Is There Anything Good About Men?

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

by bootload • 16 years ago

250 110 16 years ago

psy.fsu.edu

johnthedebs3• 16 years ago

A long, but interesting read. This line stood out as pretty interesting - I'd never given this sort of thing much thought:

"If a group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full-sized. But if it loses half its women, the size of the next generation will be severely curtailed. Hence most cultures keep their women out of harm’s way while using men for risky jobs."

Overall, it's a pretty objective (and in-depth) view of the gender debate.

wvenable• 16 years ago

I question it's relevance to this site. There are other sites (reddit, for example) for this sort of content.

pkghost• 16 years ago

I'm relatively new here and don't read reddit. What about the article doesn't fit here?

johnthedebs3• 16 years ago

The article talks a lot about risk-taking, and the cultural/societal reasons that men take more risks than women. That's definitely true of this community - entrepreneurship has more risk-taking than nearly any other field (excepting things like the military).

That, plus it definitely "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Seems relevant to me.

groaner• 16 years ago

Judging by how much discussion it got the last time it was posted, I think the community has decided on how relevant it is already:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589346

Locke1689• 16 years ago

I agree. This is too much of a "political" issue. In addition, there are a lot of suppositions thrown about but not a lot of data.

lsc• 16 years ago

What gender debate? Are you telling me that you take people seriously who continue the "girls are better than boys/ boys are better than girls" debate after, say, the age of 13?

philwelch3• 16 years ago

I don't take people seriously who continue the "Macs are better than PC's/PC's are better than Macs" debate after the age of 13, but I do take people seriously when they put together a case about why Macs are better suited for Ruby on Rails development, or why Windows is better for gaming, or why Linux is better for running webservers.

Likewise, you're trivializing the serious cultural debates about, for instance, whether it's wise to send women into armed combat, or whether or not it's a problem for 90% of software developers to be men. It doesn't mean anyone is better than another, just that as a society maybe we should be comfortable with having more men than women in prison, in the Forbes 500, or in combat. Or maybe we shouldn't. Point is, that's a debate worth having.

johnthedebs3• 16 years ago

Well, no, but some people continue (begin?) to question whether women are treated fairly after that age. It's useful and interesting to know how and why things turned out the way they did.

thibaut_barrere• 16 years ago

I would say yes, based on wages differences (around 20% here).

gwern• 16 years ago

A tremendous amount of money rides on gender issues. Think just of all the academic programs instituted to address gender imbalances in STEM fields. Think of the expense of them continuing, forever, because they are trying to combat not transient mutable societal norms but Mother Nature. When public policy goes wrong, it's very expensive.

sabat• 16 years ago

If a group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full-sized. But if it loses half its women, the size of the next generation will be severely curtailed.

Given that we have something like 7 billion people, the odds of losing half of either gender are fairly low. If it's because of something nuclear -- you will probably want to be on the casualty list, not the survivor's.

I wish I could downvote this post. It's flamebait, and it's irrelevant. Agree with the commenter who wondered why "debates" like this go on amongst people > age 13.

philk• 16 years ago

You're taking that quote out of context. The point is not what could happen today, but what could happen prehistoric groups. If you have two prehistoric tribes in conflict with each other it's entirely reasonable that you'll lose half of your combatants over a period of years. If you're losing men then you can replenish your numbers just as effectively, if you're losing women your capacity will be compromised.

obiterdictum• 16 years ago

It's interesting to note that Orwell takes a contrary viewpoint: http://www.orwelltoday.com/orwellwaryoungwhy.shtml

"Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man? The argument usually advanced is that in killing women you are killing the breeders, whereas men can be more easily spared. But this is a fallacy based on the notion that human beings can be bred like animals. The idea behind it is that since one man is capable of fertilizing a very large number of women, just as a prize ram fertilizes thousands of ewes, the loss of male lives is comparatively unimportant. Human beings, however, are not cattle. When the slaughter caused by a war leaves a surplus of women, the enormous majority of those women bear no children. Male lives are very nearly as important, biologically, as female ones."

joe_the_user4• 16 years ago

Hmm,

It's Orwell so it's well written.

