The late Geert Hofstede wrote,
Masculinity describes a society in which emotional gender roles are clearly distinct – men are supposed to be assertive, tough and focused on material success, women are supposed to be more modest, tender and concerned with the quality of life – versus Femininity, a society in which emotional gender roles overlap – both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life . . .The Masculinity/Femininity dimension is the only one of the four in which gender affects the scores: women on average score higher in Femininity than men
Lotta Stern pointed me to Hofstede’s work as relevant to my thoughts on emasculated culture. His work seems fascinating, and all of his cultural dimensions appear to be relevant to my distinction between the older culture and the newer culture. Here is his Wikipedia entry. Here is his web site, now maintained by Hofstede the younger.
These differences between men and women in competitiveness, personality, IQ, and preferences are common findings in some parts of sociology and in neighboring fields. All of them are reported as stable results over time and contexts. Yet in sociological studies of labor market differences between men and women, they are ignored.
She points out that one can have a libertarian feminism that supports equal rights and opportunity for women without embracing the view that all inequalities in labor market outcomes between men and women ought to be eliminated.
It’s great to see Hofstede referenced! I relied heavily on him to define individualism and measure its impact on economic growth in my book God is a Capitalist: Markets from Moses to Marx. His measures of individualism vs collectivism and power vs equality are tremendous.
What’s a good introduction to his work?
Hofstede, Geert. Culture’s Consequences. London: Sage Publications. 2001.
Thanks.
The a few things I can think of that drive polarization:
1) More things in government purview. I wouldn’t have imagined a year ago that many of the impositions I deal with daily would be within the governments purview nor that it would have such a huge partisan angle (red states open, blue states closed).
2) More things in the cultural purview. I would say that employers and service providers are dramatically more partisan/political than they used to be. “Republicans buy Nike’s too” replaced by Woke Capital:
https://twitter.com/WokeCapital/status/1362038612418846725
3) I think there is a genuine fear of demographic driven Californification on the right and a genuine inevitable triumphalism of Californification on the left. If you think the ascent of the left is a fundamental demographic inevitability, then the left doesn’t need to adapt or compromise at all. Just ram that bill in 51-50, who cares, those losers are on the wrong side of history anyway. If we lose, just wait for a little more demographic change. We get XX million more voters in eight years, right.
I could buy that if we had the demographics of 50 years ago, that any shift to far to one partisan side would trigger a backlash to the center, and so there wasn’t any need to get too worried over anything. Now I fear continuous leftward ratchet with no countervailing force in the long run.
0 for 2? Wrong thread again?
Indeed. Clicked on the first post and its a new post.
A concise, abstracted statement of the theme of the Academic Corruption series could be, “Institutional excellence requires both narrow selection of highly talented and very motivated people, and high standards, rigorously enforced. If you relax the criteria for selection, you will also have to relax the standards, and you will lose some excellence. Pushing marginal individuals through programs they do not love or for which they are not cut out can indeed give those people credentials and result in personal benefits, but it has a high opportunity cost and very low success rate of producing excellence as an outcome.”
James Damore was fired for pointing out that the fact that fewer women love coding means it’s hard to make the numbers come out politically correct, and trying hard to do so has negative and unfair consequences. Ezra Klein’s characteristically slimy treatment of Damore’s case makes me grimace whenever I see Cowen fawn over him.
Charles made this tradeoff “inclusion for worse performance” explicit in the Bell Curve even to the point of quantification in some instances, but didn’t take a stance on what the tradeoff should be. He only felt that honesty and integrity required discussing the tradeoff explicitly, not trying to hide or rationalize away the reality of the decision.
I suspect he believes the dishonesty is necessary to keep the current state of affairs going, as an honest account would be so demeaning and shaming that people would have a hard time supporting it. However, that wasn’t central to the argument, and you could still argue for AA in some sense within his framework. His main point was that the lying in and of itself was having a worse impact on society, as it made people, especially our top performers and leaders, abandon honesty as a guiding principle in the hopes that doing so would achieve some worldly end. This itself causing far more damage then having around a few token sinecure holders around.
In a sense we would be better off just admitting that the left was explicitly buying off political support from minorities, it being out in the open would limit the dishonest aspects of the spoils systems. America survived the actual spoils system, after all.
He also warned that the tradeoff between performance and inclusion was most costly at the highest levels of performance, since high performers are the ones that most drive forward qualitative progress for all of society.
James Damore was fired for writing a memo suggesting the Truth. All who favor the truth should be outraged by his firing.
Outraged.
I use DuckDuckGo, and try other maps, other translators.
Have not yet deleted by almost 20 years of gmail – but that’s coming.
I’m outraged, often fantasizing about Reps winning and re-writing the laws / re-manning the decision making committee so that that he wins his lawsuit.
