You edited your comment into something I can more clearly reply to, so I retracted my original response. Thanks!
It’s not unfair to think that I’m reasoning about stereotypes here because stereotypes often reflect common behavioral patterns. I didn’t give must justifications because to me these patterns seem obvious.
I don’t claim that they are universal patterns, though. Like all patterns, this is rather fuzzy. I offer something more like an 80⁄20 explanation of differences in male/female motivation. There will of course be counter examples because humans are complex systems that are difficult to predict, so at best I can point to the category of things we call “men” and “women” and talk about the behaviors that are frequently associated with them.
I mostly offer an evolutionary explanation (which is not strictly the same thing as a biological one) because I think it’s the source of the difference. The full context of how someone meets the world obviously comes in to play here, though notably it’ll be influenced heavily by the biological and cultural conditions created by evolutionary processes. This helps explain why there are so many counter examples: individuals have life histories that create many opportunities to introduce variation, though I think not so much variation that the pattern disappears and the theory holds no explanatory power.
Thanks for the answer! Appreciate you recognize these as stereotypes. I also may unconsciously believed that being more general is less rude than being more specific, but it creates more confusion. I have a couple levels of comments (if I accidentally posted this before finished, it could be an error as I was in and out between meetings.)
That is, men are more willing than women to trade off safety to earn respect and women are more willing than men to trade off respect to increase safety.
First of all, what I take as “safety” and “respect” do not belong to the same dimension. Respect is something everyone want and need, and it is independent of how much “safety” a person want. Any human without respect feels not a human. From your context, I would think by “respect” you probably meant something else as “validation” or “admiration” or even “authority”/”power”. The safety-respect trade-off seems to be best along the lines of “risk-averse” vs “risk-taking”.
To wit, women can only reproduce if they are alive.
...it helps to understand that women don’t share their same strong drive for respect.
On above first quote: they can also kill themselves/the baby if they do not want to reproduce but was forced to. On the above second quote, it is a wrong claim to me, as women share the same strong drive for “respect”.
Following from the previous paragraphs, with the new definition of “risk-averse” vs “risk-taking”—are there correlations with gender? That I am also not sure about based on my experience, and need to do some additional research and experiments. But what I know as a fact, is that there is no causal relationship. Therefore, I generally have problems with claims that could imply causal relationships. This will be enhancing bias and stereotypes about not only the opposite sex but your own sex/in yourself. It is almost how people enjoy constellation reading sometimes, where the more you read something about “your group and their associated traits”, the more you try to fit to that description unconsciously, and the more you feel descriptions may be accurate. The causal factor here is—how is this person raised? This could also be quite situational, as opposed to a fixed preference.
I mostly offer an evolutionary explanation (which is not strictly the same thing as a biological one) because I think it’s the source of the difference.
I agree with evolutionary explanation is different with biological explanation, but the source of that evolution seems still to be biological. And I personally believe that we as humans have developed far beyond our animal instincts, so evolutionary/biological arguments might not be a good source of explanation, though could be a side one, conditional on if it is explained properly (following up with how things have changed/humans have developed).
Further, it seems you are extrapolating this to dating context, which would be good to be separated out. Dating preferences is also quite different among people, at least those who have seriously explored themselves (as opposed to following what the societies impose on them).
It’s not unfair to think that I’m reasoning about stereotypes here because stereotypes often reflect common behavioral patterns. I didn’t give must justifications because to me these patterns seem obvious.
Reasoning about stereotypes and believing in certain stereotypes versus another could mean it is something about the person who is exhibiting the stereotypes, not necessarily the stereotyped group themselves (opinions vs truth). Overall, this also echoes back to avoid making simple/surface level claims.
Another layer is “want” vs “being forced to”. Historically for example, women were not able to participate in lots of activities, and were educated to not take risks (though times have already changed with lots of efforts and reforms, that I hope is not going to be gone in a second given recent events). These are explicit and implicit restrictions societies has put on certain types of populations.
Finally, I have a ton of anecdotes to share on all points written above that may help understanding, but still debating on if I should.
There’s a lot in your reply. I’ll start a thread addressing just one point for now, and can come back to more later once we finish talking about this one (depending on my time and energy for doing that).
