Curt Doolittle

Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

  • The Nature Of Man?

    The nature of man is to reap the rewards of a market economy, while spending his efforts on avoiding any and all PARTICIPATION in the economy. In other words, the vast majority of people would prefer to live in countries with advanced market economies, largely because of the quality of life that can be obtained due to the lower price of goods and services. On the other hand, they also want bureaucratic jobs, government jobs, union jobs, and any other kind of employment that insulates them from the unique and necessary property of the market economy: taking risks with one’s resources in an effort to fill the needs of others.

  • The Liberal Gene

    Researchers have determined that genetics could matter when it comes to some adults’ political leanings. According to scientists at UC San Diego and Harvard University, “ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4.” That and how many friends you had during high school. The study was led by UCSD’s James Fowler and focused on 2,000 subjects from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Scientists matched the subjects’ genetic information with “maps” of their social networks. According to researchers, they determined that people “with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults.” However, the, subjects were only more likely to have leanings to the left if they were also socially active during adolescence. “It is the crucial interaction of two factors — the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence — that is associated with being more liberal,” according to the study. “These findings suggest that political affiliation is not based solely on the kind of social environment people experience,” said Fowler, who is a professor of political science and medical genetics. The researchers also said their findings held true no matter what the ethnicity, culture, sex or age of the subjects were. Source: Scientists Find ‘Liberal Gene’ | NBC San Diego

    Some of the comments were humorous.

    “So, we now have scientific proof that liberalism is a birth defect?”   “That explains their total lack of logical thinking, they can’t help themselves. Probably explains why they’re so needy too. Do you think there will ever be a cure?”   “Does this discovery bring us closer to a cure?”

    We need both conservatives and liberals. Really. We need people who, out of ignorance or passion want to improve the existing order. We need people who out of understanding and investment, require that improvements to the order be meritocratic, and maintain group persistence, and are not simply attempts at taking power for power’s sake. The western dichotomy between church and state, between liberal and conservative, has been a very powerful combination. Our errors derive largely from the consequence of relying overmuch on our rather primitive rhetorical political process, the consequences of leaving the gold standard and adopting fiat money against conservative sentiments, and the opportunity to behave unwisely amidst the decline of the west, and prior to the rise of the east, and our foolish abandonment of the monarchical system, without understanding it’s strengths. But we need liberals. We just dont need them to have too much power.

  • The BiPolarity Of Class

    In response to The Tea Party is a Marxist movement on Half Sigma, I created this diagram.

    BiPolarityOfClass-2010-08-29

    The BiPolarity Of Social Class, And The Status Competition Between Them. I”ve posted a diagram that is in progress. It’s at: http://www.capitalismv3.com//srv/htdocs/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/BiPolarityOfClass-2010-08-29.png What I want to illustrate is the difference between people who exist in the market economy and people who exist in the bureaucratic economy, and their gender, class and cultural origins. Tea partiers are, in general, status seekers who participate in the non-clerical, market economy. They are white people who are remnants of the anglo saxon social order. Very “Burkeian.” Tea partiers are a status and power movement – a cultural movement that crosses classes. Most tea partiers appear to be middle class, or upper prole. Uppers and upper middle (like me) are not as status-challenged as middle’s are by cultural dissolution. In other words, in any cultural or racial group, the penalty for loss of political dominance by your elites is paid for by its middle and proletariat classes, who benefit from cultural network opportunities created by the dominant preferences. So it’s materially important: The prole risk status loss if they do not rescue their elites. Even as such, I’m not sure anglo saxons don’t have a bifurcated proletariat class: militial service in the west conveys social status, and anglo saxons are a militial society. This drives enfranchisement lower into the class system.

