“Are women just fundamentally less interested in high risk/reward investments than men? If that difference holds true over the overall general populations of women and men, is it cultural or evolutionary in nature?”
So this meta-analysis looks like it has the largest dataset of any of these types of studies (and with all the flaws inherent in meta-analyses of previous studies where there were probably the standard amount of p-hacking, data-mining, and conclusion-forcing as exist in all soft-science research).
It’s from 1999, but if the “nature over nurture” concept were true, it wouldn’t really matter when they got the data, other than regarding any methodological improvements they’ve made since then (I don’t think they’ve made many).
The paper concludes in the classic hedging style by saying that, yeah, it seems to clearly show that males take more risks than females, but that this “doesn’t seem to manifest itself in a simple or constant way across ages or contexts.”
In other words, there will be differences in the risk averseness of males vs females depending on the variables of “age” and “everything else that goes into human decision making and the world and situation in which that decision-making takes place (i.e. that “context” they dropped in there).
And even then, it looks like it’s going to be nearly impossible to set-up any kind of experiment with the proper controls, that can show us whether any differences which MAY exists between the genders regarding risk taking (if there are any at all) are mainly causes by biological/evolutionary factors or socio-cultural ones.
It’s orobably a little bit of both, although I can’t really think of (or know of) of any idea as to why the human brain/nervous system would/could evolve in a way where risk-taking/risk-aversion would be selected for (evolutionarily speaking) in one gender and not the other.
I mean, I can think of all types of pseudoscientific stuff that could get thrown out there (women evolved to want virile men and risk taking correlates with higher testosterone blah blah blah) but nothing that actually passes muster of some good solid science.
This is all a long run up to me saying, yeah, I think there are less women in crypto for the same reason there are less men in Nursing, or why Blue is (today) the boy color and Pink is (today) the girl color:
Meaningless Cultural Junk.
Of course, the propensity for human beings to allow their lives to be structured by Meaningless Cultural Junk, I think, can be shown as rooted in some evolutionary selection for path-dependency and the desire to live in groups.
In any event, yeah, more women should get into crypto. More people should get into crypto.
No more dogs though.
One is enough.
No more kitties either hopefully, they practically broke ETH. Great find on the meta-analysis study, I look forward to digging into it. Followed!
Pinker's book I mentioned above goes into this in detail, I really think you would enjoy it if you're interested in walking through that logic (luckily I found the audiobook as those are much easier for me to get through).
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Yeah, I enjoy Pinker's writing immensely. I've "browsed" The Blank Slate (read bits and pieces at friends houses and the library), and it just fell right into that "Pinker is so brilliant so how is he so wrong" category for me.
I think what bothered me, specifically here, about The Blank Slate, was that Pinker seems to have this intent of reconstructing the conceptual foundations that post-modernism smashed apart and left in a mess on the floor.
But as obnoxious as the post-modernists can get (reading even two sentences by Derrida makes me want to stab myself in the eye with an ice-pick), they had one fundamental thing going for them, which was their willingness to set aside the fear of a sloppy, disconnected world, and really explain why that's ok anyway.
Pinker, it seems, really wants to be back in a world where scientists KNEW how the world works, and the things they didn't know were just things they didn't know YET, but would find out in due course.
But I don't think we can get back to that world, because it was, essentially, a lie.
The Uncertainty Principle in Science. The Incompleteness Theorems in Math. The Is-Ought Gap in Logic.
A lot of people like Pinker--people who are so incredibly curious and crave knowledge and want to know the world so they can love it and fix it and help it and improve it--they don't like those concepts, because those concepts put humanity and existence in a permanent state of partial blindness. We can get close to understanding. We can approximate it really well. But we can never reach it...not really.
Pinker, in almost everything he does, is a kind of push back against that.
The Blank Slate is an attempt to show that actually, yes, human beings do have a definitive certain nature that can be explained by science. Pinker wants to show that the old scientists had the solution in front of them, but they just weren't understanding what they were seeing.
Except at every turn, Pinker has to fall back onto the same uncertain assumptions and unjustified assertions that he wants to get rid of, to make his case.
He gets credit for trying. It's not like people shouldn't make the attempt to get at some kind of understanding of "human nature" such as it is, because we will get a lot of valuable information from the attempt itself, even while it ultimately fails.
Which is why I love people like Pinker. He's so brilliant and he's doomed to always fail to prove what he wants to prove, necessarily, but we are all enriched by his brave and strenuous attempts.
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