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- [00:01]
A
Particularly as a woman, I was interested in this question. I actually want to know how my psychology, my personality or my brain function may differ on average from men. And it was just a fascinating question to me. So I read all of the papers that I could and I spoke to scholars and it was really heartbreaking to hear how scholars felt maligned and they were name called as sexist for trying to study this very important topic.
- [00:33]
B
And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
- [00:41]
C
My guest today is Claire Lehman. Claire is the founder of Colette and she also regularly writes for the Australian newspaper. Claire and I had a really interesting conversation about some of the remaining taboos in social circumstances science. Why is it that so many people are resistant to thinking seriously about empirical facts that may somehow undermine their preferred political theories? How does that apply to questions like whether or not there's sex differences in personality or perhaps in the way that we perceive and think about the world? To what extent are we still in the grips of what Steven Pinker called the blank slate fallacy? To what extent is our public culture still resistant to accepting the influence that genes and hereditary factors have on how we go through our lives? And finally, in a part of a conversation that is reserved for paying subscribers of this substack, for those of you who have very graciously decided to support our ability to record these podcasts, we talk about what it takes to not just be skeptical when everybody is for the current thing, but also to be skeptical when your own tribe decides to always be against the current thing. How it is that Claire ended up getting on the wrong side of many people on the right when she defended some of the Australian government's policies on Covid and has been very vocal in criticizing Donald Trump. One of the questions we ask is about whether the term of a woke right has any utility as a kind of parallel to the woke left. To listen to that part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please go to yashamonk.substack.com and if you go to yashamonk. Substack.com thegoodfight you will get 25% off an annual subscription. Claire Lehmann, welcome to podcast.
- [03:08]
A
Thanks for having me, Yasha.
- [03:09]
C
It's a real pleasure having you on the podcast, Claire. It's sort of. I'm a little incredulous that we haven't had this conversation before. You're somebody who has been critical of a lot of woke excesses in the social sciences and increasingly our society as a whole since the founding of Colette and before you're also one of the few really consistent, philosophically liberal voices who hasn't been sort of captured by your audience or captured by critics in such a way that you sort of stick with your tribe no matter what comes. And you've been taking some heat from the right on social media, especially on X, both when you were defending some of Australia's COVID policies during the pandemic, and now for your very clear criticisms of Donald Trump. Help listeners who may not be as familiar with you and your work as I am, sort of understand your political coordinates and perhaps we can have a little therapy session, sort of. What does it take in these moments when it's tempting to go with what your audience wants you to do or expects you to do to stand up to political principles, when frankly, a number of people who one would hope and wish would do the same? Don't always do that.
- [04:31]
A
Sure. Well, I'm an Australian and I founded quillette back in 2015 and I, I came out of, I wasn't an academic, but I was a postgrad student at the time and I noticed that social sciences and my discipline, psychology, were being sort of skewed due to political bias. And so I had an interest in how politics was affecting academia and scholarship in particular. And so when I started Quillet, I had academics writing for me and they were of the, the heterodox variety. So they were putting forward ideas that were not popular in media and were sometimes completely suppressed inside academia itself, like things like biosocial criminology, sex differences in neuroscience, sex differences in psychology and so on. And so we had, we had a real focus on academics who were saying things that were unpopular in their fields or in the profession of academia. It didn't take long until we were receiving stories of people being completely cancelled, so fired for their views or mobbed online. And so it just so happened that founding Colette sort of dovetailed with this explosion in cancellation episodes. And we published, we became the go to publication for people who are suffering from these horrible experiences. And there were so many of them, I think they've died down now, thankfully. But, you know, people would be cancelled just for raising an awkward question in a theater group, for example, about transgenderism or something like that. There were artists, scholars, people working in left leaning milieus just suffering the consequences of illiberalism, this mob mentality that became popular in the years of 2018, 2019 and particularly 2020.
- [06:47]
C
And to what extent did you foresee this? I mean, when you started to focus on some of Those things in your own writing and in Colette. Did you think at the time, we're at the beginning of this rapid development that is going to get worse and that is going to gain more power? Or were you just sort of worried about what you were already observing in your corner of a world like psychology and the social sciences, and you sort of got somewhat lucky or unlucky for the world in getting in on the ground floor? I mean, as for myself, I started worrying about this relatively early on. I wrote about what I called so called squared, the very funny attempt by Helen Pluckrose and some others to write these completely absurd social science papers that they managed to place in academic journals and so on. But that was a good number of years, I think, after the founding of Colette and after you are starting to sort of talk about this. So there's always some element of getting lucky and some element of having foresight. But to what extent do you think you really were driven to do this because you sort of saw this coming? And to what extent did that take you by surprise?
