>>Maybe part of the problem is that we under value compassion and empathy?

Well... no.

First of all I wish to point out that this has nothing to do with the point of my meme, which was focused on a lack of logic. Cathy Newman tried to bring out 'exceptions' as if they were some kind of argument against 'averages'. Which is, of course, nonsense.

However your guess here is dead wrong. Wrong in several ways, but let's focus on one that Jordan Peterson talks about frequently: scalability.

In any economic environment where reality is honored, scalability is important. If I sell one burger to one person every day, I am not providing as much value as if I sold 100 burgers to 100 people every hour. That is basic logic, and cannot be escaped.

Compassion, by its very nature, is not scalable. You might get a marvelously compassionate nurse. She might succeed in demonstrating her compassion to one or even ten patients in a given shift. She simply cannot use her compassion for 100 or even 1000 patients an hour. That is not the way compassion works. It takes time, and it takes focus.

So a computer programmer can write a program which he can sell to 1,000,000 people, all of whom can use it at the same time, and thus receive value from him. Indeed they can keep using it while he sleeps, and tell their friends about it, etc.

The best nurse in all the world can do nothing of the sort.

So what would it mean to 'value' that compassion? We can easily see how the computer programmers work is valued: lots of people buy and use his product. But we literally cannot do the same thing for the nurse.

So what we would have to do is charge more for the nurse. But what that would do for society would be devastating: good, compassionate nursing care would become impossibly expensive!

This is but one reason why, in the purely economic realm, we cannot 'value' compassion in the sense you propose.

@VonO I think your perspective of compassion is quite limited if this is a finishing argument on the subject for you. And I figured something posted under debate strategies could warrant some discussion?

There is a lot of belittling female opposition, and I don't have a problem seeing why. Their debate strategies often leave me wondering if there is no one better to be doing the research and sitting in the presentation seats.

I'm new to this conversation, so forgive me if I'm missing the point. I see lots of complaints and criticism of females while men call for logic, all I'm doing here is offering up some middle perspective. The bickering seems childish on both sides, but I'm witnessing the conversation patterns more than the subject matter itself.

Taking a nurse for your main example is a very limited perspective. Putting aside that different jobs have different requirements and thus would benefit from different skills sets, I'll take a more generalized approach.

Compassion is not really an act, it is an emotion. An emotion can be filtered through every aspect of someone or be reserved for specific situations. This can happen in healthy ways and not so healthy ways.

Men have typical emotions they experience the world through, while woman have typical feminine emotions they experience the world through. These tend to balance each other and create a duality to the way we see, process and interact with the world.

I'm not saying every job would benefit from this agreeableness, but we are still bickering over treating men and woman as equals while drawing lines in the sand to make woman feel as valuable as men. It's becoming pretty politically correct to admit men and woman arnt equal, but different. So why keep arguing?

I agree at her falty logic, but wouldn't we find resolution faster by trying to understand what the problem really is? It's easy to point fingers and say who you think is right or wrong. What is hard is conflict resolution, and I see little to none of that going on in any of these debates.

I don't know, I don't hold any stake in this personally. But the perspective someone sees the world though shouldn't be discounted so quickly. Sometimes what you see as weakness in someone else is actually a strength and vice versa.

All I did was purpose a shift in the direction of conversation, I'm not saying i have all the answers or am even going in the right direction. But I can see no answers from anyone else ether. So why not try shifting the conversation to be more productive?

Or do I to lack enough logical thinking for you?

@Oxfret
>> do I to lack enough logical thinking for you?

Depends on whether 'missing the point' is faulty logic

The subject at hand in the OP is pay. The statement by Peterson is that agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people. The larger point is that this is not only good, it is inevitable.

I pointed out one aspect of the issue, namely scalability. I pointed out that professions which reward compassion are generally not scalable. You can agree with that, or disagree with that, but shifting to 'more general' just misses the point. The 'general' is made up of a whole lot of 'specifics'.

Let's take another specific. Agreeable people tend to be content in their jobs and not seek new opportunities. They tend to feel sympathy with their current employer and thus not take other opportunities that present themselves... even those that are higher paying. This obviously, on average, leads to them getting less pay.

So now we have two specifics (scalability and willingness to shift jobs) that lead to agreeable people getting paid less.

@VonO I do disagree, if agreeableness by nature lacks scalability I do not believe you have done anything to logically highlight that in your comments.

I generalized because taking a specific that suits your argument and weighing it against an arbitrary point of measure just to make a point is not logical in my book.

If you want to use a nurce, then you must compare a nurse with a nurse. If you have two, one compassionate and one not compassionate it is possible the less compassionate one could get through more patients and thus make more profit for those being profited. Though I find this an uncomfortable reference as I don't believe that's what a nurse should be focused on.

On the other hand, if the patients are particularly hard to deal with compassion may in fact speed things up, compassion does not limit itself to a time consuming get to know you. It can give insight to get a job done faster while working with people that could be impossible for others. As you said, there are many details that could change these situations, but to make a blanket statement that there is no scalability what so ever in something you don't understand because it's out of your perspective is not very thought out.

On the other hand, a compassionate programmer may do just as well or even better than their presumably male counterpart. There is no proof of this, but your comment didn't give any specifics, just that a programmer would be more valuable than a nurse. So here I presume the female is as competent just with different skill sets. Programming is about problem solving, so bringing new eyes to a problem is usually helpful and can often surprise those stuck on it.

