[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior” That was obviously not Aristotle; he had very different views to Plato.
Rick Rosner: How old is that quote? Well anyway, that brings up all sorts of issues including the issue that got the chancellor of Harvard fired 20 years ago, Larry Summers. Larry Summers said that women on average are as smart as men but there are fewer outliers. In other words, he said there were fewer female geniuses. And there may have been a study at the time but you can always find a fucking study. Anyway, he had to quit running Harvard.
Jacobsen: Here we go, it was Socrates. The quote is 2,500 years old.
Rosner: Socrates. It’s a really old quote.
Jacobsen: Two and a half millennia.
Rosner: Okay. Now, for one thing, it’s a little like IQ. IQ is a terrible metric or there’s no really good way to measure intelligence. There are some not terrible ways but they’re not ideal. Even worse is something general like who’s better; men or women? There’s no metric that you can establish. And then when you take a quote from 2500 years ago which you know the civilization under Aristotle, it wasn’t exactly a feminist paradise; ancient Greece. So it could have been just like throwing women a bone because why not because nobody gave a shit. Yeah you can say women are better than men because we men are in charge of fucking everything and we can just say it. A certain component of chivalry is the assumed superiority of men. Yeah we fucking run everything but we’re still going to be nice to you in certain limited ways.
Now, a modern-ish point of view might be that everybody has a brain, everybody’s a conscious being and that should be the prime criterion and under that criterion people are largely equal. Everybody experiences the same emotions unless their brains are badly broken. Everybody has roughly the same conscious experience created by mediated through their brain. That’s the basis of the golden rule that what you want you can assume in general. Everybody else wants because everybody else is the same kind of animal with roughly the same brain. But if you want to get into the specifics of how women might be superior there’s always that shit that I used to think was more or less real, which is the corpus callosum; the fiber bundle that connects the two halves of the brain is thicker in women and guys supposedly have a lower impulse control. So when a woman makes a decision it’s maybe made taking less rationally and taking more factors into consideration or if you just want to boil it down, guys are more likely to be assholes than women.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 