Jordan Peterson Explains the Gender Paradox - Joe Rogan

Well, I was there, I went to Stockholm twice, Oslo twice, Helsinki twice and Copenhagen once in the last month and spent quite a bit of time. There are many interviews and much discussion about the so-called

gender

paradox

. something very interesting because it has really put their tail in a knot in Scandinavia and that makes sense because the Scandinavians will have to deal with this first because they have come the furthest along the path to making their society

gender

equal, explain that . I don't care, I will, I will, so imagine first that there are two types of equality that you could pursue, one would be equality of opportunity and that would mean that you know that there is a wide range of talents among people.

Regardless of its type, whatever it is, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, there is talent distributed everywhere and it is a kind of truism and I would say a Western truism in the deepest sense that each of the individuals within of those groups must be in a position. where their talents are they are encouraged to manifest those talents partly because that would be good for them spiritually and psychologically, but also because it would be of obvious benefit to the community, right, I mean rare talents that people don't understand, there are many. different types of talent, but in each field it is rare and therefore it is beneficial for everyone to exploit talented people to the maximum possible degree, so even if you are selfish, you should push for equal opportunities because the more people The more interesting things you can have and, hopefully, the more diverse and interesting your life is, the more you can implement equal opportunity policies and the Scandinavians have done that, especially trying to break down barriers for women in the workplace. and for all.

By all standard theories, the Scandinavian countries and places like the Netherlands, Canada and, to a slightly lesser degree, have gone further than any other country in pursuing those policies, and part of the consequence of that is that some many of the differences between men and women have been minimized, so obviously there are many more women in the workplace than there were forty years ago and there are men in many occupations, there is actually a predominance of women, there is a predominance of universities, there is a predominance in health care fields, so women have spilled over into the workplace and hypothetically there are problems with that because it puts a lot of stress on the family structure, but hypothetically that is for the best and because it gives people a wider range of options and gives everyone access to more talent, so also if Look around the world and you will see that one of the best predictors of the likelihood of economic development in developing countries is their attitude towards equal rights for women and it seems causal the more positively the country is predisposed to women's rights. they're more likely to develop economically and maybe that's because that indicates that they're open to new ideas or something or open to transformation, so okay, that's a kind of equality, opening the playing field for everyone. have the opportunity to compete. and cooperate in Lent and on earth wherever they want, but the other kind of equality is equality of outcomes, and that is often described as equity and in today's language, so the ultimate utopia of equity would be to take every job, every conceivable type of job and then stratify it. for every conceivable level of authority within each job and then ensuring that each category of person is represented in precise proportion to their prevalence in the population, so each job should be made up of 50 percent women and 50 percent of men and, say, 13 percent of non-Western people. ethnic minority and whatever it is and then you could break that down and otherwise there is evidence of systemic bias.

Well, the first thing to say about it is that it is impossible and the reason it is impossible is because there is no limit to the number of ways. that you can categorize people into groups so you know about sex, ethnicity and race, maybe those are the most obvious, but now you have gender and then ethnicity, and then there is attractiveness, intelligence, temperament, Height and age and socioeconomic background, I mean, let's say there's 20, but there's a lot more than that. There is no possible way to regulate a society so strictly that each of those groups is equally represented in each of those occupations. at each level of the hierarchy, those are the important ones, men, women and race, yes, but who's to say those are the important ones, that's the other thing, it's not even obvious if they are, because I would say it's one more significant.

It's cognitive ability because it's a much bigger predictor of long-term success in life than sex or race, so I don't even think we've necessarily identified the canonical groups that we just decided are gender and race, although maybe they are the most obvious thing is true, but isn't there a problem? It's just that people don't do it. What they don't do is not assimilate in terms of cognitive capacity. They are not part of a team. They do not integrate. There are people who are sexist, yes, but it is very rare for someone to be elitist in terms of their cognitive ability.

