The sexual dimorphism of the human species means that there are numerous “hacks” of our bodies created when the various signals regarding sex happen during development. Women’s wider pelvises, the way that their hormone system works, all of that is different from the sort of thing that a male goes through during development and growth. Men are optimized for things like hunting and ranging farther afield, and it’s so subtle that there are even sexual differences you can identify in how the two sexes navigate. Men are more “time, distance, direction” oriented, in general, and women are more “landmark and feel”.
So, that there are differences in injury rates for the same sports, most of which started out as male games in the first place…? Yeah, not surprising: Women are trying to operate on a playing field they are simply not adapted to.
If one were honest, you’d see the same thing in the military whenever some gender-weird decides to integrate women into combat arms elements. Women are simply physically unsuited for the way in which our armies fight in direct combat infantry roles, and their prevalence in guerrilla roles and other things fools the general public into thinking that it’s merely male recalcitrance that doesn’t want them on the front lines. Reality is that it’s these little things like greater propensity towards knee injuries and a far less robust frame that militates towards keeping them out of front-line direct combat.
Mentality? I’m not so sure on that one, but I’d be open to persuasion in either direction, were someone to actually do the research. It’s my opinion that the monthly hormone swing leaves a lot of the female population essentially irrational during the swings, and I’m suspicious of the general ability of the broad class of women to cope with direct combat and/or remain in control of themselves. People joke all the time about PMS and combat, but I’m not gonna do that–What are you going to do when your commander loses her bearings in the middle of things, and calls in fire on militarily unjustifiable targets?
Friend of mine related a situation with a female mid-rank leader in an adjacent unit in Afghanistan, who basically razed a village after one of her troops got hit by fire nearby. He wasn’t sure that the choices she was making in that situation were necessarily rational, or that she was on an even keel, emotionally. From having worked with her for some time, his opinion was that had that soldier been wounded on any other day of her cycle, then that village might not have gotten the treatment it did. Which was, in his judgment, more than slightly excessive…
That, from a guy whose attitude towards Afghans and Muslims in general is basically “…can’t kill enough of them to make me happy…” really makes me wonder what the hell happened that he thought it was over-the-top and not really justified…
Isegoria: That Onion piece is from 2003, so The Simpsons beat it by three years.
James James: “The Simpsons” made the same joke in 2000: President Lisa Simpson: As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump. How bad is it, Secretary Van Houten? Milhouse: [shows a chart] We’re broke. Lisa: The country is broke? How can that be? Milhouse: Well, remember when the last administration decided to invest in our nation’s children? Big mistake.
Bob Sykes: Combined with the replication crisis, it appears that “Science!” Has died and been buried. Vox Day’s anti-science diatribes are beginning to sound like the centrist, moderate position. 46 years of my life…
Bruce: State education fills the niche of a state church. Patronage for bossy verbal loyalists. Like a state church, it may fulfil higher functions as well.
Phileas Frogg: “Many Americans imagine public education operates on a shoestring budget. Private education, in contrast, looks so pricey it’s implausible government does much to make it affordable. Both perceptions are wildly at odds with the facts.” I can confirm this by direct personal experience. Calculating the cost per student for the local public school district for which I serve as a board member, you get $30,000/student annually. The local Catholic school I taught at managed to spend...
Jim: Phileas Frogg: “No, just start at Wikipedia, move onto google, try archive or project Gutenberg, and finally, just buy a book from Amazon on the cheap.” In other words, what, if anything, is “the marrow of college”?
Phileas Frogg: A guy standing there lecturing, even a highly entertaining and captivating lecturer, is competing with the internet, both from an information efficiency and entertainment standpoint. He’s screwed. Best I can tell it looks like auditing rates have dropped by around 40% since 2005, and I can imagine they were higher even before that if we go further back. Add in the fact that college education has been, “democratized,R 21; and universalized, and it’s no wonder fewer...
McChuck: It’s hard enough to figure out what classes are even being offered by the average university. Learning who teaches them, along with where and when the classes are held, is generally a secret more closely held than most military plans.
Phileas Frogg: Raw ability vs Signals about ability Some disassociation is inevitable as per Goodhart’s Law, but total alienation is practically impossible (despite some of our best efforts).
Bob Sykes: Which degree you get is far more predictive of future income than mere levels of degrees. Degree field is also an indirect measure of IQ. It requires substantially more native intelligence to earn a mathematics or physics degree at any level than to get a Ph. D. In the humanities or social sciences.
