Hacker News Reader

Please don't use JP as a reliable source. He is extremely subjective and pushes many ideologies in his "non fiction" takes.

I know little about him personally, and I shouldn't have quoted the last bit, because it wasn't related to what we're talking here.

The point is sex differences exist and are framed in a way that culture or nature have really no meaning anymore.

They are both hard to change and even if we change them in a meaningful way, we can't be sure it will fix what we think needs fixing.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> yet also ensure that girls and women will not avoid mathematics more than boys and men due to mathematics anxiety. Policies must take into consideration that sex differences in career choices are not a simple function of gender equality and equal opportunities; and that, paradoxically, other factors (e.g., sex differences in occupational interests [74–76] and sex differences in other skills [9, 81, 82]) emerge in highly developed, gender-equal countries that might disproportionately affect girls’ mathematics anxiety and participation in STEM.

It doesn't mean of course that one sex is intrinsically better than the other, but the fact that we as individuals have not really existed for thousands of years and our choices in life have always been a cat and mouse game between rules of society and biological instincts, makes the distinction harder to make.

Our DNA tells us what we are biologically, but that's only the bootstrap process, what we become is mostly about the experiences we live and even in the flattest possible ideal society, where every choice is possible, we will all live different experiences and become different individuals.

And we would not see a perfect random distribution of choices, but very clear patterns or clusters, much more clear than they are now.

EDIT: sorry for being verbose.

Another example I can make is universal welfare state in Italy.

It was supposed to help families raise kids with less effort than the previous generations.

The unwanted (I hope) effect has been that it shaped a society of full time men workers and part-time or no-working women.

Because one way or another kids needed to be with their moms more than with their dads, we're talking about 60s in Italy here and a salary or a salary and half were enough. More money meant bigger dreams, moving to the city, in shiny new houses, but away from families that had been the buffer that allowed women to go to work while grandparents took care of kids.

It meant hiring a nanny, but why hire a nanny that costed as much as the woman's salary, when she could stay home, save on money and raise the kids?

This way men monopolized the higher paid jobs and women dominated education and services, because it was more flexible on hours.

It was good nonetheless, my parents couldn't have raised two kids without the free nursery school that the public hospital offered to their employees (having to kids when you work 12 hours night shifts is not really possible without help), but that's how a system created to support natality and to make it possible for women to go to work, have become the disaster of inequalities that it is now.

I don't see it that way.

He is professor of psychology who taught in top universities, his scientific articles have many citations, why wouldn't he be reliable? As far as I'm concerned he is as reliable as whole field of psychology - there can be multiple competitive theories, but you can't reject his just because you happen to not like them.

As a counterpoint, consider Peter Duesberg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesberg), a world expert on viruses, who denies that the virus HIV causes AIDS. The reason we can reject this claim is that (unlike his previous work) it's totally unsupported by any evidence, counter to high quality evidence from large numbers of mainstream science.

The way to make a counterpoint is not to bring up someone else and say "this other guy's claim is unsupported by evidence."

Instead, you'd do this by showing how Peterson's claim is unsupported by evidence, specifically on how his view pertains to the current topic.

My counterpoint is apt; it points out that even people who have credentials can be wrong, and it's important to consider that.

Hitton's point is that "you can't reject [Peterson] just because you happen to not like them." If it was instead "because his claims are unsupported by evidence," then I could see how your counterpoint is apt. However, that is not the case.

I was responding to "He is professor of psychology who taught in top universities, his scientific articles have many citations, why wouldn't he be reliable?", not "because his claims are unsupported by evidence".

> who denies that the virus HIV causes AIDS

That's understandable.

He supported an alternative theory.

But he was already 50 years years old when he published his first essay on HIV, and over 60 when he started the campaign against HIV/AIDS correlation.

And most of his theories have been disproved by following studies, his first publication on the subject is date 1987, Montagnier discovered HIV in 1986 and it was taken for granted as a fact years later.

The best moments of Duesberg career had already gone (like 30 years before).

Montagnier himself late in his life, at the age of 77, gave a speech that basically supported the validity of homeopathy.

I bet it's more an aging related problem than a credibility problem.

BTW Duesberg was wrong on HIV but not on the other topics he studied.

I have no reason of doubting your warnings on Peterson, but it may be possible, as in the Duesberg and Montagnier cases that he might be wrong on something and right on something else.

