Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

LESSONS ON GENDERS

I have only a few “I wish I had, if I’d known” regrets of life in general. I wish I’d moved to philosophy, and I wish I’d saved my marriage, and I wish I’d been more demanding of the medical profession. But otherwise I’ve accomplished my goals in life – not that there isn’t more work to do.

I have many “I feel bad that I accidentally caused or contributed to” regrets – like most of us, this is what people remember of us. Most of my enemies (in business) attribute to me malice I did not have, and underestimate the advantages I could exploit if I desired. Those that I hold malice against deserve it in multiples. There are very evil people in this world, and they commit by financial and legal predation that which in old was done by violence. But there is no difference in the losses incurred.

I have a very few “I hurt people significantly because I wasn’t diligent enough”, and just a few “I … hurt people because I was young, smart, and ruthless”.

Those ruthless things were in business against men of greater age and experience than I who did not know the cunning autism of the monster they were dealing with. They were, by and large, good people, too entrenched in the past to understand the wave of technology that was changing the world. One of them died from the grief. Others withered away.

I was so burdened (and still am) by these consequences that I changed my life dramatically having done them, and instead pursued (((people))) who advocated these (((crimes))) by abusing the trust of our people – and our civilization of noblesse oblige.

Yet that concern did not help me in three similar matters with women. And this is the lesson I took and I want other men to take.

In my generation we were raised to treat women as equals – and it worked on me. Moreover, I’d made quite a bit of money advancing women that were against a glass ceiling at larger companies.

But you can sit around a table of men, even men you hate, and through that hate they will eventually tell you the truth – their incentives. You can sit with a table of men who are intimidated, and expose your vulnerabilities and incentives and they will eventually meet you with theirs if it is in their interest. In other words, we avoid the impulse to violence by incremental exposure of our interests – and therefore these interests are impersonal.

But in my dealings with women of equal or greater abilities to their male peers, I consistently overestimated their abilities, and overestimated their confidence, and overestimated their transparency. And this has largely to do with my lack of understanding, as foolish as it was, that these women had built relationships independent of their ability to execute while men generally build relationships only because of their ability to execute.

And the world of technology was shifting very quickly such that the value of servicing a customer expensively was offset by the quality and number of people in the field. (In other words, tech was, as predicted, becoming a butt-crack industry, like plumbing, hvac, and electrical). And because the world market for creative, marketing, and technical talent given the internet and internet delivered technologies, destroyed all value of locality to customers. Tech has become, much like the construction trade, a hierarchy similar to general contractors (structural steel vs top services firms), through specialists in some niche technology, through ordinary alliances of tradesmen, to the equivalent of unionized workers working through websites.

So i was falsely biased in favor of women, then frustrated with their lack of transparency and performance in a business where we specialized in execution – even at higher cost than all competitors.

The problem is, that these women assume I had taken advantage of them when the fact was, that I was a product of my generation. But if I could reverse those three events I would have. They were costly, and they were harmful to everyone involved.

Women can rarely afford to be as honest as men, even if they desire to or are able to – at least until they have a few centuries to adapt. They are more fearful than men especially of conflict. Less able to resolve conflict BY INCENTIVES. Because womens incentives are less empirical and more positional than men. They are less loyal than men – meaning less willing to incur harm for the group, saving that for family. They are the weaker sex not the less able sex. There are many things better done by one gender or the other – on average. And those things are stereotypically distributed. Distributed that is, not partitioned.

So my regrets are no only my fault, but the fault of the falsehoods that the boomer generation taught me. Like everything that (((boomer))) generation taught.