Cory Clark On Sex Differences

Cory is a behavioral scientist, the executive director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at Penn, a visiting scholar at Penn, and an associate professor of psychology at New College of Florida. She’s also been Director of Academic Engagement for Heterodox Academy and an assistant professor of behavioral science at Durham University. Time to talk about “social feminization”!

For two clips of our convo — on the female dominance in education, and the growing power of HR — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in a big Catholic family in Ohio; her mom a gym teacher and dad a school psychologist; the culture shock of higher ed; the different evolutionary challenges of men and women; “warriors vs worriers”; the Big Five personality traits; neuroticism and risk-aversion; the male sex drive and propensity for violence; the gendered reaction to controversial ideas; safe spaces; The Coddling of the American Mind; extended adolescence; grade inflation; anonymous reporting systems; the boom of the mental health industry; the rise of the parenting industry; women in the military; mediocre men replaced by competent women in the workforce; MeToo; the decline of yelling in newsrooms; Puritanism; aggressive nuns; Prohibition; the Larry Summers row over women in science; the hostility toward men in higher ed; young men becoming reactionary; fairness in sports and locker rooms; the DEI industry; Harris and Walz; and Trump as a crude parody of an idiot male.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Fiona Hill on Putin’s war, Mark Halperin on US politics, Michel Paradis on Eisenhower, Vivek Ramaswamy on the right, Jason Willick on trade and conservatism, Shadi Hamid on US power abroad, George Packer on his Orwell-inspired novel, and Arthur Brooks on the science of happiness. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod:

Your conversation with David Ignatius was interesting and thought provoking. (I knew nothing of his background.)

You, and especially David, seem a little more optimistic than I am about the future of the American republic, and the world. We are less than a year into this shit, and between the gerrymandering on steroids and the various GOP efforts to make it harder to vote, it seems likely that the MAGA cult will retain control of both houses of Congress. Even if Trump were gone, it’s hard to think it would be any better with Vance. There seem to be no checks on anything, including the murder of people in boats in international waters, threats against Venezuela (which is not a threat to the US), and now, threats against Nigeria.

We can only hope that somehow, things will get better.

Another writes:

When I had my subscription to the Washington Post, I liked David Ignatius. Besides being a good writer, he is a good person and very informative, while others display arrogance.

Just before the paywall cut off the Dish episode, David was saying how he regretted his support for the Iraq War and called it the USA’s worse foreign policy action. Well, I recall a front-page article in the WSJ a few years back on the topic of how ISIS was dealt a defeat/setback in the Middle East. The Iraqi army was the main element (the US, NATO and other Middle East allies also assisting) in this “victory” for the civilized part of the globe.

Would this have happened if Saddam Hussein or his handpicked successor was still in power? My betting money says NO! If he had stayed in power, we have no idea what the situation in the Middle East would be, and it’s unlikely that it would have been better. I dreaded the first Persian Gulf War in 1990, which got the USA the role of main player in the Middle East. Without that involvement, I do not see there being a 9/11 and thus no war in 2003.

Back to David, I remember in 2013 on the anniversary of that war, he wrote, “I owe readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense.” He didn’t go on to blame others for misinforming him. Should I renew my subscription to the Post?

No: just get a subscription to the Dish! Then you can hear the entire convo. On your underlying point: ISIS emerged in the vacuum we created in Iraq.

Another writes, “I just wanted to recommend a couple of guests I thought might be great to have on the Dishcast”:

I recently came across an interesting episode of Rogan’s podcast from a couple of years ago with geopolitics specialist Peter Zeihan:

Zeihan is every bit as confident in China’s impending doom as Nick Denton is in its ultimate triumph — which your episode with him illustrated. If you’re interested or open to hosting a debate between the two of them on the subject, I think that would make for some very interesting listening, or just having Zeihan on solo would be informative too.

I also wanted to suggest that you bring Edward Luttwak back on. I loved his Dishcast episode on China and Russia a couple of years ago! I follow him on X, so I’m aware of his thinking on recent events to some extent, but I’d love hear his longform takes on Trump’s grand strategy this term, and events elsewhere in the world. Luttwak is also considerably more pro-Trump than you or most guests are, so his perspective might be helpful for your listenership, including me, to understand where Trump and his supporters’ thinking is on the current state of the world.

Another rec:

Eliezer Yudkowsky has a new book: If Anyone Builds It, Everybody Dies. He’s been on the AI beat for years, and his new book is very disturbing.

As I read news and commentary, in the back of my mind I am always thinking: none of this is going to matter when superhuman intelligence destroys all biological life on earth (not maliciously, just as a byproduct of having weird/alien/unpredictable goals that do not align with human flourishing). AI alignment should be a much bigger deal than it is. People like Jeffery Hinton — Noble Laureate and the godfather of AI — now thinks AI has a 20%+ chance of destroying humanity. This should be top of mind!

Yudkowsky is also a very interesting guy — an autodidact who studied Talmud and never went to university. Prickly and rhetorically entertaining. A master of analogies. Writer of millions of words, including Harry Potter sci-fi fanfic! Would be great to get him in front of your audience.

We recently talked to Karen Hao about AI’s overreach, and here’s a clip:

A reader writes:

In your latest column, you succinctly summarized the current predicament of America:

This system of illiberal education is creating one of the most ignorant and incurious elites just as populism is filling the larger void that liberalism once did. And no, this is not a distraction from opposing Trump. It is central to opposing Trump, because in a world of only ideological and postmodern fantasies, the phantasms of the far right have far more traction than the far left’s, and always have.

This is extraordinarily well said. But here’s the dilemma, from where I see it as a Democratic voter: