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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

"When I ask why there are so few women in the crypto space..." reminds me of the movie Boiler Room where they train scam telemarketers to never pitch investments to women or let a guy they are pitching talk to their wife about it.

Men are more vulnerable to making certain narcissism-related mistakes, such as getting into bad investements because of FOMO or self-publishing books about new fundamental theories in physics that center around the mass ratio of the proton to the electron being exactly the square root of 3371456.

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>"Men are more vulnerable to making certain narcissism-related mistakes"

Perhaps, but I think there is more to this than just narcissism. It's an uncomfortable truth but men are culturally expected to take risks and succeed - unless they are lucky enough to be born into wealth or power. That same pressure is not as pronounced as it is for women. So that is why I suspect men make the leap into the speculative world of crypto far more often than women do. Some men are counting on crypto to make them rich (myself included, sadly) because they just don't see themselves getting ahead otherwise.

>Men are more vulnerable to making certain narcissism-related mistakes

Does this mean there are inherent differences in personality traits between sexes? I don't necessarily disagree, but seems like a controversial take nowadays.

Yes. Have you ever tried to raise a teenager during puberty? Hormone-induced behaviors is definitely a thing.

I think it's still widely accepted. What's not is trying to apply these traits to a single person, and saying that the differences are only biological rather than cultural.

Men grow up in a different environment from women so I can't say (don't know) how much of the behavior difference is biological rather than learned.

My hunch though is that a lot of it is going to reverse.

It's only "controversial" in leftist circles that spout "equity". The difference in personality traits between men and women (even boys and girls before puberty) are well established in the literature for a very long time now.

Yea, three of my male college friends just self-published the same book. What are the odds!

> or self-publishing books about new fundamental theories in physics that center around the mass ratio of the proton to the electron being exactly the square root of 3371456

That is oddly specific. Do you have a link to this book?

I just squared the proton to electron mass ratio and rounded it to get that.

It's a common trope for physics crackpots to try to find closed expressions for things like the fine structure constant, electron/proton mass ratio, etc. The latter is completely nonsensical today because the proton isn't an elementary particle.

I got thinking about the "crackpot physics" subject again because about two weeks ago there were a series of crackpot physics posts to Hacker News by a woman. It might be "You've come a long way baby" but I'd want to check that it isn't a trans woman before announcing that.

(... certainly you see more men than women in real physics but you have Emmy Noether, Lisa Randall, Elise Meitner, Vera Rubin. It's men who get the idea that they are 'very special' and have 'unique insights'.)

Pretty much anyone that is in a position to be required to produce some body of work on a regular schedule in order to advance their careers can fall into this kind of thinking imo. Unecessarily gendering it seems inappropriate. There's a lot of tropes about men gaining ground and I'd ask you not feed them.

The real physicist has to "produce some body of work on a regular schedule to advance their career", the crackpot moves on his own pace. (e.g. I used to be a bit of an expert on this because I was involved with arXiv's anti-crackpot policy)

The real physicist publishes in journals like Physical Review E, the crackpot self-publishes books (or maybe) publishes in predatory journals that specialize in crackpot papers.

Crackpotism has nothing to do with science but with feelings of "I'm special", and it is right up there with taking LSD and thinking you are the Christ or the anti-Christ.

Crackpots who study physics and try to publish are a well-known phenomenon and almost all of them are men.

I don't think narcissism is the issue here and I don't think women are less likely to fall for scams, just different kinds of scams.

The latter, eg the choice to use the word "narcissism" in place of more charitable or reasonable explanations, is more what I was critiquing. Using narcissism frequently with respect to explaining men's behavior rather than exploring reasonable options is something I see more and more lately and needs some soft corrections.

There is the common use of "narcissism" as a synonym for "bad" and I disagree with that.

"Narcissism" is "self-love" and it is a part of the psyche like the heart is part of your body. When people have trouble with their heart they could have high blood pressure, heart disease, heart failure, heart attacks, heart defects, arrhythmia, etc. So even disordered narcissism is more than one disease.

I just brushed my teeth and that's a healthy expression of narcissism.

A physics crackpot imagines that he is an underlooked genius, is "special". The one thing he knows about Al Einstein is that Einstein worked at the patent office, he doesn't know about the many scientists and mathematicians who Einstein worked with. That's unhealthy narcissism.

If somebody is thinking about having money for retirement I'd say narcissism is always involved because you have some conjecture/mental picture about yourself that is based on your self-image, hopes and fears.

It's good to have realistic and positive self-esteem but boy is it hollow, shallow and ineffective to try to paint it on because somebody told you should.

