Jordan Peterson Explains the Gender Paradox - Joe Rogan

well I was there I went to Stockholm twice in Oslo twice in Helsinki twice and and and Copenhagen once in the last month and I spent quite a bit of there's a lot of interviews and a lot of discussion about the so-called gender paradox now it's a very interesting thing because it's really put their tails in a knot in Scandinavia and and that makes sense because the Scandinavians are gonna have to deal with this first because they've gone the farthest down the road for like making their society gender equal explain that to me I don't mind I will I will okay so so imagine first of all that there's two kinds of equality that you might pursue one would be equality of opportunity and so that would mean that you know there's there's wide range of talent across people regardless of their type whatever that might be sex gender race ethnicity there's there's talent distributed everywhere and it's kind of a truism and I would say a truism of the West in the deepest sense that each of the individuals within those groups should be put in a position where they their talents are they're encouraged to manifest those talents partly because that would be good for them spiritually and psychologically but also because that would be of obvious benefit to the community right I mean talents rare which people don't understand there's lots of different kinds of talent but it's but in each domain it's rare and so it's to everyone's benefit to exploit talented people to the maximum possible degree so even if you're just selfish you want to push for equality of opportunity because the more talented people there are out there the more cool stuff you get to have and hopefully the the more diverse and interesting your life is so so you can pursue equality of opportunity policies and the Scandinavians have done that especially trying to knock down barriers for women in the workplace and by all accounts by all standard theories the Scandinavian countries and places like like halt like the Netherlands Canada to to a slightly lesser degree have done a have gone farther than any other countries in pursuing those policies okay and and and part of the consequence of that is that some of the differences between men and women have been minimized so obviously there's far more women in the workplace than there were forty years ago and men many occupations there's actually dominance by women there's dominance in the universities there's dominance in the health care fields and so women have poured into the workplace and hypothetically there's problems with that because it's put a lot of stress on family structure but hypothetically that's for the best and because it gives people a broader range of choices and it gives everyone access to more talent so and then also if you look around the world you see that one of the best predictors of the probability of economic development in developing countries is their attitude is the attitude in those countries towards equal rights for women and it looks causal the more positively the country is predisposed to female rights the more likely they are to develop economically and maybe that's because that indicates that they're open to new ideas or something like that or open to transformation so okay so that's one kind of equality open up the playing field so that everybody has a chance to compete and cooperate in lent and land where they will but then the other kind of equality is equality of outcome so and that's often described as equity and today's language and so the ultimate equity utopia would be take every job every conceivable kind of job and then stratify that by every conceivable level of authority within every job and then ensure that every single category of person is represented in precise proportion to their to their prevalence in the population so every job should be 50 percent women and 50 percent men and say 13 percent non-western ethnic minority and whatever that happens to be and then you could break that down and so and otherwise there's evidence of systemic prejudice okay now first thing to say about that is that's impossible and the reason it's impossible is because there's no limit to the number of ways that you can categorize people into groups so you know you you know about sex and ethnicity and race maybe those are the obvious ones but now you have gender and then you of ethnicity and you know and then there's attractiveness and intelligence and temperament and and height and age and socio-economic background and I mean let's say there's 20 but there's a lot more than that there's no possible way that you could ever regulate a society so tightly that every single one of those groups was equally represented in every single one of those occupations at every single level of the hierarchy that is the significant ones men and women and race yeah but who's to say those are the significant ones that's the other thing it isn't even obviously if they are because I would say that like a more significant one is cognitive ability because that's a way bigger predictor of long term life success than sex or race so I don't even think that we've necessarily identified the canonical groups we've just decided that gender and race are though maybe they're the most obvious right but isn't there a problem is that people don't that what what they don't do is they don't take in in terms of cognitive ability they don't get on a team they don't get on like there's people that are sexist yeah but there's it's very rare that someone is elitist in terms of their cognitive ability well hard to say Joe I mean I think one of the reasons the oceans hell lead is prejudiced is a better word I don't know I mean it you could be right but look I think one of the reasons that like if you here's something that's kind of actually make sense now that I'm thinking about it because they are it's well there's one thing that's quite peculiar about the United States in that regard is like most working-class people let's say are far more irritated with the intellectual elite than they are with the wealthy elite and