But even Orwell needs references to back up this argument.

stanleydrew• 16 years ago

The evolutionary processes that got us to where we are were operating during a time when we did breed like animals because we were animals. So I don't know that Orwell's is a contrary viewpoint. It's possible to hold the view that male and female lives are just as important biologically now, while acknowledging that that is only a relatively recent development.

akgerber• 16 years ago

Isn't one of the main motivators for polygamy to provide a means of support for the excess women in a patriarchal society in which many men have been killed?

See, say, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levirate_marriage

c00p3r2• 16 years ago

There are a social and economical constraints, not a biological ones.

v3rt• 16 years ago

Continuing in the evolutionary psychology vein, though, the two viewpoints can be reconciled - humans evolved in an environment where it would likely be more acceptable for women to reproduce without a steady partner, so it would be advantageous for groups to protect women more than men for the reasons cited in the original article. However, in modern society, those tendencies could well be unjustified, since contraception and the increased payoffs of committed parent pairs in a society where it's expensive to raise children have made it less likely that a single woman would have children by a man that hasn't committed to her. So we may well be in a situation where we're wired by evolution to protect women more than men despite the practice not being demographically justified in a modern society.

brc3• 16 years ago

His point holds only if the society never converts to polygamy. This is true in a period of time during British history in which it was written. However, you would assume that over the period of one generation, if there were consistently more women than (suitable) men, the society would begin to accept multiple marriage, first tacitly, then finally explicitly. Or, as we experience in today's society, single mothers. Once shunned, then accepted, now supported. In fact, because of the surplus that modern society now generates (and thus is able to support single mothers, for the most part) single mothers can succesfully raise a family. In a modern society with a surplus of women and a deficit of men, widespread single motherhood is more likely than polygamy. Thus, successful men are going to have multiple partners, but might not stick around to support them.

kevinh2• 16 years ago

Full-sized, yes, but you'll probably lose a significant amount of diversity. Half of the Y-chromosomes in the population will be eliminated. I would imagine this would cut down the genetic variation significantly.

pmjordan2• 16 years ago

The Y chromosome doesn't carry much genetic information. For the most part it just defers to the X chromosome's version of the data, which is why recessive genetic disorders hosted on the X chromosome are more common in men. (e.g. red/green colour blindness, haemophilia, etc.)

woodall5• 16 years ago

That reasoning only works if all members are still willing to mate. What if the remaining species are heart broken/distraught/ect and unwilling to mate? Do we force them to mate? How do our values and ideals change when this occurs? Do they change at all?

When we imagine this apocalyptic doom of population, and mankind, we imagine a perfect world in some much that we think everyone will breed with everyone. Some men my have a problem(ED), some women may not be able to bare children(thus the creation of fertility gods), and some-be it male or female- may not want to "do it" period(homosexuality). We may also still hold old world values/moral beliefs, such as monogamy, dear.

The quote posted by Obiterdictum[1] from Orwell, one of my favorite writers, is very intriguing to me. The part that stands out the most is:

''But this is a fallacy based on the notion that human beings can be bred like animals.'' -One the topic of utilitarianistic gender values

Animals in captivity are usually force breed to maintain a linage or specific trait. Animals can build emotional bonds, however, in the wild we see very few mammal species that follow the same guidelines we find social acceptable[2]. For us to believe that every male will mate with every female we must also believe that every female will mate with every male, and vica versa.

Part of monogamy is breed into our subconscious, part is based on proximity, part is due to social context, and part is, well, emotional[3]. There are countless stories of widows never marring after their husbands are gone[see Penelope in The Odyssey]. We, many of us, enjoy monogamous relationships. Something about them brings us a joy that is very hard to put a value on. We can be tricked into them, stockholm syndrome, we can even be forced into them, rape, but we can rarely artificially create them, Truman show.

We must also asses the value of monogamous relation ships versus open relation ships(I am sorry I do not know the proper word for it); thinking that everyone will value them the same. I do not have enough data to pass judgment, although, the animal kingdom does seem to be doing well for itself ;).

