out that people with darker skin, which strongly correlated with certain ethnic groups, are more protected from UV radiation shouldn't make someone from that same ethnic group feel shitty if they happen to have lighter skin.

I suppose I would agree that terms masculine and feminine are pretty subjective and more culturally defined so one could more easily take offense.

You're talking about stating an observation; parent is talking about celebrating group characteristics.

The main problem here is that when you celebrate stereotypical traits, you ostracize people from the group who don't have the stereotypical traits.

Denial of sexual dimorphism is an odd shibboleth, but amazingly persistent. It always makes me laugh when any ideology claims to be pro-science, as the left has done recently. They deny natural selection when it encumbers on their domain just as quickly as the religious right does. Reality has no ideology. Natural selection is a search process that is literally powered by death and suffering; why should we expect it, that vast indifferent thing, to distribute desirable characteristics in the manner prescribed by our flimsy ideologies?

>male masculinity being shamed

citation needed... When is the last time you saw an action hero movie with a man who was shamed for being too masculine? Western Culture as a whole views male masculinity as a good thing. Being non-masculine is viewed as weakness.

On the other hand, if a woman is masculine, she's assumed to be a lesbian, and otherwise shamed. As a result, women are stuck between trying to be what society claims to like (masculinity) and what they are supposedly good at, but society doesn't value highly (femininity).

CEOs and other officials are congratulated for making tough calls, being aggressive, taking risks, outsmarting and defeating their competitors. It's generally discussed in terms of battles, and the tone is almost always in rewarding the "masculine" approach. This is why startup culture is often in the news as very unwelcoming.

Did you not just give an example yourself - the "masculine" startup culture is often in the news as very unwelcoming?

Who says femininity isn't valued?

Doesn't the popularity of single income families where the woman stays home indicate that men value having their wives around so much that they're willing to effectively lose half their income?

Saying that is feminity is like saying women valuing their husbands is masculinity.

Unfortunately I don't associate the two.

Diversity based on grouping people together has several drawbacks, among others that "us and them" is strongly connected to hostility and dehumanization. Discrimination is only possible when people are sorted into distinct groups rather than embracing that all humans have some uniformable traits that define everyone as human.

A "us and them" thinking is directly linked to our emotional reaction to security. Many (majority?) feel more insecure when isolated and surrounded by people they associated as "them", with the opposite feeling when surrounded by "us". "us and them" is involved in practically every war ever fought, and many conflict is resolved by having the distinction of "us and them" being erased, rather then embrace how different "them" are and later embrace it.

I would like to think that society can truely embrace how similar people are and start to perceive everyone as belong to "us".

The "us" vs "them" conflict between men and women goes back thousands of years and was introduced with specific purposes. My personal research on this can be found at https://blog.kareldonk.com/sexual-suppression-and-repression...

We'll start perceiving everyone as "us" as soon as most people realize what I discuss there.

from the link

> Many thousands of years ago a technologically advanced race of extraterrestrial beings came to planet Earth to mine metals

Yes as strange as it may sound you may want to check my references and investigate.

The references seem to try and poke holes into our current understanding of evolution (and I agree it's still very incomplete) and suggest that an alien arrival is the best reasonable explanation to fill the gaps. I'm not sure that's very convincing.

What's even less plausible is an alien visitor, having all the technology necessary to get to earth, somehow needing humans for the purely physical task of extracting metals. I mean we ourselves are now almost capable of automating mining yet haven't made it past our very own moon.

Why make metal robots when you can manipulate DNA and make biological ones?

> My personal research on this

Freud and ... aliens. Yeah, right, sure.

Sure. Investigate before dismissing.

Holy crap I'm glad I scrolled to the Summary.

But the author missed the golden opportunity to take a shortcut to the "us". Nothing will unit men and women like an alien hostile mining race!

PUT ASIDE ALL PETTY GENDER DIFFERENCES JOIN THE FIGHT AGAINST THE MINER ALIENS THE WORLD NEEDS YOU!

Could you give an example of an "imperfect solution to a deep rooted problem"?

Affirmative action programs are like the canonical imperfect solution to a deep rooted problem, especially for college admissions. Although they certainly help handfuls of disadvantaged minority students achieve higher education and the success that results from that, those fortunate individuals rarely have the power to do anything to resolve the socioeconomic problems that plague the communities that they came from. Having a token minority on your Fortune 500 board is great, but it doesn't do anything to resolve the class struggle in the Americas.

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