that's because they think they could become wealthy and they could but they don't think they could become part of the intellectual elite and it isn't obvious to me that the intellectual elite so those would be the liberal left-leaning types that dominate the media and academia are particularly positive in their in their attitudes towards the typical working-class person I think they're prejudiced and elitist I do believe that that's the case and I think they're also what would you call it patronizing and I think that the typical working-class person say who voted for Trump is very very sensitive to that and so they're much more concerned with the 1% who are the cognitive elite than they are the 1% who are the economic elite because at least they think that's a game they could play so anyways it's also because there's caricatures right of the the 1% of the economic elite you just think of people that are in these lofty positions that are in control the financial institutions but the 1% of the intellectually you think of in terms of like some of the more preposterous things are you hearing out of universities now and save spaces and oh yeah there's that - yeah there's that too things that there's no well there's no appreciation on the part of the intellectual elite for the pathologies of rational of rationalism I mean there's no there's nothing stupider than a smart person who went wrong you know like you you can tank I've seen this in my clients you know frequently like if I have a particularly smart client who's particularly disordered in their personality that that's just that's often just that's so difficult it's almost unimaginable because there's for example yeah what is your approach to handling something like that who's like super intelligent but yet completely their life is in disarray well you know I'm usually I usually take a very practical approach like you know we try to identify because I start always in my therapy practice I always start with behavioral principles it's like okay well let's see if we can identify a few areas you know through negotiation that are really causing you grief and misery you know like what's what's wrong with your life as far as you're concerned and so that often takes a lot of discussion and then we might try to figure out what's causing that and that's often very difficult to figure out too because it might be jeez it might be something physical you know you might be sick in some way because depression is lots of depression is autoimmune related and and anxiety can be a side effect of all sorts of physiological disorders or eating improperly or sleeping badly or or not exercising you know enough to kind of keep yourself regulated to try to figure out what's what's causing it and then you try to sketch out some possible solution that we could both test and then with the with the with the more intelligent ones you know often they can come up with all sorts of reasons why none of this is going to work or a thousand reasons why yeah well usually a thousand reasons why none of this is going to work and with people like that sometimes it's useful to turn to their dreams if if they dream because one of the things that's cool about dreams is that even though they're hard to interpret they never lie and so sometimes you can take someone who's hyper-rational and have a dream and they'll tell you the dream and then you can work through an interpretation which is a tricky business and the dream will tell them something and there's just no denying it it's like well it's a statement from nature so what are you gonna do you're gonna pretend that that's not the case you know so so that's that's often extremely useful so so okay so well back to the Equality issue so okay so here's what's happened so psychologists have and this is what's putting a tail knot in the tail of the Scandinavians psychologists have come to a pretty decent agreement about standard personality models right so there's extraversion neuroticism agreeableness openness and conscientiousness and they look fairly stable cross-culturally and that was all done by asking thousands of people hundreds and hundreds of questions and then grouping them statistically so it was a theoretical basically compute card took computational power and statistics to to find out that these are how traits group so an extroverted people are sociable and happy and neurotic people experience a fair bit of negative emotion so that's the positive and negative emotion dimensions agreeable people are maternal and disagreeable people are competitive and there's a fair bit of male/female difference there conscientious people are dutiful and industrious and orderly and the open people are creative and so those are your basic five dimensions ok so that's been established and everyone more or less agrees on it now maybe there's seven dimensions and we've got a questionnaire that that that breaks the five down into ten that's called understand myself but but basically there's good there's good consensus consent consensus on the five okay so now as soon as you have the five basic traits you can ask some questions like well do men and women differ and so what you do is you just give the questionnaire you can either fill it out yourself or have other people fill it out on your behalf so and it could be a teacher could be a you know and that's all been done and what you find is there are systematic differences between men and women and the biggest differences are that women experience more negative emotion and that and that they're more agreeable than men so and that's borne out by the psychiatric evidence because higher levels of negative emotion are manifested in depression and anxiety and women are diagnosed with higher levels of depression and anxiety all around the world and with agreeableness that's also borne out by the clinical literature in some sense the medical literature socio medical literature because disagreeable people are more likely to be incarcerated because it's the best predictor of being incarcerated even though it's not a very good predictor and men are incarcerated at about