Polling Thread

In the spirit of crude empiricism, I'll give it a go anyway and see what happens.

Poll: what probabilities do you assign to the following statements?

Men generally have a larger variance than women in most traits. [pollid:585]

Because of genetic differences between men & women, men generally have a larger variance than women in most traits. [pollid:586]

Men vary more in intelligence than women. [pollid:587]

Because of genetic differences between men & women, men vary more in intelligence than women. [pollid:588]

Men vary more in intelligence than women, and that contributes non-negligibly to gender imbalance in the sciences. [pollid:589]

Because of genetic differences between men & women, men vary more in intelligence than women, and that genetically-driven difference in variance contributes non-negligibly to gender imbalance in the sciences. [pollid:590]

I see. I wonder if the aliases should just be deleted from the help page? There's no real need to have a bunch of aliases for a poll-command, and as you demonstrate, it's possible to read the page and not realize they're aliases rather than differently-typed polls.

Learning people's beliefs about Jesus is informative about Jesus, it's just you already know that a lot of people believe in Jesus so there's very little new information.

1. Do you dispute the truth of the sentence that precedes the one you quoted? Here it is again: "As long as their beliefs aren't totally independent of the facts, those beliefs will constitute evidence (one way or the other) of the facts."

2. Replacing "pixies" with "Jesus" should not change whether people's beliefs are informative about Jesus. It may change the degree to which their beliefs are informative, for the reason /u/RowanE mentioned.

3. I am not suggesting that learning people's beliefs about pixies would be incredibly informative. I am only suggesting that it would be more informative than not learning about such beliefs.

4. Here's a thought experiment I often find helpful, tailored to the pixie-belief question:

Imagine Omega has come to you with a question: Are pixies real? She further tells you that a correct answer will result in an eternity of bliss for you and everyone you care about, and that an incorrect answer will result in unspeakable suffering for the same people. (The point is, a lot is at stake.) Then here is the key part of the scenario: Before you answer, she hands you an envelope marked "What People Believe About Pixies." You can open it and get accurate information about people's beliefs about pixies, or you can not open it. (Also, to make this work, we have to assume that you currently don't know anything about people's beliefs about pixies. Otherwise, the question becomes the value of info about pixie beliefs at the current margin, rather than simply the value of the info.) There's no cost (or reward) from opening it, beyond the information you thereby obtain.

Would you open the envelope before answering?

If your answer is no, then we can conclude that you really do consider people's pixie-beliefs to be completely devoid of information about the reality of pixies. But if you would open the envelope, can't we conclude the opposite: that you consider their beliefs to be entangled with the truth, however tenuously?

(I like this thought experiment because in the past it has helped me see when I am believing in belief instead of, as I had supposed, just believing. I think I starting doing it after reading this 2011 Yvain post.)

In reality, pop-feminism and conventional wisdom doesn't often bother delving into evo-psych and thinking about sexual strategy

That doesn't seem to be so. Conventional wisdom has TONS of heuristics about sexual strategy. The real problem is that these heuristics are just a bunch of separate pieces of advice so they tend to contradict each other and in general lack any coherence or structure. In that sense I agree that the Blues have not "adopted a position on the matter", but instead they propose a large variety of inconsistent positions.

Red is ... factually mistaken in its conclusions about what sorts of signals one should send out and how these thing work.

I think it's pretty obvious that this depends. It seems to me that there is a subset of people for whom the Red approach works well (there is some self-selection here as well) and there is a subset of people for whom it doesn't. I agree that the Red claims about their "truths" being biologically hardwired and universal to all humans are... excessive :-)

what general signals you aught to send out to induce attraction in the average, generalized case

That's not a good way to formulate a problem. Any specific individual isn't much interested in the "average, generalized case", s/he has more or less specific preferences, and using any techniques selects for people who respond to these techniques.

To give a crude example, flashing a Rolex, keys to a Lamborghini, or talking about your private jet is an excellent signal to "induce attraction" from a very specific kind of females. If you're interested in this specific kind it's a good technique. If you're not, it's not.

The reason women are thought to vary less than men is because that's what nearly all the statistics say.

The only statistics I've actually seen addressing sex differences in standard deviations from the mean are IQ, height, weight, and life expectancy. Do you have links to studies from this perspective on other traits?

There is a fairly straightforward ev-psych explanation for this.

Without disputing the fact that evolutionary psychology may correctly explain some things, the problem with ev-psych exlanations is that they can explain anything. Just as you can finance pundit diametrically opposed stock market data and they'll find some way to fit both sets to their theory, and armchair evolutionary psychologist can explain any behavior in ev-pysch terms, correct or not. Being able to offer a mechanism is, in my view, rather important for corroboration.

If that's their argument, I'd rather they stated that explicitly, rather than relying on the ambiguity of generic plurals.

(And in certain cases I can't see what's wrong with just using the same legal/social/institutional framework that already exists for men. “After all, we are a university, not a bath house.”)

No, failing to sustain a satisfying relationship because you are giving your wife what you assume she should want, except that she actually doesn't.

"Genuinely desirable" seems like the problem here, in that it's conflating base sexual attraction with a more pragmatic evaluation of someone's prospects.

Beta males certainly have many admirable qualities; they're reliable productive and civil, usually friendly and loyal as well. But those qualities, while again being very important, are simply not attractive.

Alpha males, on the other hand, are really quite a menace. The Dark Triad traits which make them attractive also mean they are shiftless and poor contributors to society, at least for the most part.

Hence the pattern of "Alpha fucks, Beta bucks." Women want to get the Alpha but will, if forced to by circumstances, trade sex to Betas for resources / security.

In that context, female "Betas" would be the low-risk women men settle for reluctantly while "Alphas" would be high-risk women who are highly sought after.

We are looking at genuinely desireable (for men) properties but orthogonal properties in woman.

Can you rephrase? I don't understand what this means.