Then we have to break down the proper breeding matrices. No one has said anything about age distribution in population. So are we assuming all the males/females too young/old to breed died OR are we not including them in the first count? To inspire discussion I will say we never included them in the first count...but then the situation doesn't really work as we have a new generation coming of age at some point; a boost if you will. Hypothetically, using the example given with a population size 150(aftermath) we are left with 100 women and 50 men. Breeding can be done in at least 1 day; a week at the utmost. Now those women are taken pretty much out of commission at the ~7,8,9 month. That leaves 100 women more vulnerable to starvation, illness, miscarriage, death giving birth. We also do not have the number of still births. What is the status of food? How did this population destruction occur? Too many variables.

For every perfect scenario there exists an imperfect one just as likely to occur as the latter. No person, be it male or female, is more valuable because they were born with a functioning set of genitalia. Value is always in the eye of the beholder[see currency, trade, marketing].

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635248

[2]http://www.trinity.edu/rnadeau/fys/barash%20on%20monogamy.ht...

[3] http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/346monogamyAnimals.html

[4]http://www.mythweb.com/odyssey/book01.html#notes5back

I had to edit and remove some of my comment as it became more of a rant than an acceptable comment. The tl;dr version is, we are all different and thus behave differently. Some may be more willing to breed for the sake of it while others not so much, however, we can all be conditioned so that we are prepared for such a situation. I am not condoning this. I feel that place male and female on a scale is boarding the lines of eugenics- to which I am more opposed than I am for. Some men are strong, while others are weak. Some women are stronger than a weak man. Some men are cowards, others are not. Some women are brave, others are not. Measuring strength is easy, measuring other- not so physical traits- is harder.

lionhearted3• 16 years ago

> We may also still hold old world values/moral beliefs, such as monogamy, dear.

I think monogamy spread because St. Augustine made it part of the Roman Catholic dogma that became the foundation for all Christian dogma, Christianity took over Europe, and then Europe colonized pretty much the rest of the world. I tend to think if things had gone differently, we'd be looking at a polygamous world.

(Edit: Did I just argue sexuality is a social construct? Oy vey...)

chegra3• 16 years ago

I think the author has a point even if we were to maintain monogamy. With a man high sex drive those women who are kept safe can serve as partners to an ally states. Consider a low rank man from our ally. Would he want to continue in a state where his chances of finding a mate is low or come over to us where the females are plenty and his status need not be so high in order to mate.

bootload2• 16 years ago

"... Part of monogamy is breed into our subconscious, part is based on proximity, part is due to social context, and part is, well, emotional ..."

When you mean monogamy do you mean sexually exclusive or socially monogamous? There is some evidence to suggest the later more than the former. [0] And some counter arguments. [1]

[0] Barber, Nigel "Monogamy is social - not sexual" ~ http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201007/m...

[1] Johnson, Sue "Monogamy: are we - can we be - monogamous?" ~ http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hold-me-tight/201003/mon...

joe_the_user4• 16 years ago

Evolutionary biologists have argued the monogamy-with-cheaping is a standard human behavior.

In evolutionary terms, a woman would want to give the man the impression that she'd never mate with another if he was gone or away. Whether that's true is a different question.

The human switch from a visible estrus cycle was a change which allowed monogamy-with-cheating to be a much more feasible strategy than with earlier primates - who knew when mating was going to happen.

I actually wouldn't say that monogamy-with-cheating is the only human social/sexual pattern since humans also evolved an incredibly ability to change their behavior based on their social system.

But don't assume that a society that overtly pushes monogamy will actually wind-up with husbands always fathering their official children.

gbhn• 16 years ago

The article tends to use more polarized language, but it's worth observing that it took tens/hundreds of thousands of years to build up that stark 80/40 percent success rates. At any time, the gender differences are a lot less stark, and of course, mean very little applied to specific people. Just because more men than women are CEOs of large corporations doesn't mean that a particular woman would be a poorer one than a particular man.

russell• 16 years ago

Humans are mostly monogamous, but men with status/wealth get more women. The tribal chief gets several wives while others have only one. In early civilization the distribution was even more disparate with emperors having hundreds even thousands of wives/concubines. Today large numbers of male politicians, sports stars, business leaders, have one or more women on the side.

