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lucidfox comments on Ask and Guess - Less Wrong Discussion

68 [deleted] 01 December 2010 05:54PM

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Comment author: lucidfox 02 December 2010 07:44:08AM *  9 points [-]

Things women and men tend to do in unmixed groups, respectively.

[Citation needed]!

Comment author: Ferd 03 December 2010 04:37:50AM *  -2 points [-]

You can't think war isn't gendered, or that women as a group have trouble understanding that money can be exchanged for goods and services. You probably don't think I'd be really attached to the ideas in one dashed-off post that's full of holes.

And I hope you don't think that the first thing you should do, when you run across a new concept, is to go find sources to justify any associations it might trigger.

So what are you really objecting to?

ETA: Seriously. I'd like to know.

Comment author: lucidfox 03 December 2010 08:04:32AM 6 points [-]

I'm objecting to hasty generalizations and hasty conflation of unrelated concepts.

War is probably gendered - I suspect it stems from physical disparities that have existed since the hunter-gatherer times. But how on Earth does asking correspond to war, as opposed to diplomacy?

or that women as a group have trouble understanding that money can be exchanged for goods and services

Replace "women" with "men" or "humans", and the statement remains valid. So why emphasize women?

Comment author: HughRistik 03 December 2010 08:50:55AM 5 points [-]

War is probably gendered - I suspect it stems from physical disparities that have existed since the hunter-gatherer times.

We had a discussion in one of the evolutionary psychology threads about sexual selection that relates to this question. Rather than males fighting more because of physical sexual dimorphism, David Geary argues that it started the other way around: there is physical sexual dimorphism because there was more selection pressure on men to fight each other.