OK so here's just a rant on something that has probably bothered me more than anything about many social and political movements. The social sciences.

I remember in college, reading a paper that insisted that "men can't stand assertive women". One of the data points it mentioned was something like "men very strongly preferred women who ranked high in agreeableness and empathy. Men seek these traits because they are submissive, and men seek domination over women as they do in most other aspects of their lives."

OK a few questions. 1. Is that really what you took from that? 2. Did you ask the same question to women about men? 3. If you did and they responded differently, that seems more worthy of concern. 4. What competing hypotheses did you also test? 5. How well does the data fit those models? 6. Was your particular hypothesis the best match? 7. If all the models match similarly well, have you composed a new experiment that can test your hypothesis and specifically distinguish it from the other competing hypotheses?

This is my issue. It is all hindsight armchair narrating. Top-down arguments that start with a narrative and use that narrative to describe the data.

This would be fine if the narratives weren't prioritized over the data, and if all fitting hypotheses we're considered instead of the first piece of the narrative that fits the data, and had to be eliminated by further repeated and competing experimentation.

Why do we teach Freud and his personal conclusions, rather than simply teaching ideas that include his data as part of the whole? In physics, we don't teach "Newton", "Gauss", "Feynman". We teach mechanics, electromagnetism, and quantum electrodynamics.

If we taught Newton, we would be learning about the sacred number 7 and the occult. If we taught Tesla, we would learn of the horrors of earrings and the bliss of pigeons with glowing eyes.

So what we get is stuff like "X is real because such and such activist wrote a book about it". The conclusions should survive without the need to write a book about it. Outsiders should be able to come in with only the data and be able to come to the same conclusion.

These are fine as talking points, but they have little-to-no rigidity on their own. Everyone has an opinion on the wage gap or suicide rates. People don't really have an opinion on "do things fall down" despite how hard some politicians may try.

This also muddies things like climate change and evolution, because people think it's just opinions by some guy with a pipe in an armchair.

This may also be applying only to social science journalism and not the social sciences themselves. I know science journalism is rather awful. If it is anything like nutrition science or quantum physics, they're completely butchering it to write clickbait.

But that's my issue. People are holding conjecture in way to high if esteem way too early. And it's obvious to see.

"We need to close women's prisons. Because women only go to prison because of the stresses of their gender roles" "What about men, who make up like 90% of prisoners" "Well......in that case is that they seek dominance and can't stand to see their privilege threatened." Referencing a conversation I had about the UK's once intention to close all women's prisons and remove imprisonment of women.

Or in the original question. What if women also strongly preferred more agreeable and empathetic men. Would you draw the same conclusion? I won't assume anything, but I'd predict it would sound a lot like "because women need a sense of safety in a world that hates them."