- [07:58]
A
I think I was taken by surprise by the volume and the ferocity of the cancellations and the illiberalism around the years of 2018, 2019 and 2020. And I was also taken by surprise by the pushback against US Quillet as a publication. And me in particular, I had been concerned about bad ideas in the academy for a long time. So before I studied psychology, I did an English degree and I was very familiar with Foucault and post structuralism and the fashionable theories. I didn't study critical theory at university. That came after my time. But I was very familiar with postmodernism and the denigration of objective truth and empirical investigation. And I thought that these philosophies were nihilistic and they could only lead to a bad place. So I had been concerned about bad ideas coming out of the academy for some time. And so when I saw the liberalism in the culture, particularly in American culture, sort of, sort of gaining momentum, I was concerned. But the bat. But the. You know, I was still surprised. I was surprised in 2020 when business communities all over the United States started putting out statements about, you know, in favor of BLM, when riots were happening across major cities in the U.S. you know, there are lots of things that still surprised me, even though I was very familiar with these bad ideas. And I'm familiar with how conformity takes over and people do irrational things because lots of other people are doing them. I was surprised when I. When I first started Quillet and I started publishing academics who were putting forward some basic ideas, such as genetics, you know, has an impact on who we are as, as. As people, you know, genetic genetics matters. The, you know, people calling me a eugenicist or a Nazi, that surprised me because it. And I thought that there must be something in American culture in particular that is hostile to some of these basic facts that we get taught in Australian universities. Like, when I was at university, it wasn't controversial to learn that intelligence is partially hereditary. But then when I spoke to American academics, they told me that American students don't. Don't learn that in their coursework. It's controversial.
- [10:38]
C
Yeah. And sort of, it's interesting to see where the taboos lie and how they've evolved. One of the questions I have is whether the particular histories and political cultures of places produce the taboos or whether there's a demand for taboos because actually the purpose is for cancellation itself. Right. So one way of thinking about this is that questions of race, for obvious reasons, are particularly sensitive in the United States, given the particular history that America has. And even though the ideas that you're referring to are primarily about genetic inheritance, at the individual level, there may be this sort of fear that if we acknowledge what is completely uncontroversial in the literature, which is that on average, parents who are much more intelligent, as measured by IQ tests or other things, are going to have children who are more than average intelligence, there's some reversion to the mean. There's also a strong hereditary element that might somehow then be used or abused to also argue the same thing at the group level, where the political taboo is easier to understand. But there's also a theory which says that actually it's not driven by any specific things in the culture that may be what determines where the biggest taboo is. It's really about the demand for having taboos so that it can go after people. And I was thinking about that with a disjuncture which has now slightly changed between race and trans salience, you know, at a time in which in America, it was all about race. And you could, you know, get canceled and be told that you're a racist for, you know. Well, as in the case of one famous food writer criticizing two women who both happened to be Asian American. And the nature of a criticism wasn't really in particular connected to any negative stereotypes about Asian Americans or anything to do with that, but that was enough to say, hang on a second, perhaps this person is racist and they're going to get Canceled, and she effectively was fired from the New York Times, or at least never wrote to the New York Times again. And at the same time, trans issues had this incredible salience in the United Kingdom and that was really the third rail in Britain. And it seemed to me at the time that what was happening is not that somehow Britain has a particular history that makes trans issues more salient there than they are in the United States. And in fact now transitions have become more salient in the United States, perhaps in part because sort of not of race issues, of course, in any way resolved, which likely never will be given American history, but because, you know, after four or five years of that being the absolute center of obsession, you know, by sort of a natural seeping into the background, and so there's kind of need for a new arena of battle. And so now we sort of become that. Right. But in Britain, where the race thing wasn't as available, you know, that's why sort of a trans topic took up more space.
- [13:30]
A
Yeah. And you're probably familiar with Moussas Al Ghabi's thesis that a lot of this stuff is about intra elite competition for status when a lot of people with advanced degrees or post secondary qualifications are downwardly mobile. So, you know, if you're a master's graduate in English literature and you're finding it difficult to get a job, maybe you can secure a position by claiming that someone who already works at your university or media institution is racist. So it's about fighting over limited resources. Is that what you mean when you say people are searching for taboos?
