Joe Rogan & Jordan Peterson - Are Men and Women More Similar or Different?

I guess the other reason that people are on my case to some degree is because I have made a strong case, which I think is fully documented by the scientific literature, that there are intrinsic differences, say, between men and women. And I think the evidence in that, this is the thing that staggered me, is that no serious scientists have debated that for like four decades. That argument was done by the time I went to graduate school. Everyone knew that human beings were not a blank slate, that biological forces parameterized the way that we thought and felt and acted and valued. Everyone knew that. The fact that this has become somehow debatable again is just, especially because it's being done by legislative fiat. They're forcing it. To me as a scientist, it's just, well, in the States too, with Title IX, for example, because Title IX is sort of predicated on that viewpoint. What is Title IX? Oh, Title IX was originally just a piece of legislation that mandated that female sports teams were funded to the same degree that male sports teams were funded in the American universities. But it's been expanded out so that if there's any differences in any areas whatsoever between the genders, then the universities are being taken to court. And like 200 of them, I mean, last I looked, about 200 of them were up, and they can have their funding revoked if they violate the Title IX provisions. So it's become like a vicious weapon for social justice warrior equality of outcome types. So it's not just about sports? No, it's got way, way beyond that. Yeah, it's become an equality of outcome issue fundamentally. There was an article that I sent you. One of them was from, I think, I got it off of dig.com, but it was Jordan Peterson is having his moment, and we should ignore him. I sent this to you, and there was one part of it. It's probably, the last part of that might be true. One of the things in the article was citing this study that showed very little difference between men and women. Oh, yeah, I read that damn study. Oh, God, it's a pathetic study. Yeah, I sent it to you because I was like, this is not right. Well, the thing is, like most things, it's complicated. Yes. So are men and women more similar or more different? Well, it depends on how you define the terms first. But they're more similar. Well, why? Well, they're the same species. So we could start with that. But the question is, what are the differences, and how do they manifest themselves, and are those manifestations important? So here's an example. If you took a random woman out of the population and a random man, and you had to bet on who was more temperamentally aggressive, if you bet on the man, you'd be right 60% of the time. But you'd be wrong 40% of the time. And that's not a walloping difference, right? 60-40. It's not 90-10. So there's a lot of overlap between men and women in terms of their levels of aggression. And you think, well, they're more the same. Yeah, except. So then let's say, no, no, let's play a slightly different game. Let's pick the one in 100 most aggressive person from the random population. Well, they're all men. And that's why all the people in prison are men. So even though, on average, men and women... Most. Well, yeah, it's 90-95%. And often if the women are in prison, it's because they got tangled up with a really bad guy. So one of the problems is that differences at the extreme are where the differences really start to manifest themselves. And so you can have a small difference at the level of the average, but out at the extremes, it starts to make a massive difference. So let's say to be a Google engineer, which is hard, right? Because not only you have to be an engineer, but you have to be a very good engineer. Say, well, you have to be interested in things rather than people. That's a huge difference in interest. Like men are more interested in things, generally speaking, and women are more interested in people, generally speaking. Now, there's still a lot of overlap between them, but that's one of the biggest differences between men and women. It's been demonstrated cross-culturally. It's also a very big difference in the Scandinavian countries. Well, on average, the difference isn't that great, even though it's a relatively large difference. But at the extremes, it's the same thing. Almost all the people are hyper... what would you call hyper-focused on things. They're almost all men. And all the people who are hyper-focused on people are almost all women. And so how does that play out in the world? Well, in the Scandinavian countries, it plays out this way. About 85% of nurses in Scandinavia are female, and about 85 to 90% of engineers are male. It doesn't mean women can't be engineers. It doesn't mean men can't be nurses. It also doesn't have anything to do with intelligence, but it does have to do with interest, and the differences in interest are big. Now, at the extremes in particular. So when you read a review like that, the one that was pointed out, the first question is, well, what do you mean by big and little? There's more overlap between men and women than there is difference, on virtually every parameter. Okay, fine. Are the remaining differences significant in how they play out in the world? And the answer to that is overwhelmingly significant, because you select for extremes. So here's another example. Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 115. So in the typical population, overall, has an average IQ of 100. 15 points is about the difference between the typical college student and the typical high school student. Okay, so it's not a massive difference, but if you go to the extreme, say, well, let's go look at people who only have an IQ of 145, which is kind of where you hit the beginnings of genius level. It's like the Jews are overwhelmingly overrepresented. So relatively small differences in the average can produce walloping differences at the extremes. People don't understand that. It's not surprising, because it actually requires a fairly sophisticated grasp of statistics. But when we're talking about things like differential outcome in the workplace, then you have to take a sophisticated statistical approach to it, or you don't know what the hell you're talking about. And unfortunately, many of the people who are talking about things like gender differences, they have no idea what they're talking about. They don't know the literature. They don't know there is a literature. They don't understand biology, like the social constructionist types, the women's studies types, the neo-Marxists, they don't give a damn about biology. It's like they inhabit some disembodied universe. So the review was poorly written at best, and did not, showed a very poor grasp of the relationship between group differences and economic and practical outcomes. It's not just that. It's deceptive. And there's a need in some way on that side, this side of the debate, the anti-Jordan Peterson side, to label men and women as being virtually identical when there's so much evidence that that's not the case. And what you're saying, what you've never said, one is superior, one is inferior, what you