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I do not believe I am any more kind or empathetic than my brothers, my father, my boyfriend, his friends, my male coworkers, my cousins, my uncles and my grandfather because of how I was born. I think thinking otherwise removes agency from all those people - that no matter how hard they try, they’re always going to be a little less than me - dehumanizes them and doesn’t treat them as a whole person with free will and the choice to be better.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on the whole “men are funnier than women and there are more smart men than women” thing.
"I do not believe that I am any taller than my friend from Japan because of how I was born. I think thinking otherwise removes agency from Japanese people - that no matter how hard they try, they're always going to be a little shorter than me - dehumanizes them and doesn't treat them as a whole person with free will and the choice to be better."
Maybe you believe that blank-slate thinking is "nicer" than recognising the genetic components of various physical and psychological traits. That doesn't mean that blank-slate thinking is true: that it makes more accurate predictions than the alternatives. I think you're getting confused on the is-ought distinction.
As an aside, I'm consistently baffled as to how blank-slatists did such a good job of marketing themselves like they're the ones who are promoting a kinder, more charitable worldview. I recognise that, genetics being what they are, some people are just smarter than other people through no fault of their own, and there's not really much they can do to change that, so they shouldn't feel bad about it. But blank-slatists would have us believe that, because there's supposedly no genetic component to intelligence, then if someone is bad at maths, the only possible explanation is that they're lazy. Which is both untrue and extremely unkind to a person who may well be driving themselves to distraction trying to understand algebra and just failing to get it for reasons entirely outside of their power to change.
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Wait, does this only apply across gender lines? Do you agree that some people are more empathetic or kind than others on an individual level? If no then that's wild, please expand. If yes then why would you expect these variable traits to be equally distributed between groups that have wildly different hormonal profiles which cause behavioral differences in a very straightforward manner?
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Are most, if not all, of the individuals you just brought up taller than you are? Do they have greater grip strength than you do? Assuming the answer is yes, do you believe it invalidates their agency? Do you think tall people just simply work harder at stretching their bones than shorter people do, and therefore the difference in height is a matter of agency?
Similarly, do you think it dehumanizes me to suggest that no matter how much effort and resources I dedicate to improving my appearance, I will never be as physically-attractive as Henry Cavill? That he simply has better baseline genetic potential than I do? Do you think that makes me less human than he is?
Yes, they are taller. I have no idea what their grip strength is but I'd hazard 50/50 have more strength than mine. I don't think it invalidates their agency because I don't think the physical differences between the sexes has anything to do with a person's ability to be funny, or intelligent, or the myriad of other aspects of a personality. So no, I don't think tall people work harder at stretching their bones lol.
I think you're dehumanzing yourself by boxing yourself into a rigid view of attractive, I guess? So what if he has better baseline genetic potential if I think, and therefore others think, that his chin and neck are too thick to be a 10, much less a 9? That doesn't make you any less capable of reaching the objective level of attractiveness you want than him.
This is statistically extremely unlikely. On average, men have roughly twice the grip strength of women. Do you have some reason to believe that all of the men in your life are so far below the male median in grip strength that only 50% of them have higher grip strength than you do?
The problem here is that you’re not engaging at all with any of the relevant knowledge we have about how genetics and heredity affect personality. The brain is a physical organ, same as any of the others in your body. Of course it is more operationally- and computationally-complex than your gallbladder; that does not make it exempt from being a product of physical processes mediated by the output of your genes. You apparently acknowledge that there are fundamental genetic processes which cause men to grow penises and produce motile gametes, and you appear also to acknowledge that the same basic genetic processes lead men to achieve significantly higher height on average than women do.
Why, then, do you refuse to acknowledge that these processes also act upon the physical architecture of the brain? You seem to have adopted as an article of faith the proposition that individual humans have 100% agency to develop each and every aspect of their personalities, shorn of any probability distributions produced by heritable traits. A pure tabula rasa view of human potential. But where is your evidence for this view?
Uh, yes? I don't know what to tell you lol they don't work out, are skinnier than me, or the myriad of reasons why a person has poor grip strength.
My evidence for what? That women are not less funnier than men? That women are less intelligent? I'd say statistics. I don't find my father funnier than me, so unless I'm just wrong about humor because of my brain which I can't be because humor is a subjective trait, not an objective trait, my father is therefore not funnier than me. If it was wired in my brain to be less funnier than him, I'd find him hilarious, but I don't. Statistically, if I am experiencing that, somewhere out there another woman is too, which means there are >0 women who are funnier than men. Therefore you cannot say "women are less funny than men" when you literally have at the minimum two who are. You can say "some women are less funnier than men". Repeat that for every subjective aspect of a personality.
So, your contention because there is a non-zero number of funny women, and a non-zero number of non-funny men, we can’t draw any reliable conclusions about populations averages?
You would immediately recognize this as specious reasoning if applied to height. Suppose I said, “I once met a woman who was seven feet tall! That’s taller than I am! Therefore, we can’t say that men are taller than women.” You would understand that I’m failing to engage with what statistics and population averages mean. If I lined up a hundred men and a hundred women, I might end up with a handful of women who are taller than the average height of the men. The vast majority will not be, and I think you understand that. The existence of some overlap in the distributions due to outliers does not at all invalidate our ability to draw conclusions about the population as a whole.