First of all, what I take as “safety” and “respect” do not belong to the same dimension. Respect is something everyone want and need, and it is independent of how much “safety” a person want. Any human without respect feels not a human. From your context, I would think by “respect” you probably meant something else as “validation” or “admiration” or even “authority”/”power”. The safety-respect trade-off seems to be best along the lines of “risk-averse” vs “risk-taking”.
All goals can be traded off against each other, even if they are not directly competing goals, because each person has finite resources (time, energy, etc.) to pursue them, so the tradeoff happens at the level of “how much time, energy, etc. am I going to put in to getting more safety, respect, etc.”. And my claim is that men put more effort into getting respect than women, and women put more effort into getting safety.
Now sometimes there are direct tradeoffs, like @Cole Wyeth mentioned in this comment about UFC fights. In fact, men frequently take on dangerous jobs because it earns them respect. Big game hunting was perhaps the original dangerous job for humans, as was war. In modern times men do things like risk their financial safety for a shot at high variance gains.
Women of course sometimes do these things, but on the whole men engage in more risk taking behavior that will help them earn respect than women do (men also show a general willingness to take more risks, but this doesn’t make sense by itself unless there is something to gain, like respect, from risk taking).
Conversely, women take fewer risks and less seek respect. For example, more women work in professions than men where outsized gains are impossible but they can also expect steady employment. They won’t get lots of respect as an individual as a nurse, paralegal, etc. (though they may be respect as a member of a group because the group is respected), but they will get a lot of safety in knowing they can always do the job. We also see similar patterns in how women seek mates (they mostly prefer men who are reliable to men who are taking big risks (which means women much prefer men who have taken risks in the past and already won to men who will continue to take risks and have no yet made it)), choose friends, pick vacations, etc.
Yeah I have a lot (that’s why in the first place I don’t really know where to start.)
Now sometimes there are direct tradeoffs, like @Cole Wyeth mentioned in this comment about UFC fights. In fact, men frequently take on dangerous jobs because it earns them respect. Big game hunting was perhaps the original dangerous job for humans, as was war. In modern times men do things like risk their financial safety for a shot at high variance gains
men frequently take on dangerous jobs because it earns them respect
Besides the definition that I disagree on respect, I also disagree even if that word is replaced by “validation”. Whether people choose to do something according to social approval or not is independent of gender. The problem is what society consider as socially approvable behavior for certain groups. If as a society people approve men to be more prudent in taking risks, are you saying men still “want” to take risks? In other words the point I am getting at is, if for women, the socially approvable behavior is to take less risks, and for men the socially approvable behavior is to take more risks, then for a women and a men who choose to conform to these expectations, they are both asking for validation.
They won’t get lots of respect as an individual as a nurse, paralegal, etc
To clarify: what you mean by individually nurse and paralegal are respected? You seem to have an assumption that more risks means more “respect” which is circling back to my disagreement on the definition.
All people, if they can, want to thrive, granted if they are able to. For example, RBG need to fight for a lot of cases where schools do not admit women, or west point do not admit women. “Want” is a way too strong of a word. I would suggest something more along the lines of “historically women may be forced to pursue more risk averse options for reasons xxxx during time period A to Z, and this need to change”, if “women ending up in more risk averse options” is true for some time A to Z.
(I have a bit more to say as well but will probably come back to this later).
Besides the definition that I disagree on respect, I also disagree even if that word is replaced by “validation”. Whether people choose to do something according to social approval or not is independent of gender. The problem is what society consider as socially approvable behavior for certain groups. If as a society people approve men to be more prudent in taking risks, are you saying men still “want” to take risks? In other words the point I am getting at is, if for women, the socially approvable behavior is to take less risks, and for men the socially approvable behavior is to take more risks, then for a women and a men who choose to conform to these expectations, they are both asking for validation.
Yes, it seems you have some idea about what “respect” means that’s the source of the disagreement. I think you are somehow failing to grasp the full nature of respect and keep looking at it in narrow ways (or that’s how I would classify what’s happening).
It doesn’t mean the same thing as “validation” because “validation” is more generic. A woman might be validated by the acceptance of her friends. A man might be validated by the respect he receives from others.
I’m not sure how much help I can be here. Dictionaries don’t do a great job of explaining all the nuance of what the word “respect” means or what it means in the context of this post. It’s a word that points to a kind of status acknowledgement between people. I didn’t mean any of this to be complicated. If you are missing some intuition for what I mean by “respect” that’s a bit outside the scope of what I wanted to write here (I’m not saying it’s wrong to not share my intuition, just that I probably don’t have time or energy to teach the intuition that most readers seem to share with me.).