Felix: “I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time.” The key word is “our”. Schools, world-wide, certainly teach a shared culture. Out in the sticks there may be a few unenlightened, deplorables of the lower orders who have issues with that shared culture. But, pfft.
Gaikokumaniakku: “In 2003, the United States Department of Education gave about 18,000 randomly selected Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL).” Of course, these must have been 18,000 randomly selected white Americans, to make a reasonable comparison with the historically white population of the majority of America, right? … right? The ghost of William Shockley is hovering silently over me and shaking his head from side to side in a manner I can only interpret as ominous.
Phileas Frogg: Every educational concern or observation in the modern world comes down to this: “Unless and until we finally accept that people are no more equal in their educability and intelligence than they are in their ability to sprint 100m, dunk a basketball or stand 7 feet tall, we will continue to waste limited time, energy, and resources on solving a problem without a solution: men are not equal.” God needs all sorts. And yet, every class of person projects their narrow measure of...
Jim: The labor market pays you for what you know now… The “labor market” is a centrally planned, authoritarianly organized corporate economy, a free market for employers as against employees, not a free market for employees as against employers. Fortunately, the Singularity is poised to render mutational load a thing of the past.
Isegoria: Caplan’s response would be that almost no one uses any of those skills, and those skills don’t generalize or transfer, at least not for most people most of the time.
Gaikokumaniakku: Geometry can be taught in many ways. Knowledge of proofs might be more useful than knowing the volume of a sphere. A bigger problem is that school is intended to reinforce the social order. If schools taught students how to resist cops and lawyers, government would find maintaining power to be more difficult. Another angle is skills versus facts. I probably don’t need to know the year in which Shakespeare wrote (a fact) but I certainly do benefit from understanding how Shakespeare...
Isegoria: Excellent example, Bob. I’m reminded, oddly enough, of how Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor of his Tesla factory: “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”
Bob Sykes: I once had a family doctor who commented that doctors knew when to to add new prescriptions but not when to stop old ones.
Isegoria: Bryan Caplan is definitely allergic to shared culture. On the other hand, I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time. I was just reading Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and that is one of his main points: The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the reading textbook used in elementary school, the variants of which were modeled on the overwhelmingly most popular series, the McGuffey Readers. They...
Women are at higher risk of knee injury in sports because of the way they cut and plant. Seems this is especially endemic in women’s soccer.
The sexual dimorphism of the human species means that there are numerous “hacks” of our bodies created when the various signals regarding sex happen during development. Women’s wider pelvises, the way that their hormone system works, all of that is different from the sort of thing that a male goes through during development and growth. Men are optimized for things like hunting and ranging farther afield, and it’s so subtle that there are even sexual differences you can identify in how the two sexes navigate. Men are more “time, distance, direction” oriented, in general, and women are more “landmark and feel”.
So, that there are differences in injury rates for the same sports, most of which started out as male games in the first place…? Yeah, not surprising: Women are trying to operate on a playing field they are simply not adapted to.
If one were honest, you’d see the same thing in the military whenever some gender-weird decides to integrate women into combat arms elements. Women are simply physically unsuited for the way in which our armies fight in direct combat infantry roles, and their prevalence in guerrilla roles and other things fools the general public into thinking that it’s merely male recalcitrance that doesn’t want them on the front lines. Reality is that it’s these little things like greater propensity towards knee injuries and a far less robust frame that militates towards keeping them out of front-line direct combat.
Mentality? I’m not so sure on that one, but I’d be open to persuasion in either direction, were someone to actually do the research. It’s my opinion that the monthly hormone swing leaves a lot of the female population essentially irrational during the swings, and I’m suspicious of the general ability of the broad class of women to cope with direct combat and/or remain in control of themselves. People joke all the time about PMS and combat, but I’m not gonna do that–What are you going to do when your commander loses her bearings in the middle of things, and calls in fire on militarily unjustifiable targets?
Friend of mine related a situation with a female mid-rank leader in an adjacent unit in Afghanistan, who basically razed a village after one of her troops got hit by fire nearby. He wasn’t sure that the choices she was making in that situation were necessarily rational, or that she was on an even keel, emotionally. From having worked with her for some time, his opinion was that had that soldier been wounded on any other day of her cycle, then that village might not have gotten the treatment it did. Which was, in his judgment, more than slightly excessive…
That, from a guy whose attitude towards Afghans and Muslims in general is basically “…can’t kill enough of them to make me happy…” really makes me wonder what the hell happened that he thought it was over-the-top and not really justified…