Or as I like to say, our Software might be up to date but our OS and BIOS are still legacy.

Is your idea that Software could be an analogy for our worldview, OS could be an analogy for instincts and BIOS an analogy for genes or do you mean something entirely different to my interpretation?

Precisely. There is a (now outdated) model called Truine Brain model which proposes three layers of intelligence: the cortex which is responsible for higher thinking/planning/executive functions, the limbic system responsible for 4Fs/emotions, and the basal gangalia/brainstem responsible for basic functions like movement, homeostasis and etc. It's uncanny how this matches closely with the Software/OS/BIOS analogy.

This is great. I'm putting this in my favorite comments.

You have no idea how much this software can be changed with an consistent effort exerted over many decades.

Funny how the results of polyamory and responsible nonmonogamy in the Bay Area was “high status men having more sex with more people”. Wonder how that happened.

Yes we all know grooming works and it doesn't take decades. Though the government tries similar at the slower rate of decades.

I'm skeptical that biology plays a significant role in this, it seems much more likely that it is a purely societal and cultural artefact.

I think the answer is almost always “both”, and there should be a high bar for evidence if someone is going to posit that either one is the sole driver.

Take our social norms around sleep, for instance. We call bad dreams “nightmares”, we set our business hours to 9-5, etc etc. All of this is social, but clearly there is a biological link because we’re not inherently nocturnal animals.

Not everything has a biological link though. Why is the color pink associated with girls and blue with boys? Purely an artefact of cultural zeitgeist, pink used to be masculine.

IIRC the invention of agriculture caused a huge shift in cultural dynamics as regards sex and gender world wide, favoring men. It is not unreasonable to think that an age that lasted 10kyrs might have some lingering affects on how we view the world.

The pink/blue thing is low hanging fruit because it’s (at least apparently) obvious that we don’t have any biological predisposition towards sex-based color choices. Also, I’m not aware of any culture that’s free from western influence that has similar color norms.

But most other norms are more complicated. So the idea of the man as a physically strong provider - it’s not universal but it’s extremely common across the world.

I just got done reading Jesus and John Wayne. A century or more of hammering it into boys and men that we're inadequate if we're not virulent warrior providers had to have predictable consequences, didn't it?

Where are the cultures that didn't hammer that into men?

Cultures and societies are subject to the same kind of natural selection as individuals and species. Cultures that are self sustaining, defensible, and expansionary are the ones that win out in the end.

I suspect the commonalities have to do with essentially all of our cultures being agricultural for thousands of years. Before that was half a million years of being hunter gatherers, a completely different lifestyle. And now we are moving into an era when almost all of us will be city dwellers. I expect our culture will change a lot during that transition.

I don't think city dwelling is going to be the driver of change. We've been doing that for thousands of years.

It's the automation of force that will drive change to how we view maleness. The increasing reality is that strong, aggressive males aren't nearly as necessary in the battlefield for the defense of societies. A 100lb woman can pilot a drone and drop bombs just as well as a 300lb linebacker of a male. Humanoid robots are rapidly entering the scene and will start to replace human soldiers and police officers as the ground units of power projection. eSports will start to overshadow the NFL as we start socially valuing individual human strength less and less in favor of tactical and strategic ability to control robots.

Societies have always used young males as disposable members who are thrown into the most dangerous and lethal jobs for the simple biological reality that wombs are scarce and sperm is not. If all of the lethal work gets automated away (a fantastic thing!) then that will be one of the most drastic changes to human social order that has ever happened.

> A 100lb woman can pilot a drone and drop bombs just as well as a 300lb linebacker of a male.

You are making the same mistake as the clowns that cry how you “can’t use your AR15 to stop the government”.

Ignoring the reality of asymmetrical warfare, and failure of the strongest military or universe has ever seen failing to secure a state of uneducated farmers and merchants for the last 20 years…

If your goal is to glass something - sure the 100lb recruits in the drone program are your go-to. We leveled two parts of Japan and it ended things, then the math changed with mutually assured destruction.

But that isn’t how you actually take something over.

You take things by putting your people on street corners. Going door to door. Preventing undesirable assembly. Securing travel and trade.

Tanks and drones really suck at standing on the corner. The soldier isn’t as outdated as you suggest.