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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3970 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 11, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why are there no direct flights from Alaska to Asia? There are tons of airports in Alaska (lots of places are only reachable by plane from what I understand) and a lot of people who live in Alaska are there from maritime or military/Navy connections and they're part of the Pacific rim where lots of US military bases are. There are tons of flights between Japan and Hawaii, and Alaska and Hawaii, but none from Alaska to Japan. You can fly from Fairbanks to Frankfurt Germany. There are flights to various places in Canada from Alaska and seasonally, to Reykjavik. But not to Russia, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China, or Mongolia. Wikipedia says that 6% of Alaskans are Asian (as of 2020, a number that has increased steadily since 1970.) It seems like there should be enough demand for at least one route between Alaska and Asia.

I just watched the movie Sinners. Good movie, enjoyed the use of Folk motifs and generally cracking vibes and pace until the last 10 minutes or so.

I felt like the story they were telling didn't really need the bit with the Klan at the end, just seemed super detached from the rest of the movie. Would recommend the movie, all the same.

I can get why Coogler didn't want the bad guy to be lying about the Klan, thematically.

I thought the mid-credits scene was a bit indulgent though and raised needless questions about the established vamp lore.

I just felt like it should have been brought into the vampire climax somehow and felt like it just kinda weirdly floated above the rest of the movie just to tick the 'racial oppression themes' mentioned box moreso than really contributing to the plot perse. Also like the only two real white person interactions of the movie are 'The Local Klan is ready to go on 24 hours notice for the grave crime of selling an old barn' and 'Old drunkard's friend is mass lynched for the crime of having $20' which is a pretty insane setup.

If it had tied into the vampire plot with say the Vampiric mulatto woman going to the local town and making up a rape or something to galvanize the Klan into action to get the vampires into the barn I'd buy that, or if it somehow tied into the source of the Chicago money with organized crime contacts using the Klan to try and get revenge. Otherwise it's just a child's understanding of the South where mass lynchings were a daily occurence in every locality.

This movie reminded me of the line Billy Crystal made at the 2003 Oscars about LOTR Return of the King. "It was nominated for eleven Oscars...for its eleven endings!"

Now wait to see extended version. It's not called Bored of the rings for no reason.

They don't call me Barry Poppins for nothing!

I feel like I am misremembering some old version of the rules of this place. The term is "enlightened Buddha principle". It meant something along the lines of: each post has to meet at least 2 out of 3. And I think one was kind, another was necessary, third I am unsure. The sentiment is still present in the rules.

I tried searching but Buddha and enlightenment are such a strong keywords that it overrides most results. LLMs proved useful. And I found Socrates triple filter test:

  1. Is it true?
  2. Is it necessary (or useful)?
  3. Is it kind (spoken with goodwill)?

If a statement can't pass all three it shall not be spoken (posted). So that seems to be close. But it lacks the 2 out of 3 part.

So my question is whether there was such rule? If it was called that? Or am I only misremembering while keeping with the general sentiment?

Slate Star Codex: The Comment Policy Is "Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite"

There is an ancient Sufi saying beloved of the Buddha, which like a surprising number of ancient Sufi sayings beloved of the Buddha, originates from a book of preachy Victorian poetry. It goes:

Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates; At the first gate, ask yourself, is is true? At the second gate ask, is it necessary? At the third gate ask, is it kind?

Slate Star Codex has lower standards than either ancient Sufis or preachy Victorians, and so we only require you to pass at least two of those three gates.

If you make a comment here, it had better be either true and necessary, true and kind, or kind and necessary.

This policy is cited in the sidebars of /r/slatestarcodex and /r/culturewarroundup, but not in that of /r/themotte.

Thank you very much, exactly what I was looking for! I was looking through internet archive version of /r/themotte but did not consider /r/slatestarcodex Obvious in retrospect as I suspected that the term originated with Scott.

Do we know anything about 2nd or 3rd generation Han / Japanese / Korean criminality and educational attainment? I’m not looking for Asians generally, because of Hmong. This could conceivably tell us the influence of culture on behavior, no?

I would suspect criminality would be much lower regardless of genetic disposition, because generally if you want to get seriously in to crime, you have to actually know some criminals. The average suburban shut-in of any race probably isn’t going to have the resources necessary to join a street gang or become a drug trafficker.

There isn't much research on 3rd generation Asian-Americans, which would be necessary to answer your question, but this study seems to show some convergence in educational outcomes with Hispanics (although it includes all kinds of Asians). I was unfortunately not able to locate another paper I recall reading that showed incomplete convergence of several personality traits between 2nd and 3rd generation Asian immigrants with American averages e.g. something like 25% of the difference along any given axis between 1st generation immigrants and the average American is still present in the 3rd generation. Studies on Asian adoptees will also tell you what the floor is on differences attributable to culture.

Now if I were to guess based on my own observations, I would tell you that 2nd generation immigrants have the highest educational attainment due to parental pressure, followed by a decline to a level somewhat higher than the white average. Criminality, on the other hand, I would expect to increase with each generation, eventually hitting an asymptote somewhat lower than the white average.

this study seems to show some convergence in educational outcomes with Hispanics (although it includes all kinds of Asians)

The problem with cross-sectional comparisons of different generations is that each generation is from a different wave of immigrants. This study was published in 1998, using data from students who were in eighth grade in 1988, meaning that the 3rd+ generation were from families that had been in the country since long before the 1965 reopening of the country to Asian immigrants. And 20% of 3rd+ generation were Pacific Islanders and 50% "other Asians"; who knows what that means?

Because the legacy Asians come from very different cultural and genetic backgrounds, you can't necessarily attribute to generational differences to assimilation.

I don't know the answer to your first question, but I am wondering why it would tell us with any definitiveness the influence of culture on behavior. Possibly I'm being obtuse, but could you explain?

IMO Asians assimilate in every aspect of culture, including parenting and worldview. If their educational attainment and criminality are the same after 2/3 generations then it would be strong evidence that the effect of culture on behavior is insignificant. I know there’s already studies like this wrt immigration in Europe but I haven’t seen one for this.

There is extensive evidence from numerous disciplines--psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics--that culture has an effect on behavior. You mention significance--do you mean statistical significance? That would require numerous studies with numerous groups, and even then there's the question of generalizability. I think to simply look at "Asians" and make assumption XYZ then look at 2nd or 3rd generations (presumably "outside" their culture? To whatever degree?) and make more assumptions is a weak analytical design.