I highlighted generally because this covers a wide range of aspects that haven't been discussed. Compassion is like a lens you see the world through, you can't possibly understand what value there is or how scalable it is. You might be right, but you have not used logic to convince me, you have used blanket statements supported by extremes that don't realy compare with each other, they just make your point.

I think your perspective on agreeable people is also limited, some may feel this way but others certainly feel like they are being treated as door mats and don't know how to stand up for themselfs. Or this argument wouldn't be presenting itself in the first place IMO.

"Profesions that reward compassion are generally not scalable" I agree this is likely true, but doesn't that highlight an us or them mentality?

If the profession decided to appreciate the skill set as they are instead of deeming it not scalable maybe they could actually find a use for it. I'm all for capitalism, but haven't we gone too far? Destroying the earth and focusing on nothing but profit and scalability? Businesses think that there is no limit to how much they can scale, maybe a more long term perspective could be gained on both sides if both sides where understood and appreciated more.

I just think we could do more to reward different skills and perspectives, they are valuable. That popular statement "if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree you will forever think it is stupid" pops to mind.

If woman at large have this agreeableness then maybe there is more use for it than we give credit for. And discounting them because they don't live in a world that appreciates what it is useful for is pretty short sighted.

Like schools, and the health system I believe much of our current practices are out of date, and missing the point. There is growth needed, and this is just me putting out a line to see if the conversation has a better direction to go in than what I've seen because what I've seen is very disappointing.

The only universal truth I've found across the board, is truth lies somewhere between the two aposing perspectives. If your perspective is limited, and let's say the feminist perspective is limited then it stands to reason if you stopped arguing with each other and started trying to find solutions, maybe the truth in between wouldn't be so difficult to understand or accept for eather side.

@Oxfret
>>If you want to use a nurse, then you must compare a nurse with a nurse.

Well, no, I don't... altho I can.
One reason why people are paid less is because of the professions they choose. The 'caring' professions (nurse, teacher, etc.) get paid less in part because of a lack of scalability in their professions. More agreeable people tend to go into these professions. Ergo they get paid less.
On the other hand it is even true nurse vs nurse. A nurse who is more 'agreeable' will tend to stick with nursing jobs that have a lot of direct patient care... and thus are less scalable. They won't tend to go into the kind of nursing, like administration, that gets them out of direct patient care...and who are paid more.

@Oxfret >>On the other hand, a compassionate programmer may do just as well or even better than their presumably male counterpart

The point is that compassionate people... people people... don't tend to take jobs that involve staring at a screen all day.

@Oxfret
>>If woman at large have this agreeableness then maybe there is more use for it than we give credit for.

There is a huge use for it, as Peterson points out. It was designed to help women protect and raise children. You've got to be pretty agreeable to be willing to get up at two AM to care for a fussy infant and not kill him.

@VonO well, we will have to agree to disagree. I do agree with and see your points, I just also think there is a greater picture than is highlighted in your understanding in this conversation.

Compassion comes in many different sizes boxes, just like other emotions. And I don't think you can assume to know that compassion directly results in compassionate job types.

And if a of people stand up and make a fuss it's not very logical to tell them they are not aloud to use there skills outside of a specific situation you deem acceptable or proper.

As I said, I have no personal stake in this, but I am good at conflict resolution. And it's hard to really know if woman are at large agreeable or if that is a society standard conditioned into them. Maybe we teach them to be agreeable the same way we teach men to be assertive.

Of course this could be fixed by woman being more assertive on their own accord, but as you've seen it's hard for them to make leeway. It's a roundabout argument that could go on for days depending on how one chooses to argue.

@Oxfret >>well, we will have to agree to disagree. I do agree with and see your points

I don't do the whole 'agree to disagree' thing. Indeed I wrote a post about it
But it seems really odd to say that and then say you agree with my points. Feel free to list your own points (like, actual points, not general platitudes) and maybe I will agree with them.

@Oxfret >>Of course this could be fixed by woman being more assertive on their own accord

There is nothing broken. There is nothing wrong with women, on average, making less than men, on average... or women, on average, being more agreeable.

@VonO something is wrong, or there would be no debate at all. What that is exactly is the argument.

Since I have given you a broad explanation as well as a specific one I simply have no more to discuss if you don't see my points as valid. That's ok, I understand your points and I don't need to argue with them.

To agree to disagree is for me, a willingness to walk away from someone who has a different perspective than me, without trying to make them feel there perspective is wrong or less than.

Your perspective is a basic freedom I have no right to deny and so when I see there is no common ground to be made why would I fight to change that? You don't have influance over me and I don't have influance over you. Nothing wrong with agreeing to see different perspectives.

Maybe I'll read your post about it and expand my own perspective when I have time, but for now my points are not so simple as to list them out. My points take into account a lot of variables that can not be summarized into a neat list to apose your own.

My point as always is a broader understanding of the world as a hole, of our bodies as the mini ecosystems they are with their own high functioning computer runing programs based off emotional input gathered over a lifetime of experience and filtered through base programming we where born and conditioned into.

But maybe my agreeableness and compassion are confusing my logical skills, your certainty entitled to your own opinion on that.

I think the point Peterson was trying to make to Newman is that if women expect to be paid the same as men, then women must be prepared to compete with men. Men compete with other men for pay at the same job. Why should women not have to compete with men in order to be paid the same as men for doing the same job? I think Peterson's point is that it is about competence, not gender. In other words, if a man is high in trait agreeableness, he will have to deal with that in the same way a woman will. Peterson might say that both men AND women with trait agreeableness need to learn how to ask for a raise!

@theanimalside He actually said that that is one of the things he teaches people how to do: how to be assertive and ask for raises etc.