- [14:19]
C
Yeah, I think that can be one of the explanations. And there's kind of various levels of, you know, how self conscious that needs to be. Right. I mean, there's kind of Rob Henderson's idea of luxury beliefs, which in some of his formulations I think have a slightly more conspiratorial tone, and others, I think, a much less conspiratorial tone. And when you push him on it, I don't think he really believes in a more conspiratorial way that you might read it. Right. But that's kind of, you know, he does suggest at one point, his memoir, that, you know, his classmates at Yale who are talking about the evils of capitalism and turning around to apply to Goldman perhaps have at some level in the back of their mind that that's a good way of making sure they don't have too many competitors. There's the kind of broader how do you gain cultural currency? Which I think is the smarter version of that which both Henderson I think defends and perhaps in a different way, Al Ghabi, where it's sort of in your PhD program in English literature, how do you show that you are the most groundbreaking, radical, politically engaged, organic intellectual? And it's by sort of going further and further in sort of how recherche and frankly silly or furious. I wonder whether it is also in response to some emotional needs though, Right. If you sort of have a need to be in a moral community that you feel is pure and where you are demonstrating the purity of a moral community and the superiority of your own moral standing by finding sinners and expelling them and tarring and feathering and flogging them in the town square, then you need pre written or ad hoc rules which you can accuse them of having broken. Right. And it seems to me that that's kind of the main thing that's coming.
- [16:10]
B
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- [16:40]
A
I find that explanation the most persuasive myself. And just through anecdotal experience, you know it is the person who is able to separate out morality from accuracy is a surprisingly rare person. And so being able to decouple what is true from what is good doesn't come naturally to us. We sort of have to be trained in that type of thinking style. And so I think it's just very natural for people to confuse their moral outlook with the way the world should be and any kind of facts or theories or ideas that run contrary to the way they think the world should be deemed as threatening or taboo and worthy of censure.
- [17:32]
C
Yeah, I think that's interesting. I was thinking about this in the context of teaching a little while ago when I was teaching about questions of democracy and identity and diversity and so on. And some of the readings for my course were ones that I sort of expected to be contested and controversial and where I obviously assigned readings on both sides and really encouraged the students to have a good debate. Then some of the readings, it took me by surprise that the students had real resistance to them. And I can mention two of those. One of them was a very classic book on African politics that Sort of asks the question about how we should think about a democracy in a deeply ethnically divided place. So what if you have pretty good democratic institutions in a stylized way, let's say, the perfect institutions. There's no disadvantage to the opposition. You have a free press, you're not jailing opposition leaders or anything like that. But it's a society in which one ethnic group has 55% of the population and the other ethnic group has 45% of the population. And so ethnic group A always wins and they always have all of the key cabinet positions and the regions of a country where they're hugely overrepresented, get a huge share of funding of the country, and therefore have more economic development. It's a democracy on the simplest idea of what a democracy is, but it obviously seems not to live up to one of the core promises of democracy. And so that's an interesting paradox. And the students I had in this particular course just did not want to engage with that. And they said, there's no country that's like that. And of course it's a stylized example. No country is exactly like that. But there's plenty of countries that are like that to some extent, a good number of them in Sub Saharan Africa, but others, for example, in Bosnia Herzegovina, in Europe and other parts of the world. Right. Ethnic politics, unfortunately, is a very real presence in various ways in countries on virtually every continent. Right. And that to me was an interesting example that wasn't woke exactly. Right. It doesn't exactly touch on the hot button issues of a culture war over the last 10 years, but it did feel to me like a refusal by some of her students, not all of her students in the course, of course, to engage with facts that in their mind might require them to come to conclusions they want to resist. Now, I think that there's often ways in those circumstances to resist those conclusions. Right. There's ways to take this seriously as a challenge to democracy and not to come up with the idea either that democracy is doomed or that multi ethnic societies won't ever work or whatever. Right. But I think they felt, oh, if I accept this empirical premise, I might be pushed towards a normative conclusion I really don't want. And the easiest way around that is just to refuse the empirical premise.
