If you’re only thinking about it for long enough to come up with a single hypothesis, and then confidently declaring that you have the correct answer, I’d suggest maybe thinking about it for longer than a moment :)
It's not a single hypothesis. If you want me to write an essay on hacker news on all the behavioral differences between males and females - it's tough luck :) If you have counter-arguments - post them so I can refute them. Cheers.
The article's main thrust is a focus on risks that have negligible gain. So in that context your argument reads, "they have more to gain from a risk that has negligible gain."
Negligible gain can still be enough to distinguish oneself. What gain do colourful feathers on birds really have except to draw attention.
Also, evolution is likely not precise enough to have evolved accurate intuitions about the fitness value of all possible risks. We should expect some reasonably broad degree of randomness around the value of risk taking.
Except that a lot of risky male behavior doesn't impress most women. Maybe it impresses other risky-behaving men though, and the respect those risky-behaving men show the risk taker translates into more desirability from women.
It may not impress women, but there are lots of studies which show that men expand a lot more energy in engaging risk-related behavior when other females are around. Whether this is biologically adaptable or not may be a question which needs to be probed further, but risk-related behavior and competition have been closely linked in humans...
