Change My Mind Series

Discussion in 'Off Topic Area' started by Pretty In Pink, Jun 25, 2018.

  1. SWC Sifu Ben

    SWC Sifu Ben I am the law

    I'm following the research from several decades which when taken as a whole shows a tendency for men and women to be attracted to different factors more toward reproduction and survival respectively.

    Remind me again how complete and ancient a science genetics is?

    I'll bust out my time machine and give you an exact date when two-hominids "loved each other very much."

    And modern beauty is quite different to prehistoric beauty but the human brain is an amazing thing.

    Your whole argument against evo-psych was basically that artificial social structures have existed for a few thousand years and therefore common attributes for sexual selection across cultures (like waist to hip ratio for example) and which therefore likely evolved before the presence of those structures, are somehow invalid. I think at this point even if I presented all the data, which would probably take at least a month to pull together even if I still had access to University resources, you'd reject it. So I don't think this line of argument is going to go anywhere.
     
  2. SWC Sifu Ben

    SWC Sifu Ben I am the law

    Are unicorns purple?
    Is president Obama hitler reincarnated?
    Does Deadpool have a cure for cancer hidden under his bed?
    Is it easier to throw questions at people so you seem smart rather than make actual statements yourself?
     
  3. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    I think you should read more of that site, and more on the subject in general.

    It was a lack of regulation and trade unionism that depressed wages, not market saturation.
     
  4. SWC Sifu Ben

    SWC Sifu Ben I am the law

    So more market freedom because of less interventionary forces led to a devaluation in a profession where there was an oversaturation of a particular skill among 50% of the population. You really just made my point about market forces for me David.
     
  5. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    Except you haven't given any evidence of over saturation. Sweated labour seamstress was only one of many jobs performed by women, and it was common because it was always in demand. Women could be paid less because of a lack of regulation and unionisation in piece work and sweated labour. If you read some of the legislation brought in to combat the exploitation of women and children in the labour market you would see the arguments for the necessity of regulation. Regulation also brought down prices, because factories were more efficient than piece work. Regulation of markets raising wages and lowering prices at the same time... who would have thought it possible?!
     
  6. SWC Sifu Ben

    SWC Sifu Ben I am the law

    It was literally the first thing I did in referencing that site.

    Let me rephrase that for you: With a more free market a market with an overabundance of women able to do the work they were paid at market value instead of an artificially constrained value.

    And now let's bring this back into the present. My female coworkers who are in the same company, doing the same job, under the same market constraints, are paid the same wage. And that statistically holds across the board. Go figure!
     
  7. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    No, you just demonstrated that it was a common skill, not that the market was saturated with seamstresses employed in sweated labour.

    That's not too far off saying that African American slaves picking cotton were paid at market value instead of an artificially constrained value.

    Except you said that they weren't doing the same job, you said they were treated better:

     
    Last edited: Jul 4, 2018
  8. SWC Sifu Ben

    SWC Sifu Ben I am the law

    Yes, an incredibly common skill will be devalued because it is so common. Queue the example about burger flipping.

    Yep, completely free market. Now I'm not saying that's a good thing but that's a far cry from someone not being paid the same to work at McDonalds as to do brain surgery. I long for the days of a 100% post scarcity society where anyone can have anything they want for free, but until we get there some things will be worth more than other things as will some jobs.

    I suppose that's my male privilege at work, being paid the same to be treated worse.
     
  9. Pretty In Pink

    Pretty In Pink Moved on MAP 2017 Gold Award

    What's that one about 50 Shades of Grey? If the setting was a caravan park rather than a million dollar penthouse suite the story would be very different? Something like that. (Also it's just an anecdotal joke, I don't believe it one way or the other because my girlfriend loves me like crazy and honestly she loves me for me)
     
  10. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    This one is hilarious.