The evidence is not always strong. It’s mostly correlative. I’m familiar with adoption studies. I’m interested in how it affects important behaviors, not just any behaviors.

That would require numerous studies with numerous groups

It would require some strong studies with a few groups before I am convinced that culture is less important than previously considered. If Chinese Americans and Chinese French, after assimilation in the 2nd or 3rd generations, are still behaviorally Chinese, then of genetics is even more important than I previously considered, and culture is probably less important than I previously thought. It would add credence to a thought I’ve had recently where cultural institutions are primarily for filtering genetic types and not for directing individual behavior (or rather, it’s for improving multigenerational behaviors through genetics rather than improving an individual’s behavior).

then look at 2nd or 3rd generations (presumably "outside" their culture? To whatever degree?)

Yes, because I’m interested in truth-seeking; I have the luxury to not be engaged in the neurotic janitorial work of academia where careful minds go to die. In real life, because I know that Asians overwhelmingly assimilate into cultural norms, I can use this proxy to obtain the information I’m looking for. An academic would have to first spends year and publish papers “proving” that Asian Americans assimilate, when it’s obvious.

Why the snipe against anthropologists (the 'neurotic janitors'?) I get that many have lost all faith in academia but that seems like throwing out the bathwater, the baby, the soap, and the tub itself.

I think to design this study or studies you'd need to first sort out what you mean by "Asian." That may sound eggheaded but you would want as much precision and as little noise as possible, or you'd risk losing any statistical rigor and thus your conclusions would be suspect. Depending on how well you designed the study (accounting for as many other variables as possible besides however you operationalize the term 'culture') you'd still require replication, and replication across and into different cultures, to have any definitiveness in your conclusion.

There's a term 帰国子女 in Japanese referring to children who are taken abroad by their parents when very young, and who then must return to Japan when dad gets transferred back home, or whatever. There's an entire system of schooling set up both in Japan and abroad to cater to these children, because of the impact of cultural norms and how the kids get thrown out of whack (as it's perceived here) in that process. The changes in behavior and attitude from before and after are often dramatic. This is individual level, however, not longitudinal across generations.

Hey, The Motte. Recommend us some books that are fun to read and that aren't about the destination, but the journey. Books that delight the reader with clever turns of phrase, witty jokes or badass scenes every few pages.

The Complete Works of Saki. Pen name of H. H. Munro, a bitchy gay early 20th century British writer. Mostly wrote short stories, which are delightful.

Ender's Game.

Practical Guide to Evil.

It doesn't exist in book form (yet) but I need a physical copy of it yesterday. Multiple times I thought I knew where it was going only to have the rug pulled out from me repeatedly, and it easily satisfies the requirement for cool characters doing cool things.

Annoying favor request: would you find the location (Book+Chapter number) of what you feel was the first really exciting rug-pull, add a random number of chapters between 0% and 20% of the count up to that point to avoid this being a total spoiler, and tell me?

I started reading A Practical Guide to Evil at one point a couple years ago, but didn't make it very far before getting a little bored of it and moving to something else. I'm no stranger to fiction that takes a little while (Mother of Learning) or a long while (Babylon 5) to introduce itself before it gets really good, but I feel like I need some place at which to say "either I like it by here, or it's just not my cup of tea".

I think you can actually write off the first book. There is the stench of YA fiction about it for a long while although it is unfortunately a necessary slog to understand Catherine's character, how she views the world, how her mentor views the world, and the way the world has metafictional trappings of character and story that frame the setting (as well as portraying an expansive ensemble cast).

I initially also wrote it off because I thought the story was a generally predictable run where Catherine is being groomed to replace her mentor in his role as Effective, Competent Evil. The setting has metafictional rules that thumbs the scale to allow Good to triumph over evil; after looking at the historical record of the setting the Black Knight has decided he's done losing.

The moment I realized it had me was that this is not where it goes. Rather than lean fully into Effective Evil because Good is just so stupid, Catherine realizes that his path is also doomed, just in an entirely different way, and she has to navigate this mess as a rising third power in the world. But this was a while in, maybe four or five books, and I'm not sure if you had trouble sticking with it before then that this would be worth the trouble.

There's an additional element to it taken as a complete whole, it takes potshots to the quokka beliefs that smart people in charge will fix everything, that misunderstandings are the root of conflict, as well as the rationalist trap - that enemies are stupid.

It's not perfect and it's overlong/could use an edit like most works of web fiction, but it just ramps and ramps and ramps some more and when you think it can't possibly escalate any harder it keeps going. There are multiple conflicts later on where plans from five or six characters end up paying off at the same time only to domino all over each other and going to shit simultaneously.

Thanks!

Yes, but:

  1. It's so massive that it's actually inconvenient. It's around 3 times the length of the entire Harry Potter series, which is a lot to jump into. 2.If this matters to you, it felt like there were more gay than straight characters.

I'm going to go against the grain and say rather than the Pratchett novels, where I've read two but felt they were kind of uneven and mostly just imitations, just go straight to the original delight: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the original trilogy. The quotes are literally next-level.

Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Historical fiction executed as a combination of agape and western, told episodically, with gorgeous descriptions of the landscape and humanity. I recommend it specifically because the tale of the lives of two French, Catholic priests sent to New Mexico, unfolding over decades, is not something I would predict I would enjoy, but was more than pleasantly surprised I did.

Once upon a time, this is what I got out of Wheel of Time. It didn’t matter if the prose was florid or the plotting glacial. The sprawl was the point. I wasn’t reading it to find out what happened in each finale, but to watch the setting evolve, further selling the illusion of another world.

I would argue that this is the ethos behind most of the great fantasy doorstoppers, even the ones like ASOIAF which stumble into the mainstream. “Journey before destination,” hmm?

Buuuuuut I’m not going to pretend that these satisfy your third sentence. For a superior ratio of wit to word count, allow me to make two suggestions.

Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse is an iconic, delightful bit of English absurdity. Every other page offers some combination of words previously unseen in the language. The comedy works both in the short term, via dialogue and gags and ever so many puns, and in the long term, thanks to incredible brick jokes and a fundamentally silly premise. Great fun. The full text is available here, though I thought it benefited from a print copy.

I’ll also recommend Levels of the Game by John McPhee as a more serious sort of cleverness. It’s a synthesis of two biographies and a play-by-play tennis match. Since both players are near the absolute peak of their sport, the physical competition is recast as a psychological one. I can’t do it justice without explaining how little I expected to care about tennis, and how compelling I found it anyway. You can read some (all?) of it here.