a 10 to one rate compared to women and are more likely to be antisocial and conduct disordered so the personality differences are mirrored in the socio medical literature ok so that's so now so there are differences but then there's a question are those differences a consequence of socialization or are they biological and the answer to that is tricky because how much something is social and how much it is biological actually depends on the social circumstances so while here's an example if you have a society where no one has enough to eat and people are starving then there's a huge cultural effect on people's intelligence let's say that's mediated by economic factors even though it's got a biological origin right that's the starvation so the relationship between biology and cultures are actually partly culturally dependent so it makes it complicated but in any case here's how the scientists decided to address this they thought well why don't we rank order countries by how egalitarian their social policies are which you can do with a fair degree of reliability you know you put the countries where women are second-class citizens at the bottom and you'd put the Scandinavian countries at the top you can get good reliability across raiders for how you'd rate those countries and then look at the magnitude of the differences between men and women by the egalitarian social policies and so then you'll find out and here's the hypothesis if the difference is between men women are primary primarily social then as cultures become more egalitarian men and women will become more alike that's not what happened the opposite happened the more egalitarian this society and it turns out the richer this society because that's also being discovered now the more different men and women become and so the differences are not huge so with agreeableness for example if you took the average man if you took a typical man and a typical woman out of the population just randomly and you had to bet that the woman was more aggressive than the man you'd be wrong 60% of the time so there's quite a bit of overlap right because you'd be right 40% of the time but the problem is is that a lot of selection takes place at the extremes maybe you're only concerned about disagreeable people when they become violent and maybe it's only the one in 50 most disagreeable person who's violent and they're all men so you can have quite a bit of similarity at the average level and big differences at the extremes and the extremes is where people do things like like employment selection so the biggest difference that's been discovered between men and women and this is the one that gets biggest in the Scandinavian countries is interest men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people and it's a big difference it's one full standard deviation and so what that means is that if you're a man you would have to be more interested in people than 85% of men to be as interested in people as the 50th percentile woman and you'd have to be more interested in things than 85% of women to be as interested in things as the typical man and what do you how do you define things objects okay no no no inanimate things cars car yeah yeah tools yeah you know technology right right STEM fields because the other thing that's happened is that the more egalitarian the society the fewer women go into the STEM fields the fewer that's interested yeah okay so so now this unravels in a big way it's this is a hugely relevant issue politically because it means that you cannot have equality of opportunity and equality of outcome at the same time it's not possible because as you make your society more egalitarian and you open up the opportunity for equality of outcome you increase how different men and women are are and that changes their occupational choice so if men are more interested in things which they are by a substantial margin then way more of them are going to be engineers wouldn't that possibly support this idea that an enforced model of equality would allow people to be themselves more I mean this is almost what you're saying well that is the optimistic viewpoint like hello mister well look it's so funny because the Swedish foreign minister told me to go climb back under the rock that I came out from under when I was in Scandinavia because I was describing this these this science I read that but I'm not exactly sure why well she regards me as misogynist because I think that there are because I think because I've been putting forward the evidence that there are genuine differences between men and women but she should be held accountable for that because that's just a flippant thing to say like you should have especially in a position of power like she's in you should have a very specific argument saying like for a leader to have such a base thing to say such a crude um thing to say crawl back under the rock that you came here well I thought she was a joke about lobsters but I don't think she was the rock lobsters going to rocks I guess they do the groan cracks yeah and the bigger lobsters have better Rock that was another very interesting thing in the GQ thing where the woman was challenging you on your neurobiology yes well hardly hardly any hardly any psychologists understand that serotonin is associated with hierarchies it's like a truism it's been known for thirty years so we definitely get back to it but I'm very curious about this because this idea of enforced equality right ensuring that there is such a high emphasis played placed on a quality quality that you have the equal amount of men the equal amount of women and the opportunities are absolutely available as much to women as they are to you and this is enforced you know this creates an environment where there's less resistance now in an environment where there's less resistance perhaps women don't feel as compelled to say I'll show you yeah that is what seems to have but this is though well here's an EQ look here's an example so there are fewer women mathematicians in the in the higher echelon it's okay but here's something interesting about mathematical