I unfortunately had the same feeling that you had the concept of respect wrong, and lacking of the understanding of the underlying social aspect of risk averse vs risk taking in this post, and felt didn’t have enough time yet to educate. Sorry for the bluntness.
I could only maybe say—as a woman I could try to say is we want basic respect (which any decent human should get), impact, power, authority, influence, winning, fights, adventures, becoming better versions of oneself as much as non-woman, but if you as non-women and strongly believe that’s not true I am not sure how much better I could approach the problem/dispute. (As you hinted in the post you might be overestimating how much you know about the population you are making a claim on.)
You edited your comment into something I can more clearly reply to, so I retracted my original response. Thanks!
It’s not unfair to think that I’m reasoning about stereotypes here because stereotypes often reflect common behavioral patterns. I didn’t give must justifications because to me these patterns seem obvious.
I don’t claim that they are universal patterns, though. Like all patterns, this is rather fuzzy. I offer something more like an 80⁄20 explanation of differences in male/female motivation. There will of course be counter examples because humans are complex systems that are difficult to predict, so at best I can point to the category of things we call “men” and “women” and talk about the behaviors that are frequently associated with them.
I mostly offer an evolutionary explanation (which is not strictly the same thing as a biological one) because I think it’s the source of the difference. The full context of how someone meets the world obviously comes in to play here, though notably it’ll be influenced heavily by the biological and cultural conditions created by evolutionary processes. This helps explain why there are so many counter examples: individuals have life histories that create many opportunities to introduce variation, though I think not so much variation that the pattern disappears and the theory holds no explanatory power.
Thanks for the answer! Appreciate you recognize these as stereotypes. I also may unconsciously believed that being more general is less rude than being more specific, but it creates more confusion. I have a couple levels of comments (if I accidentally posted this before finished, it could be an error as I was in and out between meetings.)
First of all, what I take as “safety” and “respect” do not belong to the same dimension. Respect is something everyone want and need, and it is independent of how much “safety” a person want. Any human without respect feels not a human. From your context, I would think by “respect” you probably meant something else as “validation” or “admiration” or even “authority”/”power”. The safety-respect trade-off seems to be best along the lines of “risk-averse” vs “risk-taking”.
On above first quote: they can also kill themselves/the baby if they do not want to reproduce but was forced to. On the above second quote, it is a wrong claim to me, as women share the same strong drive for “respect”.
Following from the previous paragraphs, with the new definition of “risk-averse” vs “risk-taking”—are there correlations with gender? That I am also not sure about based on my experience, and need to do some additional research and experiments. But what I know as a fact, is that there is no causal relationship. Therefore, I generally have problems with claims that could imply causal relationships. This will be enhancing bias and stereotypes about not only the opposite sex but your own sex/in yourself. It is almost how people enjoy constellation reading sometimes, where the more you read something about “your group and their associated traits”, the more you try to fit to that description unconsciously, and the more you feel descriptions may be accurate. The causal factor here is—how is this person raised? This could also be quite situational, as opposed to a fixed preference.
I agree with evolutionary explanation is different with biological explanation, but the source of that evolution seems still to be biological. And I personally believe that we as humans have developed far beyond our animal instincts, so evolutionary/biological arguments might not be a good source of explanation, though could be a side one, conditional on if it is explained properly (following up with how things have changed/humans have developed).
Further, it seems you are extrapolating this to dating context, which would be good to be separated out. Dating preferences is also quite different among people, at least those who have seriously explored themselves (as opposed to following what the societies impose on them).
Reasoning about stereotypes and believing in certain stereotypes versus another could mean it is something about the person who is exhibiting the stereotypes, not necessarily the stereotyped group themselves (opinions vs truth). Overall, this also echoes back to avoid making simple/surface level claims.
Another layer is “want” vs “being forced to”. Historically for example, women were not able to participate in lots of activities, and were educated to not take risks (though times have already changed with lots of efforts and reforms, that I hope is not going to be gone in a second given recent events). These are explicit and implicit restrictions societies has put on certain types of populations.
Finally, I have a ton of anecdotes to share on all points written above that may help understanding, but still debating on if I should.