Once upon a time, this is what I got out of Wheel of Time. It didn’t matter if the prose was florid or the plotting glacial. The sprawl was the point. I wasn’t reading it to find out what happened in each finale, but to watch the setting evolve, further selling the illusion of another world.

That's curious; I'd find myself skipping Perrin, Egwene, Elayne, Nynaeve POV chapters out of boredom to get to the climax with Rand. Almost all the moments from the series that stick with me a decade or so later are with Rand: Picking up Callandor (and trying to revive the dead child), Rhuidean, cleansing saidin, using the True power against Semirhage for the first time, his epiphany on dragonmount.

I suppose as a teen I was even more of an uncultured swine than I am now.

Hear hear!

I've tried to refrain from commenting on this myself but I found the middle of the WoT books to be tedious as often as not. I'm one of the ones that bogged down hard for the first time right around the bloody menagerie in TFoH. Nor did I particularly care for the style of rapid-fire exposition endings that were then revisited in excruciating detail in a subsequent book that evolved around that time, either, but Brandon Sanderson finished out the series so strongly that I liked it enough overall to go back for a re-read.

Which was a mistake that I was making because once again, I bogged down at the bloody menagerie and realized that regardless of how much I liked the series as a whole, life was too short for me to force myself to slog through those middle books all over again. I still think that the first four and last three books are tightly plotted and well written despite their length and I can only wonder at what might have been if Jordan had never gotten deathly ill with amyloidosis.

Catch-22 is very good.

Unsong also has many jokes.

I'm just commenting "Discworld" here because I'm only allowed to upvote @PokerPirate once.

To make my comment less redundant, here's the Discworld Reading Order Guide. IMHO although the best starting points depend on your taste, you can't really go wrong with "Guards! Guards!" or "Mort".

The reading order is worthwhile to avoid missing backstory (or to let you know what backstory you can miss - "The Color of Magic" wasn't nearly as good as his later books), but the books get even better as you go on. I could name stories by many authors that set me on edge from the suspense, or teary-eyed from the tragedy, or laughing from the comedy, but I'm having trouble thinking of anything other than Pratchett's "Thud!" that managed to do all three at once, and with a single line that would make no sense whatsoever out of context.

Piranesi - Most books you're on the ride with the Main Character knowing more than you about the setting, characters, etc. This book provides the odd experience of feeling like you know more than the MC while having all the same facts as him. It is beautiful, haunting, all about the process of reading it while still having some exciting bits. Think House of Leaves for people who don't hate themselves.

that aren't about the destination, but the journey

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is great for this. It's a window into a worldview that's very specific to 1960s and 1970s America, dressed in absurdist storytelling.

badass scenes every few pages

The Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. It started out when someone claimed that you needed a good idea to write an engaging story. Butcher disagreed, and the person making the claim bet him that he could offer up an idea so stupid that no one could make it work. The idea in question was "the lost Roman legion meets Pokemon".

Butcher took the bet and played it completely straight.

Problem is, it’s an amazing idea lol.

The whole diskworld series by Terry Pratchett. The plot is roughly "use fantasy tropes to make fun of the real world" and has excellent longterm story arcs along those lines. But it's also full of excellent one-liners like the following:

Give a man fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Les caught Akhan's eye. They exchanged a very brief glance which was nevertheless modulated with a considerable amount of information, beginning with the sheer galactic-sized embarrassment of having parents and working up from there.

Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.

Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.

Against all rationality, his hair ached.

Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces!

HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM.

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

To call Rincewind's understanding of magic atrocious left no word to describe his practical application of it

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

No one ever said elves are nice.

Elves are bad.

Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces!

Which book is this from?

I think it’s been a decade since I last read Pratchett and should probably get back to it.

"Small Gods"

But I had to look that up, so clearly it's been too long for me too...

Small Gods is one of my all time favorites!

Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte.

Yes, and posted a review of it here. Of the 14 books I've finished reading this year it's my second-favourite, after Eliza Clark's Boy Parts.

Elif Batuman, Possessed (beware has a lot of Russian novel references but even without that is pretty fasted paced with stories and asides). Another really gripping memoir read is the Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. For fiction the Secret History by Donna Tartt, its longer and maybe not as fast paced but I found I read it quickly. Reading some parts were like eating dessert.

Seconded The Secret History, an incredibly readable book even when almost nothing is happening plot-wise.

Tartt's best book. Bar none.

Agreed. The Little Friend was a massive disappointment. The Goldfinch had a very promising start, and the Las Vegas sequence almost achieved the dizzying heights of The Secret History, but she didn't manage to stick the landing.

Light in August

One of my favorites! The character of the adoptive mother is the one who made the deepest impression on me. I think I would get a lot out of rereading it.

The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the GOATs.

Steven Brust writes fantasy novels in the style of Dumas. They're spinoffs of a noir-style series that's also fun in a very different way.

I have been keeping an eye out for Vlad Taltos books every time I go to a used bookstore for…years now. Still haven’t found the first one of any subseries.

For me personally, good examples would be Snow Crash, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and a Confederacy of Dunces. All three were just a pleasure to read. For something more niche, I really enjoy reading almost anything written by G.K. Chesterton. His prose is very good and I never get tired of his irony.

If you liked Snow Crash, try The Rapture of the Nerds.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on the Iliad and Dialectic of Enlightenment, which has turned out to be much more interesting than I expected.

Currently reading SM Stirling's To Turn the Tide. Which is exactly the sort of ISOT story I signed up for. Not the deepest characters but still enjoyable enough. Except...

I just wish Stirling didn't crib from his own - much better - genre namer. You read enough of a small circle of althist writers like him and Eric Flint and you start to see the same tropes.

Just finished Misbelief by Dan Ariely. He was brought in to consult the government during lockdowns on how best to encourage mask wearing and how to boost engagement with remote learning, but played no part in the decision to require masks or close schools.

Conspiracy theorists on the internet became convinced he was one of the evil masterminds behind the plandemic. He reached out and engaged with several and wrote a book about it. One interesting insight was that if someone gets deep into a conspiracy theory — to the point it causes them to become ostracized by their family and (former) friends — it is exceedingly hard to pull them out of the conspiracy, as their new social circle consists of other people who have experienced the same, and they don’t want to go through a second social death.

The people sending Ariely death threats, were to his surprise, quite supportive of one another in their Telegram chat groups. One, after lengthy one-on-one communication, conceded he realized Ariely was not an evil power broker, but acknowledged he could not say so lest he lose the only social circle he had left.

