The thing that offends is that the PUA’s conception of what women are like is perceived by some as demeaning. Imagine how you would feel if someone made inaccurate assumptions about you via generalizations from some group you belong to?
Do you consider accuracy relevant here?
Obviously the offense makes sense if the generalization is inaccurate both in general and in specific. What about when it is accurate in general, but wrong in the specific case? Or when it is accurate both in general and in specific? (For some definition of “accurate in general” approximately equal to “accurate for a majority of individual cases”, or perhaps a plurality if not a yes/no question.)
To the fact that people are offended? No. They would be offended simply because the words are negative, regardless of accuracy.
As for myself, I’m not personally offended … I think it’s a half truth. Yes, dominance might be attractive in some contexts, no, that doesn’t mean that being a jerk is generally an effective mating strategy.
The racism example is a half-truth too. Blacks do perform worse on cognitive tasks...but there is no evidence that this difference is genetic, and quite a bit of evidence that it’s due to socioeconomic and health related factors. If I didn’t tell you the second half of it, you might have just implicitly assumed the differences were genetic.
Having spent a reasonable amount of time looking into the matter in the past, I do feel fairly comfortable in making that claim, unless something new has come out in the past ~4 years.
Do you consider accuracy relevant here?
Obviously the offense makes sense if the generalization is inaccurate both in general and in specific. What about when it is accurate in general, but wrong in the specific case? Or when it is accurate both in general and in specific? (For some definition of “accurate in general” approximately equal to “accurate for a majority of individual cases”, or perhaps a plurality if not a yes/no question.)
To the fact that people are offended? No. They would be offended simply because the words are negative, regardless of accuracy.
As for myself, I’m not personally offended … I think it’s a half truth. Yes, dominance might be attractive in some contexts, no, that doesn’t mean that being a jerk is generally an effective mating strategy.
The racism example is a half-truth too. Blacks do perform worse on cognitive tasks...but there is no evidence that this difference is genetic, and quite a bit of evidence that it’s due to socioeconomic and health related factors. If I didn’t tell you the second half of it, you might have just implicitly assumed the differences were genetic.
No evidence that it is genetic, whatsoever? Any of it? That’s a bold claim. It’s certainly great if that’s the case!
Having spent a reasonable amount of time looking into the matter in the past, I do feel fairly comfortable in making that claim, unless something new has come out in the past ~4 years.
Given that IQ is over 50% heritable and IQ heritability increases with age, my prior would be that it’s largely genetic.