[LINK] International variation in IQ – the role of parasites

I think pretty much anything can be turned to stupid purposes if people try hard enough. And they consistently do.

Think it's because people don't separate energy intake and nutrition as two independent considerations. Re: supersize me. He had an oversupply of energy leading to obesity but also was suffering from malnutrition. Assuming in that specific case his energy needs were well met but possibly his mental performance would have suffered due to malnutrition.

Edit - also the outcomes of too much of either are quite different. Excess energy generally produces obesity, excess nutrition can result in poisoning. Symptoms of either represent themselves in completely different ways physically / mentally.

I think it is obvious that helping women is better for signalling than helping men. This is enough to conclude that something which helps women more than men will be easier to promote.

The question is only why helping women is better signalling than helping men. (Even mentioning that poor men are excluded from women-oriented activities is low status.) One explanation is that poor women have it worse than poor men, so it is rational to give more help to poor women. Other explanation is that poor men have lower status than poor women, therefore activities for helping poor men are also lower status than activities helping poor women. These explanations are not contradictory.

I have no hard data; it just seems obvious to me that men are often judged by their ability to "win", while women are often judged by other criteria (such as beauty, etc.). Therefore the fact that a specific man needs help brings him greater status penalty than it would give to a woman. (Also on the opposite end of scale, success brings him greater status bonus; a rich man has higher status than a rich woman.) There is no male equivalent of "damsel in distress"; a helpless man worth rescuing is almost an oxymoron. This all makes sense from evolutionary perspective: in an ancient environment, if a male cannot fight and generally take care about himself, why spend group resources on his survival? In today's society it's not just about fighting, but the attitude translates to other things.

Quick and dirty assessment: if poor men and poor women had approximately equal status, then we'd expect the following:

1. People would value nonprofits that primarily help women as equal or lesser in value to equivalent nonprofits that help all (depending on the strength of anti-discrimination sentiment.) So, you wouldn't see many nonprofits expend resources getting the message out there that they primarily help women.
2. There would be an equal number of nonprofits that primarily help women and those that primarily help men, and they would be about equally loud about it.

This is pretty demonstrably not the case. (Quick google: compare the marketing resources devoted to http://www.kiva.org/women vs. http://www.kiva.org/men)

I agree that the signal being sent is coarse-grained.

I agree that finegraining it is a lovely thing for people to do if they can do it in a way that's low-cost to everyone else.

I disagree with your implicit separation of signalling community (dis)approval on the one hand, and reputation costs on the other. The reputation in this case is precisely a function of community (dis)approval; I don't see how you can sensibly separating them. If I endorse explicitly signalling community (dis)approval at all (which I do), I can't help but endorse explicitly raising/lowering reputation.

My only concern with the FAQ approach is the question of what an individual voter whose reasons for (dis)approval don't align with the FAQ ought to do. If I'm understanding you, your idea is that the FAQ trumps the actual preferences of people in the community -- that is, I'm expected to vote in accordance with the FAQ rather than my own preferences. That makes the existence and contents of the FAQ an implicit power structure, and such things are best approached with caution.

That said, I don't object to it if so approached.