Currently reading Moss Hart’s autobiography Act One after it was highly praised in both Graydon Carter’s memoir and a recent New York Magazine article on the history of Broadway. The rags to riches story has been quite good so far, blending an interesting memoir with insights into acting, directing, playwrighting and the theater business, living up to the hype.

Anybody got a good sci fi or fantasy series to recommend?

Have you read The Sun Eater series?

Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s a novella rather than a series but happens to fit both of those labels nicely.

Ahh I just read his Children of Time series which was pretty good.

Try The Human Reach- it’s basically Tom Clancy played completely straight in ultra-hard sci fi.

What are you interested in?

Epic fantasy!!! and scifi. mostly. Uhh idk man I like anything as long as its well written.

Try The Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio.

Murderbot

eh unfinished. rip.

I'm reading A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway) so far so good, trying to read more and limit screen time. Recently finished the Beautiful and the Damned (Fitzgerald) was a slower start but once the bride enters the scene what a trip.

I always find Fitzgerald’s books an unending wonder. Often it feels like not much is happening but afterwards, often years afterwards, you still find yourself bathed in the glow of whatever feeling he manages to convey. Gatsby is amazing but possibly the least “bathesome” - Beautiful and the Damned and Tender is the Night both left me with something inexplicable and permanent in my veins.

Is that by Fitzgerald?

Edited to add authors!

About a hundred pages into Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. I'm enjoying it so far, although not as much as A Scanner Darkly. There's a funny bit where one of the white characters is looking at a Japanese woman and admiring how beautiful she is, thinking to himself that, compared to the Japanese, white people are defective, unfinished, taken out of the kiln too early (a curiously Yakubian sentiment). As a white man who's had more than my fair share of Asian sexual and romantic partners, I found this rather amusing, and read the paragraph out to my Asian girlfriend, who laughed. (Although funnily enough, part of the reason he finds her so beautiful is because she doesn't even need to wear a bra - a description which was not true of any of the Japanese women I've dated.)

Christ in the Americas, a high school history textbook for Catholic students. It's a pro-Catholic telling of North and South Americans history. Columbus is portrayed as a good man with flaws. Cortes is portrayed as a champion of order and goodness, a sort of crusader king. Aztec nobles are portrayed as blood drinking demon worshipers (Aztec deities are referred to as "the devil gods") who oppress the borderline-enslaved peasant masses. St Brendan the Navigator is claimed to have probably visited Newfoundland. The writing is definitely aimed at high school kids, but the narrative is compelling. It's kind of like reading an action novel.

I started Retail Gangster: The Insane Real-life Story of Crazy Eddie by Gary Weiss just a couple of days ago. It's been a highly interesting read thus far, the glimpse into the New York City of the 70s has already made the read worthwhile for me, much less the story of Eddie himself.

I’ve read this. I love non-fiction tales of financial crimes, and this is a favorite. I found how the fraud inverted over time particularly interesting.

I'm finding it gripping as well and in fact I'm right at the point where they're pushing for their IPO!

You get the feeling that, as a public company, if they could have moderated their greed, tempered it a bit, they might have gotten away with everything, albeit at a lesser scale in the second phase. But that tragic flaw brought them to that point and they couldn’t change.

When I gashed open my face a coach commented that it was going to be a cool "300 scar" after it healed up, so I thought I'd finally read the Frank Miller original comic. I'd seen the movie about 30 times when I was a kid, we used to quote it to each other constantly, it's hard to express what a big impact that movie had on little league baseball teams and boy scout troops around that time. I was surprised by the original in many ways:

-- The plot points and lines from the book largely make it to the movie 1:1, with a lot of stuff added in to pad out the movie run time. The movie is largely, I would say, better for it. Having watched the movie, the comic feels like it's missing beats. In the book the soldiers are "boys" and merely "his bodyguard" while in the film Leonidas specifies that he picked men who had sons to carry on their name, which was a good scene from the start. Especially the "back at the ranch" plotline in Sparta. But the plot around the queen wouldn't work anyway because...

-- The art style surprised me. Stelios is ugly, sort of dreadlocked, and vaguely African looking in the art. All the characters are ugly in that same sort of way, while the in the movie everyone is gorgeous. I remember Gym Jones being a major fad at the time, and the 300 WOD that was supposedly used as a benchmark during the training process remains a well known workout benchmark. Not get too navel gazing and homoerotic about it, but at the time the male bodies in 300 were a real cultural touchstone. This was a thunderbolt image of white masculine virility; so shocking I remember liberals like Dan Savage denouncing the movie as racist and homophobic, how it was movie about the fantasy of Republican White Men beating up fags and ragheads, some line like "When the Persians don't look like Iraqi Muslims they look like a gay pride parade!" Watching the movie that critique makes a certain amount of sense, reading the comic it really doesn't: the ethnic and physical gap isn't the same.

-- It's amazing how the comic lead to the movie created such a cultural movement, but I feel like the movie and even more the comic are barely remembered. About a million people a year run a Spartan Race now, and when it was founded in 2010 everyone knew it was coasting on the film, and now I would bet most people don't make the connection. Reminds me of the Desperate Housewives TV fiction drama, which inspired the Real Housewives of... reality TV juggernaut.

I'm still working through Infinite Jest with a friend, and I'm reading a Platonic dialogue every week or so. I picked up Celine's Journey to the Edge of Night which is brilliant and feels like a really important work, but I'm not far into it enough to comment. I'm curious how much it impacted Henry Miller, Sartre, Kerouac, etc.

Celine is excellent, and he had a big impact on the young Sartre, although of course after the war they hated each other. There's a darkly amusing anecdote in Ernst Junger's war diaries where Celine manages to horrify a party full of Nazi officers with his antisemitic bloodthirst. Still, at least Celine was an honest misanthrope, whereas Sartre buries it under layers of bloated theorizing and projected dishonesty.

Funny, Junger is next up on my list!

Happy to give any recs based on what you're looking for, I happen know a thing or two about Junger. Have one book and a half left before I've finished his entire (translated) bibliography (and "Bartender Venator" is chosen after the protagonist of his novel Eumeswil).

I have Storm of Steel on my kindle right now! My understanding is that is the place to start, right?

Storm of Steel is certainly the classic place to start, but worth remembering that Junger published it at 25 and lived to be 102. Most people only know him for WWI, and so they miss the incredibly rich development of his work afterwards. I'd urge you not to be satisfied without reading either On The Marble Cliffs (fiction) or The Forest Passage (philosophy) to get a taste of the later Junger, both of which are very short books. If you had to pick just one Junger, given your intense reading schedule, I would recommend On The Marble Cliffs (in the newish NYRB translation), which will hopefully give you the taste for more.