Well, it's hard to say, Joe. I mean, I think one of the reasons lead in the oceans is biased is a better word, I don't know. I mean, you could be right, but look, I think one of the reasons why, if you're here, there's something that actually makes sense now that I'm thinking about it, because it's well, there's one thing that's pretty peculiar about the USA. In that sense, it's as if most working class people, let's say, are much more irritated with the intellectual elite than with the rich elite and that's because they think they could get rich and they could, but they don't think they could. become part of the intellectual elite and it is not obvious to me that the intellectual elite (i.e. those would be the left-liberal types who dominate the media and academia) are particularly positive in their attitudes towards the typical working class person, I think they are prejudiced and elitist, I think that is the case and I think they are also what you would call condescending and I think the typical working class person who voted for Trump is very, very sensitive to that and that is why they are They are much more more worried about the 1% who are the cognitive elite than the 1% who are the economic elite because at least they think it's a game they could play, so anyway it's also because there are caricatures of the 1% of the economic elite. elite, you only think about the people who are in these high positions that control the financial institutions, but the 1% of the intellectually you think in terms of some of the most absurd things that you are hearing in universities now and you save space and oh yeah, there is that - yes, there are also things that there is no good, there is no appreciation on the part of the intellectual elite for the pathologies of rationalism, I mean, there is nothing more stupid than an intelligent person gone wrong, you know, like you.

I can tank I've seen this in my clients, you know frequently, like if I have a particularly intelligent client who has a particularly disordered personality, that's just often it's so difficult it's almost unimaginable because there are, for example, yeah, which is your approach to driving? something like he's super smart but yet his life is completely messed up, well, you know, I usually take a very hands-on approach, as you know, we try to identify because I always start in my therapy practice. I always start with behavioral principles. it's like well, let's see if we can identify some areas that you know through negotiation that are really causing you pain and misery.

You know what is wrong in your life as far as you are concerned and that often requires a lot of discussion. and then we might try to figure out what's causing that and that's often also very difficult to understand because it might be something physical you know you might be sick in some way because depression is a lot of depression is related to the autoimmune system and and anxiety can be a side effect of all kinds of physiological disorders, eating improperly, sleeping poorly or not exercising. He knows enough to stay regulated to try to figure out what's causing it and then he tries to outline some possible solution. that we could both try and then with the smarter ones, you know, they often come up with all kinds of reasons why none of this is going to work or a thousand reasons why it will, well, usually a thousand reasons why none of this will work. this is going to work. this is going to work and with people like this it is sometimes useful to turn to their dreams if they dream because one of the interesting things about dreams is that, although they are difficult to interpret, they never lie and, therefore, sometimes you can take someone who is hyperrational and has a dream and tells you about it and then you can work on an interpretation, which is a complicated matter and the dream will tell you something and it can't be denied, it's like it's a statement of nature, so what are you going to do? do?

You're going to pretend that's not the case, you know, that's often extremely helpful, so, okay, let's get back to the issue of equality, okay, so here's what happened, what psychologists have done and This is what's putting a knot in the tail Scandinavian psychologists have come to a pretty decent agreement on standard personality models, so there's extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness, and they seem pretty stable cross-culturally and all that. It was done by asking thousands of people, hundreds and thousands of people. hundreds of questions and then statistically grouping them together to make it a theoretical card, basically it took computational power and statistics to figure out that this is how traits are grouped, so extroverted people are sociable and happy, and neurotic people experience a good amount of negative emotions, so those are the dimensions of positive and negative emotion, nice people are motherly and unpleasant people are competitive and there is a good difference between men and women.

Conscientious people are obedient, hardworking and orderly and open people are creative, so those are their five basic dimensions. So that has been established and everyone more or less agrees on it now, maybe there are seven dimensions and we have a questionnaire that divides the five into ten and it is called understanding myself, but basically there is a good consensus, consensus, consensus on the five. Well, as soon as you have the five basic traits, you can ask some questions like: Do men and women differ? So what you need to do is just give the questionnaire and you can fill it out yourself or ask other people to fill it out. in his name then and it could be a teacher it could be a you know and that's already been done and what you find is that there are systematic differences between men and women and the biggest differences are that women experience more negative emotions and that and that they are They are nicer than men and this is confirmed by psychiatric evidence because higher levels of negative emotion manifest in depression and anxiety and women are diagnosed with higher levels of depression and anxiety worldwide and with a nicer which is also confirmed in the clinic. literature in a sense medical literature sociomedical literature because unpleasant people are more likely to be imprisoned because it is the best predictor of being imprisoned although it is not a very good predictor and men are imprisoned at a ratio of about 10 to one compared to women and are more likely to be antisocial and have conduct disorders, so personality differences are reflected in the sociomedical literature.

