It's a bit like investing. Nature takes a more high risk approach with men. High risk can yield high reward, but it also means a higher rate of failure. This is why, when investing, the advice people generally give you is to make conservative/safe investment decisions.

In more egalitarian societies, we consistently see women make "better" choices when it comes to work/life balance etc, where as men are much more likely to unhealthily pursue career / etc doggedly even if it means sacrificing everything else.

It probably only tips the scales a tiny, tiny bit, but when you're talking about 7B people and societies that want to extract maximum efficiency from participants, it shows.

Also, romance writing and fiction writing as a whole (self-publish or not) is dominated by women and the hustle they need to do requires a ton of determination and business sense.

Would you say women are pursuing nursing because they want to be the best nurse in the world? That is the kind of behavior I'm saying you see more in men (as an average). I was under the impression that nursing is attractive because you get to work with people, it pays pretty well, you can do it with an associates degree, and you can have a good work/life balance. But yes, of course doing it well requires drive.

Again, the idea here is not "men have drive and women don't", it is "men by a razor thin margin are more inclined to doggedly pursue something to the exclusion of all else, which shows up when you're looking at entire populations and you've geared your society in a way where you elevate people that are the best at one very particular thing". A nurse having more drive than you isn't really the point. It is like when you say "men are stronger than women", it does not mean that any man will be able to best any woman in a contest of physical strength. Of course not.

Nursing requires continued certificate renewal and continued education. It's also competitive to get into any nursing program, so much so that you indeed need a lot of dogged pursuit to get in.

Also, as mentioned in a sibling comment, it used to be that you could find a single authoritative hosting of this lecture/essay, but now it's been ... adopted by the internet. I'd recommend googling and checking sources.

However, statistically men are more likely to be the breadwinners while women are more likely to have the luxury of "better" choices.

It used to be that you could find a single authoritative hosting of this lecture/essay, but now it's been ... adopted by the internet. I'd recommend googling and checking sources.

Nature vs Nurture - it's this combined with a lack of scientific rigor that I primarily disregard discussions in this area. At worst discussions become a screaming match of woke.

A large percentage of "normal" people, ie close to the median will see those famous people as potential role models. When their internal pattern matching engine detects that 90% of those belong to a class they do not identify with, that can cause a crisis of faith in their own dreams, self-esteem, etc.

At that point, there is no comfort to be found that 90% of the people at the very bottom belong to the same class as those at the top. Not only do they not see those at the bottom, they do not WANT to see them.

So if someone tells a story that explains the difference as a result of oppression, it becomes really tempting to chose that explanation, whether or not it is true.

Oppression may indeed be the main reason for differences in many cases, but even when it is not, it will be attractive to believe it is.

This means that you don't have a set of super humans that extraordinary at everything, but that for any arbitrary scale, the group with higher variance will tend to be over represented at the extremes.

It's interesting how frequently this pattern exists where history is silent about class difference and loud about race/gender differences.

That's not a coincidence. The 0.1% would much rather the 99.9% squabble over race and gender than class: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...

At some point, you wanted to ask if he truly thought his salary was worth more than half of the development team's combined salary, and whether he thought that was equitable.

   men tend to have more variance in everything due to having only one X chromosome

   As every function of the society scales more and more, more things become winner-takes-all games 

   more things become winner-takes-all games and end up being male dominated

   The only way to prevent the extreme outlier men from dominating everything is to prevent winner-takes-all games

In some other species like - I think - birds, it’s the female who has fewer copies and who also displays more variation in traits.

Regarding the winner-takes-all phenomenon, there’s an interesting workup of the idea in the book The Sovereign Individual. Basically, in every market, there’s usually a winner. Before, there were many local markets. Now, there’s one mammoth global one, or at least a few regional ones. Correspondingly, there are fewer winners, who now win on a global scale.

The other statements I think are false. Men dominate in high IQ areas because more men are high IQ because of the Variability Hypothesis. It has nothing to do with being "winner take all". I'm not really sure what that means.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_restaurant_process

Then, if we suppose that 99% of people's copies of the gene are A and 1% are a, and that there's totally random distribution, then you can calculate that 98.01% of the population has AA, 1.98% has Aa, and 0.01% has aa. Which means 99.99% will appear "normal" and 0.01% will exhibit the condition.

Now, what happens when the gene is on the X chromosome? Women will have two copies, men have one. What happens when a man has "A" or has "a"?

I think the mechanism for recessive genes is often something like, "Allele A codes for an enzyme/protein, while allele "a" codes for a version of it that does nothing; if your body is producing the normal amount of that enzyme or half of it, it still has the normal result, but if you produce no working copies of that enzyme, then you get the unusual result." Or something like it. So in that case, a man who has "A" will appear normal, and a man with "a" will have the condition.