Some of the prose in On the Marble Cliffs was mind-blowing.

Maybe I’m an illiterate savage or whatever, but I think especially of the lines towards the beginning, describing the snakes in the garden, and it’s just perfect visual imagery.

He really is a wildly underrated writer, almost certainly because he wasn’t the right sort for mid and late 20th century literary circles, and I’m glad he’s seeing a Renaissance.

Stelios is ugly

Clicking this link reminded me that Michael Fassbender was in this movie. And Dominic West. I'd completely forgotten everyone but Gerard Butler.

Never could get onboard with Frank Miller. Everyone says that Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns kicked off the so-called "Dark Age" of American comic books. While my opinion of Watchmen has hardened over time (I now largely agree with the common critique that it insists upon itself, wherein Moore's determination to show off how clever he is with puns, symbols and parallelism actually takes you out of the story and breaks the immersion - From Hell is vastly better in part because he dialled this tendency of his down a few degrees), I still think it's basically a solid story, and its influence is undeniable. But The Dark Knight Returns - I don't know, man. Did nothing for me. Maybe it's a Seinfeld is Unfunny thing where it was so widely imitated that the original has lost its lustre - but Watchmen is also widely imitated, and still manages to be engaging and affecting on its own terms. And I just remembered that I read a few of the Sin City comics when I was a teenager too, but completely forgot about them until just now - shows you how much of an impression they made.

What physiological/psychological advantages do women have over men? The only solid ones I can think of off the top of my head are a better immune system, greater flexibility, and greater conscientiousness. I've also seen some stuff about more acute color vision, more efficient use of fat stores during endurance activity, and better scores on verbal/memory IQ subtests, though I haven't investigated those as thoroughly.

Many mothers believe that becoming and being a mother is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to them.

I think you're making the mistake of thinking about bearing, breastfeeding, and raising a child as a "bare biological function" rather than something that is, yes, biological, but also deeply tied in to people's social, emotional, and spiritual sense of who they are -- in other words, to the elements of life that lead to eudaemonia.

"Eating food" is a bare biological function, but it's loaded with social and spiritual meaning -- think about "who sits at what table" in High School, about dinner dates, about feasts and holidays, about Thanksgiving dinner, about gourmonds who learn to savor every bite, and even think about many ancient religions (including Christianity) where "having a meal with the gods" is the fundamental principle of sacrifice.

Sex, too, is a bare biological function, but think about how many ways in which it has emotional meaning for people: not just as a reinforcement of status (which men experience intensely, and thus see sexlessness as utterly wounding to their value as human beings), but as reinforcement of connection, as a means of bonding, as a means of play, as something more than the sum of its parts.

And into this I have to assert: bearing, feeding, and nuturing a child is about more than biology. It is social, emotional, and spiritual. And many -- though certainly not all -- mothers experience it in just this way. Not as a denial of eudaemonia, but as true eudaemonia, flourishing so flourished that it nutures another being's flourishing. Hail, full of grace!

Fathers experience this too, though to a lesser degree. My girlfriend likes to visit old churches to appreciate the architecture, and a common feature of old churches is the church graveyard. What I have often noted to her is that, on almost all of the graves of men, what it reads is not "high-powered lawyer," or "statesman," or "had a bunch of money," but rather: "Husband and FATHER." The greatest legacy of almost every man and every woman, the great evidence of their flourishing to the world, is not what their career looked like or how aggressively they "chased their dreams," but the children they brought into the world, and the way they nurtured them. Your children, not your coworkers, will tend your grave.

I think maybe this is an agreeableness problem -- your argument here is essentially that women are too agreeable and too neurotic. Sure, neuroticism is always a danger, and both men and women with neuroticism struggle a lot. And women are statistically higher in it. But agreeableness is a strength of women, not a weakness: men's great honor is low neuroticism, but women's great honor is high agreeableness.

It can be hard to see on the motte, where disagreeableness is common, but agreeableness is necessary for the maintanence of society. Not only because it is the necessary lens through which to nurture a child, but because it is the necessary lens through which to care for anyone who needs caring for, and to build systems of social harmony that tie people together, that build and maintain social bonds. We could not live in a society were it not for the social bonds maintained by agreeable women.

Some studies have suggested that, in the general population, people maintain stronger connections with their maternal grandparents than their paternal grandparents. Researchers sometimes argue that this can be attributed to the social bonds maintained by mothers.

I speak from experience here: that rings very true to me. In fact, not only am I closer to my maternal family than my paternal family, but my mother is closer to my paternal family than my father is!

Maintaining social bonds is extremely important; this is how social capital is maintained. Societies where these bonds are not maintained are impoverished by it. As we are, in these days of atomization and rootlessness.

So your lens strikes me as incredibly limited: you're saying that 99% of what's important for the maintanence of society is done by men, while not even fully noting the importance of things that women do. You're asking for what would make women valuable without even acknowledging the value they do have.

While you apologized, the fact that you posted this on mother's day without realizing it was mother's day says quite a lot. Did you not speak to your mother yesterday? Did you spend any time with her? Send her flowers?

Because, for what it's worth, that's what maintaining social bonds looks like. And you devalue it to your own peril.

"Men build civilizations, women build cultures."

Just wanted to say this is fantastically put!

Anyone answering this question should consider the middle of the bell curve. Of course, at the extremes, men are typically going to have an edge, but on average, what are women better at?

There are other silly minimizations: EX: Better Handwriting "just because of small hands". It doesn't matter what the source of the advantage is; the discussion is whether or not it's there. Men are only faster sprinters because of their skeleton and muscles anyway.

Finally, dismissing women's ability to be primarily responsible for creating and sustaining life is cope. Just because they need sperm to get to that point doesn't diminish the power of it at all. A single dude can be milked to provide the biological matter for hundreds of women. It's clear they've had to make significant physiological and social compromises to have this ability, but it's obviously a huge fucking deal. Maybe I'm simping because it's mother's day, but still.

There are other silly minimizations: EX: Better Handwriting "just because of small hands". It doesn't matter what the source of the advantage is; the discussion is whether or not it's there.

I mean, this would suggest that women should have worse handwriting when it comes to writing in large sizes, which does create a notable exception for "better at handwriting".

In any case I think it does matter. If the difference in dexterity is mostly a matter of size then we could just retrofit many things to be man-sized rather than woman-sized instead; it is contingent on our current circumstances. But if it is really an inbuilt difference then there is no point.