are is a guy who's pointing out the reality of the difference between the various types of human beings. And you've been very open about the extremes, about your... Look, I'm well aware of the extremes. I deal with MMA fighters. I know a lot of female MMA fighters. They're as aggressive and as tough as any man you're ever going to meet in your life. And I know a lot of men from comedy that are meek little guys who they're not nearly as aggressive as some of these female fighters. I think one of the beautiful things about freedom is that people get an opportunity to express themselves in a way that's genuinely them. And whether that is like our friend Alex Honnold, who's a free climber, who is climbing up these fantastic mountains with no ropes, or whether it's a female MMA fighter like Raquel Pennington, who's just a tank and beating the shit out of people. And that's what she loves to do. All of these extremes are available to people because of freedom. This is not a suppressive thing. No one's stopping people from choosing these paths. I don't know if you saw the most recent slip-up by the CEO of YouTube. I retweeted it today. They were talking about why there's not as many women in tech. And she basically said... They both, her and the CEO of Google, said exactly what James DeMoehr was saying in his memo. They completely fucked up. They tried to... Did you find this? Look at this. This is goddamn hilarious. And James DeMoehr had this on his page. They respond, women a lack of tech... No, go to James DeMoehr's tweet. Just go to what I retweeted and what he said. So there was a study published a while ago about... No, James, scroll back up. It was right there. It's right there. Just make his tweet larger. There you go. Look, see, he's saying, did I read this right? I don't know how to say her name is Susan. What... I'm sorry. I don't know how to say her name. W-O-J-I-C-I-C-K-I said that women find geeky male industries as opposed to social industries not very interesting, and Sundar cites research on gender differences. Yeah, well, that's exactly the difference in interest that I just pointed out. That's exactly right. This is what James DeMoehr wrote in his memo that got him fired. And this, in my mind, if I was the lawyer for James DeMoehr, I'd be like, oh, well, look what we have here. This is checkmate. You dummies. You just said what he said. The DeMoehr story is really interesting, you know, because I think it's such a classic story of an engineer getting tangled up in politics. So DeMoehr went to this diversity seminar, and he wasn't very happy about it because he knew the literature. And so at the end of the seminar, they asked for feedback. Well, James DeMoehr is an engineer. So when you tell an engineer that you want feedback, the engineer thinks, oh, you want feedback, and you want, like, facts and stuff, right, because that's what feedback would be like. So DeMoehr went and wrote this, like, thorough memo and gave it to them. He said, well, you know, this is what I think. Here's some feedback. And then it traveled around. He got no real response from the diversity people, and then he posted it on one of these internal boards at Google where people can discuss things, which people at Google do all the time. So it was perfectly reasonable for him to post it because he didn't get a response from the diversity people. He thought, well, let's see what other people think. And then it was there for a long time until it was leaked into the outside world. It wasn't like DeMoehr was trying to expose Google for what it is. He was just doing what an engineer type would do when someone asked him to provide feedback because he's not thinking politically. He's not thinking, oh, they just want to hear what they already said. He thought they actually wanted some facts. Anyways, I think they picked on the wrong guy because DeMoehr turns out to be pretty damn tough. Well, he's very smart and a very kind guy. When you sit down and talk to him, he's not a sexist. He's a guy that's talking about facts. In fact, he wrote more than a page and a half, I believe, on strategies for getting more women interested in tech. He's not a sexist. This is just a guy that was talking about the differences and the choices that people make that's based on just the variations that you were just discussing. Well, there's a good study done a while ago, and unfortunately I don't remember the author, but they were looking at junior high math prodigies. And they're pretty equally distributed between boys and girls. But by the time university came along, the math prodigy boys, they'd tend to go into the STEM fields, but the girls wouldn't. And it isn't because they lacked ability because they had stellar ability. It's because they weren't interested. And it turns out, like the interest thing turns out to be a big one. So with personality alone, if you measure men and women's personalities and then you add up all the differences in personalities, you could tell with about 75% to 80% certainty by looking at a full personality readout whether a person's male or female. So you'd be wrong 25% of the time, something like that. But if you had interest to that, you can get it up to about 90%. And so, you know, you say, well, are these differences large? Well, individually, they're not that big. They make more difference at the extremes. But if you add them up, then you can almost completely differentiate men from women. So by that token, they're very large. And the interest thing actually turns out to matter a lot. Like it's probably the most important individual difference that has been discovered between men and women at the psychological level. And has real decent explanatory power because you might say, well, men have a slight edge in spatial intelligence and that's why they're overrepresented in STEM fields. And women have a slight edge in verbal intelligence. This is debatable, but literature kind of indicates that. And that's why they're overwhelmingly the majority of fiction readers, for example. Is that the reason that there's differential representation in the STEM fields? It's like, no, it doesn't seem to be. It doesn't look like it's an intellectual issue, which is also what DeMoure pointed out, by the way. He never said once that this was a cognitive issue. But it's a matter of choice, a matter of interest. And women tend to be more people oriented. Now, the thing is, this has also been discovered in chimpanzees and other primates. Like if you offer baby or child chimpanzees, juvenile chimpanzees, the choice between thing-like toys, like cars, or people-like toys, like dolls, the males will go for the thing-like toys and the females will go for the people-like toys. So you see that in primates. And you think, well, is that surprising? It's like, well, no, it's not that surprising, really. I mean, women have to take care of infants, tiny infants. And you have to be really people-oriented to do that, because a tiny infant is an unbelievably demanding social relationship. And it's a primary relationship for about two years, you know? And so women are tilted towards the kind of temperament that makes that possible. It's like, well, is that such a shock? Really? That's such a surprise? Yeah.