Sure, although, I mean, I did high school biology, I know what testosterone is.

What do you think testosterone is?

Pretty much what the first paragraph of the wikipedia article on it says it is (emphasis mine):

Right, its “linked to violence.”. And now you have to weigh that and compare with the role culture plays on men wrt to violence. It’s not as clear cut as you’d like it to be.

I made a very simple assertion:

You can read "predisposed" as "genetically predisposed" if it helps clarify.

My claim is very clear cut. The claim you are refuting doesn't seem to be, but it also doesn't seem to be mine.

No, it's deliberately papering difficult questions of nature vs. nurture. It's like bahba declaring that actively managed mutual funds are the best investment possible and then appealing to common sense or "basic economics" or whatever.

It’s the testosterone and the society. Jfc

Before you can address nuanced questions such as gender roles and stereotypes and to what extent, if any, the perpetuation thereof is desirable in society, you need to be able to agree on certain basic foundational facts such as "human males are on average genetically predisposed to be physically bigger, stronger and more aggressive than human females". If you don't have that common ground to use a springboard to launch further discussion, any attempts at such are unlikely to bear fruit.

To use your analogy, it's more like bahbah being completely wrong about how progressive taxation works and making an irrefutable arithmetic error in calculating the tax liability of a $250k earner, then using the result of this calculation as a premise when opining on the more nuanced aspects of tax policy.

Are you trying to say men aren't as pre-disposed to violence as women?

No, he is avoiding the direct claim and refuting some adjacent claim we are supposed to assume is essentially identical and subconsciously elide over the "and then some magic happens" part, hoping nobody notices. It's actually a pretty effective debate tactic, but I feel I've had my intelligence insulted somewhat that he even bothered trying it on me.

If you restarted human civilization on a parallel world at the exact point it was 10,000 years ago on Earth, and then you checked in on that human civilization on that parallel world 10,000 years later, how similar do you think it would be to current human civilization on Earth?

I think there is a 99.5% chance that it would be vastly different.

I'm unpackaging what we mean by "pre-disposed."

This feels like naked strawmanning.

When someone makes a point, in general, don't assume that that point is building towards something just because you've heard others make that connection. He even said 'it's not as clear cut as you'd like it to be'.

Male brains send signals through the central nervous system to dispense more testosterone to the body than female brains, reducing this to a problem already addressed by a previous post. QED

If the planet's geography and climate were exactly the same and the biology of all living things on the planet were exactly the same, I believe 10k years later everything would be exactly the same.

If they were not the same, then the differences would be random. I fail to see how that says anything important about human culture.

I could not disagree more. I think that random events (and non-events) have had a profound impact on human civilization.

To take the most obvious example, even if our parallel world had exactly the same geography and overall climate as the Earth, it doesn't follow that acute weather events (droughts, etc.) or pandemics would affect exactly the same people in the exactly the same areas in exactly the same years as they have on Earth.

Entire civilizations, and untold numbers of individual geniuses, have survived or not because of things like droughts and communicable diseases.

I think I actually agree with Chillrob. Basically, if we accept the premise that evolution is the result of a bunch of coin flips where the coin was weighted heads 51% of the time, it's an inescapable conclusion, mathematically.

Replace "heads" with whatever trait evolution selected for, and you reach the same results with the same or marginally different inputs. No "butterfly effect" here, it would actually run contrary to the principle of the whole thing.

Except we aren't flipping coins and we aren't really talking about evolution. (Human genetic evolution over the last 10,000 years has been minimal.) Events in human history are not fungible. They are singular to a greater or lesser degree. And very singular events either occur or they do not occur. For example, Constantine either survives long enough to convert to Christianity or he does not. It was hardly an inevitability and the effects on world history of his conversion were very significant.

I missed that you said 10,000 years - I thought you quoted a number that was more or less commensurate with abiogenesis, but I get that this isn't material to your point.

Would you agree, that, in N-->infinity experiments, given the same initial conditions, life on Earth (or an Earth-like planet) evolves in pretty much the same trajectory most of the time? I'm not talking about "slight glitches in the matrix", i.e. the odd war or genocide or whatnot here or there. Take a bigger view - on an evolutionary time scale, those are but minor bumps in the curve.

I would actually agree with Rococo here. I think you are underestimating the effect random black swan effects have had in influencing evolution, with the most obvious example being a giant asteroid causing the dinosaurs to go extinct, allowing mammals to evolve.

For a more mundane example we see how mammals evolved completely differently in isolated environments such as Australia and Galapaos Islands, where a lot of this extreme variation is believed to be due to different random genetic mutations that evolution acted upon.

Even starting with similar conditions, I think the vast majority of the time life goes extinct long before something like humans evolve, probably long before multicellular life evolves. There may be other life out there somewhere, but that is just because the universe is such a large place, not because it is statistically likely that life would evolve or follow a particular path. It is in fact possible the chance of life happening and evolving in the direction of sentient life is so statistically small we may be alone as far as sentient life goes.

Never heard of the Fermi paradox before, thanks boss.

You're pointing at the 'great filter' version of the answer to the Fermi Paradox, which is not really a paradox in the literal or metaphorical sense, because the answer to it is very simply that space is very big and time is very long and there likely have been vast vast numbers of alien civilisations but they exist so far away and in such a relatively small slice of time as to render them effectively impossible to find evidence of let alone communicate with. We have no alternative history generators with regards to the development of life and even though there's such a thing as a goldilocks zone, and a habitable zone as it applies both within a single solar system as well as galaxy-wide, it could turn out that life is actually a lot more common and likely than we previously thought, and that given enough time, most sources of life end up in complex organisms such as ourselves. There's even some current belief that Venus, despite its horrendous conditions, could harbour life, or have harboured life before now but still in its present state.

What I think is the main issue here is a style of belief that really is kinda religious in nature akin to 'destination'. History is not a matter of destination. It's absolutely not the case that the way we are, and all the stops we've had along the way, are guaranteed, or even likely. If any huge number of seemingly small events had gone even slightly different ways, the world could and would be very, very different. There is no 'arc of history' in this sense. There may be truth to the idea that history rhymes but does not repeat, and perhaps even some validity to the idea of 'cycles' as a number of historian-philosophers going back as far as (AFAIK) giambattista vico talk about, but those cycles are not set in stone and are subject to change.

Really? That's right up your alley.

My reaction was that he was being sarcastic given Kelhus didn't actually mention Fermi Paradox explicitly, but his response falls victim to Poe's Law