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I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

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Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#241
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if they're equally capable but prefer shampooing dogs > then is that really a problem The problem is that their like/dislikes/personalities are not formed in a bubble. Society has influence over these things.

So then why should it be alright for men? No one really makes a stink about needing more men florists or hospice nurses? Doesnt it seem like instead of really talking about or trying to fix the gender stereotype issue we aren't doing much good by singling out women. It seems like we're making them into victims. Wouldn't you say the problem works both ways and focusing on one gender or race turns them into victims ims…

  > No one really makes a stink about needing more men
  > florists
That's because people aren't clamoring for more florists in general.

  > hospice nurses
Why did you specify hospice nurses rather than just nurses in general? There is a demand for more nurses in general, and part of that is a push to get more men into nursing.

  > It seems like we're making them into victims.
Huh? We're talking about how children are influenced. They aren't victims. Unless you think society at large has no influence over the development of a child, I'm not really sure what you're up in arms about here.

The whole point is to spend less time discouraging some types of play while encouraging others based on gender roles (i.e. Billy shouldn't be playing with dolls, he should be playing with toy guns).

Also, if a child only ever sees male doctors, do you think that doesn't subtly influence whether or not being a doctor is seen as a male-only thing to do? (The same could be said of only seeing women nurses. It cuts both ways.)

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#243
My daughter is 4. She loves LEGOs. She also loves bugs, snakes, sharks, dinosaurs, Star Wars, her train set, Barbies, princesses, fairies, puppies, and sneaking into her grandma's makeup.

My son is 11 months old. He's taken a liking to cars and balls, but he also loves his sister's Barbies. Particularly, he likes to pull their hair, but I think he's drawn to the (ahem, slight) humanness they possess. They look friendly.

Separating "boys' toys" from "girls' toys" is pretty much nonsense. Of course, older boys aren't going to want to play with Barbies. Not necessarily because they wouldn't enjoy it, but because they are marketed to girls, and, most importantly, they would get made fun of for doing so. Were it socially acceptable for boys to play with Barbies, I promise they would.

Realize that when we're shopping for toys for my daughter, the toy store is twice as big for her, because she's not aware that she isn't supposed to like action figures and rc cars.

I think the genderizing of colors is just crazy. What makes pink a "girl's color" and blue a "boy's color" ? I'm convinced it's just marking influence. Most girls' clothes are pinks and purples, and similar "girly" colors. With that, most of what my daughter wears is pink or purple. Of course she loves the colors; we drape her in them daily. She chose blue, green, and red for her bedroom, and we let her do that, instead of saying "No, no, those colors are for boys."

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#244

When I see these stories taking companies to task over why they sell what they do, I always wonder why nobody holds consumers to task. For example: why doesn't Lego sell to girls? Why doesn't Barbie have more realistic features? Why don't car manufacturers offer an electric vehicle? Why doesn't McDonalds sell salads instead of fries? Why do record labels offer such crappy music? It's easy to blame the companies -- bu…

because facing up to the fact that other people have different values from you and most of them SUCK is intellectually easy to grapple with, but on a gut level not so much.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#246
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The heart of the matter is, what is gender? It's clearly not the case that gender is identical to being biologically male or female, eg, based on which sex organs are present, or on the chromosome. You need only read the Wikipedia pages on "intersex" and "third gender" to see some of the diversity in the world. Sex indeterminacy is only one of many possibilities. Go back to the original Turing Test. In "The Imitation…

Gender is entirely a social construct very loosely tied to biology but not at all determined by it. I personally think the same thing is probably true of sexual orientation (which really is sexual attraction to gender not necessarily the same sex ). I would add that many anthropologists don't think people are born with a gender.

Gender is entirely a social construct very loosely tied to biology but not at all determined by it.

This doesn't sound plausible.

[tl;dr: If evolution didn't build in a powerful urge to make our gender behavior match our reproductive sex, then it made a huge error and missed a very easy and effective optimization.]

