https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=X9hcKUUFn5k
Well a subset of males are biologically hyper aggressive. You can identify them at two years of age. And they’re the kids, if you put a bunch of two-year-olds together, there’s a small subset, they’re almost all males, about 5% of males, who will kick, hit, bite and steal. Okay, so that’s their biological programming, let’s say. But the vast majority of them are socialized by the time they’re four years old. So… That’s me. Yeah, sure, absolutely. I mean, it is. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And the thing about boys like that is that if you socialize them properly, it’s quite a bit of work because they’re very combative. My son was like that. And if you socialize them properly, then they can become unbelievably useful. They’re courageous, they’re forthright, they’re, you know, they’re not going to back down from a challenge. There’s all sorts of massive utility in that, and that’s this proper interplay between the biological circuitry and the socialization. But, you know, and with James DeMore’s memo, you know, he was, he’s been accused of taking a biological essentialist route, which is not true. One of the things James said is, look, there’s credible evidence that there are biologically mediated differences between men and women at the level of temperament and interest that are actually large and profound. And I would say, the science on that is sufficiently settled, so that someone can come out and say, that’s scientifically credible. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s right, because the scientists could be wrong. But what you can’t say is that what James DeMore said was scientifically uninformed. It was scientifically informed. But he also said, look, let’s make the assumption, I’m paraphrasing slightly, but let’s make the assumption that we want to, as a society, we want to extract maximum useful economic value from talented people. So one of the things we want to do is if some of those people are women and some of them are men, we want to understand the actual differences between women and men, so that we can set up the workplace so that both women and men can contribute to the maximum economically, so that they can benefit as individuals and everybody can benefit socially. So you can use the biological. So, I mean, for example, one of the things, here’s a biological problem. On average, women are more agreeable than men. And I think that’s because agreeable people are, they’re self-sacrificing. And I think as a woman, you need to be wired to be self-sacrificing, or you won’t be able to tolerate taking care of infants. That’s my sense of it. Okay, now there’s some problems with that. It’s like, let’s say that a huge part of female wiring is tilted in the direction of the necessity of self-sacrifice for infant care. Okay, that doesn’t equip women very well for dealing with aggressive men, because aggressive men and infants are not the same creatures. So women pay a price, being optimized to some degree for infant care, they pay a price that they’re less, what would you call, prepared, that’s one way of thinking about it, with dealing with hyper-aggressive and competitive men. Well, one of the consequences of that is that agreeable people don’t make as much money. And the reason for that is to make money, you actually have to be disagreeable, because you have to go to your boss and say, give me some bloody money, or something you don’t like will happen to you. You have to also be able to fight for an idea too. But, so there’s something, this is a perfect test case. So, biologically speaking, there’s a very good reason for certain kinds of wisdom to be biased in the direction of manifesting in females. Females, because they have the capacity to have fewer offspring in a lifetime than males, are obligated, as you say, to care in a particular way. And the fact that care in human beings takes so many years has resulted in menopause emerging. And menopause, essentially, when a woman is done producing new offspring, her interests in, her evolutionary interests, which in this case, I think, are honorable, become synonymous with the lineage, the population, because her offspring will either do well or do poorly based on the population that they’re in. So, women have a kind of farsightedness about lineage. And I don’t think this has anything to do with human women, actually. This is a trait that we can see in females of other species. So, it’s an ancient thing. Whereas males are high variants. That is to say, a male can have many offspring in a lifetime. Many males have no offspring in a lifetime. And that high variance means that, to the extent that there’s wisdom that surrounds risk-taking, that has traveled historically along the male path. Now, in modern times, there’s no reason that we can’t look at these two kinds of wisdom and democratize them both. Right? The fact is, there’s no reason, if you’re born female, that you can’t tune into what has historically been male-biased wisdom and take advantage of that. And we should be encouraging this. There’s no reason that people have to continue… The problem is, is that we can’t actually have a reasonable discussion about it, because, you know, the discussion is often forestalled by the claim that, well, men and women are exactly the same. It’s like, that’s not a helpful discussion. And, you know, with the agreeableness issue, I don’t know exactly what should be done about that, but one of the consequences of it is, is that there’s many reasons why the pay… There’s pay differential between men and women, and the issue itself is very complex. But we do know that agreeable people, overall, make less money in the same positions. And it’s because they don’t negotiate on their own behalf very well. Now, it’s conceivable that you could have an intelligent public policy or corporate policy discussion about what to do about that. Like, maybe the rule is something like, you review male salaries once a year, and female salaries every eight months, or something like that, you know. And I’m not saying that’s a good idea. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that, if you take the facts on the ground into account, there are ways that you might be able to use them, so that you could… And I’m not going to say level the playing field, because I think that’s an appalling phrase, but maximize the possibility of economic contribution across the genders, which is obviously in everyone’s best interest.