- [20:25]
A
Yeah, I think that's quite a common outlook. And I think it's not a conscious outlook, it's just a difficulty that many people have in separating out their moral feelings, their emotional response to what they think the good society looks like from reality, which can contrast with that and it's. I'm not sure what the. You know, if I look at it from a psychological point of view, perhaps personality traits such as openness to experience mediate that relationship. Perhaps it's not a matter of intelligence. Perhaps it's a matter of being open to different to new ideas. And a lot of. Or perhaps it's people very high in conventionality struggle to sort of update their moral worldview when challenging facts. When they're confronted with challenging facts. I think it must be a psychological
- [21:31]
C
issue that is interesting and I am convinced by some of the psychological research that correlates those traits with political behavior. There's one interesting study that made the rounds a number of years ago which suggested that people who are high in the dark personality triad, so things like narcissism, Machiavellianism and so on, are also more likely to be drawn to the political extremes on both the far right and the far left. And that some woke politics may be not driven by a genuine desire to undo injustices, but actually by the search for an excuse to punish people for heterodoxy, right, for deviance from the in group norm. I was initially a little bit skeptical about this just because there's so many psychology papers that don't replicate. But there's actually, I think, quite a convincing replication of that that came out subsequently, perhaps a year or so ago now, which also had some interesting things to say about the role of sadism in this. That part of this really is sort of wanting to engage in sadistic behaviors and being drawn towards online spaces that give you an excuse for that. And this is something that I argued in an article in my substack that I think I called the Cruelty is the Point. Platforms like bluesky can very easily fall foul of. Now. It's interesting to wonder whether the behavior I experience in the case of these students would be correlated to broader kind of big five personality scores like openness and experience. I can see why it might be right. I can see that the logic here is that if you're just quite rigid in your worldview and you're very threatened when you think your worldview might be undermined, then you're going to resist that. Of course, there might be a countervailing factor here, which is that the kind of political communities in which some of those far left views are popular also, I think tend to be ones that are actually quite open in experience for four kinds of reasons, including the fact that those people are more likely to be drawn to study in certain kinds of universities, to Live in big cities and so on. And at least they would think of themselves as being very open to experience. Right. I am the sort of person who is really open to the world. So it'd be super fascinating to see whether that hypothesis holds up.
- [23:49]
A
Yeah, it would be. But remember that conformity, you can be a conformist even in a social milieu that sees itself as non conformist. Right?
- [24:02]
C
Yeah, of course. But the question is sort of what is the psychological profile of the people in that milieu? Right. Are people who are open to experience more likely to be drawn to these milieu's that claim that they're super nonconformist, even if they end up being conformist for nonconformity or the most? So perhaps it's that within the non conformist milieu, the super conformist people are the ones who are not open to experience. But whether they're less open to experience than the average person who isn't drawn to the non conformist milieu in the first place is a different question.
- [24:34]
A
Perhaps when you mentioned the dark triad traits, an interesting finding, I think it's been replicated, is that competitive victimhood signaling correlates with narcissism. People who present themselves as victims and use victimhood to gain social or cultural currency do tend to have, on average, more narcissistic traits. Which I think is fascinating and it resonates with my anecdotal experience, it seems
- [25:06]
C
to me as well. And that, I think is. We're thinking of some of the same papers, I think, in that reference. What would you say are some topics that 10 years ago, when you founded Colette, were outside of the realm of polite discourse that now rightly have actually reached a broader audience and have been more broadly understood? And what do you think are some areas where the solid academic basis for believing in an idea, or at least for taking it seriously as a candidate for consideration, where that taboo still holds, where we're still not willing to actually engage with those ideas?
- [25:48]
A
Yeah, well, I was very fascinated with psychological sex differences 10 years ago and still am. And that surprisingly, that area of research was somewhat stymied within the academy, within psychology, and particularly within neuroscience, because it was seen as having the potential to justify sexism. So if, for example, if we look at neuroscience, if we can see the brain activity on fmri, FMRI scans as being slightly different between men and women, there were, you know, some scholars argued that that would justify women being excluded from the highest realms of economic and political activity. So this was very, this is, this is very second wave Feminism, this idea that any differences between men and women would automatically lead to women being excluded or not given fair opportunities. But coming from my generation where, you know, my mother worked and I, I didn't, you know, this, the second wave feminists were obviously successful, it seemed silly and old fashioned to me to suppress or to frown upon any kind of empirical research for that reason. It just seemed self defeating. And particularly as a woman, I was interested in this question. I actually want to know why, how my son psychology, my personality or my brain function may differ on average from men. And it was just a fascinating question to me. So I read all of the papers that I could and I spoke to scholars and, and it was really heartbreaking to hear how scholars felt maligned and they were name called as sexist for trying to study this very important topic. And we know now that it's very important, particularly for things like in the neurosciences, particularly for, for things like drug dosages. We know that men and women are sensitive to different drugs at different levels, but because it wasn't seen as important for female brains to be studied, women have just been receiving the male level of dosage for many drugs for decades. And so there are real world harms that come from stymieing research of this kind of. But I think now we're, I think the, the culture has shifted and more and more younger women are coming through and saying, look, we are interested in this topic, we need to know about it. And that older generation of academics who are heavily influenced by the second wave feminist ideas that men and women are interchangeable, they're retiring and they're less powerful within the academy. So I think it's a generational thing that's very interesting.
