It reads like a 1000 word humblebrag.

I skimmed it. It's not a particularly compelling piece, but research supports the idea that praising kids for "being smart" is inherently problematic.

Furthermore, she's a woman in a man's world. Women tend to spend a great deal of their time performing unpaid labor in the form of raising children and running the household -- aka "women's work." This creates myriad problems in them trying to establish a public reputation.

I was a military wife and homeschooling mom for a lot of years. I've really struggled to create some kind of public reputation that will lead to adequate financial compensation, so it's a problem space I know a lot about. Women are constantly put in a double bind when it comes to trying to claim their competence, establish a public life, etc.

>unpaid labor in the form of raising children and running the household

What a backwards society we increasingly live in, where putting time and effort into one of the most rewarding aspects of life, tending to the success and well-being of your offspring, is dismissed as "unpaid labor."

>Women are constantly put in a double bind when it comes to trying to claim their competence, establish a public life, etc.

Maybe that's because they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. The choice to leave the breadwinning to the male and become the primary caregiver is ultimately a male one in today's heavily pro-female corporate climate.

I was full-time wife and mom supporting my husband's demanding military career for two decades. Post divorce, I've struggled to make ends meet the entire time, in spite of having six years of college and still receiving alimony to this day, more than a decade later. This includes a stint of nearly six years of homelessness.

I also have a serious medical condition, so you can't blame it entirely on my gender. But I'm quite confident my gender is a significant factor in my intractable poverty.

My sons are incredibly loyal to me. They still live with me and tell me every single day "You're an awesome mom and I'm so glad you raised me."

I certainly don't regret raising them. But I'm extremely tired of being poor and also tired of listening to bullshit about how it's somehow not actually due to sexism.

Being told I'm being dismissive of the value of the work I lovingly devoted myself to for leaving a supportive comment about some other woman's writing is ...wow. I don't even have the words for this.

Like I said, women are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And I hope other people here see your reply as evidence of the kind of uphill battle I'm talking about.

It's quite the rarity these days for an American woman of my age who is college educated to have spent two decades as a homemaker. If I can't comment on the pitfalls involved in that without being attacked as disrespecting women, who the hell can?

Oh, I know: no one. Because the entire point is to make it impossible to escape the trap. The entire point of societal sexism is to keep women "barefoot and pregnant."

don't take this the wrong way. I believe a man would also face significant hurdles to try and get hired after not being in the field for two decades. Honestly on paper such a person has less to offer then a cheaper, younger person who is fresh out of college. I mean If you don't do something for two decades you have forgotten most of it.

To attribute your predicament to you being a women seems shortsighted to me. But this is only from the information I gained from reading your post and I don't actually know what experiences you went through.

I'm guessing you are not a parent. I have a toddler and a one month old. It is rewarding in many ways, but it is also crushingly boring, repetitive work. It's also overwhelmingly placed on women; men simply don't do as much child care by a factor of probably ten. I'm pretty sure no woman is trying to have her cake here, and every single one would choose to have help so they could do anything else on occasion.

before we had children my dream was to work part time so i could spend a lot of time with my children. when we had children, i got that opportunity, because my wife got a good paying job and i was a struggling freelancer.

and i hated it. it was boring, unfulfilling, and i didn't feel that i got enough time to work (which was where i'd seek that fulfillment)

when working, my wife often talks about how she'd like to stay home to take care of the kids, but since i work from home i know that she also feels unfulfilled if she is not at work.

we are fortunate that we live in a country where having a nanny is common and socially acceptable (means, it's not considered a rich peoples privilege), (most often it's a relative like the kids grandparents).

i eventually developed a theory that men are really privileged to live in a society where it is acceptable for them to leave this work to their partner.

In my experience, people who grew up under pressure to perform and with frequent external validation of their intelligence tend to humble brag a lot. I wonder if it's simply because they're mirroring what people have done to them. I grew up with something much different and find the bragging repulsive, but perhaps that's an expression of my own insecurity or jealousy to a degree.