    [callout]Tea partiers are a status and power movement – a cultural movement that crosses classes. Most tea partiers appear to be middle class, or upper prole. …. In any cultural or racial group, the penalty for loss of political dominance by your elites is paid for by its middle and proletariat classes, who benefit from cultural network opportunities created by the dominant preferences. So it’s materially important: The prole risk status loss if they do not rescue their elites.[/callout]

    In our case, it so happens, that the tea partier social preference is for freedom, individualism, and capitalism, which also happens to be a material benefit to society. Even if they wrap it in religious doctrine. But they wrap it in religious doctrine because as a group they tend to create solid families, and solid families tend to be more religious. While religiosity increases as IQ decreases, the statement is open to erroneous interpretation. WIthin a people of similar values, the religious moral codes are equally justified among all the member classes. It’s just that the upper classes are more rational, the middle are more allegorical, and the lower are more sentimental. It’s just a matter of articulation – methodology – not one of differences in execution. The tea party movement relies upon sentimental arguments rather than rational arguments because conservatism lacks a rational social science to compete with marxism. While conservatives and libertarians have tried for over a hundred years, they have so far failed to articulate a social science that can compete with the combination of marxist sentiments, democratic secular humanism, and mathematical positivism. This is partly due to inter-temporal complexity, and our over-reliance on the analysis of money and redistribution rather than the status economy – an economy that humans are far m ore sensitive to than the monetary economy. (Intertemporal complexity is too complicated for here. But in general, conservatism is a longer time preference, that puts greatest emphasis on group persistence – it is a capitalization strategy for the future.) I think, Half-Sigma’s goal was to try to pull marxian class analysis into the tea party movement. And there is some truth to it. But it’s not a class movement. It’s a culture or race movement. Traditional whites are now a minority and they are losing their status symbols both domestically and internationally and this goes against their core reason for existence – self sacrifice, family, forgone opportunity, in exchange for group persistence, and they see that persistence under attack.

  • The Difference Between The Liberal And Conservative Mind?

    From Education And Its Discontents

    About three years ago, a scientific study was undertaken to examine some of the differences between the conservative and the liberal mind. One of the conclusions emerging from the study was that liberal people tend to be able to handle ambiguity and nuance better than conservative people, processing new information that might challenge some of their beliefs, incorporating that information and even altering their thinking on a subject as a result. Conservative minds, on the other hand, tend to adhere to beliefs and convictions despite evidence that call them into question.

    From what I can gather from the postings, I’m not sure this test demonstrates what the authors of both the study and the articles assume. COGNITIVE DIFFERENCES Conservatives have a longer (lower) time preference. (This is why they are happier than liberals, and tend to be wealthier.) Because they have a longer time preference:


    1. They are less likely to attempt to ‘serve or satisfy’ the immediate requests of others: lower empathy, longer (lower) time preference, greater pattern reliance (tendency to see the world through natural law.)
    2. They are more likely to try to identify patterns and begin acting in anticipation, rather than simply reacting.
    3. Unless we know the male-female ratio and ages, we don’t know if this test is simply an empathy or dominance test.