- [28:43]
C
What are some of the findings in that literature that you think are true or that at least have some strong support? I think many listeners to this podcast probably do start from the starting point that men and women are of course different in all kinds of ways, but in the most important ways, our brains work the same way. We're all capable of reading the same text, of debating the same questions about the world and so on. And you know, the resistance to the idea that there are those more foregoing differences obviously comes both from how long that fundamental equality has been denied and from the recognition that, you know, I can talk about the news and debate philosophy and talk about the other things that I'm interested in with my male as well as my female friends and, you know, why should there be a difference? So where having read so much of a literature would you say, well, yes, yes, yes, but, but here are some interesting differences that actually help us make sense of the world.
- [29:45]
A
Well, there's much more overlap than there is difference. And so we know a lot more about psychological differences than we do about neuroscientific research, neuroscientific differences, because that research is in its infancy. But it is plausible that the differences we see in psychology will map onto neuroscience. So in psychology, obviously, one of the biggest differences is sexuality and sexual behavior. And that's been established for decades through research done by David Buss in evolutionary psychology. And, and when we talk about that sexual differences, it's just differences in sex drive, how many sexual partners we want to have over a lifetime, how engaged we are with short term versus long term mating. And men and women overlap in, in a lot of these areas. But there are differences on average. And then particularly interesting area is personality psychology. So women tend to be on average more agreeable than men. And that makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint because to be agreeable means to be a little bit more averse to conflict. It would be adaptive in a, in the situation where you're looking after young children. So to be agreeable means that you're a little bit more easily exploited. And anyone who's observed mothers with young children knows that young children love to exploit their mothers. And so it would have been adaptive for women to develop a more agreeable personality on average. But agreeableness, I think the difference in agreeableness explains a lot of variance that we see in occupational preferences. So I'm an entrepreneur and I work in business and I'm a minority when it comes to founders. So I have had an office in the Sydney startup hub and I meet a lot of founders and they tend to be mostly male. And it's easy for me to see why that's the case, because in the business world, people will try and exploit you. They will. If they see that you're making money, they'll try and get a chunk of it. They'll try and exploit you. They'll try and cut a deal that is not in your favor. There's a lot of zero sum activity. And it's easy for me to see how someone who is more agreeable than me wouldn't thrive in that kind of environment. So I understand, like, from my point of view, it's understandable why there aren't more female founders. For example, when it comes to brain function and the neuroscience of sex differences, this research is still in its very early stages. And I can't say with much confidence what the differences actually are. There's a great neuroscientist called Larry Carhill who has been investigating this question for decades, and he does find that there are. You can. You can see differences in the brain, in the structure and activity that would map onto personality differences and subtle differences that have meaningful behavioral manifestations. But beyond that, I worry that if I try and characterize his research, I'll get it wrong. I'll just leave it at that.
- [33:14]
C
Yeah. One of the things that I always find interesting in these kinds of discussions is not just that political goals end up taking precedence over scientific curiosity, but also that I think people have a very mistaken, intuitive model of how best to serve our political goals. So let's say that you are concerned about the fact that female founders are underrepresented in the tech world or in startups more broadly. Right. And you're trying to solve that. I think a lot of the reason why somebody might hear for the first time this idea that perhaps women tend to be more agreeable and that is one of the things that results in them being underrepresented in that world, is to say, hang on a second, this seems to give this kind of natural, biological explanation for what is going on. And so then perhaps it justifies it. And if only people hear more about that, then they're going to not want to do anything about that. Or perhaps they'll want to send women back into the kitchen and say, your job is in the home, and that's all going to be terrible. And I think that that overestimates the agency of academics, writers, intellectuals, and so on. It thinks that sort of naming an idea, if it is true, I haven't read the research, I don't know what it is, but naming this idea and being open about it somehow is going to have this huge impact, in part because the kinds of people who are engaged in this want to flatter themselves into having a huge impact in the world. And at the same time, I think they sort of give too little weight to the idea that, well, that's one of the things that's going on. Then perhaps there's fixes around that, right? There's ways of whether that's training programs, ways of changing some of the rules around startups, ways of doing whatever else that might actually make being disagreeable less important to being a startup founder. And by the way, that might be a good thing, right? Perhaps a. That might also encourage some men who are more agreeable to be startup funders, and they too may have a Good contribution to make. B perhaps if we select successful startup funders less on being disagreeable, that might have all kinds of positive impacts on how they run the giant businesses. If they somehow come out of that. There's all kinds of potential there you might think about. But the first instinct is, oh no, no, no, this is somehow a dangerous idea, you know, not because in this case, as I was saying with my students, it might force me to draw the wrong normative inference, but because other people might then act in the wrong ways upon this information. So let's shut it down.