Well, that's how it is now, there are differences, but then the question arises of whether those differences are a consequence of socialization or are they biological and the answer to that. It's complicated because to what extent something is social and to what extent it is biological depends on the social circumstances, so while here is an example, if you have a society where no one has enough to eat and people are starving, then there is an enormous cultural effect on people's intelligence. Let's say it is mediated by economic factors even though it has a certain biological origin, that is famine, so the relationship between biology and cultures is actually partially culturally dependent, which makes it complicated, but in any case , that's how scientists decided to approach this, they thought well.

Why don't we rank countries by how egalitarian their social policies are, something that can be done quite reliably? You know, you put countries where women are second-class citizens at the bottom and you would put the Scandinavian countries at the bottom. At the top, you can get a good reliability between raiders on how you would rate those countries and then look at the magnitude of the differences between men and women based on egalitarian social policies and then you will find out and here is the hypothesis whether the difference is between men, women are mainly social and then,As cultures become more egalitarian, men and women will become more similar.

That is not what happened, but quite the opposite. The more egalitarian this society is and it turns out that the richer this society is because that is also being discovered now, the more different men and women become and, therefore, the differences do not are huge, for example, with kindness, if you took the average man, if you took a typical man and a typical woman from the population just at random and you had to bet that the woman was more aggressive than the man, you would be wrong the 60% of the time, so there is quite a bit of overlap, because you would be right 40% of the time. the moment, but the problem is that a lot of the selection takes place at the extremes, maybe you only care about unpleasant people when they become violent and maybe only one in 50 most unpleasant people is violent and they are all men, so You can have quite a bit of similarity at the average level and big differences at the extremes and the extremes is where people do things like job selection, so the biggest difference that has been discovered between men and women and this is the one that it gets bigger in In Scandinavian countries the interest is that men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people and it's a big difference, it's a full standard deviation and what that means is that If you are a man you should be more interested in people.

Over 85% of men are as interested in people as the 50th percentile woman and you would have to be more interested in things than 85% of women to be as interested in things as the typical man and how do you define yourself? things objects okay, no, no, inanimate things, cars, automobiles, yes, tools, yes, you know, technology, right, STEM fields, because the other thing that has happened is that the more egalitarian society is, the fewer women enter STEM fields, fewer people interested, yes, okay, so-so Now this largely falls apart, it's a hugely politically relevant issue because it means you can't have equal opportunity and equal outcomes at the same time.

At the same time, it is not possible because as society is made more egalitarian, opportunities open up. for equality of outcomes, it increases the difference between men and women and that changes their occupational choice, so if men are more interested in things they are by a substantial margin, then many more of them will be engineers, will they? Wouldn't that be possible? This idea that an imposed model of equality would allow people to be more themselves. I mean, this is almost what you're saying, well, that's the optimistic point of view like "Hello sir, look, it's very funny because the Swedish Foreign Minister told me to go back up." Under the rock that I came out of when I was in Scandinavia because I was describing this, this science, I read that, but I'm not exactly sure why, well, she considers me a misogynist because I think there is because I think because I believe.

I've been presenting evidence that there are genuine differences between men and women, but she should be held accountable for that because it's a frivolous thing to say something that you should have done, especially in a position of power like the one she's in, you should have a very specific argument. that says a leader has something so base to say something so crude, um something so crude to say, crawl under the rock you came here, well, I thought it was a joke about locusts, but I don't think she was the rock. lobsters turn into stones I guess they make the moans, yes, and bigger lobsters have better Rock, that was another very interesting thing in the GQ thing where the woman challenged you on your neurobiology, yes, well, almost almost almost No psychologist understands that serotonin is associated with hierarchies.