Success is a social construct. Intelligence is a social construct.

Those are staggeringly enormous claims. Got any scientific evidence?

Just for argument’s sake, my opinion is that intelligence is a kind of social construct. What we view as “intelligence” is the manifestation of traits that are important for our current society to function. i.e, we value bridges, so the traits of bridge builders are viewed as positive traits, which we call “intelligence”. In other environments these traits might not be seen as intelligent. For example, from what I’ve gleaned from reading books written a hundred or so years ago, “intelligence” could only be possessed by members of the upper classes, so even if you could build bridges, if you weren’t born into a certain class you were seen as mentally inferior. So our definition of intelligence shifts over time based on whatever society deems as important.

Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills. Your example of equating intelligence with wealth or bridge building is not even close to how intelligence is measured. It will be measured in dimensions like long term memory, working memory, pattern recognition, rotation of visual space, strategy/problem solving. And these abilities invariably dictate how people will be able to learn or perform at things like bridge building or software engineering. You will never be an exceptional software engineer if you cannot keep a suitably sized problem space in working memory.

It's so frustrating to me that we keep regressing our political conversations with assertions of this nature, that intelligence is a social construction, when in doing so we are literally turning a blind eye to what is arguably one of the greatest injustices our society faces. Intelligence is not a social construction, and it's not distributed equitably, and that isn't fair. It's the single greatest psychological signifier for material success. I'd much rather accept reality as it is, and spend resources attempting to ameliorate objective injustices, rather than making assertions that intelligence is a social construction because it gives some opening for a utopian alternative that can simply dispense with our "oppressive conceptions of competence."

Our definition of intelligence comes from a set of measures which were calibrated to correlate with measures of success. Success is by definition a measure of societal “fit” and so the whole program is by definition socially constructed.

Doesn’t mean it’s not “real”. But I also would not say it’s “abstract” in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not derived from first principles, nor do we have any kind of theoretical model of intelligence that’s good enough to construct measures around.

I agree with you, believe it or not, what I was referring to was “our definition of intelligence” (edit: ie, the collection of traits we see as “ingelligent”), not the underlying traits.

>Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills.

This is exactly what social construction is: reifying a set of observations into an abstract notion. Intelligence is a social construction.

The fact that intelligent people were seen as mentally inferior doesn't negate the existence of their intelligence. The upper classes relied on the expertise of engineers, scribes, musicians, mathematicians, and artists and supported them materially even as they debased them in other ways. Otherwise that intelligence wouldn't have been selected for and inherited by later generations.

This paper already assumes that success is a social construct, and so it is not evidence of the kind you’d need to substantiate your initial enormous claims.

From the very first part of the abstract: “[...] the literature has not fully explored distinctions between the ways leaders of these organizations socially construct success, [...]”

Claiming success is a social construct seems to me to be trivially true, not a staggering claim. Intelligence is less obvious since there is a vast literature around it, but, again, it is clearly a social construct; we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct.

I'm also not sure what "scientific evidence" would look like here. You seem to have had some sort of allergic reaction to the assertion of social construction and retreated instinctively to familiar but hollow epistemic grounds.

>we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct.

This makes everything a social construct, which negates any usefulness of the distinction. Having to agree to definitions cannot be a realistic definition of social construct, because it's a basic part of using language.

Yes? And? This is one of the most profound and basic observations of twentieth century philosophy. That is what social construction is, it underlies our basic notions of perception and reality.

Read this book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_R...

What you've said is not profound. When you go around saying "the sky is blue" people aren't wrong to assume you meant something relevant, rather than just tossing out vague and trivial statements.

I'm not sure what to do with this remark. You said my definition of social construction was untenable because the implications were too broad and you seemed to find that frightening. I responded by saying that social construction IS a theory with broad implications and gave you a reference to read, since you seem to be unfamiliar with these concepts. Your response seems a non sequitur.