- [35:58]
A
Yeah, and I think it comes back to this deep seeded cultural narrative that people are blank slates and that language somehow, I mean language does influence the culture, we know that. But as you would know in the humanities, it is just sort of, it's just the conventional wisdom that discourses produce power. And so if you're having these discussions around personality traits or if you're giving scientific labels to clusters of human behavior, that somehow this will then manifest in the world and it will be sort of self fulfilling, this Foucaultian idea. So I think there's a, there's a hesitancy upon from some intellectuals and academics to engage with the scientific literature because they think it will then shape the world in ways that they don't want. Like quite literally, they think that the, the labels will manifest more strongly in people. Which I think is wrong. I think that's a false, a false idea.
- [37:03]
C
Let's touch a little bit more broadly on this idea of the blank slate. You know, one of the objections that came to my mind that I'm sure many people will have when they hear something like research and agreeableness is precisely that. But yes, of course if you give a personality test to women today, women are going to be more agreeable than men. I think probably few people have real resistance to accepting that part of it. A lot of resistance is going to come by, by people saying but that's because of sexist norms in society. That's because women from a young age are trained to be agreeable. That's because if a four year old boy stands up for himself, people applaud and say, oh good, you know, you're gonna grow up to be such a self confident man. And when a woman, when a four year old girl stands up for self in that way, then adults might say, oh you know, be careful, you know, you, you, you, you're being a little bit bitchy or you're, you know, really not being very feminine and you shouldn't be so unpleasant to people. Right. What do you think is the reason to think that some of these differences aren't just conventional, they're not just about our social norms? And more broadly, why is it that we tend to have a preference for explanations that assume that these kinds of sex or other differences are based in contingent social norms? When I believe in your view, often they are more biologically hardwired.
- [38:35]
A
Well, the reason we know that these traits are not socially constructed is because there's different forms of evidence coming from different areas. So we have convergent evidence. There's research by people like David Schmidt and David Geary that shows that sex differences in personality actually increase in more gender egalitarian countries. So if you survey men and women's personalities in Scandinavia, for example, they will have bigger differences in traits like agreeableness than in countries where gender egalitarianism is not the norm. So you'll still find differences in countries where gender egalitarianism is not encoded in law, but the differences become larger in more gender equal countries. And the theory behind that is that when you open up opportunities and when you take remove legal barriers, people's natural inclinations are more able to manifest openly. And even if you don't subscribe to that interpretation, the findings do contradict the social role theory, which is that women, you know, we're trained from being from little girls to be more agreeable because that's what society wants. You know, if you've got little girls in Sweden and Australia and other countries where gender egalitarianism is promoted being more, you know, still expressing these personality differences, you know, there's something going on there other than social constructionism there. There's also, there are also good evolutionary reasons for these personality traits to exist. And, you know, I know that many people still resist the idea that evolution may have impacted our psychology, but it doesn't make any sense for us to believe that evolution has shaped our bodies, but hasn't stopped at the neck, it hasn't shaped our brains.
- [40:49]
C
And by the way, I think the reasons for that resistance are precisely the one that we've been talking about in various guises. Now, throughout this conversation, some of the same students who I mentioned earlier, who didn't want to engage with this example of how to think about democracy in ethnically divided societies also really sort of rebelled when I assigned a chapter from the Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, which I think is one of the best books on political psychology, certainly written in the last decades. And it was precisely because they were saying, well, evolution, biology is just sort of unserious as a field. It's sort of interesting how students sometimes sort of pick up on these slogans. Right. I think again, the, the reason here is that there are a lot of bad evolutionary psychology arguments, particularly in the kind of popular science realm which say, you know, because, you know, women have historically done X and men have historically done. Yeah, it's good for men to be in charge and for women to be sort of the sex that just accedes to whatever men want or whatever. Right. And so I think they sort of have a sense that perhaps on. On Tick Tock or on social media, there are some people making those kinds of claims and they seem to be. Make. Ref. Be making reference to evolution. And so for anything that's trying to use evolutionary explanations for how modern humans might. Might think about the world must be politically suspect in the same way. So let's just sort of deny the legitimacy of the entire kind of methodological enterprise.