    The same test would need to be run with time preference survey questions, and the male-female statistics would have to be included. The more interesting question is, why liberals — people with shorter (higher) time preference, and greater empathy — tend to be less happy and less successful in life? RESISTANCE TO CHANGE The reason conservatives are change resistant, is because: a) they are inter-temporally pattern sensitive they are very reliant on forecasting, and significant pattern changes mean high cost of reorganizing patterns. b) In natural law, and in Greek philosophy, and in the western mythic narrative, human HUBRIS is the primary warning. ie: they are skeptical. c) Government is the repository of a great deal of power, and the most dangerous human hubris, and is most susceptible to the fashionable short term sentiments of human beings. d) Conservatism, because it is the repository of the militial and commercial sentiments in western civilization is meritocratic in the sense that they accept established rules, and will operate within them, and see others who do not make the sacrifice of operating by the same rules, and in particular, those who use the artifice of government to circumvent ‘the rules of the game’, as either immoral or thieves or both. This is a different strategy from charity. Redistribution and charity are conservative sentiments, but they allow conservatives to ‘fund’ instances of charity that have ‘good’ behaviors, most of which are extending time preference. They see people who use government to forcibly redistribute without requiring extending time preference, as either profiting from corruption, theft of the fruits of their effort for personal political gain, or simply a moral corruptoin of society that shortens time preferences. Understanding the conservatives sentiment requires understanding that conservatives KNOW that they passed on many opportunities for self satisfaction. To a large degree, conservatives do not disfavor redistribution. They disfavor the means and uses of redistribution favored by people with shorter, higher time preferences, because they see it as theft of their sacrifices. And not all people who vote conservatively have longer time preferences. There are plenty of people in the financial sector who are not conservative, just voting with conservatives to exploit the monetary opportunity of doing so. The fact that they take advantage of conservative policies does not mean that they are either conservative or have a longer time preferences. It simply means the are voting for longer time preference in order to exploit the opportunity for a shorter time preference. In effect, this is fraudulent behavior and one of the problems with democracy itself.THE NATIONAL CONTEXT The country is center-right (conservative leaning) and will always be so. This is for demographic reasons that have largely to do with the dominant class and culture of the people who occupy that particular geography. Structurally, conservatives have opposed both good and bad change. The impact of women, catholic, and Jewish votes, as well as the rapid third world immigration did accomplish exactly what they stated it would do. Whether that is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a matter of economics and preference. The conservative sentiment is to resist change until they see risk abandoned, then to adopt the new state of affairs as the ‘conservative’ position. To a conservative who sees the rules established by the constitution (a classical liberal) or a conservative who adheres to the western tradition (a conservative) or a religious conservative, or a small business owner or craftsman (an economic conservative), or an investor (a financial conservative)the threat to the established political order, to which they feel they have made sacrifices and taken risks, these political ‘innovations’ are not ‘goods’. They are ‘bads’. Because of the two party system, there are conservatives in both parties. People tend to be conservative or liberal on different issues. They self identify as liberal or conservative, for a set of reasons. And left-right political nonsense is almost always meaningless, because all elections are decided by a fractional portion the independents in the middle. The change in US voting patterns is almost entirely to the rise in young single mothers, immigrants and breeding rates of different social classes. Independents and conservatives are in roughly equal proportion, making up over eighty percent of the population. With liberals making up less than twenty. Despite our desire to the contrary, political sentiment is NOT rational: it is inherited from one’s parents, and is largely a function of class, history and occupation. IN CLOSING Given the interpretation of this questionably meaningful study, it’s easy to see that this is another example of why conservatives believe that hubris is alive and well. 🙂

    UNDERSTANDING TIME PREFERENCE

    • Time preference is the tendency to seek shorter or longer outcomes. In the literature short time preference is called ‘High’ and long time preference is called ‘Low’, because at the time when economists were inventing Marginalism, they thought about satisfying preferences marginally, by stacking people’s preferences. in the ‘stack of preferences held by the individual’, something could be described as higher in the list or lower in the list.
    • Because time passage increases complexity logarithmically, long time preference must rely on what cannot be observed directly – general rules and principles using historical allegory.
    • In general terms, Long time preference is a FORECASTING method of human interaction, not a SATISFACTION method of human interaction.
    • Time preferences are incommensurable. Or more simply, long waves and short waves don’t allow us to think both short and long term very well. Planning by combining long and short time frames is either difficult or impossible.
    • Different social classes have different time preferences. Since longer time preferences require greater complexity, and complex goods are of greater scarcity, then classes are divided by those with higher mean IQ’s, longer time preferences, and who engage in production involving and affecting a larger number of people, over longer periods of time.
    • Since it must rely upon what cannot be observed correctly it often appears less EMPATHIC and EGALITARIAN. When in fact, it is the difference between having a priority for short term or long term satisfaction. We would not successfully raise children if women were not empathic and sensitive to cues from children. Children cannot survive a mother who does not feel the need to satisfy them. Conversely, tribes would not survive if the males were not working on the problem of whether the local territory could continue to support them.
    • In large part, the division of labor increases production. The division of knowledge increases production. And since different outcomes take different amount of time, and some outcomes take a very long time, and since planning becomes very difficult for human minds when we mix a large number of time frames, humans participate in a vast division of TIME, with some producing short term goods and some long term goods, and together we tend to specialize.
    • The shorter time preference strategy is to accumulate small successes at low cost and to navigate to a satisfactory end. The longer time preference strategy is to forgo short term satisfaction in order to accomplish a long term end. This is why conservative societies survive longer: they are capable of surviving duress without loss of social cohesion.
    • Urbanites and Ruralas have different time preferences, largely because there are more opportunities for inexpensive gain when people are in more dense population. This is why cities are inseparable from markets. A city is market, otherwise it would not be a city. Each would not survive in the others environment.

  • Egalitarianism (Insurance) vs. Status Seeking (Access To Mates)

    Egalitarianism is an attempt to either:

      Egalitarianism is the passive and low-cost alternative to producing innovation, excellence and performing actions in real time.