Wars and fighting provide a ready surplus of women. In an Amazon tribe, the Yanomamo, I believe, 40% of all males die by murder or fighting. Recent genetic studies show that we have twice as many female ancestors as men. (Sorry, about the lack of citation.) Today jails, drug use, and general decrepitude keep large numbers of males out of circulation.

elai• 16 years ago

Look at islamic societies, where having 3 wives and one husband is acceptable. This kind of relationship structure comes from war heavy societies which islam was born out of.

lotusleaf19879• 16 years ago

Absolutely fascinating. I guess mostly it comes down to XY and XX chromosomes. XY leaves more room for random chance. XX would be more moderate because it would presumably have more genetics to balance out its extremes.

ars• 16 years ago

No, it has nothing whatsoever to do with that.

eru4• 16 years ago

It may (may!) have been the initial tiny nudge in this direction. Though I know that different animals (or even lifeforms) decide on gender differently.

lotusleaf19879• 16 years ago

Why don't you elaborate then instead of just giving some smug answer? Hacker News would be a lot better without pointless contrarians like you.

mjterave• 16 years ago

"Men go to extremes more than women, and this fits in well with culture using them to try out lots of different things, rewarding the winners and crushing the losers."

Is there anything more fitting to the audience of this site? Does this fit in with the sex distribution here? (surely)

alxp• 16 years ago

This speech was posted to MetaFilter a few years ago and generated a much deeper discussoin than it seems to here. http://www.metafilter.com/64034/The-Waw-effect Definitely worth reading some less glowing discussion about the talk.

henrikschroder• 16 years ago

I mostly saw moaning about how evolutionary psychology is bullshit, and not much serious discussion about the merits of his claims.

I do agree though that it starts out good, and becomes less and less substantiated, but on the whole it is interesting.

jlouis• 16 years ago

Precisely my thought. People take a specific literal quote and use it as an attempt to refute his main argument - but you have to refute the statistics instead.

One argument was that the adventurous sailor would be subsumed by the cobbler or tavernkeeper in the mating game. True, but he wouldn't be subsumed by the beggar, now would he?

Another argument is to find a counterexample. "There were female scientists. Good female scientists. Your claim is now disproven!". Except for the fact that the claim is statistical and you just picked an outlier. There are a couple of main claims, which are quite objective:

Are males more extremely distributed than females? Is the minimum wage pertubing the mean wage (yes, it is - but significantly?) Is the absolute grade scale pertubing the results (yes, but by how much?) If all three are confirmed, you could say the societys obsession with the mean is what causes all the trouble.

I think your point about less and less substantiality is warranted. It is the first couple of paragraphs which has the most meat and is the most objective. It would be bad to dismiss them, if the latter parts are weaker. Yet, the weaker parts are the ones people will attack in an argument - they are the low-hanging-fruit. Especially if they have an agenda to be fulfilled in the gender wars. Though the more objective parts are the parts you should seek to refute.

I think the future will be even more interesting than now. In the most developed parts of the world, women surpasses men in higher education. Note that this fits the presumption: males have a more extreme ability distribution. This will have a great impact. There will be less well-educated men for the well-educated women. And this is a first in the history (of Europe). It will be interesting to see how that one plays out.

chegra3• 16 years ago

Summary: Men are both better and worst than women. They are most at the top and also the most at the bottom. More men in CEO position and also more men in prison.

He tied in the fact that a society needs as many womb as possible and a few penis would do the job. Basically, saying the more people in a society the stronger it is. With this fact men basically are expendable, thus encouraged by society to participate in high risk endeavors. With high risk comes high reward. Hence a few successful men at the top.

Also, he points to the fact men have lots of shallow relationship while women value intimate relationship. But having a many shallow relationship allows men be more innovative since concepts are passed between then quicker compared to women.

Women would form small groups of intimate relationship while men will form large group. With large group emerges synergy and the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. Hence, men form cultural things like religion, universities, sport teams, etc. What comes with forming and creating them is men dominate them. Also, the system men set up are design that only a few can be rewarded and recognized.

There wasn't no real conspiracy by men to dominate.

joe_the_user4• 16 years ago

There wasn't no real conspiracy by men to dominate.

"There was no conspiracy" theory seems to have become as problematic today as all-embracing-conspiracy-theories.

