Everything you have seen has been an illusion
I think for a long time there was an assumption that men were the proper human beings and women were sort of an inferior copy; and the question was: Could women be almost as good as men? Then there was a brief period of arguing that there were no differences, that they were equal. But since about 1980 almost all the literature on gender differences either says women are better or some say there are still no differences. But it’s become sort of taboo to see men as superior in any way. I look at things as the world is more built on tradeoffs, and any lasting difference is likely to be because of a tradeoff. So, being better at one thing is likely to be connected to being not as good at something else. (…)
A lot of people argue that women are more social than men. What are some of the other dimensions that women are allegedly superior to men in tradeoffs? Being more social is an important one. I think being less aggressive and competitive and all those things. I think there’s just general assumption that it would be better if men were more like women, and the Psychology of Men’s groups and the American Psychological Association say that there’s a lot of assumptions that men should change to be more like women. More empathetic, express themselves better, show their feelings, cry more–those sort of things. (…)
My sense is we really have changed the way we bring up children. It’s a much more girl-centered environment. I don’t have as much contact with the schools, but my wife goes there and so on, and she says: It seems like with each decision they have to make, if there’s one way that’s better for boys and one better for girls, they feel like it would be sexist to do the way that’s better for boys, so they just do the way that’s better for girls. Over and over all those decisions get made like that; and especially girls are more desired as students there; they mature a little bit faster. (…) Women generally run the schools and they are making the decisions; and the girls are the better students. And they are trying quite earnestly to be fair to both, but each time it seems, well, we should do it the way that’s better for girls. So, we end up kind of raising our boys like girls, which is probably not going to produce the best results. (…)
The real experts on intelligence come in and say: Well, in adulthood there is a tiny difference; that the male is slightly higher than the female. In measured IQ tests? On IQ tests. But it’s such a small difference as to be trivial. The more meaningful difference is the greater difference at the extremes. My sense is it goes with the difference rates of reproduction. In essence, males are nature’s way of rolling the dice, because if you think of it constantly experimenting, to try a new variation or a new mutation, most of those experiments will turn out badly. Every so often you will have one that turns out well and moves the species forward. So, you want the bad ones to be flushed out of the gene pool right away and not reproduce. Whereas you want the good ones to reproduce a lot. And male reproductive variance is like that. In other words, some men have no children at all, and some men have a lot of children. Whereas women tend to cluster in the middle. Relatively few women throughout history have had no children at all. Certainly fewer women than men have gone childless.