    • Higher social classes have a significantly higher average IQ than lower social classes

      Reposted here for reference.

      Social class IQ differences and university access By Bruce G Charlton A feature for the Times Higher Education – 23 May 2008 Since ‘the Laura Spence Affair’ in 2000, the UK government has spent a great deal of time and effort in asserting that universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, are unfairly excluding people from low social class backgrounds and privileging those from higher social classes. Evidence to support the allegation of systematic unfairness has never been presented, nevertheless the accusation has been used to fuel a populist ‘class war’ agenda. Yet in all this debate a simple and vital fact has been missed: higher social classes have a significantly higher average IQ than lower social classes. The exact size of the measured IQ difference varies according to the precision of definitions of social class – but in all studies I have seen, the measured social class IQ difference is substantial and of significance and relevance to the issue of university admissions. The existence of substantial class differences in average IQ seems to be uncontroversial and widely accepted for many decades among those who have studied the scientific literature. And IQ is highly predictive of a wide range of positive outcomes in terms of educational duration and attainment, attained income levels, and social status (see Deary – Intelligence, 2001). This means that in a meritocratic university admissions system there will be a greater proportion of higher class students than lower class students admitted to university. What is less widely understood is that – on simple mathematical grounds – it is inevitable that the differential between upper and lower classes admitted to university will become greater the more selective is the university. *** There have been numerous studies of IQ according to occupational social class, stretching back over many decades. In the UK, average IQ is 100 and the standard deviation is 15 with a normal distribution curve. Social class is not an absolute measure, and the size of differences between social classes in biological variables (such as health or life expectancy) varies according to how socio-economic status is defined (eg. by job, income or education) and also by how precisely defined is the socio-economic status (for example, the number of categories of class, and the exactness of the measurement method – so that years of education or annual salary will generate bigger differentials than cruder measures such as job allocation, postcode deprivation ratings or state versus private education). In general, the more precise the definition of social class, the larger will be the measured social class differences in IQ and other biological variables. Typically, the average IQ of the highest occupational Social Class (SC) – mainly professional and senior managerial workers such as professors, doctors and bank managers – is 115 or more when social class is measured precisely, and about 110 when social class is measured less precisely (eg. mixing-in lower status groups such as teachers and middle managers). By comparison, the average IQ of the lowest social class of unskilled workers is about 90 when measured precisely, or about 95 when measured less precisely (eg. mixing-in higher social classes such as foremen and supervisors or jobs requiring some significant formal qualification or training). The non-symmetrical distribution of high and low social class around the average of 100 is probably due to the fact that some of the highest IQ people can be found doing unskilled jobs (such as catering or labouring) but the lowest IQ people are very unlikely to be found doing selective-education-type professional jobs (such as medicine, architecture, science or law). In round numbers, there are differences of nearly two standard deviations (or 25 IQ points) between the highest and lowest occupational social classes when class is measured precisely; and about one standard deviation (or 15 IQ points) difference when SC is measured less precisely. I will use these measured social class IQ differences of either one or nearly two standard deviations to give upper and lower bounds to estimates of the differential or ratio of upper and lower social classes we would expect to see at universities of varying degrees of selectivity. We can assume that there are three types of universities of differing selectivity roughly corresponding to some post-1992 ex-polytechnic universities; some of the pre-1992 Redbrick or Plateglass universities (eg. the less selective members of the Russell Group and 1994 Group), and Oxbridge. The ‘ex-poly’ university has a threshold minimum IQ of 100 for admissions (ie. the top half of the age cohort of 18 year olds in the population – given that about half the UK population now attend a higher education institution), the ‘Redbrick’ university has a minimum IQ of 115 (ie. the top 16 percent of the age cohort); while ‘Oxbridge’ is assumed to have a minimum IQ of about 130 (ie. the top 2 percent of the age cohort). *** Table 1: Precise measurement of Social Class (SC) – Approx proportion of 18 year old students eligible for admission to three universities of differing minimum IQ selectivity