- [42:26]
A
Yeah. And I think it's unfortunate that statistics, basic statistics, is not taught at the high school level because I think it's. It should be a part of any educated person's vocabulary to know the difference between an average and an outlier. And you know, I, I will read the literature on psychological sex differences, and I know that the average doesn't apply to me because I'm not, I'm not the average female. I'm an outlier. I have different interests, I have different behavioral behaviors than, Than the average. So it's very easy for me to not take offense at this notion that the average looks like this. But I think for some people who aren't familiar with basic statistics such as, you know, the normal distribution and variance and standard deviations, I think it can be. They might see themselves as being pigeonholed into a description that they disagree with. But the thing is, it's just very interesting to know about, you know, there's a distribution in human behavior and we all sit on a spectrum and I find it very empowering and liberating to understand more about these descriptions. But I think a statistical illiteracy might have something to do with the pushback
- [43:49]
C
to return for a second to those questions about, insofar as there are gender differences, what are they rooted in? I'm talking about two things. One is just the observation that I think many people make when they have children that, you know, they're trying really hard to give the same toys to their sons and their daughters, and they're giving, you know, little cars to the girls and want to give Dolls to the boys. But it's just the boys want to, you know, on average in the mean, play with a toy cars and the girls, on average in the mean, want to play with adults. And obviously there's outliers. But I know some of my friends who, you know, for example, are quite skeptical about evolutionary biology and you know, trained in sociology and you know, tend to prefer these kind of contingent cultural explanations, have been really struck by the behaviors of their own children. It's obviously not statistically significant sample sizes, but it's just kind of interesting. And the other thing is, you know, I'm thinking about one of the most powerful texts on gender equality, which is by John Stuart Mill on the subjection of women, in which, you know, a very strong argument he makes to his contemporaries is you have a bunch of assumptions about what women are like, what women are capable of. But a lot of that is because in any society of which we have much experience, they have been disqualified legally and through social norms from being able to engage in all of these kinds of activities. So we don't really know what women are and what women are capable of because we've only seen them in these extremely conscribed. Now, of course, the inverse of that, which I hadn't thought about until what you were saying is that, you know, as we build societies that aren't perfectly equal, but in which there's much more equality than there was in the past, in which women are certainly empowered legally, but also in terms of social norms, that does allow us to observe a little bit more about what women actually are like. And if it turns out that some of those gender differences are stronger today in Sweden than they are in Egypt, for example, in terms of a kind of preferred professions, occupations of women, then that actually gives us very interesting information that wasn't available to John Stuart mill in the 19th century.
- [46:10]
A
Yeah, and I don't think we should be so. I mean, I think the differences should be welcomed. So, for example, if you go to any modern university today, you'll find that girls outnumber boys in medicine, in psychology, any kind of profession that is dealing with people, veterinary science. And that's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing that women want to go into the caring professions and are not as interested in perhaps computer science. Like it's not. I think that one of the issues I've had with second wave feminism or mainstream feminism is this idea that whatever is male must be the gold standard. From my point of view, if women's career preferences or life Paths differ somewhat, or if they're not as competitive in. When it comes to their trajectory, you know, if they're not. If they're not out earning men in executive fields or whatever, that's not necessarily a bad thing. We've sort of. We've gone. We've fallen into this trap of thinking the male life track as being the gold standard and that any deviation from that is somehow inferior, which I think is just completely wrong. I think that, you know, we could, we could completely reimagine that and see the female life track and female preferences as the gold standard. And there's actually something wrong with men. I mean, I, I don't believe that. I think we're just different and we have different preferences for different evolutionary reasons. You know, I really resist this idea that just because women are doing something different, that that means they're either oppressed or inferior.
- [48:00]
C
A brief final question on this, and then I want to move to Trump and other stuff like that. The other thing, just sort of broadening this question of a blank slate out beyond, you know, gender differences between men and women that I'm struck by is how little people have taken on board the importance and the power of twin studies.
