11 Comments

I wish someone would corroborate these findings in professional workplaces. I suspect much of it holds. In startups, being highly competitive would favor a mostly or all male team. But no one wants to say this. And I’ve seen the problems with mostly or all female startups again and again. Competition in the market doesn’t inspire female cohesion, so they have to work much harder to achieve it. They tend to prefer stable, peaceful workplaces, but these don’t naturally generate cohesion, they generate passive aggressive politics

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Nov 6, 2022Liked by Rob Henderson

“The lesson: visit used books stores.” ... Unless the store is outside your group territory. Then take an expeditionary force and visit used book stores “

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“But if a fight does break out between females, they seldom reconcile.”

This is true with female chimps and humans. I can’t tell you how many quotes I’ve come across on social media about “cutting out the toxic friends in your life.” This practice is most likely considered healthy because of our evolutionary process. We know females don’t usually reconcile after conflict so it’s better psychologically to narrate this practice as cutting out toxicity than saying you lack the desire and skills that are necessary to repair the broken relationship.

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“Mathematical modeling of human evolution suggests that human cooperation is a consequence of competition.”

This seems a key point. Another is that competition for social status is a ubiquitous human trait.

My female friends seem more prone to deny that they are competitive and claim that they are agreeable… while demonstrating some nasty passive-agressive behaviors that are clearly motivated by competition of pursuit of social status.

I really worry about the health of our military with more female recruits.

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Women war parties raiding villages to captures husbands sounds like the basis for a good comedy movie.

This sort of thing I would imagine is broadly based but not true across the board right? Sort of like saying Men are taller than Women; true in general but plenty of cases where a woman is taller than a man. Just saying because i'm a guy but think I can be passive aggressive to a pretty good degree.

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It would be interesting to add another timeless dimension to this competition hypothesis....the alpha-beta male spectrum and the pretty-plain female spectrum which I have written about here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired

Sex/gender journalism tends, in my view anyway, to over-generalise...it's always 'Men' behave like such-&-such; 'Women' behave like such-&-such.

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When I was in the Air Force my friends and I came up with a game called The Friendship Test. The game was, you would just walk up to your friend at a party and punch them in the face as hard as you could. The "test" was if you could remain friends with your attacker, it was "true" friendship. No one ever failed the test, and a lot of times we would have all-out fistfights in the name of friendship, and spend the remainder of the party bloodied and bruised. We never played the game on strangers or even casual acquaintances. You had to be in our (very close) group.

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This is just incredibly significant information

I can't imagine how many people would have trouble internally accepting the findings - one wonders if it would ever be accepted by the mainstream

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