Ex-poly – IQ 100; Redbrick – IQ 115; Oxbridge IQ 130 Highest SC– av. IQ 115: 84 percent; 50 percent; 16 percent Lowest SC– av. IQ 90: 25 percent; 5 percent; ½ percent Expected SC diff: 3.3 fold; 10 fold; 32 fold Table 2: Imprecise measurement of Social Class (SC) – Approx proportion of 18 year old students eligible for admission to three universities of differing minimum IQ selectivity Ex-Poly – IQ 100; Redbrick – IQ 115; Oxbridge – IQ 130 Highest SC –av. IQ 110: 75 percent; 37 percent; 9 percent Lowest SC –av. IQ 95: 37 percent; 9 percent; 1 percent Expected SC diff: 2 fold; 4 fold; 9 fold *** When social class is measured precisely, it can be seen that the expected Highest SC to Lowest SC differential would probably be expected to increase from about three-fold (when the percentages at university are compared with the proportions in the national population) in relatively unselective universities to more than thirty-fold at highly selective universities. In other words, if this social class IQ difference is accurate, the average child from the highest social class is approximately thirty times more likely to qualify for admission to a highly selective university than the average child from the lowest social class. When using a more conservative assumption of just one standard deviation in average IQ between upper (IQ 110) and lower (IQ 95) social classes there will be significant differentials between Highest and Lowest social classes, increasing from two-fold at the ‘ex-poly’ through four-fold at the ‘Redbrick’ university to ninefold at ‘Oxbridge’. Naturally, this simple analysis is based on several assumptions, each of which could be challenged and adjusted; and further factors could be introduced. However, the take-home-message is simple. When admissions are assumed to be absolutely meritocratic, social class IQ differences of plausible magnitude lead to highly significant effects on the social class ratios of students at university when compared with the general population. Furthermore, the social class differentials inevitably become highly amplified at the most selective universities such as Oxbridge. Indeed, it can be predicted that around half of a random selection of kids whose parents are among the IQ 130 ‘cognitive elite’ (eg. with both parents and all grandparents successful in professions requiring high levels of highly selective education) would probably be eligible for admission to the most-selective universities or the most selective professional courses such as medicine, law and veterinary medicine; but only about one in two hundred of kids from the lowest social stratum would be eligible for admission on meritocratic grounds. In other words, with a fully-meritocratic admissions policy we should expect to see a differential in favour of the highest social classes relative to the lowest social classes at all universities, and this differential would become very large at a highly-selective university such as Oxford or Cambridge. The highly unequal class distributions seen in elite universities compared to the general population are unlikely to be due to prejudice or corruption in the admissions process. On the contrary, the observed pattern is a natural outcome of meritocracy. Indeed, anything other than very unequal outcomes would need to be a consequence of non-merit-based selection methods. Selected references for social class and IQ: Argyle, M. The psychology of social class. London: Routledge, 1994. (Page 153 contains tabulated summaries of several studies with social class I IQs estimated from 115-132 and lowest social classes IQ from 94-97). C.L. Hart et al. Scottish Mental Health Survey 1932 linked to the Midspan Studies: a prospective investigation of childhood intelligence and future health. Public Health. 2003; 117: 187-195. (Social class 1 IQ 115, Social class V IQ 90; Deprivation category 1 – IQ 110, deprivation category 7 – IQ 92). Nettle D. 2003. Intelligence and class mobility in the British population. British Journal of Psychology. 94: 551-561. (Estimates approx one standard deviation between lowest and highest social classes). Validity of IQ – See Deary IJ. Intelligence – A very short introduction. Oxford University Press 2001. Note – It is very likely that IQ is _mostly_ hereditary (I would favour the upper bound of the estimates of heredity, with a correlation of around 0.8), but because IQ is not _fully_ hereditary there is a ‘regression towards the mean’ such that the children of high IQ parents will average lower IQ than their parents (and vice versa). But the degree to which this regression happens will vary according to the genetic population from which the people are drawn – so that high IQ individuals from a high IQ population will exhibit less regression towards the mean, because the ancestral population mean IQ is higher. Because reproduction in modern societies is ‘assortative’ with respect to IQ (i.e. people tend to have children with other people of similar IQ), and because this assortative mating has been going on for several generations, the expected regression towards the mean will be different according to specific ancestry. Due to this complexity, I have omitted any discussion of regression to the mean IQ from parents to children in the above journalistic article which had a non-scientific target audience.