Polarization reduction, and support of Truth, won’t happen without laws and legal decisions which support the Truth.
“one can…support equal rights and opportunity…without embracing the view that all inequalities in…outcomes…ought to be eliminated”
Not only *can* one do so, if one supports equal rights and opportunity, then one *must* also be prepared to accept potential inequalities in outcomes, whether between men and women or any other groupings. Rights and opportunity include the right and opportunity for individuals to achieve different outcomes than other individuals, and any grouping of individuals might group individuals non-uniformly by outcomes.
This all sounds pretty basic. Men are From Mars Women Are From Venus was written in 1992.
Didn’t Dennis Praeger have a weekly masculine feminine hour?
Is there anyone (other than some random crackpot) who is arguing there are no differences?
If you want to get yourself cancelled you’re gonna have to do better than this!
I would say that James Damore got fired for much less than what’s in MAFMWAFV, and that the book couldn’t get published today without extreme revision.
John Gray’s book wasn’t a sensation because it was common sense that everyone already knew and believed, but precisely because even as early as the late 80’s most people had been encouraged into adopting naive projection as their theory of mind for the opposite sex, which contributed to all kinds of basic relationship and communications problems which didn’t occur nearly as much or with as much severity in prior generations. (Not that they knew better what worked, but they knew better what wouldn’t work, which is half the battle.)
When Gray kept encountering this naivete over and over, he decided to write the book, which that generation embraced as a ‘revelation’, because that is what the conventional wisdom of merely a generation prior feels like when there’s a been a gap in the continuity of its transmission.
Men from Mars, Women from Venus, is far far more accurate than most current feminists shouting for “equality” – in outcome, not opportunity.
Lower standards for physical stuff – lower standards for many of the most mentally difficult stuff – even lower standards for many of the most personnel sensitive stuff.
Reality is sexist (differences!) Reality is racist (differences!)
Our society needs far more Serenity Prayer observance
Please, God,
Grant me the Serenity to Accept the Things I Cannot Change,
Courage to Change the Things I Can Change, and
Wisdom to Know the Difference.
We need a lot more wisdom among the elites.
(I like this version, others put Courage first)
….Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers
-Shakespeare, Macbeth
I thought this was a very pertinent portion from a recent tech interview with a famous computer architect, Jim Keller, on a podcast:
Lex Fridman – What do you make of the anger and the passion and all of that, the firing and the mood swings, the madness, being emotional and all of that, that Steve [Jobs], and I guess Elon too: is that a bug or a feature?
Jim Keller – It’s a feature. So there’s a graph, which is, y-axis productivity, x-axis at zero is chaos and infinity is complete order, so as you go from the origin, as you improve order, you improve productivity and at some point, productivity peaks and then it goes back down again. Too much order, nothing can happen.
Lex – But the question is, how close to the chaos is that..
Jim – Now, here’s the thing: once you start moving in the direction of order, the force vector to drive you towards order is unstoppable, and every organization will move to the place where their productivity is stymied by order. So the question is, who’s the counterforce? Cuz it also feels really good, as you get more organized, the productivity goes up. The organization feels it, they orient towards it. They hire more people, they get more guys who can run process, you get bigger. And then inevitably, the organization gets captured by the bureaucracy that manages all the processes. And humans really like that, so if you just walk into a room and say, “Guys, love what you’re doing, but I need you to have less order.” If you don’t have some force behind that, nothing will happen.
Lex – I can’t tell you on how many levels that’s profound, so…
Jim – So, that’s why I say it’s a feature. Now, could you be nicer about it? I don’t know, I don’t know any good examples of being nicer about it. Well, the funny thing is to get stuff done, you need people who can manage stuff and manage people, because humans are complicated…
Obviously, there is a gender affinity to this order/chaos dimension too.
“Obviously, there is a gender affinity to this order/chaos dimension too.”
I don’t think this is true, or at least, not well-defined enough to be ascertainable as true. For example, the military is rightly considered to be a masculine culture, but there there is a constant need to impose as much order as possible on chaos, on people, on processes, everything. Indeed (while there are some who dispute the common etymology), military commands are called ‘orders’ because they ‘put things into more order’. Could you flesh this out a bit more?
I don’t think it’s worth talking about the military, as that’s an extreme culture that isn’t applicable to most any other human organization: it would be like taking the organizational culture of female ER nurses and drawing conclusions about all female-dominated cultures.
I think it’s well-accepted that women have a preference for order and men for the higher disorder borne of competition: Baumeister and others say boys get over-medicated for ADD these days because the female teachers want them to shut up and sit still like the girls. Obviously, like any other affinity, it’s no absolute: you will find some hard-driving women and some extremely order-seeking men. They’re simply the minority of either gender.