In any social species, subgroups with common interests has colluded to different degrees. The collusion has been more effective when the group had dominant social power. Many societies have strictures which aim to keep women in-line and faithful to their husbands. It rather clear this is organized in the interests of the husbands (and not in the interests of the handsome vagabonds passing through...).

One can be certain there have been many overt and implicit conspiracies among groups of men as well as among groups of women, now and through-out history. Just not a single one since men and women are each members of other groups as well.

Confusion• 16 years ago

Emergent collusion due to groups of people sharing a goal is not equivalent to a conspiracy. There is no such thing as an implicit conspiracy: that's a contradiction in terminis.

Similarly, a group of men conspiring to do something is not equivalent to a conspiracy for male domination. It's usually a conspiracy for their domination; their maleness is incidental.

kqr2• 16 years ago

Roy F. Baumeister recently expanded his original essay into a book:

Is There Anything Good About Men? How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men

http://www.amazon.com/There-Anything-Good-About-Men/dp/01953...

jarin• 16 years ago

I think a key takeaway from this is that while there may be fewer motivated/ambitious women in business or skilled work, the women who ARE motivated/ambitious are equally as capable as motivated/ambitious men and should be given the same mentoring and opportunities (probably their biggest disadvantage right now).

Joeboy• 16 years ago

> Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men

Anyone know where that conclusion originates? It's kind of hard to google - I keep finding myself back at Roy Baumeister.

c00p3r2• 16 years ago

Some general introduction for those, who really interested in such topics. http://oyc.yale.edu/ecology-and-evolutionary-biology/princip...

btw, you may skip hardcore genetics in lectures from 2 till 8. ^_^

jseliger• 16 years ago

Two books I often recommend:

Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved

They're probably the best, most thoroughly researched, and least political of the evolutionary bio books I've found that aren't primarily about hardcore genetics and heavily math-based game theory.

known• 16 years ago

And men and women will always have different and distinct priorities in life.

bambax4• 16 years ago

As a (happy) father of three I feel the right to share a dirty little secret: taking care of young kids is boring as hell.

But somebody has to do it; in mammals it's only natural that it's the female, since she has to be around anyway in order to breast feed (which is not the case with birds for example: both parents can find and bring back food to the young).

So maybe the adventurous sailors explore the world simply because they can; not "in order to come back rich, and mate" but because, having mated, they can leave their family behind and go do something else.

GFischer• 16 years ago

"taking care of young kids is boring as hell."

There were articles about how couples with children are unhappier over here recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494011

Yet I believe I'd be unhappy in my old age if I don't have children (not to mention several good points in that discussion).

I keep going back to the "experiencing self vs remembering self" talk many people here directed me to:

http://sheshtawy.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/experience-self-vs...

The experiencing self is unhappier, but the remembering self is definitely happier :)

bambax4• 16 years ago

Like I said, I'm a very happy father (my kids are 5, 2 and 1). I love them (they helped me understand what "love" actually means). They are the joy of my life.

But spending too much time with them is not as fulfilling as actually doing something -- or even reading a good book.

There is no fulfillment in wiping a child's ass, or even feeding them. You do it because you have to, and I actually don't mind doing it. But as useful as it is for them, it's pointless for me.

That is not a problem as long as I have other things to do / to care about; it would be if they were the beginning and end of my day.

brc3• 16 years ago

That's been the biggest shock of parenthood to me : how mind-numbingly boring routine it is. It's an unpaid job because it's terrible work. Parenting is just a 24 hour routine of fighting entropy via an immature human.

It's the ultimate in taking a long view. Most investments will have paid off (or disappeared) several times by the time the investment in a child repays. A good investment of time and money in a child can pay off well, with personal and monetary fulfilment, but you've got to keep up with the time and money for 20 years with a child.

Many parents will disagree with this position, but it's rare to find one that doesn't really enjoy the time when the kids are in bed asleep.

tmcw• 16 years ago

Hey, I've devised a simple rule for determining whether articles are completely vacuous! Just divide the number of times the author uses weasel words like "most" by the number of references cited:

(38 most) / (0 references) = ∞ vacuousness!

ajscherer• 16 years ago

He does refer to other "research", but since it is a transcript of a talk they aren't really explicit citations.