    • Do Not Assume Freedom Is A Desire Of The Majority. Security Is. But But Freedom.

      People do not seek freedom. They seek the security that is provided by the prosperity of the creative class in a free society. But they do not seek freedom. They seek security.

      [callout]the classical liberal fantasy that rhetorical debate can convince a majority to favor freedom over security is simply a conservative utopian fantasy. It will never occur. Ever. Period.[/callout]

      And the classical liberal fantasy that rhetorical debate can convince a majority to favor freedom over security is simply a conservative utopian fantasy. It will never occur. Ever. Period. Once an argument is understood — in that it possesses explanatory power, is non-contradictory, and solves a pertinent practical political problem — one can seek consensus. And as long as that consensus appeals to a majority, then a democratic polity can adopt the policies that support the argument. However, the classical liberal ideal of freedom cannot be supported within a democracy, and no such rational arguments can prevail, for the sole reason that freedom is the desire of the minority – the creative class. And instead, safety is the objective of the majority. And the majority will always pursue safety rather than liberty. If the freedom-desiring minority loses it’s willingness to use violence to preserve it’s freedom, it will possess neither freedom, nor prosperity. And the rest of the civilization will calcify upon being deprived of the mental fertility of its creative, and therefore, most productive classes. This is the history of civilization. Fertility followed by calcification, followed by conquest and poverty. The answer is not violence, nor is the answer argument. The answer is sufficient argument so that the creative classes will apply violence, for the purpose of obtaining and maintaining the political power needed to secure the minority liberty against the predatory majority’s exploitation of the creative class in order to obtain security.

      [callout]We can be free, or we can be exploited, or we can be oppressed or we can be enslaved, or we can be murdered. Choose your position on that spectrum.[/callout]

      We can be free, or we can be exploited, or we can be oppressed or we can be enslaved, or we can be murdered. Choose your position on that spectrum. Because your actions in the use of violence will determine it. Talk is cheap, and demonstrably ineffective.

    • Another silly season: A sure sign of recession or recovery? Divorces and breakup

      Another silly season: A sure sign of recession or recovery? Divorces and breakups. Yet another animal spirit, cognitive dissonance, epistemic failure from our inability to isolate environmental signals. People breaking up is an illustration of the change in sentiments. Seems like it’s the season. Next signals to look for? Coalescence around a new hierarchy of status symbols. Emergence of new myths.

      Source date (UTC): 2010-06-12 13:14:00 UTC

    • Density Is Not The Panacea Utopians Think It Is

      What is it about an office that promotes so much illness? I know that offices where people interact frequently and move between locations lot, and have greater density are natural distribution centers for affection, and I know that the more time children spend in day care and in school, the more they become distributors, and I know that closed-ventilation buildings are better grounds for bacteria and viruses, but knowing that is not the same as having to lose so much time to illness. I mean, it just seems like between my son, the office and airports my immune system is exhausted. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a chinese national a few weeks ago. There is this wealthy Chinese urban activist whose name I don’t know, but he wants to design and build very dense housing for people. What I told him was that it has been thought about and tried over the past century. But the problem is that HUMAN BEINGS ARE TOXIC creatures, and second, that if you move shanty-dwelling-people to nicer circumstances, they just maintain their previous behavior and destroy it – inviting lots of relatives, and putting up sheet metal and cardboard. Now the counter argument is that chinese authorities can impose discipline that other nations can’t get away with. But Im skeptical. What bothers me as a political economist is that all civilizations to convert to urbanism die. (Jarred Diamond has it wrong. It’s an information problem not a resource problem. He has it backwards.) We don’t know how to run a largely urban society for very long because law, which is our primary social technology after religion, simply ceases to work in large cities without extraordinary costs of repression. Money and credit may change that but only if we change policy from taxation to credit the way we changed from religion to taxation as a means of maintaining social order. Human density is not the panacea our planners and utopians think it is. Density is toxicity, it decreases the disease gradient, and it leads to political tyranny and instability, and it becomes increasingly difficult to concentrate capital and therefore productivity. The problem is to balance birth rates and productivity. Not density. And no matter what we do, ‘He Who Breeds Wins.’

    • Women Dominate The Veterinary Field and Not Technology. This Isn’t A Mystery.