There’s a lot in your reply. I’ll start a thread addressing just one point for now, and can come back to more later once we finish talking about this one (depending on my time and energy for doing that).
All goals can be traded off against each other, even if they are not directly competing goals, because each person has finite resources (time, energy, etc.) to pursue them, so the tradeoff happens at the level of “how much time, energy, etc. am I going to put in to getting more safety, respect, etc.”. And my claim is that men put more effort into getting respect than women, and women put more effort into getting safety.
Now sometimes there are direct tradeoffs, like @Cole Wyeth mentioned in this comment about UFC fights. In fact, men frequently take on dangerous jobs because it earns them respect. Big game hunting was perhaps the original dangerous job for humans, as was war. In modern times men do things like risk their financial safety for a shot at high variance gains.
Women of course sometimes do these things, but on the whole men engage in more risk taking behavior that will help them earn respect than women do (men also show a general willingness to take more risks, but this doesn’t make sense by itself unless there is something to gain, like respect, from risk taking).
Conversely, women take fewer risks and less seek respect. For example, more women work in professions than men where outsized gains are impossible but they can also expect steady employment. They won’t get lots of respect as an individual as a nurse, paralegal, etc. (though they may be respect as a member of a group because the group is respected), but they will get a lot of safety in knowing they can always do the job. We also see similar patterns in how women seek mates (they mostly prefer men who are reliable to men who are taking big risks (which means women much prefer men who have taken risks in the past and already won to men who will continue to take risks and have no yet made it)), choose friends, pick vacations, etc.
Yeah I have a lot (that’s why in the first place I don’t really know where to start.)
I have replied to this from the DM with Cole, and posted below. See the comment here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jhrWnxYkoZPxMZMj/women-want-safety-men-want-respect?commentId=TvjJd2gKfewbR6v8a
Besides the definition that I disagree on respect, I also disagree even if that word is replaced by “validation”. Whether people choose to do something according to social approval or not is independent of gender. The problem is what society consider as socially approvable behavior for certain groups. If as a society people approve men to be more prudent in taking risks, are you saying men still “want” to take risks? In other words the point I am getting at is, if for women, the socially approvable behavior is to take less risks, and for men the socially approvable behavior is to take more risks, then for a women and a men who choose to conform to these expectations, they are both asking for validation.
To clarify: what you mean by individually nurse and paralegal are respected? You seem to have an assumption that more risks means more “respect” which is circling back to my disagreement on the definition.
All people, if they can, want to thrive, granted if they are able to. For example, RBG need to fight for a lot of cases where schools do not admit women, or west point do not admit women. “Want” is a way too strong of a word. I would suggest something more along the lines of “historically women may be forced to pursue more risk averse options for reasons xxxx during time period A to Z, and this need to change”, if “women ending up in more risk averse options” is true for some time A to Z.
(I have a bit more to say as well but will probably come back to this later).
Yes, it seems you have some idea about what “respect” means that’s the source of the disagreement. I think you are somehow failing to grasp the full nature of respect and keep looking at it in narrow ways (or that’s how I would classify what’s happening).
It doesn’t mean the same thing as “validation” because “validation” is more generic. A woman might be validated by the acceptance of her friends. A man might be validated by the respect he receives from others.
I’m not sure how much help I can be here. Dictionaries don’t do a great job of explaining all the nuance of what the word “respect” means or what it means in the context of this post. It’s a word that points to a kind of status acknowledgement between people. I didn’t mean any of this to be complicated. If you are missing some intuition for what I mean by “respect” that’s a bit outside the scope of what I wanted to write here (I’m not saying it’s wrong to not share my intuition, just that I probably don’t have time or energy to teach the intuition that most readers seem to share with me.).
I unfortunately had the same feeling that you had the concept of respect wrong, and lacking of the understanding of the underlying social aspect of risk averse vs risk taking in this post, and felt didn’t have enough time yet to educate. Sorry for the bluntness.
I could only maybe say—as a woman I could try to say is we want basic respect (which any decent human should get), impact, power, authority, influence, winning, fights, adventures, becoming better versions of oneself as much as non-woman, but if you as non-women and strongly believe that’s not true I am not sure how much better I could approach the problem/dispute. (As you hinted in the post you might be overestimating how much you know about the population you are making a claim on.)