Peterson is a particularly problematic source because he usually doesn't correctly declare where the science stops and his personal musings start.

The Big Five in your quote are a perfect example: They have a significant heritable component, but for all factors heritability ranges from 40 to 60%, meaning 60% to 40% are explained by environment.[0] Yet when listening to Peterson somehow the environmental factor doesn't seem to matter at all, which is clearly in contrast to the current state of research.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/neu.10160

You are either lying about Peterson, or you just haven't listened to him properly. He brings up heritability ranges all the time and he also explains why a seemingly smallish difference between preferences by gender can have surprisingly large effects.

I've both actually studied the topic so know what this is all about, and watched dozens of hours of content from Peterson. His 101-like lectures (e.g. his 2014 personality lectures in his YT channel) are pretty good, both content-wise and from an educational standpoint. He certainly is a really good orator. I whish I had more psychology professors like him.

But just listen carefully to his more political talks. I sadly can't find it right now, but there was a mythical lecture about different cultures all having a variant of a tree of life. He simply lists a few cultures and then states that this list obviously can't be coincidence, ergo god exists.

He also routinely phrases things like "people high on consciencousness tend to be more conservative" in his public appearences. Which is true! The problem is in the context and the way he says it implies causation where there is no proof of any. Same thing for the gender differences.

Unrelated, but I personally really dislike his strawman arguments like his stance that postmodernism equals leftism, then criticising postmodernist theory. Practically all leftist/materialist theorists are directly opposed to postmodernists. There have been decades of bitter ivory tower battles between both factions.

Mind you I have no axe to grind here. I actually feel really sorry for the things the social media mob did to him. Just from watching his videos you can really see how bitter that experience made him in just a few months. The tragic thing is that in that original 2016 incidence, he actually was right! It really is futile to try to fight human tendency to categorize by changing the language for the categories. And there there is abundent evidence for that. (Amusingly the idea of changing reality trough language is actually a conservative one, represented by e.g. Heidegger.)

> "Women are better at social activities while men are better at competitive activities" much less so.

I never heard Peterson or any research claiming this. The claim is that women PREFER certain activities, while men PREFER others. Given a free choice, they're (on average) likely to pick different things to do with their time. That is very different from being better or worse in something, in fact it's a huge misinterpretation.

And this directly brings us to my parent post, because I just proposed what I believe is the main reason contributing to huge and very emotional reaction to these theories (and the hate that Peterson is getting for it, among others). People (women to be exact) feel threatened by it, they feel it takes from them the freedom of choice and puts them into boxes. Which, I argue, is misinterpretation of what statistics claim. Statistics don't say anything about any individual person, and deal with purely fictional middle person.

However, I stand corrected, as your own interpretation of Petersons theories itself is a big proof that the fear of females over these theories is not irrational, as obviously many men will not miss a chance to jump to conclusions like "we are better at this", which is a malignant construct that science never implied nor supported. Being good at something depends on many factors, and personal preferences are only a minor one. Intelligence, discipline, motivation, work habits are all much more important, and AFAIK sex doesn't influence these, in fact some researchers claim that women are better at self-discipline (again on average)

> many men will not miss a chance to jump to conclusions like "we are better at this", which is a malignant construct that science never implied nor supported

Exactly.

And there is no amount of social construct that can change this "opportunism".

Either we stop doing and publishing researches on social behavior or we have to assume that it will be distorted and used by malevolent actors or by sheer ignorance.

> and AFAIK sex doesn't influence these

I agree, the only exception I could see is testosterone.

Testosterone, among its other properties, is linked to risk taking behaviour, and risk taking behaviour, apart being of course dangerous, is a way to improve faster.

Just a funny aside if you allow me: gender pronouns are imho a great example of how seemingly trivial design choices can have a ripple effect on systems behaviour. What I mean by that is my mother tongue have no such concept as gender pronouns! It's not a thing. This whole problem that people spend enormous amounts of energy discussing on various social platforms like twitter simply does not exist. I find this rather amusing.

that's spot on.

I had the same conversation trying to explain that in Italian there are "male" things that have "female" names and vice versa.

For example "car" (automobile in Italian) or bulldozer (ruspa in Italian) are feminine nouns.

If you lookup those words in an Italian dictionary you'll find

    ruspa
    [rù-spa] s.f.

that s.f. means singular feminine.

We don't associate the fact the bulldozer has a feminine name with the notion that women are bulldozers.

At least, I don't!