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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3971 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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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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