ability first of all it's very rare so that's the first thing to keep in mind now it looks like if you look in junior high that give mathematically gifted men and males and females are approximately as common now there's a little bit of debate about that because there is some evidence that maybe at the very upper extremes there's a male advantage just like there's a male disadvantage at the low end because the male distribution for intelligence might be flatter and so that's the greater marry male variability hypothesis there's been papers putting that forward that have been retracted as a consequence of pressure from politically correct people even though greater merit male variability is actually quite common in the animal kingdom for a variety of reasons men are more expendable that males are more expendable in some ways or you could say that males are more likely to produce to pursue high-risk high-return strategies you can look at it either way and it's certainly possible in any case the men the males in junior high who happened to be mathematically gifted are less likely to also be verbally gifted whereas that doesn't seem to be the case for the females and so if you're a male math nerd then math is a pretty logical pathway for you because you don't have as many other options whereas if you're female math nerd you have other options because you're all you're less likely you're more likely to also be verbally gifted and so that's enough to at least in principle account for some of the reason why there are fewer women mathematicians than men mathematicians they have other options they have other options and there's lots of complex there's lots of complex reasons like this and so we have this reflexive idea and this is very much the case because this is like the core idea among the feminist neo-marxist types is that if there's differences in outcome that's that's proof of prejudice and that's support for the idea of the patriarchal tyranny and that's like the core axiom of the radical left is the patriarchal tyranny as far as I'm concerned that's that's God for them the patriarchal tyranny it's like well if it turns out that many of these differences in outcome between men and women aren't a consequence of the patriarchal tyranny in fact even get bigger when you reduce the tyrannical aspect of the patriarchy and even the patriarchal aspect to it then it makes that theory not only wrong but opposite of the truth which is the worst kind of wrong and so you know if men are more likely to produce pursue careers in the STEM fields which seems to be the case under conditions of optimal freedom for men and women then that's going to drive income disparities because the STEM fields pay more and they pay more partly because they're scalable like it's really hard to scale care for people you know like if you work in a daycare you're gonna care for three infants you're not gonna care for 50 because you can't it's not scalable but if you're like a software designer it's infinitely scalable and so there's there's a much wider range of possible of possibility for generating much larger much larger income pools and much larger pools of wealth you know and men are also more likely to work longer hours and if you work 10% longer hours you make 40% more money there's a nonlinear return on that's a good thing for everybody who's listening to know if you have a job you want to be the guy or the woman who's working that extra ten percent because the return on that is nonlinear so that's a really useful thing to know men are more likely to work outside they're more likely to work in dangerous businesses they're more likely to run full-time businesses rather than part-time businesses and they're more likely to move in pursuit of their career goals and that all contributes to differences in and and in in mangu BER drivers they're they make seven percent more money because they drive faster so and so anyway this is not good high return issues it's a pattern male ya common it's more risk there's more risk in us so there's more return as long as you don't get hurt right and I think that's a pretty common male pattern is there's more risk is there's more return as long as you don't get hurt problem seems to be when discussing these things in any way romanticizing or glorifying male behavior or putting any emphasis whatsoever on there being a positive aspect to a lot of things that we think of as being negative like aggression or ambition or or yes or competition yeah well the competition amongst men is fine competition with men against women is often thought of as cruel mm-hmm yeah well that yes well and there's a certain amount of reason for that as well because obviously physical competition is it's easy for that to border on cruel this is why we're sure we were talking before the show that instead of calling people men and women when referring to like because there's there's this very disturbing in my opinion trend of transgender women entering into these competitions now with women who are biologically female you know and dominating them yeah and that instead of calling people men and women let's dispense with you you could be a woman yeah you can be a man or woman that's your choice and you can change it whenever you want so you're a man or a woman though and that's your choice but we're gonna have a new rule which is that if you have an X Y chromosome so you're an X Y person or an X X person then if you're an X X person X Y person you don't get to engage in physical combat with an X Y person yes man or 1x expert doesn't matter yeah how would that if you're XY you can't engage in physical combat with XS that's right XY z-- cannot hit x axis how's that and maybe they can't run in running contests against them and maybe they can't play tennis against them not within and maybe that's just reasonable

Channel: JRE Clips

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Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of, Jordan Peterson, gender paradox, feminism, gender, pronouns

Id: UVvOv1UwJLA

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 29 2018