I think women are also more likely to be good at signs and calligraphy, due to caring more.

I’m pretty sure “caring more” explains the entire difference. Men’s handwriting a century or more ago was far neater than most women’s today, and was in many cases neater than women’s handwriting from that same period. But back in the day, having a strong secretarial hand was a common job requirement, so more men were incentivized to write better.

Men are only faster sprinters because of their skeleton and muscles anyway.

We do have aerodynamic advantages. A friend of mine was training swimming at a high level in the 90s. So we talked about why the swimming career - so many women drop around age of 16 - his answer they get boobs.

Damn, I legitimately forgot it's Mother's Day, I look like an asshole. To the women here, I apologize for my oh-so-masculine lack of tact.

...but if you'll afford me some charity, I'm trying to highlight the other admirable qualities of women besides their (definitely important!) biological prerogative.

Girls hit most developmental milestones before boys, so in a certain sense a "longer" adult life is possible.

Women seem much more genetically stable. Basically ever trait there is a higher standard deviation from mean for men than women.

Existing tests consistently show women are more capable of discerning colors and odors, and have better memory for life events and lists and also show better fine motor control. Unclear how much nature vs nurture, but there is a biological pathway to describe the memory differences.

Women are physically smaller, which is bad for max physical output, but improves longevity (most likely through less stress on the heart), g force tolerance, and uses less resource and space. Women only need about 3/4 as much food as men, which given average US spending is about $100 a month savings.

Women generally live longer even accounting for height and there is some evidence that the aging process for men and women is different.

Women seem to generally have an edge at firearm marksmanship, and given how few women are evenly remotely interested this probably has some form of genetic basis.

More people report finding women attractive than men, and women experience less balding.

A bunch of other tradeoffs that may be better or worse depending on environment:

-People vs Things

-Conscientiousness

-Conformity

-Lower risk tolerance

Women seem to generally have an edge at firearm marksmanship, and given how few women are evenly remotely interested this probably has some form of genetic basis.

Is this an edge for the right tail (women win more events), or an edge for the average competitor (the mean/median woman competing does better than the mean/median man)? The former would be extremely impressive in the context of reduced interest (uninterested women who could have become winners don't even compete, yet the remaining women are still better enough to win), but the latter is just what you would expect from selection bias (the less talented women are more likely to quit than the less talented men, so the latter bring down the male average but the former don't bring down the female average).

Anecdotally, I've heard multiple different firearms instructors report that on average women learn faster than men, and they generally attribute it to humility - by the time they've convinced their male students to "unlearn" bad habits, their female students have already started perfecting good habits. The people saying this included some who are unabashedly sexist in the opposite direction in other contexts, so I don't think their reports here were just "women are wonderful" bias. They might be comparing averages to averages and so just reporting what we'd expect from selection bias, though. Some may also have other unconscious motives to want to encourage women - another common anecdote is that the men in a mixed-sex training class tend to work much harder after they realize the women are starting to beat them.

Girls hit most developmental milestones before boys, so in a certain sense a "longer" adult life is possible.

That faster development could be part of the cause of the spatial/logical intelligence gap, as faster development is (at least interracially) correlated with lower intelligence after the completion of puberty. I wonder if girls who get their periods later are consistently more intelligent, or if there are racial differences in average age of menarche?

Menarche seems to be affected much more by nutritional standards, rather than correlated with intelligence. The women in my generation started their periods earlier than those in my mother's generation, and they started it earlier than those in my grandma's generation, but the younger generation is smarter. Brain development and hormonal changes leading to puberty are probably mostly independent.

or if there are racial differences in average age of menarche?

IDK about the first part but the order in average age of first period is pretty much exactly what you'd expect- Asians slightly older than whites, who are older than Amerinds, who are older than subsaharans.

Black boys hit puberty earlier as well, BTW, and this probably explains a small part of black overrepresentation in athletics in the US- blacks are noticeably bigger at the ages where it starts to separate by skill.

Due to differences in skeletal muscle composition, differences in metabolism esp. re lipids, and difference in anatomical structure mean that women are often more suited for endurance compared to bursts of physical activity. Men still top the charts when it comes to endurance running and swimming but it is a closer call than it is with sprinting, where there is just no hope for women to ever catch up with men.

In particular I think this would come into play more than we would expect from looking at competitive results when we consider the endurance required for e.g. farming.

  1. Better people skills, at least in the sense of tact, curtesy and reading body language. Male charisma is its own thing but in the median social situation, women are better.

  2. Relatedly, better memories about personal and biographical information. I've noticed that my wife and female colleagues are much better at remembering stuff about people, whereas me and the men I know are better at remembering stuff about stuff.

  3. Better at learning foreign languages. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever taken a language class.

  4. Better at multi-tasking/task-switching. This one is well known.

  5. Definitely more conscientious (at least with certain subtypes of conscientiousness)

  6. More conformist and neurotic. These are more trade-offs than straight advantages, but if you want to avoid big life-ruining screw-ups and danger then they are definitely helpful.

  7. Better fine motor control. Women are faster typists and have neater handwriting.

  8. More organised? I'm less sure about this one but the stereotype of a husband asking his wife where something is and her pointing out that it's right in front of his face is definitely a real thing.

Better at learning foreign languages. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever taken a language class.

I'm not sure how true this is, and how much of it is a reflection of interest rather than aptitude. At least even if there's a skew, I don't think it's blatantly obvious.

Better at multi-tasking/task-switching. This one is well known.

I'm pretty sure this is false; pretty much everyone other than rare savants suck hard at multi-tasking/task-switching almost equally.

Better fine motor control. Women are faster typists and have neater handwriting.

Are women faster typists? I think I type faster than every single woman I know.

In any case, I suspect that this stereotype has two components, and the advantage might disappear as soon as these are controlled for:

  • For skills that are learned during formative years, differences in earlier development of girls might lead to e.g. better handwriting; boys that learn handwriting a little later IIRC also have relatively neat writing (I am not entirely certain that this "disproves" superior female fine motor control -- if the boys took longer rather than simply later to be able to learn these properly it would be still be indicative of a difference. Likewise I think girls are quicker to learn to hold chopsticks than boys do very early on in life)
  • For skills involving small components e.g. sewing and knitting, women are smaller generally and have smaller hands and thinner fingers in particular; I think more recent studies have generally shown the increase in motor control in these tasks to be more related to the size of the hands/fingers, with differences disappearing when controlled for (hand/finger) size, implying that this isn't really a difference in neurological control. Though this does still lead to a practical advantage with regards to motor control in daily tasks that matter.

