The rejection is not in not wanting men to go to war, or in favouring any particular social order, but in denying innate sex differences.

According to Junger, these theories are strongly rooted in academia, and particularly the social sciences.

“I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all gender differences are cultural.”

> “I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all gender differences are cultural.”

You would think that, no matter what your goals for the roles of gender (or sex) in society are, you would achieve these goals best by deliberately seeking out and investigating the properties of the underlying biology (and culture) with the utmost of academic and intellectual integrity, and only afterwards pushing for the policies you prefer to realize that world. Then you would have the advantage of using a position of Enlightenment, instead of Ignorance.

Maybe in a few more generations when people look back at us the way we look back on the Victorian era.

> "You would think that, no matter what your goals for the roles of gender (or sex) in society are, you would achieve these goals best by deliberately seeking out and investigating the properties of the underlying biology (and culture) with the utmost of academic and intellectual integrity, and only afterwards pushing for the policies you prefer to realize that world."

That is how it is supposed to work, but reality is never so clean.

One of the best modern examples of doing it backwards (starting with a conclusion, and then working backwards from there), is so called "intelligent design"/"creation science". Many different groups and movements are guilty of it, but the ID scene is relatively unique in the lengths that they went to present themselves as legitimate scientists. See: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School...) Those nutjobs insisted that they were real scientists, despite the glaring contradictions with their nonsense and the scientific method.

His comparison was rather apt.

ID was nuts because it tried to present itself as a description of the past.

But if you're trying to issue prescriptions for the future (i.e. what kind of world do you want to create?), there's nothing fundamentally wrong about first identifying where you want to go and then cherrypicking biological and psychological traits to manipulate in order to get there. It would be just like writing a program to get the results you want.

Descriptions of the past are not nuts. History, the legitimate peer-reviewed study of history, does the same. Evolutionary biology tells us much about the past, as does much of physics. None of that is problematic.

ID was nuts because of their flawed methodology.

> "But if you're trying to issue prescriptions for the future (i.e. what kind of world do you want to create?), there's nothing fundamentally wrong about first identifying where you want to go and then cherrypicking biological and psychological traits to manipulate in order to get there."

Do not confuse policy forming / social engineering with science.

Actually, I agree with you.

What I meant is that ID used an inappropriate methodology for what it purported to do, but the same methodology might be appropriate in other contexts such as social engineering.

Are blacks less intelligent than whites? How many jews were really killed in the holocaust? These are absolutely not settled questions but what university will allow that kind of research? Who will publish it if the results support something that's illegal to publicly state? Even academics put their careers ahead of integrity when it would result in losing their career as well as being widely condemned.

Personally I find the entire "the holocaust was only about Jews" meme appalling. Yes, it disproportionally affected Jews, but it also affected a lot of non-Jews (as well as people who did not self-identify as Jews). Presenting it as a purely Jewish tragedy is disrespectful to all the non-Jewish victims.

The more important thing is that it was about humans. Humans did these things to other humans. You should not feel any better about what happened if you're not personally related to any of those who caused the suffering than you should feel any less offended if you're not personally related to those who suffered.

The Holocaust was a failure of humanity. As was every single genocide before and after that particular one. Turning it into a "Nazis killing Jews" story allows us to artificially distance ourselves from what happened: "I'm not a Nazi, so why should I care?" or "I have nothing against Jews, so what does it have to do with me?" ("I only hate gay people").

In Germany we have a huge problem with this. We pretend to have dealt with our history, but we vehemently oppose the idea that the "monsters" who committed that "great evil" were normal human beings. As if that would somehow make them innocent. It does quite the opposite, actually: acknowledging that it was "just" humans doing those things to humans can help us understand what made ordinary humans "like us" end up doing something that horrible to other ordinary humans.

We're actually seeing something similar with East Germany: because everybody knows East Germany was an "Unrechtsstaat" (literally the opposite of a "Rechtsstaat", or "state of law", but also implying "organized injustice") their mass surveillance and censorship was fundamentally different from our mass surveillance and censorship. There's absolutely nothing we could learn from them because by definition we're nothing like them and any attempt to portray East German life as anything other than constant suffering and oppression "trivializes" the injustice of its government.

Creating taboos around these problems doesn't solve them, it just hides them. The US hasn't solved its racism just because the current president has darker skin. Acknowledging physiological differences between sexes or even ethnic groups isn't sexist or racist. Treating people unfairly because of these differences (or assumptions about the extent of those differences via stereotype pigeonholing) is.

I have a (lefty) colleague who sincerely believes that testosterone does not significantly affect personality[0].

I understand that human history has been overwhelmingly male dominated, and that this has undesirable consequences and side effects. I think these effects and ideas should be counteracted "with prejudice"[1] to use a policing term.

I don't think counteracting the horrible facts of the past should include re-writing scientific facts we now know.

0. Perhaps it is prejudice and incorrect teaching that leads me to think that testosterone has effects on personality, if so, please correct me.