She's a single mom who has a son.

It doesn't seem to me that she has an understanding of how much more picky females are than males when it comes to sexual selection. Her son needs to compete hard in his life, whether she likes it or not.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Whatever biological concept you're thinking of here, you're incorrect to generalize it to humans.

Our complex brains, societies, and medicine (like birth control) significantly change our mate selection. We are not antelopes.

And yet study after study, not only in humans but in many animals describe the female sex to be the choosy one and the males to heavily compete (even in mortal combat) for a chance for sex.

And yeah we are not antelopes, we are big apes.

>We are not antelopes

On the internet, nobody knows you're a gnu.

You’re right that there are multiple factors, but you also can’t discount the role of phenotypic brain “firmware”.

Yes, science reveals inconvenient truths. It tells us that we’re responsible for climate change, and it also tells us that our brains come pre-loaded with a wealth of routines shaped by millennia of evolution.

Can’t just accept some results and pretend others aren’t also well-supported. Well-supported scientific findings are what they are.

Societal factors do exist, but are often overstated or don’t bear a scientific foundation. A lot of social sciences have done real harm to scientific progress and the field of evolutionary psychology.

Birth control and women's rights, and marrying for love[1] are fairly new (within the last 20-100 yrs) and limited to a handful of countries.

We just don't have data on how humans behave when such huge reprodutive variables change. Seeing how a single generation responds isn't a long enough time period, because children accumulate the social norms of their parents.

1. https://www.livescience.com/37777-history-of-marriage.html

We do have data on this. In the modern educated industrialised environment intelligence reduces fertility.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu...

> How Intelligence Affects Fertility 30 Years On: Retherford and Sewell Revisited — With Polygenic Scores and Numbers of Grandchildren

> Using newly available polygenic scores for educational attainment and cognitive ability, this paper investigates the possible presence and causes of a negative association between IQ and fertility in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study sample, an issue that Retherford and Sewell first addressed 30 years ago. The effect of the polygenic score on the sample’s reproductive characteristics was indirect: a latent cognitive ability measure, comprised of both educational attainment and IQ, wholly mediated the relationship. Age at first birth mediated the negative effect of cognitive ability on sample fertility, which had a direct (positive) effect on the number of grandchildren. Significantly greater impacts of cognitive ability on the sample’s fertility characteristics were found among the female subsample. This indicates that, in this sample, having a genetic disposition toward higher cognitive ability does not directly reduce number of offspring; instead, higher cognitive ability is a risk factor for prolonging reproductive debut, which, especially for women, reduces the fertility window and, thus, the number of children and grandchildren that can be produced. By estimating the effect of the sample’s reproductive characteristics on the strength of polygenic selection, it was found that the genetic variance component of IQ should be declining at a rate between −.208 (95% CI [−.020, −.383]) and −.424 (95% CI [−.041, −.766]) points per decade, depending on whether GCTA-GREML or classical behavior genetic estimates of IQ heritability are used to correct for ‘missing’ heritability.

This whole thread is about mate selection, not child production

I don't really know about antelopes, but the human side is well documented on multiple fronts. Women have to be much more selective than men, just because they are biologically aren't capable of having as many babies as men.

Also you can just try a dating site using an average looking man and average looking woman and get similar results to this experiment:

https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

To me this comment looks unrelated and lacks proper sources.

What does sexual selection has to do with this article?

How do you define „picky” in this context? Do you have sources on females being more picky?

The latest well-replicated scientific experiments and research findings show strong evidence for what you’re saying here about firmware differences between the two sexes.

Perhaps a further question, though, is: SHOULD it be this way? Should we actively try to rein in this tendency of our firmware, just as we try to rein in other tendencies like our quickness to anger?

The meat still matters, for sure, but I wonder if we should be trying harder to transcend its less helpful qualities.

Then again, perhaps the competitiveness you’re referring to could be viewed as a net positive...