It may be the case that gender could be very loosely tied to biology in a philosophical or theoretical sense, but in the world that we're in right now, there are very strong adaptive reasons that gender expression and reproductive sex tend to stay close (statistically, of course) in any sexually dimorphic species, which I'd call a very strong "tie to biology".

Evolution 101-wise, gender can only be allowed to diverge from reproductive sex to a limited enough extent that it's more or less irrelevant to reproductive success. Evolution will make sure of that on a long enough time scale (at least up until the modern era, where we can to some extent decouple reproduction from sex).

If the two diverged commonly enough that animals were often foregoing sex with reproductively compatible partners in favor of incompatible ones that nevertheless matched the gender role they were interested in, then an adaptation that better facilitated reproductive matchings would easily emerge and dominate the population.

Note that such a compensating adaptation might even emerge as some form of social behavior, even if the impetus to that behavior was genetically driven; IMO, this doesn't make it any less tied to biology.

As an example, one suggestion [1] to solve the "gay problem" in evolution (why has full homosexuality, where a person is not at all attracted to members of the opposite sex, not been eradicated from the gene pool, since it should be so devastating to reproduction rates?) is that getting rid of the "gay gene" (or genes, or whatever) is actually a very difficult task for evolution to carry out (I'm anthropomorphizing evolution here for ease of speaking, not because I don't realize why that's wrong) for some reason. Difficult enough so that accepting the ~10% homosexuality rate was a better option, though obviously not ideal. So instead of getting rid of homosexuality, evolution tried to mitigate the "damage" that such behavior causes by enhancing an inclination for people to disapprove of it, which meant that even when people/animals were fully homosexual, they still tended to mate with members of the other sex due to social pressure. Thus the seemingly fitness-devastating 10% homosexuality rate was bumped down to a more ignorable number via social effects, and the presence of the gene was a net win. This is not to say that there's a "homophobia gene"; if this theory is correct, I'd guess that evolution more likely leveraged existing social behaviors (like wanting to fit in, or hating people that act differently) and turned them up to a slightly higher level.

In the case of gender identity, I suspect that there is a heavy dosage of social conformity involved in training people to signal their reproductive sex through gendered behavior. But I think it's biologically driven, or at least that it would be extremely surprising if it wasn't, since it's such low-hanging fruit. I'm sure that these biological imperatives are somewhat flexible, and that if pink was considered a boy color then boys would flock to the pink section of Toys R Us, rather than these things being hard-coded into the genome (though certain behaviors are definitely going to be hard-coded, since sex signaling had to take place before higher-level thought centers could be leveraged). But the inclination to figure out what these socially derived sex-signaling behaviors are is not a social construct - that's an evolutionary imperative, so while we may be able to change the particular expressions of gender that we see in the world, it's probably going to be rather difficult to prevent people from seeking them out and conforming to them.

This is why I'm always uncomfortable with nature vs. nurture questions - the environment that evolution optimizes any particular genome to succeed in includes the entire existing social structure, which was also influenced by previous rounds of evolution. So picking apart what is a "social construct" and what is "biological" is really a fool's errand, when it comes down to it - there's a delicate interplay between the two, and they always play off of each other.

[1] I should mention, there are other theories as well, the simplest being that even with the "gay gene", a person is only sometimes fully homosexual (twin studies have shown that homosexuality is definitely not 100% determined by DNA, though it's not 0%, either), so they do rather limited damage, and if tied to useful adaptations, there would be no particular evolutionary imperative to get rid of such a gene; the point, though, is that such arguments only hold up to a point, and if a large percentage of the population was gay, there would be much more selection pressure against that behavior, tamping down the ratio rather quickly to a lower level.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expected people would take issue with it. Unfortunately some people really really want it to be the case that girls and boys are only different because of their environment. Given the way evolution works, doesn't that seem ridiculously unlikely? Given the way we evolved to have clearly defined roles, and how we have obvious physical differences to enable that, doesn't it seem pretty obvious that we evolved our brai…