Suppose you and I are at a bar, and I offer to make a bet with you: The next time a straight couple walks through the bar, which of them will be taller, the man or the woman? If you predict it correctly, I’ll give you $50, and if you predict incorrectly, you give me $50. Now, maybe you’d hesitate to take the bet, suspecting that I’ve rigged it in some way. (Maybe I have my friends, Short Shawn and Tall Tracy, standing by to enter once I give them the signal.) But assuming no foul play, you’d have to be very misguided to predict that the woman will be taller than the man. Population averages are what they are, and we have very reliable measurement data to demonstrate it.
My contention is that personality traits work this way as well, to at least some extent. If you ask me to predict whether the child of two people with a Ph.D is also very intelligent, as measured by an IQ test, the SAT, etc., the very easy money is on “Yes.” If you ask me whether I guess that your friend who gets in fistfights all the time is male or female, obviously I’m going to guess male, because that’s a personality trait infinitely more common among men than it is among women.
And if you asked me to predict whether your friend who is a theoretical physicist is male or female, I’m similarly going to guess male, because that too is an extremely heavily male profession, due to (among other factors) aggregate personality differences between men and women.
Telling me that you’re funnier than your dad gives me almost zero useful information about how funny men are on average. Sure, humor is subjective, but only to some extent: there is actually a measurable end result, which is “did I make somebody laugh”. If I had ten randomly-selected men and ten randomly-selected women enter a room and try to make each other laugh, my prediction is that the men would have significant more success than the women in achieving this goal. This is based not only on my own anecdotal experience, which is only marginally useful, but also in more reliable population-level data.
For example, British researchers Gil Greengross and Paul Silvia aggregated 28 studies on sex differences in humor, and found that 63% of men are funnier than the average woman. Now, this obviously does not mean that no women are funny! Nobody on earth has ever claimed this! Nor has anybody ever claimed that every man is funny! But, just like height, there is a bimodal distribution here, with men clustered on one end and women on the other.
Visual-spatial intelligence is also unequally-distributed between men and women. The number of men who are very good at mental math and at mentally rotating shapes is significantly higher than the number of women. This does not mean that no women are great at these things! I’m a man, and my spatial reasoning is certainly a relative weakness of mine; I have no doubt that there are many thousands of women better at it than I am! This does not in any way invalidate populations-level aggregate data.
My contention is because there is a non-zero number of funny women, and a non-zero number of non-funny men, we can’t draw any reliable generalizations about population averages. I would predict that there is a decent chance the woman will be taller than the man, because, despite population averages are what they are, I believe inter-state travel and urban sprawl allow for such a variance in something like the people who will enter a bar that it is possible to win your bet that the woman will be taller. Look, I know a lot more guys that are shorter than me than not and I'm not that tall. And yet, men on average tend to be taller than women. What gives? How did I manage to land in a random pool of short men? Additionally, I think I'm funnier and smarter than most of the men I have known and do know IRL. What gives there? Do I prove women are smarter than men because I outrank, like, 50+ men? The variance is just too much to make such sure decisions such as "your friend who is a theoretical physicist is going to be male because on average there are more males in that field".
So, this dovetails nicely with one of my pet theories, which is that people who are progressive — and if you weren’t aware, I am someone who was very firmly in that category for a long time — just genuinely live in a bubble wherein the sexes are less dimorphic.
Like, I am a short (5’7”ish) and not particularly strong man. My personality traits tend toward the feminine along a number of vectors. It was very easy for me to believe that men and women are not all that different on average, because I’m personally not that different from the average woman, at least not one of comparable intelligence and cultural background. And from an early age in school, I surrounded myself socially with people who are fairly similar to me. The guys I hung out with were mostly pretty nerdy and not especially masculine or alpha. And the girls whom I actually got to know reasonably well, because they were in the same advanced-placement classes and nerdy extracurricular that I was, were not extremely different psychologically from me.
So, when I started being exposed to all this data about the very large aggregate differences between men and women — not merely physical, but also in terms of personality — it was difficult to square that with my anecdotal experience. Because I had been ensconced within a filter bubble bringing together males and females within a relatively limited band of personality traits and interests! And this is true to some extent even today!
Sometimes I’ll be talking to my male friends who are significantly more masculine-brained than I am, and who spend a lot more time among significantly more feminine-minded women than I do, and they’ll make some claim about how inscrutable women are and how they act a certain way. And it’s tough for me to really participate because that has not been all that true of most of the women with whom I’ve had close personal relationships! However, that is more a reflection of the subset of women I spend time with than it is a reflection of what the unfiltered global population is actually like.
Like if I went to a chess club right now and talked to both the men and the (comparatively very few) women, I’m sure I could pick out some aggregate personality differences, but they would mostly be pretty similar along a number of axes. I’d expect pretty autistic- or autistic-adjacent personalities, systematizing styles of intelligence, etc. However, this wouldn’t actually help me draw accurate generalizations about the populace, because the vast majority of women would have zero interest in being part of a chess club! And look, to be clear, neither would the vast majority of men, although the reasons why the average man would find chess boring likely differ substantially from the reasons why the average woman would find chess boring.
Ultimately my move toward internalizing the significance of population-level differences, and actually changing my ideological outlook as a result of coming to grips with what those differences mean, required me to accept that while the lessons of that data still leave plenty of room for both outliers and considerable overlap, in order to develop workable theories for how all of humanity should operate, we need to be able to nail down a reliable understanding of probabilities. Learning that women are on average less likely to be geniuses than men — and that, for example, people of African ancestry are far less likely to be geniuses than people of Eurasian ancestry — helps me make better sense of real-world population outcomes. It doesn’t keep me from being able to appreciate the outliers I personally know, and it still requires me to think hard about how to apply that understanding to my own life, as someone who is also one of those outliers.
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