I'm not sure how true (being better at learning foreign languages) is, and how much of it is a reflection of interest rather than aptitude.

Interest is a prerequisite to being good at something, at least if that something requires you to put in the hours, as is the case for language learning. But it actually does look like there are differences in how men and women's brains process language, not just a difference in interest.

multi-tasking/task-switching

See my other comment. This has been shown empirically.

Are women faster typists? I think I type faster than every single woman I know.

You may well be. It wouldn't shock me if typing speed was affected by greater male variance. But nonetheless, 82.5% of court stenographers are women. When typist was a job, it was a woman's job. Secretaries (who do/did lots of typing) are almost all women. I don't think these are coincidences.

Interest is a prerequisite to being good at something, at least if that something requires you to put in the hours, as is the case for language learning. But it actually does look like there are differences in how men and women's brains process language, not just a difference in interest.

I agree with this, I just am unsure about how it translates to learning foreign languages in particular -- at least to the extent that the effect size is huge.

See my other comment. This has been shown empirically.

A brief perusal of pubmed gives me much more mixed results. I'm not convinced.

The world's top polyglots seem to be male, but on average women are pretty clearly more verbal than men. So maybe greater male variability hypothesis comes into play?

I wouldn't disagree, it's just the phrasing of the original reply:

Better at learning foreign languages. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever taken a language class.

Which seems like a stronger observation I have personally observed.

I’ve definitely noticed that among Hispanics, usually women have better English than men.

Sure, that makes me more likely to accept that there is a large difference between men and women wrt second languages in practice.

This could be partly because they are more likely to use their foreign language with more people, more often, which is well known to increase language learning speed. Seriously, as someone who does speak another language, it's always a little difficult not to laugh at people who claim they are trying super hard to learn, but when pressed, admit that 95% of this effort is simply Duolingo, and that they actively avoid using it IRL unless on specifically on vacation.

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My experience is largely contrary to yours but the final one is exactly me and my wife, not in small part because my wife likes to 'tidy up' and rearrange things. I have a very good memory and don't lose things, unless someone moves them. What I'm bad at is not remembering where things are but searching for and finding things that have been moved.

It's not just your wife that does that, it seems to be a common trait. Mine certainly does that, squirrel-style.

I've seen some evidence that women's better fine motor control is largely an artifact of their smaller hands, which would make sense. There could still be something there, though: weaving and spinning are traditionally women's work, at least in western culture.

I forgot about g-force tolerance in my OP, though again that's partly a side effect of their smaller bodies. Even controlling for that, women seem to have an advantage. Gynoid fat distribution might be the cause, but I'm unsure.

weaving and spinning are traditionally women's work, at least in western culture.

This alone doesn't tell you much, before agriculture, men were busy with hunting big animals which women couldn't do. Making clothes is not something uncommon like typist.

Most of your claims seem to be stereotypes or shit that media puts out and people have confirmation bias for. Multitasking is a myth and women aren't actually better at rapid task switching. The claim of women being better at it was based on self reports afaik.

Most of your claims seem to be stereotypes

Stereotype accuracy is one of the strongest results in social science. The word stereotype is not a synonym for 'myth'.

women aren't actually better at rapid task switching

Looks like they might be

Stereotype accuracy is one of the strongest results in social science. The word stereotype is not a synonym for 'myth'.

I'm curious as to how good stereotypes are in terms of magnitude of belief (compared to...directionality/descriptive accuracy?). I suspect it is still somewhat accurate, but less so than the qualitative aspect of stereotypes.

Testing that would run into general statistical illiteracy among the population, I think. if we asked the average person to say how much taller and heavier men are than women, I'm sure you'd get some zany answers, even though people intuitively know how large the difference is from constant observation.

If I remember correctly, magnitude is actually half of reality, not more than reality. (its been at least 15 years since I read the abstracts of the research from the 60s? 70s?).

For example, if the average person guesses that a black man is twice as likely to go to jail as a white man (stereotype), the reality would be that he was 4 times as likely. The gist was that we actually understereotype, that a pattern has to be really obvious to become a stereotype. But this research became taboo a long time ago and I haven't seen anything recent.

I would've figured that stereotypes relating to rare traits are overestimated, in the same way that progressives overestimate the number of black/indigenous/etc deaths in custody by orders of magnitude. Though I also kind of figured that our stereotypes would just kind of vaguely gesture in a direction and the level of accuracy regarding the magnitude of the trait would kind of be accurate but imprecise.

For example, if the average person guesses that a black man is twice as likely to go to jail as a white man (stereotype), the reality would be that he was 4 times as likely. The gist was that we actually understereotype, that a pattern has to be really obvious to become a stereotype. But this research became taboo a long time ago and I haven't seen anything recent.

So which stereotypes are accurate and which are inaccurate?

Are Jews cheating me twice as much as I think they are when writing a contract?

Do LAPD officers hate black guys twice as much as black people think they do?

Are the Swiss twice as humourless as I think they are?

What about outdated stereotypes? Are the French a martial race as in the 18th and 19th centuries, or cheese eating surrender monkeys as in the 20th? Are the Japanese incapable of making high quality products and only make cheap imitations, or are they single mindedly obsessed with perfection and making only the highest quality artisanal goods?

I'm genuinely curious, I tried to take out the gotcha examples!

Closely related to #6: more risk-averse. Likewise a trade-off, but it's no coincidence that men represent a disproportionate percentage of successful entrepreneurs AND people horribly mangled in auto collisions.

The ability to produce, birth, and feed a child.

And only men can produce the sperm required to conceive said child. Primary sex characteristics are table stakes.

I don't think those two contributions are really equivalent.

If I knocked up my wife when we made love this morning, and I died in an accident this afternoon, the kid would be fine. I mean he'd probably have a thing about not having a dad and his mom being sad about it and whatever; but he'd still grow up and everything.

If I knocked up my wife this morning and she died in an accident any time in the next nine months, the kid is dead. If she died any time in the next eighteen months the kid follows a different development path right away.

Even just economically, the one is of far higher cost than the other.

When I say "advantages", I mean those things which make it better to be of one sex over the other in a particular practical circumstance. It is true that mammalian biology places the burden of gestation on the woman; my question is about what other aspects of her biology might take the sting out of her manifest physical inferiority and considerable neurotic pathologies.

Fair enough, I just think being the essential sex is such an advantage that everything else pales in comparison. If we were playing a strategy game, you'd know which was more important.

Thank you for making the thread, it's been a highly entertaining read.