Your grandparent post took the argument farther than just saying that evolution has given men and women certain tendencies or proclivities (as an aggregate, allowing for the massive range of individual differences that are possible). You flat-out claim that men and women have brains that are hard-wired a certain way. If there's anything evolution has given us as humans, it's brains that are amazingly adaptable and pl…

You make an apparently logical assumption based on what you understand of evolution and biology (and how the human brain works) but I proffer that there's a fair amount of evidence that those assumptions might be wrong. (For instance, we have this recent study questioning the widely-held belief that men are by nature better at spatial reasoning: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/women-math-science...)

The problem is, there's a "fair amount of evidence" on both sides, and it's universally shoddy research.

On the "innate difference" side, the most that can usually be done is to show that a discrepancy exists, and that it exists broadly in a statistical sense, argue that it exists broadly enough to posit that the effect is at least partially biological.

On the "no innate difference" side, the most that can usually be done is to pick out a couple of instances where the claimed effect doesn't exist, argue that if it doesn't exist everywhere then it's not real, and claim that this exception proves that it can't possibly be biological at all.

The "innate difference" folks then reject the debunkings as relying on cherry-picked data (in some cases this is fair, in some cases probably not, and unfortunately the level of statistical rigor in most papers on both sides is horrendous, so it's hard to say for sure), the "no innate difference" people disagree, and nothing is ever resolved.

The problem, of course, is that there's absolutely no realistic way to do a study that removes the effect of people growing up in a world that has the current set of gender roles, so both sides are right, in a sense: none of the "innate difference" papers actually prove that the differences are primarily biological, and none of the debunkings prove that they're not.

So everybody falls back on their priors. And our priors on these matters are pretty naive, more based on emotion and the minimal set of observations that we each personally have than anything else. Women that are good at math, feminists, and those that generally side with nurture assume that the burden of proof is on the "nature" folks to prove that there is an innate difference (because it's "obvious" that men and women are equal intellectually), and the nature types assume the burden of proof goes the other way (because they look at the observed statistical discrepancies and assume that they should be taken at face value until debunked). So we all end up arguing over what set of assumptions is more reasonable, throwing meaningless references to studies at each other as if the studies actually prove anything, which they usually don't.

It's quite the mess. I would ask, at least, that everyone on either side of this try to think of at least a few experiments that would actually change your mind on these matters. They're actually kind of tough to come up with, because it's so difficult to separate culture from the equation...

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Thank you for your post! That's basically exactly what the book I recommended says, except she goes into 200+ pages of detail about it (with much supporting evidence.)

It is -- and that book should be required reading for anyone making any comment on this subject. It's shocking how often I see posts, especially on Hacker News, that take for granted "gender differences" that have been proven not to exist! And often by self-proclaimed scientists and skeptics, no less.

"proven not to exist"

Are you sure that "real science" (physics, chemistry, biology), allows for such a finding? Does it allow for "proving negatives"?

Maybe what you mean is that this concept of "gender differences", however it is defined, was never sufficiently proven to exist in the first instance.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume people want a change. I do not think they do. Do people want an end to gender specific toys? Certainly some do. But the vast majority do not. I firmly believe, through interacting with people in general, and my own children, that female and male brains are completely different. They are hard wired to like different things, and behave differently. I don't see anything wrong with that, and don't see any reas…

I take massive issue with this. We start the training with regard to gender so early that it's hard to tell what's "nature" and what's "nurture". I'm watching the choices my sister makes during her pregnancy with fascination. Gender is the earliest thing we bombard them with -- painting rooms pink, buying gendered clothes, choosing certain toys.. we don't even thinking about it because it's so normal until, for insta…

As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (P.S.) http://www.amazon.com/As-Nature-Made-Him-Raised/dp/006112056...

Some things you can't change

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