Much more frighteningly, I think crackpots and Einstein share the trait of narcissism. You need that trait to think "I can solve the mysteries of the universe".

What great physicists have that crackpots lack is intelligence and/or diligence. I think it's mostly the latter, plenty of crackpots are smart. They just don't take the time to learn the math or study the centuries of prior art.

> Emmy Noether, Lisa Randall, Elise Meitner, Vera Rubin

Chien-Shiung Wu!

Didn't someone post 'What to do when the trisector comes' [1] here recently? Great read.

[1] https://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/whattodowhentrisectorcomes.pdf

Why are there so few women in the mining industry?

Why are there so few women in arms trade?

Why are there so few women in finance?

Why are there so few women in infosec?

Why are there so few women in ...

How is "crypto space" unique? It's so easy to find countless industry events which are full of mostly men.

There are plenty of women in real finance who are totally accomplished. Many women have developed quant/derivative products (... like those CDOs that blew up in 2008), manage projects for firms like Swift/DTCC, run banks, etc. (The latter get featured in American Banker a lot.)

I am not talking of woman who go at these things with a gendered agenda but who rather go at it with quiet competence.

You can find plenty of commentary on that in the more "respectable" industries you listed (finance, infosec).

>Men are more vulnerable to making certain narcissism-related mistakes, such as getting into bad investements because of FOMO

Is there a reason men are more easily scammed?

Men have higher risk tolerance: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2741240/

And perhaps, at least with scams where money is concerned (I suppose all of them?), a greater cultural emphasis of evaluating men on their net worth.

Men would often be the authority on finances in a household, in Western culture. The notion is looked down on these days, but until the 70s, men would be the "breadwinner" of the family, and the wife would have limited influence on saving and spending and investing unless the couple was unusually communicative and fair.

When women began to enter the workplace by the 90s, the stereotype began to fade, and won't be relevant in the next decade or so - we've more or less reached parity wrt to gender distribution in the workplace.

I'd say also the nexus of narcissism between men and woman has changed. I think of that album Tommy by The Who which starts out with

"It's a boy, Mrs. Walker, it's a boy... A son!"

back then couples were happy to get a boy instead of girl. Mothers who didn't feel they could get ahead on their own felt they could get ahead vicariously through a male child.

Today it is the other way around. We hear things like "Girls are our most precious natural resource" and don't think about it... Feminists in the 1970s knew "girl" was a dangerous word (the example in the dictionary should be "girls girls, girls" with a photo of a 42nd st porno theater) but today there is a lot of pandering to young women. Many colleges are practicing affirmative action for men quietly because men aren't that interested in going to college yet young woman aren't interested in going to a college which is 70% female.

So I think the gendering of narcissism is in flux but, like usual for these things, we are looking in the rear view mirror and it will take the culture 20 or 30 years to catch up.

I would chalk it up to problems in the narcissistic sector, that is, dangling an opportunity in front of a man is likely to make them feel "special" and otherwise experience an instability in self-image that makes them not think straight.

Supporting male vulnerability here is

https://www.yourmoney.com/investing/men-most-vulnerable-to-i... https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/mass-mark... https://www.chuckgallagher.com/2021/01/27/men-or-women/

in particular

https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2017/whos-most-a...

"... fraud victims are far more likely than other investors to say that acquiring money is one of life's important achievements."

There _have_ been scams that were very effective at bilking women, but they were generally demographically targeted, rather than straight-up get rich quick schemes. Notably, nearly all large Ponzi schemes prior to Charles Ponzi's one (he didn't invent them; he just caught the popular imagination) were affinity frauds aimed at women. (Ponzi's scheme was also initially an affinity fraud, but targeted at Italian immigrants).

Men are much more inclined to take risk than women.

So, you are suggesting that bitcoin is or has been a bad investment? You clearly didn't look at the charts.

Ah yes, I forgot, number goes up in the short (10 years) term is the necessary and sufficient condition for any good investment. /s

What chart should I look at to not feel like investment is a bad idea right now? Because looking at Google and the 5Y for BTC it seems stalled between 30 - 40 and has not gotten back to its peak of 60.

Good investments can't be looked in the short-term. Over the medium-term, bitcoin has been the best investment in history.

The charts can only tell us that it went up in the past. What interests most people more is if it will go up in the future.

"Past earnings do not guarantee future earnings" can be said of literally any investment.

It is already said of every investment, which is why siwatanejo's suggestion earlier that bitcoin would be a good investment right now based on historical charts is such an uninsightful comment.

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