The result would be that, for an "X-linked" condition, 99.99% of women will appear "normal" (1.98% of which will be "carriers" who are Aa) and 0.01% will have the condition, while 99% of men will be "A" and appear normal and 1% will have "a" and have the condition. Thus, men are enormously more likely to get unusual recessive genetic conditions when the gene is on the X chromosome.

Colorblindness is one such condition, which comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness

So, if we hypothesize that there might be lots of recessive genes that have "some" effect on behavior or personality or whatever we care about... If the genes are on chromosomes other than the X, then men and women will have equal variation. If the genes are on the X chromosome, then men will exhibit more variance, because more of them exhibit the rare condition (while a similar number of women are merely carriers of it). So, if we suppose that there are some important recessive genes on the X chromosome, then we would expect to see higher male variance due to that.

I don't understand much about genetics, so please excuse my ignorance. But I remember making Punnett squares in school. Does your comment imply that some genes don't have Punnett squares and are only affected by one parent's DNA?

Would that mean that some genes are _only_ inherited from our mothers? I remember reading something about how some aspect of our blood is only passed down from our mothers; is it because they always give us an X and our fathers give us a Y? And then genes that are missing from Y always come from the X?

Can some genes only be passed from the Y? Since women don't have a Y chromosome how would that work?

That leaves the "sex" chromosomes, X and Y. Females have two X chromosomes and no Y, males have one X and one Y. (The Y chromosome is very small, has very few genes, and doesn't change much.) A mother passes down one X chromosome, via "crossing over", to a child of either sex. A father passes down either his full X chromosome, making the child a daughter, or his Y chromosome, making a son. (So, yes, it is impossible for a father to pass on X-linked conditions to his sons, while his daughters will always carry a copy. Meanwhile, if a male has an X-linked condition, then his mother must have at least one copy, so she's either a carrier or has the condition herself.)

I think most genes follow a dominant/recessive pattern, where AA and Aa behave the same (by convention the uppercase letter is used for the dominant allele) while "aa" behaves different. There are certainly exceptions to that, though. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(genetics) (in particular "incomplete dominance", "codominance").

When you have one copy of a gene (usually because it's on the X chromosome—"X-linked"), if it is of the dominant/recessive pattern, then I would expect "A" to behave like "AA" and "a" to behave like "aa".

Note that, since crossing over never happens on the Y chromosome, it's passed down fully intact from father to son, and the only changes that can happen to it are mutations—a very slow process, compared to the mixing that occurs on the other chromosomes. Evolution on the Y is thus rather slow. Also, (according to Wiki) the Y is estimated to have only 63 protein-coding genes, while the X has 804. I think the Y mostly just serves to make the child male.

Men are a little more aggressive than women. But the top 1% of the most aggressive people are all men (and not something to be proud of either.)

Women are a little more agreeable than men. But the top 1% most agreeable people are almost exclusively women.

So small differences on average can still mean there are large differences at the extremes.

For the sake of conversation, I think it's worth pointing out that we could actually break out yet another group: the extreme outlier men at the low end of the curve.

High male variance means men dominate at both ends of the distribution. This is why "incels" and such are almost exclusively a male group. These people not only lose the genetic lottery, they're then lumped in with the high end outliers demographically and systematically punished for "imbalances" when they're already less likely to win these winner-takes-all games than anyone else.

Edit: or even predominately male?

The categories would be 'normal', and 'those that pushed their luck'. The harder you push, the farther you get, unless you blow it. Sometimes it shocks people when their paragons turn out to be reprobates, but it doesn't shock me because to me it's the same category.

The variability hypthesis is interesting (and old), but I don't follow what you said about X chromosomes and males, or how it pertains to the variability hypothesis.

I'm pretty much ignorant in genetics. Does your assertion follow from this observation: "if X chromosome has a genetic disease gene, it always causes illness in male patients, since men have only one X chromosome and therefore only one copy of each gene"? As in, men exhibit more variability because their genetics are less stable, because they don't have a Barr body?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_chromosome

> As every function of the society scales more and more, more things become winner-takes-all games and end up being male dominated.

That kind of needs some explaining too.

This statistical outcome only holds for recessive genes on the X chromosome, but it doesn’t make men with the recessive gene “more extreme” than woman with the recessive gene. Just the number of people would be different. So if there is such a gene that makes people excel in their specific field, theoretically we could sequence the x-chromosome of the top women in that field and look for the common recessive gene. They would be more likely to share it if it mattered in that field.

This is interesting, but when you consider the scale by which men across the board receive different societal advantages over women, it feels trivial. The discrepancy should only appear at the top of every game, not with the middle management too.

Because of this I fear it is more likely other societal effects are at play. I try to be mindful of the ones I can directly control.