    Three main points:

    Crowder says that the US is the only country with constitutionally protected freedom of speech. This is not true, as the European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of expression and information, and so is protected in every EU nation. The US and the EU both have restrictions on free speech, but the main positive for Crowder is that you're allowed to incite racial hatred in the US.

    Crowder also lies to the last man's face when he says that all healthcare outcomes are better for the US. The man says he's seen statistics that say otherwise and Crowder simply tells him he's wrong. He's not; cancer is the only healthcare outcome with lower mortality rates than average comparable countries: How do mortality rates in the U.S. compare to other countries? - Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker
    Crowder also says that private is always better than government, but the amount of money spent for resultant health outcomes looks like terrible value for money to me.

    Crowder says that wages in the US are the highest in the world, which isn't true. They are right up there, but median wages do not account for the amount of poverty in a country, especially when it has an economy so reliant on illegal immigrants who don't show up on the books.

    More stats showing the US to not be superior to every other nation on the planet: The US has a lot of money, but it does not look like a developed country

     
  11. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    Tendency to be attracted = / = adaptation. I'd rather spend my time on a yacht than a trailer, but that doesn't necessarily translate to an adaptation.

    So you don't have any data and instead are trying to insist that it's out there somewhere? Yeah huh.

    And that's a great argument for the social conditioning of beauty rather than it being completely biological.

    Waist to hip ratio I can buy. We've got biology going on there and there's a correlation with fecundity. Wealth? Not a correlation to fecundity - plenty of rich people have few offspring. Plenty of poor people have numerous offspring. No real biological markers to talk about - it's not like your ring finger grows longer as your stock portfolio expands. You've presented no data whatsoever to support your view, simply said 'well it makes sense dunnit?' and demonstrated one of the fallacies most associated with evo-psych, namely, the idea that everything is an adaptation.
     
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  12. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    I was listening to a discussion P.Z. Myers had about evolutionary psychology and the fallacy of adaptationist reasoning (the idea that everything is an adaptation and all behaviors are adaptive) and he was discussing the primacy people place on sexual selection within evo psych. One of the things he noted going through pedigrees of people was that nearly everyone wound up with a spouse. That's been my experience too. Most of my friends have had a few girlfriends by age 30 and, were we living in a hunter gatherer society with no methods of preventing it, likely would have conceived of a child by now.
     
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  13. SWC Sifu Ben

    SWC Sifu Ben I am the law

    The tendency itself is an adaptive. Wider hips for birthing is an adaptation. Being attracted to women with that characteristic is adaptive.

    I'm suggesting that going "show me the gene for that" in a complex system when studying genetics is essentially in its infancy is like asking someone to show you the mechanism for gravity when they claim things fall down and have just discovered the microscope.

    Emphasis mine. Hoisted by your own qualifier, to turn a phrase.

    Of course intelligence denoted by cranial capacity, ability to walk upright, opposable thumbs, none of those have any correlation now to reproductive fitness therefore there's no way it could impact reproductive success, right? And because it's not a factor now it certainly was never a factor at any point in our history. And no evolutionary trait in human history was ever carried forward......right?

    I've not posted what I recall to be several hundred studies and connected them together by essentially writing a book on the subject in a post, nor shall I ever do any such time-intensive thing on any topic unless I'm being paid by a publisher. And since you dismiss evo-psych as a field and are basically arguing that data about differing attraction between the sexes is irrelevant then there's really no point in me offering anything up because you'll dismiss it out of hand anyway. I suppose we never evolved anything behavioural at all...

    I didn't suggest that everything is an adaptation but to act as though nothing is an adaptation is stupid.
     
  14. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    Again, show your work. How is being rich an adaptation? What trait are women selecting for when they look for rich men?

    Yet that's a precondition for calling something adaptive. It's gotta be genetic. It's gotta result in superior reproductive success. It's not simply a matter of being attractive.

    Nobody hoists my qualifier but me.

    You're playing fast and loose with being rich and biological traits. Do you believe that being rich is a heritable biological trait like having opposable thumbs?