1. I mean that women and men (and others) should be considered morally, politically, socially, and economically equal (and probably some others); any argument to the contrary can be discounted immediately.

I personally think that men and women (and others) are "not the same" emotionally or physically, but that these differences are A GOOD THING.

The science is much less settled on the link between testosterone and personality than you think.

Some interesting discussion of it here: http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/testosteron...

It's hard to tease out what behaviour is culturally learnt and what is caused by innate biological differences. Folk wisdom about testosterone is just one example. The downside is that these "biotruths" are used as justification for discrimination.

Sure, but there's a lot of people who basically claim that the massive hormonal and genetical differences between the genders have no impact on personality, behavior and interests.

The evidence from studies into testosterone suggests that those people might actually be right or at least the hormonal differences between the sexes (and between members of the same sex who suffer hormonal imbalances for whatever reason) are not as important in defining personality, behaviour and interests as folk wisdom would hold.

I've mostly seen the opposite results, that testosterone makes a massive difference.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19175758 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21338606

I'm interested in learning more, can you link to some studies?

> “I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all gender differences are cultural.”

This documentary is really interesting in that regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVaTc15plVs

It's a Norwegian documentary from 2010 about "Why do girls tend to go into empathizing professions and boys into systemizing professions? Why does the labor market become more gender segregated the more economic prosperity a country has?"

A lot of the scientists interviewed didn't even bother to consider evidence that innate sex differences exists.

Human sexual dimorphism? Ridiculous. Humans aren't animals.

Funny how the far right and far left so often suffer from the same defects if you look close enough.

The very definition of "cultural" is in dispute between the right and left wings. The right wing typically operates on a narrower definition of "cultural", which goes hand-in-hand with their emphasis on individual responsibility. The left wing operates on a much broader definition, which goes hand-in-hand with their emphasis on collective responsibility.

The social sciences tend to gravitate towards the latter because who doesn't like scope creep? (The right wing, on the other hand, seems to restrict the scope of the social sciences by slicing off a large chunk of it to the biology department.)

I personally prefer the idea that something can be both biological and cultural. Pretty much any change that happened to us in the last few tens of thousands of years is both biological and cultural. Unfortunately this idea doesn't seem to be popular among those with stronger ideological commitments one way or another.

"Having no political agenda" often turns out to mean agreement with/uncritical acceptance of the dominant political agenda. The status quo is perceived as a natural order or default state of the world, instead of the result of the current distribution of influence and the ideology of those in power. Thus proclaiming "neutrality" is often in fact a statement of conservativism / siding with the currently privileged / rejecting any motive for progress. If you (fail to) calibrate your world view like that, criticizing the progressive left or at least equating the left and the right-of-what's-mainstream as equally unnecessary/hysterical/dismissable "extremes" follows.

I think he is alluding to the military forced by the left wing to attempt to have equal number of both sexes in every part of the military, when as a result of evolution, males are physically stronger and will be more suitable for some roles in the military than females and should therefore form the majority in some roles, and in others where only the strongest are selected, all of the roles, because the strongest males are stronger than the strongest females.

I think that's what he meant by "I mean the far left is also now rejecting the theory of evolution, which is just insane.".

Do you have a link for "the left wing" demanding a 50% gender quota in the military?

I do have a link for Kara Hultgreen, the first female F-14 fighter jet pilot. She was the best possible female candidate for the role, however, due to [political incorrect sentence], she made mistakes where other male pilots would have been disqualified. Due to political pressure to include females in more military roles, the military pushed her to continue even when she didn't want to. During one flight, she made a mistake while flying the jet, and she died as a result.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Hultgreen

The Center for Military Readiness (CMR) suggests that Hultgreen "may have been the victim of a flawed policy" which overlooked her mistakes in training, two of which were similar to those that caused her death.[2] The Navy conceded that the material on which the CMR based its report was "largely accurate".

An Accuracy in Media report quotes Cmdr Tom Sobiek, commanding officer of Fighter Squadron VF-124, as saying of the 4 female pilots in his squadron that "the women are going to graduate regardless of how they performed" and reports that "the Navy was in a race with the Air Force to get the first female fighter pilot".[7]

I concede there is no 50% quota and should not have written "equal number" in that sentence.

Yeah, I took it as a very topical jab. That stuff has been in the news a lot recently.

> It's funny how every time I hear someone say they have no political agenda, or that they are neutral, they almost always go on to devote the vast majority of their effort to criticizing the left wing.

I see tirades on both sides. I think you're right that the conservative side of the equation is probably guiltier, but you don't have to look far to find liberals doing the exact same thing.

People like to think of their position as the neutral position. I think it's as simple as that.

> it is certainly not rejecting the theory of evolution. [...] Evolution only shows us what is. [...] Meanwhile, it's our job to figure out what ought to be

I'd take this a step farther, and argue that the author's "doing otherwise is rejecting evolution" framing is actually a rather common "Christian right" paradigm.