Women's importance to the continuance of the species is absolutely important, I agree. My concern is that on an individual level, it seems to me like women get the short end of the stick in their potential for eudaemonia, to the point where the Athenian prayer isn't unwarranted. See here downthread for my elaboration.

(I appreciate your enjoyment, thx!)

Buried the lede there a bit.

They're significantly better at getting men to do things for them, even men who aren't getting anything in particular out of it other than "you remind me of my daughter" or some such.

what other aspects of her biology might take the sting out of her manifest physical inferiority and considerable neurotic pathologies.

Lol. Charitable. How about being able to not only live longer but also live better lives due to improved social networks. Men who lose their wives are emotionally screwed, women who lose their husbands are widows and mostly fine.

I wrote the above before I saw that it's Mother's Day, lack of tact, mea culpa, etc.

To be clear, I don't want to just dunk on women — I like the women in my life and bear no ill will towards their sex. I'm just skeptical of uncritical complementarian narratives that declare that men and women are simultaneously unequal in their dispositions and yet equally valuable in their own domains, because it seems pretty obvious to me that men get the better deal. Earth Mother and Sky Father might be of equal value in nature, but the story of civilization has been of reaching to the stars with only a minimal umbilical connecting us to our roots.

If I were dictator, I'd look into ways of (eugenically or otherwise) partly relieving women of those traits which most negatively impact their eudaemonic potential (neuroticism, conformity, lower risk tolerance, lower agency) and augmenting their traits which legitimately compliment men's (verbal IQ, social intuition, physical endurance, sensual sensitivity).

Whose definition of eudaemonia are we using here? Surely a risk-averse conformist with low agency is more likely to be happy with whatever their lot in society is than an iconoclast burning with ambition who chafes at authority? Even if what you value is a life lived in service of humanity's expansion into the cosmos, the differences between men and women derive from women's role in childbearing, which absent artificial wombs is an essential part of any society (and is not well-served by them taking on dangerous tasks and getting killed). If you were in fact able to eliminate this role through technology, then there would be no reason for women as a separate category to exist at all.

Whose definition of eudaemonia are we using here?

My own idiosyncratic definition, which rests on certain assumptions:

I take it as an axiom that eudaemonia comes from the exercise of virtues, and that virtues range on a scale from passive virtues to active virtues. Passive (feminine) virtues include chastity, temperance, mercy, and piety: they are something you avoid, or are. Active (masculine) virtues include valor, industry, courage, and nobility: they are something you do, or become.

I take it as further axiom that in general, the active virtues hold greater eudaemonic potential: they are what build monuments. Feminine virtues are absolutely important for individual and civilizational well-being, but they are the mortar and masculine virtues are the brick.

Therefore, the sex who is disinclined towards and incentivized against exercising masculine virtue will suffer lower average potential for human flourishing. Women's maximum capacity for masculine virtue is almost certainly lower that men's maximum capacity due to the consequences of gestation, but I believe that they are capable of more, should be incentivized to exercise what they have, and might hopefully be gifted with greater capacity for excellence.

tl;dr: genetically-modified tomboy supremacy

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I'm just skeptical of uncritical complementarian narratives that declare that men and women are simultaneously unequal in their dispositions and yet equally valuable in their own domains, because it seems pretty obvious to me that men get the better deal.

It doesn't seem obvious that men get the better end of the deal in the current society, which is admittedly working pretty hard to make sure that they don't. They probably do have a better deal in a state of nature, but nobody who's posting on online message boards is living in a state of nature. Very obviously, whether it's more of a hinderance to be a neurotic woman or a man who can't control his temper will depend on what kind of society you're living in -- in ours it seems likely that the latter would be worse.

Why would you remove conformity? It seems useful for both the society and the individual that most people are fairly high conformity, and there are only a few highly disagreeable outliers.

Why should women take more risks? What kinds of risks should they take more of? We've probably gone a bit too far into saftyism, but high risk taking in men pays off in winning wars or having lots of sex with women they're attracted to. What does it get women?

I'm not sure what you mean about agency in this context. That they should be more assertive?

I guess the positives you listed would be nice to have more of. We can have even more aspiring novelists who run half marathons and organize aesthetically pleasing parties that they post on Instagram (though observationally this seems to be an occupation for thirty something women without children to show that they're still important, interesting, worth attending to, etc).

Why should women take more risks? What kinds of risks should they take more of? We've probably gone a bit too far into saftyism, but high risk taking in men pays off in winning wars or having lots of sex with women they're attracted to. What does it get women?

I suspect we’d all be super-rich. If you think about it, a very large part of society is structured as a giant insurance scheme, designed purely to mitigate the irrational loss aversion of people (especially women, but also men of course). Naturally, a lot of money gets lost in the pipes.

If I work in a developed european country, roughly half of my paycheck is immediately and largely unavoidably funnelled to insurance-like institutions to quiet the neurotic voice that goes ”What if you’re unemployed? What if you’re sick? What if you’re old? What if you die?”.

Well, what about it? I’d be worse off. Trying to financially compensate for the hypothetical loss is not rationally required. There is no good economic reason why one’s standard of living should never, ever sink.

All kinds of different things get thrown into the ‘risk aversion’ bucket. Driving a motorcycle drunk and naked and other young male antics are not low risk aversion, they’re high idiocy. The insurance problem strangling society should have its own term, ‘small loss aversion’. Financially, risk has been defined as volatility, which Warren Buffett and I think makes no sense.

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I'm not sure what you mean about agency in this context. That they should be more assertive?

Those typically-male traits which combine to create agency (internal locus of control, risk taking, a certain amount of disagreeableness) are what have led men to dominate public affairs since the beginning of civilization. The increasing complexity of civilization over time has in turn caused the expansion of the public sphere and atrophy of the private sphere. After thousands of years of this, 99% of everything that matters for the maintenance of civilization occurs in the male realm, and the instrumental value of femininity for civilization has been pared back to its bare biological function. You yourself have touched on something like what I'm getting at here.

Given this, it seems to me that to preserve the dignified utility of woman, her sphere should be expanded to include particular sections of the public domain. You'll notice that this is the stated goal of feminism; while I agree with the early feminists about the root of the problem and the directional solution, my preferred means and ends acknowledge intrinsic sex differences and attempt to work within them when possible and subtly modify them when required.

Also, I'm proposing an increase in the mentioned masculine traits, but not to the point of complete parity with men. There's definitely some amount of contextually beneficial tradeoff to conformity and risk aversion, I just think women's present average amounts aren't adaptive.

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