- [48:21]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [48:23]
C
You know, it is just striking across a huge variety of areas how strongly the, you know, degree of relatedness predicts outcomes. And you can see, you know, twins reared apart, for example, have very similar life outcomes despite growing up in quite different households. And conversely, you can see siblings that don't share the same parents but grew up in the same household, either because they have siblings or because one of them is adopted and therefore doesn't share the genetics of their siblings have really dissimilar life outcomes. And again, obviously the distinction between the mean and the outliers applies, but in the meantime, the twins reared apart are going to have live outcomes on most important metrics, but are much more similar than non genetically related siblings reared together. And that just seems to put a pretty dispositive end to a lot of the basic social outlook. But I certainly would have had when I was 16 or 18 and which, again, I can see might seem to have political implications that are preferable.
- [49:39]
A
Yeah, I'm continually surprised. There is more and more. There's always a new study coming out that makes me like, you know, I believe that I already accept the reality of genetics, but there's always some new study coming out, which surprises me. I read a study a few months ago. I don't know the names of the authors of the paper, but they looked at memories of childhood. So if you go into an AA meeting, for example, and you survey recovering alcoholics in an AA meeting, you'll find that something like 70% of them remember an abusive childhood. But this study was very novel, and I might be getting the description wrong, but if you. If you compare that sample with another sample of whether it's recovering alcoholics or the siblings of the alcoholics, you will find that, I think the siblings of the alcoholics don't remember an abusive childhood. And once you correlate, once you control for some kind of shared genetic influence, what appears to be happening is people with certain genes, perhaps for neuroticism or something else, remember more negative experiences from their childhood than other than other people might, even though they might have grown up in the same environment. And this, this shared trait, whether it's neuroticism or something else, both predicts remembering negative experiences and alcoholism. So, you know, there's. There's always this new work coming out that sort of falsifies this very popular cultural narrative that we have that we're completely shaped by our experiences as children, whether it's trauma or our social environment. Genes, I think genes play a much larger role than what we're ready to accept culturally.
- [51:44]
C
That is absolutely fascinating. I hadn't heard that study. You'll have to send it to me after this conversation. And of course, you know, there's going to be households where everything is wonderful and the parents are always perfect. Probably very, very few of those. There's going to be some number of households that are extremely abusive and probably anybody, whatever the psychological dispositions that grows up in such a household is going to remember those, and that is going to influence them very negatively throughout their lives. But just statistically, let's assume that the majority of households don't fall into either category. The majority of households are going to have loving parents who care about their children and who often mess up in one way or the other. And so it is actually not unintuitive once you think about it. For I wouldn't have guessed it before you told me about the study, that in that middle range, some people are gonna focus on the good things and say, you know, my dad was great, and yes, you know, every now and again he got angry in ways that, you know, wasn't great, or he messed up in this or that way, but on the whole, he treated me well. And people with a different kind of set of psychological dispositions might focus in on the time when the dad or the mom somehow messed up, and that becomes the sort of defining memory of childhood. And the second thing is, you know, we had Emily Oster on the podcast recently and one of the themes of that conversation was that parents always overestimate the extent to which they shape their children and the extent to which, you know, every little choice they make really matters. And of course, what's interesting here is that it implies that, you know, if by genetic variation you happen to have a child that is just going to hyper focus on the negative experiences, they're going to find something to latch onto in your childhood. There's no way to avoid having some conflict with your childhood over the course of 18 years or over course of 30 or 40 years, right?
- [53:41]
A
Yeah.
- [53:43]
C
And conversely, if they have psychological makeup that's pretty resilient, then even if you do mess up a couple times, right, Even if you really don't live up to your own standards of what you're expecting, your parenting a few times, they're going to be just fine. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, Claire and I talk about what it takes to actually be heterodox in a consistent way. What it takes to stand up not just to the consensus in elite institutions, but also to a consensus among people who regard themselves as contrarian and skeptical about everything. Why it is that Claire ended up with a lot of personal attacks on her during the pandemic, and why it is that she is now one of the people in the philosophically liberal space who is clearly calling out the ways in which the Trump administration is undermining values it claims to care about, like free speech. To listen to that part of a conversation, please become a paying subscriber of this podcast, please go to yashamonk.substack.com thegoodfight For 25% off, that means that you can be a subscriber for just about a dollar. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [55:46]
B
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.
- [55:57]
A
Sam.