      On Carpe Diem there is a posting that references a series of articles on the state of women in the employment figures. Primarily as a result of the disappearance of risk capital, which led to a disappearance of risky, high reward careers, which will not come back (possibly ever) unless risk tolerance returns.

      It’s no secret to anyone in Silicon Valley that math, science and technology fields remain dominated by men, despite some progress by women in recent years. Women make up 46% of the American workforce but hold just 25% of the jobs in engineering, technology and science, according to the National Science Foundation. To Sally K. Ride, a former astronaut, that persistent gender gap is a national crisis that will prove to be deeply detrimental to America’s global competitiveness.

      Or this one

      Why are there so many women veterinarians? In part because educated women are drawn to professions that are providing flexibility to combine work and careers, Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin said in a lecture at the American Economic Association in Atlanta. The increase of women in various professions since 1970 has been spectacular. But why do highly educated women enter some professions and fields more than others? “Women are 77% of all newly minted veterinarians, but they were a trivial fraction 30 years ago,” she noted.

      How about a more obvious answer: In a free society, people freely pursue their careers of preference. Isn’t that the purpose of a market? To provide for people’s wants and preferences? Women prefer to empathize with all kinds of animals (human and otherwise) the way men prefer to empathize with tools and abstractions. Women have a higher preference for empathic interactions. Men have a higher preference for tools, abstractions and physical experiences. A predominantly female field (and there is good data for this) becomes a negative status symbol for men. If a field becomes predominantly feminine, ambitious men avoid it. Visible excellence , which is a status symbol for men, is a function of time and specialization. What is hard to understand about this set of fairly obvious circumstances? That once women are no longer prohibited from the workplace, that they will dominate the fields of their preference rather than distribute evenly across careers? Men dominate the physical, risky, combative, material, and abstract roles. Because they prefer to, because it increases their status. On the other hand, if we managed by some feat to make dressmaking a masculine status symbol they’d dominate that too. Men certainly dominate the restaurant industry, despite cooking being the dominant specialty of women since the dawn of time. Empathy is not valuable in objective testing, which is what most technical jobs require. This is NOT true of customer service in technology, consulting with technology, or sales of technology, or administration of technology. It is true ONLY of the craft of technology design, development and experimentation. Empathy is a function of understanding people’s views. Science is the process of objectivtly ignoring those views. These are two ends of a spectrum. Women accuse men of seeing women as objects. but it’s not that they see women as objects, they see the world as objects, because they are tool and object makers. If women did not have empathy, or the ability to ‘experience’ other people’s emotions, they could not empathize with children it would be impossible for them to be mothers, or to cooperate in groups to raise children, who must learn over very long periods, how to articulate by verbal means, their wants and needs. If men did not empathize with tools, or ‘experience’ tools they would not be able to craft them or sit forever waiting for the one moment in which they must focus all mind and body on thirty seconds of danger. WHile it is possible to train humans to do almost anything, that is not the question free people ask. It is, how to satisfy their wants and preferences. And CETERIS PARIBUS, women, given the opportunity to excel, will do so in fields where they gain most enjoyment – where the empathy of life experience , which to which they are more ‘sensitive’, just as men would most often prefer to empathize with tools and abstractions, to which they are more ‘sensitive’. Doing otherwise is simply illogical. Why would someone pursue his or her weaker perceptions and preferences unless it was of very material benefit to them? Furthermore, and this is the important question, why should society subsidize women and penalize men, for the fulfillment of women’s’ preferences at the expense of men’s preferences? That’s the real political question here. GIven equal opportunity, if we each choose these things and men choose one set of careers and women another, and if women have a preference for child rearing and men do not, then why should men be penalized, to support child rearing, when the problem that the world faces is overpopulation, not pollution, not global warming, not scarcity of resources, but overpopulation. There is an ocean of data on this, which is why these silly little surveys about women in technology are ridiculous. Of course women are a minority in technology, because they prefer to be a minority in technology. Giving women equal legal status, equal political status, and investing in them equally so that they have equal access to THEIR OPPORTUNITIES OF PREFERENCE, all are means by which we ensure that women are not politically, or economically discriminated against. However, it is not an ambition of political equality to engineer equal PREFERENCES among men and women. That would simply be some form of slavery. Society may have an optimum that we can consistently pursue, but Men and women are unequal. We are unequal in our preferences, and unequal in our abilities, at least at the margins. We are unequal in our rate of