It's like a truism that's been known for thirty years, so we definitely come back to it, but I'm very curious about this because this idea of ​​imposed equality guarantees that so much emphasis is placed on one quality. that you have the same number of men, the same number of women and the opportunities are absolutely available to both women and you and this applies, you know, this creates an environment where there is less resistance now in an environment where there is perhaps less resistance women don't feel as compelled to say I'll show you, yes, that's what it seems to have, but this is good, here's a look at EQ, here's an example, so there are fewer female mathematicians in the upper echelon, Okay, but there's something here. interesting about mathematical ability, first of all, it's very rare, so that's the first thing to keep in mind now, it seems that if you look at high school, men with mathematical talent and men and women are approximately as common now that there's a little bit of debate about that because there's some evidence that maybe at the higher ends there's a male advantage just like there's a male disadvantage at the lower end because the male distribution of intelligence might be flatter and that It is the hypothesis of greater male variability in marriage that there have been articles that put forward that that have been retracted as a result of pressure from politically correct people despite the fact that greater merit male variability is actually quite common in the kingdom animal for a variety of reasons males are more expendable than males are more expendable in some ways or one could say that males are more likely to pursue high risk, high return strategies.

You can look at it either way, and in any case, it is certainly possible that the men in high school who were mathematically talented are less likely to also be verbally talented. whereas that doesn't seem to be the case for women, so if you're a male math nerd, then math is a pretty logical path for you because you don't have as many other options, whereas if you're a female math nerd math. you have other options because you are all the less likely to also be verbally talented and that is enough to, at least in principle, explain some of the reasons why there are fewer female mathematicians than male mathematicians. other options have other options and there are many complex reasons like this and that is why we have this reflexive idea and this is very much the case because the central idea among neo-Marxist feminists is that if there are differences in the outcome that is evidence of prejudice and that it's support for the idea of ​​patriarchal tyranny and that's like the central axiom of the radical left is patriarchal tyranny as far as I'm concerned, that's God to them, patriarchal tyranny is like that If it turns out that a lot of these differences in the results between men and women are not a consequence of patriarchal tyranny, in fact, they even increase when the tyrannical aspect of patriarchy and even the patriarchal aspect are reduced, then that theory is formulated.

Not only is it wrong, but it is the opposite of the truth, which is the worst kind of wrong, and therefore, if men are more likely to pursue careers in STEM fields, which appears to be the case under conditions of optimal freedom for men and women, then that goes. to drive income disparities because STEM fields pay more and they pay more partly because they're scalable, like it's really hard to scale caring for people you know, for example, if you work at a daycare, you'll be caring for three babies, not You're going to care about 50 because you can't, it's not scalable, but if you're like a software designer, it's infinitely scalable, so there's a much wider range of possible possibilities to generate much larger income pools and much larger wealth pools. big.

You know, men are also more likely to work longer hours and if you work 10% more hours you make 40% more money, there is a non-linear return, that's good for everyone listening to know if you have a job that do you want to have. the man or woman who works that extra ten percent because the return on that is not linear, so it's really helpful to know that men are more likely to work outdoors, they're more likely to work in dangerous businesses, it's more likely to run full-time businesses rather than part-time businesses and more likely to move in pursuit of their career goals, all of which contribute to the differences in mangu BER drivers: they earn seven percent more money because they drive faster so and so anyway this is not good high return problems it's an already common male pattern it's more risk there's more risk in us so there's more return as long as you don't get hurt well and I think that's a A fairly common male pattern is there is more risk and there is more return, as long as you don't get hurt.

The problem seems to be when these things are discussed in any way, romanticizing or glorifying male behavior or putting some emphasis on that there is a positive aspect to many things that Think of something negative like aggression or ambition or yeah or competition, yeah, well, The competition between men is excellent. Competition between men and women is often considered cruel mm-hmm, yes, well, yes, and there is a certain reason for that. Also, because obviously physical competition is easy to border on cruel, that's why we're sure we were talking before the show that instead of calling people men and women when they refer to likes, because there's a very disturbing trend in my opinion. of transgender women participating in these competitions now with women who are biologically female, you know, and they dominate them, yes, and that instead of calling people men and women, let's ignore you, you could be a woman, yes, you can be a man or a woman, that is your choice and you can change it whenever you want, so you are a man or a woman and that is your choice, but we are going to have a new rule which is that if you have an XY chromosome, then you are an X Y person or a person X X. so if you are a person X Can't you engage in physical combat? with XS, that's right, XY z... they can't hit the x axis, how is that?

And maybe they can't run in competitions against them and maybe they can't play tennis against them, not within them and maybe that's just reasonable.