There's a biblical mindset which constantly intermingles "The revelation is truthful" with "The revelation indicates the proper path". The author is assuming the inverse relationship: "If you don't like it, you must not believe in it."

It's a type of normative fallacy, because you can't naively search-replace "bible text" with "science paper". They are qualitatively different kinds of claims about the world.

What about the people who have the mindset where "The thing is not desirable" means they must deny at all costs "The thing is truth", and lose their empathy as a result? If you can't see through the people' perspective and find out what they want, how will you persuade them not to do what you don't want them to do? YC's motto is "Make something people want" after all.[1] The war reporter has traveled into a war, mingled with soldiers, and came back to share his experience, to tell us what is. And here you accuse, without having met him, of having a "fundamentally "Christian right" paradigm.". If you were more accepting of the truth of his experience, you'd be explaining what things men could do instead to differentiate themselves from women and achieve the manhood they so desire, instead of going to war.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/good.html

I agree we should be able to give evolution the middle finger. But I disagree we can do so in any effective way in the timespan of 5 years, unless we somehow hit the Singularity by then. You overestimate man's intelligence and strength of will. I mean in general, let alone people with IQs in the 80s. Until we actually have either the knowledge and technology to do genetic engineering or mind uploading so that we can make modifications against living human mind architectures, or as a longer-term solution the sustained political will to do eugenics (the kind where we don't kill everyone impure or force people not to have sex, just the normal kind we do with every other plant and animal species besides humans where we restrict what breeding outcomes are available), we will remain slaves to our adaptions, with the most intelligent and self-reflecting among us only slightly more able to control themselves. From a predictive standpoint, knowing through evolution what is can tell us that, barring eugenics in some form or another, there's no way we can get to what ought to be for certain values of what ought to be, and so many attempts by liberal-minded people predictably fail while wasting resources and upsetting the social order. The best we can do now is take what is and align the incentives for the greatest amount of people so that things can be relatively stable and peaceful until we get to the point we can truly give evolution the middle finger. When I look at the culture that kick started the industrial revolution through a liberal lens, I see a lot of evil people with a twisted social order. But from a non-liberal lens, I see order, order instead of chaos (the inverse of what I see when I look at the typical results of liberal interventions through a non-liberal lens) and I see aligned incentives, and I wonder if that sort of society is what it's going to take to get to the Singularity.

Good points, but who said it had to be done in 5 years?

I was thinking more like 50 years, or maybe even 250 years. Without some sort of eugenics or singularity as you said, it will take a long time and a lot of effort to work around a psychological trait that has been ingrained in us for thousands of years. This is exactly the kind of progress that takes place most effectively at funerals.

>The left wing, whatever it's worth, is certainly not rejecting the theory of evolution. Just because men are evolutionarily predisposed to go to war doesn't mean that not wanting them to go to war is rejecting the theory of evolution.

There is definitely a bias in academia against explaining why the world is the way it is in biological terms. Look at what happened to Larry Summers. Watch the Norwegian documentary Hjernevask (Brainwash) (it's on the net with English subtitles). The psychologist Robert Plomin said this in an interview:

>‘My very first conference was by this old guy Leon Kamin, the author of a book called The Science and Politics of IQ,’ says Plomin. ‘Kamin came back to academia just so as to stop this pernicious stuff about genetics entering psychology.

>...Then he started saying: “We’ve got to stop this talk of genetics now!” And I realised it didn’t matter to Kamin what was true. He believed in what he called “science for the people”, which was what he thought it would be useful for the people to know. I mean, that killed me because it was Kamin and these elite Harvard professors deciding what’s for the people! The idea was that science should serve politics.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8970941/sorry-but-intell...

Suggesting that violence may have a biological basis is a taboo for many people. For example, consider this commentary on a recent study on Chimpanzee violence. The popular explanation has been that the reason they do it is because of human interference, not biology:

>Prof Frans de Waal, an animal behaviour expert from Emory University in the US, said the new study was an important contribution.

>"I'm very glad they're publishing this," he told BBC News. It answers a "long, long history of resistance", Prof de Waal explained, to the idea of natural, inter-community violence in chimpanzees.

>"It has always been contentious - we've had meetings where people screamed at each other.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29237276

If those on the left are fine with accepting evolution, then why would the biological explanation have a long history of resistance? Why would it be contentious?

Plenty on the left do deny/ignore evolution when it comes to topics in human society.

Be very careful in deciding which behaviors are innate differences and which are cultural. You'll want to do comparative anthropology or inject half your subject with hormones if you want to start talking about it on a scientific basis. I recall reading about a study where they took a bunch of women and injected half with saline and the other half with testosterone. For each half they then told half the women that they had been injected with testosterone and the other half that it was saline. In a later negotiation task the women who had been told they'd received testosterone but who hadn't were noticeably slower to come to an agreement and the group which had received testosterone without knowing it reached and agreement faster, with the other two groups in between.