31–40 of 97 posts
> When you look at the subject of aggression there is no more important factor than gender. Something like 90 percent of the people in prison for violent crimes are men. Men have different brains than women, which comes from our different roles during evolution, when the brain was formed. Men had a role of being aggressive, which makes no sense for a woman because a woman was not endowed with the physical strength of…
R Douglas Fields grossly misinterprets how much people are exposed to influences their behavior. "Something like 90 percent of the people in prison for violent crimes are men." Something about all these people make them terrible humans, but it's not an adrenaline response. He's belittling all the social problems in his book by attributing them to neurological reflexes.
> When you look at the subject of aggression there is no more important factor than gender. Something like 90 percent of the people in prison for violent crimes are men. Men have different brains than women, which comes from our different roles during evolution, when the brain was formed. Men had a role of being aggressive, which makes no sense for a woman because a woman was not endowed with the physical strength of…
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Pinker is full of shit on this subject. I remember his intro to psych lecture including an example of a how gendered thinking is hard-wired involving small boys playing with guns. Obviously an example of socialization; evolution did not teach anything to anyone about guns. There is a huge amount of sloppy thinking in this subject.
Could you expound upon your definitely-not-sloppy thoughts on why boys obviously couldn't be predisposed to playing with weapons?
Some may call this naive, but this is the reason we need more unity in the world. Less division. More us...less us and them. The media seems to do a great job of pitting one side against the other. I think many of our attitudes and perspectives are learned and perpetuated by the media.
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Steven Pinker's'The Blank Slate' explains it well. Western culture has a bias toward nurture explanations rather than nature explanations because admitting nature affects people's perceptions of their abilities and our sense of agency as a culture. If all differences are culture we can fix them. That's why it becomes political.
Pinker is full of shit on this subject. I remember his intro to psych lecture including an example of a how gendered thinking is hard-wired involving small boys playing with guns. Obviously an example of socialization; evolution did not teach anything to anyone about guns. There is a huge amount of sloppy thinking in this subject.
The Atoal is believed to be ~30,000 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower And spears are ~400,000 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amentum is rather hard to date, but it's simpler than an Atoal.
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It's kind of frightening that people are leaving university with a developed hostility toward the notion of sexual dimorphism in humans.
To split hairs a bit: Gender identity is a social construct while biological sex is not. I think the author meant sex, not gender, and GP meant gender, not sex. It's easy to conflate the two in conversation, but keeping a semantic barrier between them will help maintain civil discourse without the risk of devolving the discussion into a flame war.
Take for example the correlation between feminine behavior and two X chromosomes (XX). There is high correlation between these two factors. Additionally examine the correlation between masculine behavior and XY. Again another high correlation implying the possibility of a causal connection between gender and genes.
Though correlation doesn't imply causation it lends more credibility to the hypothesis. What if we were to raise a child, born a boy, as a girl? If gender were truly a social construct there would be no issue.
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Gender =/= Sex How it is so many people don't grasp this is beyond me.
Because the conceptual difference doesn't exist for about 99.9% of people. Also, most languages have no such distinction. For example in my native language Hungarian we either use the English word "gender" or say (the equivalent of) "social sex" and "biological sex". It's a niche thing. I understand that some people feel sensitive about sex/gender or the differences between transsexual/transgender/transvestite/queer/…
When you include the full spectrum of LGBTQI you probably have to cut that down to no more than 95%, possibly less.
When you say "for the vast majority" you presume they operate in isolation, but they don't. Most people will end up knowing at least one person that doesn't conform to the traditional gender patterns, which means it's a problem everyone faces.
I remember when I was younger I would snap at the silliest moments, mostly when I wasn't getting my way. This went on for about 16 years, so there was a point I was very dangerous to be around if I lost it. What I find interesting looking back is how now I don't really get all that mad and at worse I'll just snarky or rude. I don't know what's changed over time (hormones maybe?) but I do know that unless someone real…
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I'm not a psychologist but I believe this qualifies as "projection."
Yeah. I know road rage isn't rare, but some people talk about it like its normal behavior. Most people I know, including myself, don't let minor annoyances get to them like that.