Worth noting that it's also mostly males who end up at the bottom: homeless, imprisoned, or just plain dead from non-natural causes. The only plausible explanation for that imbalance is uneven distribution of ability.

After all, if you were to voice that argument in a room full of women instead of a room full of men, it would likely be considered risible. It would also probably make many in the group uncomfortable and resentful.

If you have a mixed gender group, you're still going to instill discomfort and resentment in many of the women present — but voicing opposition will be risky and painful. So many will just quietly disappear — leading over time to a disproportionately male discussion group.

Looking at it quantitatively, the greater male variability hypothesis mattered less than I expected.

There are extreme outlier women as well.

But maybe I’m confused as to the point of all this?

Which is why we should focus on infinite wealth creation games, rather than zero-sum status games.

Throwing away equity while chasing equality is a recipe for ushering in the next dark age.

I would argue trying to enforce equity to chase equality is your actual recipe for ushering in the next Dark Age.

Look at your Scandinavian societies for a model of what happens when you allow men and women the choice to live their lives as see fit without interference from the state, in the form of 'quotas' - you get some very interesting distributions. Something like 90% of all engineers in those societies are male, and something like 90% of women are nurses. Would anyone have the gall - to border on sheer stupidity - to claim that Scandinavian nations are holding back their women and oppressing them? Or is that equity isn't a very good goal... and that when you maximum equality, you'll also get massive differences in occupation because different occupations appeal to different personality traits and men and women do not have the exact same traits in the exact same quantities?

Grouping Jeff Bezos in with Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan CEO), as both evil because they are both rich, is an extremely simplistic view of the world, but seems common, even on HN.

Bezos has his faults, but he is still responsible in an insane reduction in prices for many items for consumers. Plus he created 400,000 jobs in the pandemic.

Jamie Dimon takes huge financial risks with all sorts of opaque financial tools, an when he fucks up gets bailouts from government.

One creates wealth, the other basically rearranges it into his own pocket.

(and don't get me started about people complaining about Elon Musk being a billionaire, that is just a sad state of jealous resentment that should not be given a voice in society)

For example, if your business is based around an ad model, you are not creating value because that value already existed (people's attention / purchasing power). You are merely redirecting value.

If you take facebook as an example, they are creating value for people by letting them communicate / etc. But they are not capturing a portion of the value they are creating, they are taking value that already existed (the value of your attention) and selling it to someone else.

Or take an investment bank that purely speculates on existing assets. Any time they win, it is not because they created value and captured a fraction of it, it is because someone else lost.

I of course like fb better than the ib in this example, because they are at least creating some value. But I think any business where you're capturing value in a different area from where you're creating it is one that is very likely to end up with lots of conflicts of interesting and exploitation to a certain extent, so best avoided entirely.

For example, at least all developed societies have 'chased equality' by providing free, decent-quality public education for people at least until adulthood. Does anyone think dropping that and just leaving poor families to their own devices would actually increase total economic output?

As a teenager, I tried briefly to play basketball. But I was lucky to hit the backboard, much less the basket. Yet I had just as much opportunity to play basketball as Michael Jordan had. But equal opportunity was not nearly enough to create equal outcomes.

Nevertheless, many studies today conclude that different groups do not have equal opportunity or equal "access" to credit, or admission to selective colleges, or to many other things, because some groups are not successful in achieving their goal as often as other groups are.

The very possibility that not all groups have the same skills or other qualifications is seldom even mentioned, much less examined. But when people with low credit scores are not approved for loans as often as people with high credit scores, is that a lack of opportunity or a failure to meet standards?

When twice as many Asian students as white students pass the tough tests to get into New York's three highly selective public high schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech — does that mean that white students are denied equal opportunity?

I don't know about you, but as someone that played a lot of basketball in my youth, I did not have equal opportunity to play basketball the same way Michael Jordan did. Could I go out to a hoop at a park and play around? Sure. But at 5'-8", my opportunity to play at any real competitive level was limited by genetics long before things like drive and skill.

I'm confused why you would think this is a good analogy at all, unless you were trying to link it to intelligence (which is its own can of worms), which doesn't seem to be where you were going. Using competitive sports, which are extremely cutthroat when viewed through the lens of careers and those that make a living doing it, is almost never a good way to equate equality and regular access for the masses.

So, fairy tales?

Yes there are externalities.

But value is being added in continually more ethereal ways.

Only ignoring the externalities (including a very real possibility of wiping out billions via climate change).

We simply aren’t all going to die from climate change.

Improvements and growth to what? I'd say only quantity and quality of life counts.

And if the increments of quantity and quality of life are offset by biblical sized climate destruction and the death/life cut short of millions and impact (in worsening life conditions) to billions (which might last for centuries), it might very well not be worth it.

>We simply aren’t all going to die from climate change.

"Not all going to die" is a pretty low bar though...