It’s certainly something I’ve observed in my life, haven’t you?
“It’s certainly something I’ve observed in my life, haven’t you?”
No, quite the contrary. Order can mean a lot of different things, so it would take a long time to break it all down.
There’s also another level of subtlety to it, in that natural dispositions have two levels, which is that of an internal inclination for the individual, and a countervailing external imposition for groups.
You see that all over the place, but in the narrow context of differences between masculine and feminine working environments here is how it tends to manifest.
In a masculine environment, it’s common to see a boss with a messy desk and bachelor-like personality to match when it comes to personal matters, but who is by nature also a ruthlessly strict authoritarian when it comes to enforcing explicit rules and bolstering the hierarchy.
This isn’t ‘hypocritical’ – human behaviors don’t arise out of consistencies with abstract principles – so much as it’s ‘compensatory’ as an instinctive solution to the coordination problem of a set of people with particular kinds of similar inclinations.
Meanwhile, in a feminine work environment, one sees lots of spotlessly clean and fastidiously organized personal spaces, but a lot of hypersensitivity and discomfort with manifestations of overt domination (ordering people around, getting in someone’s face, imposing discipline). At the same time, there is much more comfort with bending the rules ad hoc and with informal and shifting cliques and going around the hierarchy, in ways that tend to stir up drama in the corporate soap opera.
Indeed, the motivations of some of those rules was precisely in reaction to these kind of recurrently observed problems and to try to tamp down this kind of drama by making it clear who has what turf and who is or is not included in communications or decisions.
When people comfortable with going around them, go around them, then people not comfortable with that get really upset, which sets up a dysfunctional social dynamic that ruins the potential productivity and performance of the group.
One solution to this is single sex institutions. For mixed sex-organizations, what happens in practice is that they tend to react with the same solution discovered by tradition, albeit deployed in a tacit, sub silentio manner, of allocation of certain types into certain key positions where the tendencies of that type are most useful and beneficial, into what is effectively analogous to the “specialization and complementarity” of the household.
I see, given the vagueness of “order,” you seem to interpret it as rules and hierarchy, which you’ve seen men generally enforce and women be more fluid about (how much of that was that they weren’t in charge, so that was how the women could assert autonomy?). I have to admit, one of the ways I thought of “order” was the superficial one you mention, of messy desks versus clean personal spaces.
I was thinking of “order” more in the sense he seemed to be talking about, the loosely defined roles and largely bottom-up personal initiative of a tech startup versus the clear roles and top-down edicts of a large corporate entity, which is similar but not exactly the same as your interpretation. The former tend to be almost all-male environments, whereas the latter brings more females in, but that may be more of a difference in kinds of male environments.
It is difficult to generalize about these matters from one’s own personal experience, but perhaps most men and women are somewhat similar in this regard but the extremes are more dissimilar, ie the averages are close but the variance is larger for men? That’s certainly the case for many other abilities, for example, on the US SAT exam, “boys have outscored girls on the math half of the dreaded exam by about 30 to 35 points for the past three decades or so,” which is not a big difference but “in 2001, for example, nearly twice as many boys as girls scored over 700, and the ratio skews ever more male the closer one gets to the top tally of 800. Boys are also likelier than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong.”
Where is the transcript? Seems interesting.
” Too much order, nothing can happen.”
I think bureaucratic rules are an attempt to require more order, and are effective in “normal situations”. More than merely effective, they are most efficient. But not robust – whenever something novel happens, which by definition means not fully in accord with the rules, ether noting happens (order! rules!), or the rules are bent/ gotten around.
The productivity increases stop when the bureaucracy rises … to its level of red-tape / orders / bureaucracy equal to the new probems coming. The organization becomes incapable of increasing productivity due to prior red-tape creation.
This is the organization/ bureaucracy version of the Peter Principle [a *Formative Book* maybe one of top 20].
It seems somewhat close to being independent of women/ men in composition, but the specifics of the red tape stoppage might be more dependent.
The fact that IQ and many other characteristics of men have lower peaks of normal, but wider tails of top & bottom, is part of why & how Reality is Sexist.
Far more often, those with the “most talent” of most things, are male. Similarly, those willing to be “most obsessive” about practicing something, anything, are more often males. Those who are *Stars* are most often among those with have great Talent and great Perseverance [not the Mars rover!] ~= obsessive practicing. Far more often men than women. Many feminists hate these truths.
Those against Sexism are, inevitably, somewhat against Reality / = Truth.
Believing the feminists requires denying Truth – which is part of what “doublethink” is all about.
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The Hofstede axis might be worth its own separate post & comments. Different axis leading to different insights.
A different POV of Truth – with quite different vocabulary.