That aside, I observed a ton of hand waving in this talk, and I'm willing to bet it isn't backed up by the appropraite amount of rigor in his "research". In particular, I am concerned about how hard he tried to poke holes in his own theory, given the risks that might pose to his forthcoming (at the time of the talk) book.

Since we just had Cargo Cult Science posted the other day, this is a great time to think about this. I sometimes think that we (hacker news readers) might actually be more suseptible to accepting theories that haven't rigorously examined because our need to understand things is unusally great. So when we come across a theory that is internally consistent, not obviously wrong, and just sort of seems to make sense, we tend to reject any attempts to discredit the theory, lest we risk going from understanding to not understanding.

In other words, I think we sometimes value the feeling of understanding something over any utility that would come from actually understanding it.

zeteo• 16 years ago

Evolutionary psychology without lots of backing data means very little. The hypotheses are very fun to think of, but there's no guarantee that you've thought of everything that could have happened a thousand millennia ago(and you probably haven't). Baumeister brought up some very interesting points (that I'm sure riled up a lot of feminist feathers), but there are also holes in his argument, such as the two below.

First, there is no mechanism of action that backs up his claim that society uses men as expendable. It's easy to see that it would be adaptive (for the society itself) to use men this way, but there's no guarantee this will happen without a mechanism of action. In fact, society seems to have developed mechanisms (such as monogamous marriage) that act against allowing men to be disposable sources of semen.

Second, even accepting everything else, his essential claim that a woman can't increase the number of her descendants by acquiring wealth and prestige is clearly false. All she has to do is find a way to transfer the wealth/prestige to her son(s), who in turn can use it in the ways Baumeister indicated.

geebee• 16 years ago

These are always interesting articles, but this one definitely slips into what I feel is a dramatic overstatement about the differences between men and women.

In particular, I've never agreed that men shoot for the moon while women are happy to live more modestly in a low-risk way. Have the people who say this ever been to Hollywood? The place is full of young women who risk everything to achieve that incredibly high status position of movie star.

Or, like the Dixie Chicks wrote in "Long Time Gone"

Me, I went to Nashville Tryin' to be the big deal Playin' down on Broadway Gettin' there the hard way Living' form a tip jar Sleepin' in my car Hockin' my guitar Yeah I'm gonna be a star....

Now, one place where I agree with the author of this article is that there there are most likely meaningful innate differences between women that may have resulted from evolutionary pressures, and that we should not be suppressed by a culture of political correctness from honestly discussing them, even when some of these differences favor men.

But the conclusions still seem very spotty to me, not at all consistent with my observations. The big about diapers? The men I know are deeply involved with their children, extremely paternal, and change a hell of a lot of diapers. Women may not start tech companies as often as men, but they are definitely willing to take great risks to seek status.

I don't mind the question, and I'm not at all offended by the answer, but I am not at all convinced. There's a lot more to this story.

WestCoastJustin• 16 years ago

disclaimer; I have not read the link.

I'm bothered by this title. Had a water cooler chat yesterday and was talking about question structure. This came up, yes/no; "do you still kick your dog?". Say, no, and it implies that you used too.

The title seems to imply that we need to explain what's good/bad about men when the entire question is dumb.

xenophanes• 16 years ago

The start of the article totally lost me. Everyone thinks women are better? Really? I thought it was the general consensus that men are better at stuff that matters like math, programming, logic, leading countries and resolving disputes with reason, and women are better at soft stuff like art, sex, fashion and emotions.

DrJokepu• 16 years ago

Where I live, at least amongst the people I know, this is not the "general consensus". In fact, one of the most brilliant prime ministers of this country (United Kingdom) was a woman.

My point is though that you have to be careful when discussing such delicate matters. While an argument could be made that men tend to perform better at abstract reasoning and women tend to perform better at other mental tasks, small differences in wording can make a difference between offensive and objective.

brc3• 16 years ago

Does someone want to donate that guy a CSS file? Talk about making good content unreadable. Just a simple margin:20px would help!

LiveTheDream• 16 years ago

Readability bookmarklet is your friend

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Is There Anything Good About Men?

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