    The fact that some behaviors and tendencies are evolved does not support your claim that this behavior or tendency is evolved. You haven't posted one study supporting your point of view, acting as if I'm demanding hundreds is silly.

    What's the biological correlate for being rich? What differential reproductive success do rich people enjoy?
     
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  15. SWC Sifu Ben

    SWC Sifu Ben I am the law

    Hmmm, what possible survival value could more resources/power/strength/etc. offer either a primitive or a modern human? Jeez this one is really hard to figure out. I suppose resources and power really offer no benefit compared to not having them.

    In a word, many. If you have someone who wins soccer games you're not necessarily sizing up their muscle tissue or hand-eye coordination, but you have a metric to judge that they have a host of qualities which leads to an optimal outcome. If an early human male has access to more resources it doesn't matter whether he's accrued them by strength, cunning, etc. Possession is 9/10ths of the mating display.

    No, it's not. It's a very broad assertion and requires a significant amount of data. No single study is enough support for the idea that men select for reproductive value and women select for survival value. If I posted even a handful of studies you could dismiss them offhand and I'm not pulling together a massive amount of research on human mating.
     
  16. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    Where is the evidence that shows trading stocks or being a celebrity defence lawyer is related in any way to behavioural adaptations accrued in the palaeolithic period?

    The assumption that those at the top of modern society would be the at the top of hunter gatherer packs sounds like the kind of nonsense prevalent on 1980's trading floors and in self-help books for making it in the corporate world.

    The way society is structured, particularly inherited wealth, cushions these people from competition, and has done so for many of the wealthiest families for centuries.
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2018
  17. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    You keep asserting this, but those attributes are decoupled from reproduction in human society. Do you have data to support the idea that wealthy individuals have greater reproductive success, or is that just an assertion?

    So are those traits attractive independent of being wealthy/being a soccer player? My guess is yes. In which case it's not the wealth that's attracting women at all. My guess is that wealth is attractive to people independent of biology because people like nice things. My guess is that the traits under discussion are also independent of being wealthy.

    [​IMG]

    This does not look like the pinnacle of human fitness.

    Translation: I don't know what I'm talking about and can't support any of it. Very good, carry on.
     
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  18. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    It's honestly unbelievable to me that these just so stories are taken seriously by people.
     
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  19. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    I can understand people believing them, as they do have a kind of folk wisdom about them, but people who call themselves scientists peddling them is galling.
     
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  20. SWC Sifu Ben

    SWC Sifu Ben I am the law

    They may be in a very, very recent portion of human evolution but we also retain traits and behaviours which we developed far earlier, which is why I keep using the words "more resources" and I think you're trying to constrain the discussion to a relatively modern period by using the terms "wealthy" and "rich."

    Do I have data to support the fact that individuals occupying higher places in society and having more resources are more likely to provide better nutrition for their children, or less likely to have them conscripted, or that they have a buffer against times of shortage and therefore less likely to die of starvation? That's a really easy one to answer.

    Wealth is a tangible marker of success and a heuristic for judging other markers of survival fitness and while you've been so obsessively focused on the idea of "wealth" and "riches," which I think are poor terms for this discussion anyway, you missed my point about it being about survival characteristics, not just resources, and certainly not only modern wealth like money.

    And I guess bower birds build bowers because they just "like pretty arrangements."

    Give the man who entirely missed my point a cigar.

    Oh lookie, a human who exists after the bulk of human evolution.

    Better translation, I can't be bothered to spend a month and a half pulling together various studies and essentially writing a book for you while you act sanctimonious because I'm unwilling to put in that level of work for a discussion on an internet forum.

    Voracious drive to the top is the same regardless of how it's expressed.

    Didn't say they would. You, like philosoraptor and possibly because of his obsessive focus on one tiny part of my argument. are really missing my point here though.

    It's almost like it has immense value and utility when it comes to survival...
     

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