development and unequal in our rate of maturation, and unequal in our verbal and spatial reasoning. We are unequal in the physical activity we need. We are unequal in our social development, in that girls learn to care about society by testing and developing expressions of empathy and empathic dominance, and boys to care about society by testing and developing the expression of the physical world, and physical and political dominance. We are unequal in our intelligence distribution, with men over-represented at the margins. While we are equal in productivity in the majority of the work force, because the majority of the work force is clerical and administrative. We are unequal in our ability at the margins of the work force where ability is ether physical or extraordinarily abstract and specialized. We will not build a society that is durable post the American Empire by assuming that political and opportunity equality should result in career-distribution equality, because career development is a preference among free people. Men and women are not equal in their preferences, and they are very different in meaningful ways. Even small differences like the difference in male and female daily word budgets, or how we relax or experience stress, or how we empathize with people or objects, will simply show up in the distribution. Fixing a problem of oppression is one thing. Utopianism, Platonism, and social engineering are simply a different form of oppression. If you want to look at data, then lets get away from this positivism, and back to some causal analysis. There is plenty of data out there. Not the least of which is that no matter how we engineer society, the mating ritual will prevail. And in that mating ritual, women want certain things and men do, and that dance will never change, ever, absent the application of chemistry during the natal process. Again, there is an ocean of data supporting this. A not insignificant portion of men would prefer to hunt and fish all day, and build things. Another not insignificant portion of men would prefer to hang out on street corners and drink or make tea, or something simple. Another not insignificant portion of men would rather fight, rape, murder and steal, than do an ordinary job if they could get away with it. Plenty of others would be perfectly happy to spend their lives in military service if it tolerated collateral damage. Not all, but many men live painfully dull lives instead simply to participate in the status and mating rituals. If you change that process, you will not get the utopia that you dream of. Especially if it’s in a heterogenous empire like ours. You will get the Mediterranean, or eastern european, which is that men simply check out of society, and practice corruption, and interpersonal dominance, because they feel society is against their interests. Our men are doing it right now with video games and prescription drugs. The redistribution of western technology, and western calculative technologies in particular (what we call capitalism), which have been our institutional advantage against other cultures, is eroding that western historical advantage and redistributing production, and and skills worldwide. Capitalism slows birth rates and creates aging populations. Aging populations are less productive, have less military power, and are less capable of maintaining trade routes. Therefore less capable of maintaining a justice system, and less capable of maintaining a dominant currency, and less capable of maintaining social programs that are debt financed. Aside from debt, social insurance programs have been designed not to be funded by saving, but by having the younger generations (which will be smaller, and more likely immigrant, and often from different classes and races who will eventually want political power) pay for the services of the older, rather than having the older lend saved money to the younger, as we have done for all of human history. The role changes that we see, the distribution of jobs, are all temporary functions of the conversion of world society from agrarian cooperative, to urban capitalist. They are minor temporary variations in the ebb and flow of that process of calculative urbanization, and population peak followed by population decline. They do not necessarily represent a trend toward an egalitarian utopia. If you want to know if men and women are equally productive in the work place then, except at the margins, in similar jobs, they are so. If you want to make sure that women have the same rights as men, that is only sensible. And current legislation would demonstrate tat they have MORE legal rights than do men, just as minorities have special rights against the dominant culture. To the point where, at least, economically, it appears that women now “Marry The State”, and use that state apparatus to extort money from men, replacing the interpersonal violence of man against woman, with the political violence of the state against men. Men are beginning to understand this. All men have a limited advantage over women, because they do not have to bear children or rear them. SOME men have an advantage because it appears that men can more easily specialize and dominate a field than can the same number of women. MOST men have a disadvantage over MOST women, in that they must specialize in some skill inorder to have value in the mating ritual, and that their social status, and access to mates, as well as their possible male alliances, is determined by that specialization. At some point, lazy statisticians and social science amateurs would do better to study ALL the data and then make determinations, rather than think that some subset of simple ‘vulgar’ statistics are sufficiently informative that they may draw conclusions from them: otherwise it’s not using the scientific method. It’s not even the error of positivism. It’s ignorance and idealism.