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Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

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Re: Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When talking about populations, this should be implicitly assumed - just like that the experiment took place on Earth and the participants were breathing air. I don't know why this isn't burned into peoples brains with a big flashing neon sign, and why someone inevitably comes up with a counterargument of 'but not all X' when these things are discussed.

Because they don't want it to be true and will come up with any argument, no matter how stupid, to counter this observation.

I think that's being too cynical. Most people simply don't think in terms of integrals over probability density functions.

We organize our understanding into categories and reason about them using propositions that are either true or false.

Re: Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

#142
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So .. you've had no actual experience of living with hunter gathers then? This is not an argument. > The women do a lot of work digging ants [1], digging lizards, trawling through sands for cockles [2] (and leaving massive midden piles in their wake over centuries), and retire to a life of painting and laughing at the quaint notions of the clueless. Great. > Many such cultures share childcare across a wide network…

Those are just two points out of a long list of actions required in a society. I don't think it really adds that much weight to the argument, even though it is true. To go back to your other comment: > Why is that a problem, and if it was due to upbringing then why that would be a problem? It would be a problem for upbringing as that is something adults have agency over. It's a bias that may not need to exist. A grea…

> Those are just two points out of a long list of actions required in a society. I don't think it really adds that much weight to the argument, even though it is true.

I think it does add a lot of weight. Certainly it casts doubt to the idea that you could observe a primitive hunter gatherer society to rule out any kind of cultural bias.

> It would be a problem for upbringing is that is something adults have agency over. It's a bias that may not need to exist.

This is just restating the assumption. Why is that bad? Culture causes an innumerable number of "biases" to exist, not just between different sexes either. Would there be a problem if people living in one state liked country music and in another liked rap? Should such a learned bias be stamped out? How about pizza vs hot dogs?

> A great example of that is when women were highly represented in computer science as it was initially becoming a field of study, but later got pushed out by boys who'd had technical skills nurtured in them when they were young while the girls did not. Oversimplifying that a little bit, but most of us have experienced it or seen it in action.

I've never heard of it before and I'm skeptical it's true, so I don't know how great the example really is. But let's set that aside for a minute and think about it if it was true it's not a case of a learned cultural personal preference by the women, it was that they got "pushed out". That is the problem.

But that's really besides the point here I think. I don't see why you go to a different situation to claim this one is bad. Because we have the actual at hand, which is that women like working with people and men like working with things. I'm asking specifically why that would be bad, not whether there are any aspects of culture and learned behavior that could be bad (certainly there are many examples that can easily be argued are bad, and many others could be argued are good).

Re: Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

#143

The more of these male vs female preferences articles I see, the less I find myself caring.

I wouldn't think it should matter for most people day-to-day.

It's relevant to understanding society-level metrics and knowing what sensible alert settings for them are, but must people don't work with those very much (maybe if you're the sort to evaluate politicians yourself during election season, rather than just voting party line, or if something comes up on a referendum?).

Re: Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

#144
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what was advocated. He recognised, as a manager, that Damore was that person that provokes people to the point where normal everyday people want to punch him. Part of being a good manager is recognising people's traits.

[flagged]

Or maybe grow up & don’t circulate political manifestos at work?

Re: Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

#145

Does this mean James Damore was right? Or is there something wrong with this research?

James’s mistake was to want to discuss taboo topics in _public_ and in a _working environment_. One of the best pg articles imo: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Google was already discussing the topic a great deal, no? I got the impression Damore's manifesto was written in response to all of Google's gender initiatives.

Re: Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever tried to talk to any women about technology? All the time - they love technology. Sue runs all the books on the local family farm (which is a large multi million $ enterprise), she pulls in all the GPS logs to a NAS, databases the livestock tags, has bots watching the stock sales. Robyn runs a super computing facility for the local SKA project (Square kilometre array) after being the Vice C. of the lo…

This is so tedious. I said there were plenty of exceptions. As with many human traits it's a distribution with long tails at the extremities, and plenty of overlap between groups. This doesn't in any way negate the existence of a mean difference between groups. In the real world innate sex differences are a fact of life. That's the whole point of the paper attached to this thread. Egalitarians believe that society wo…

How could it be reflected in the real world if we're still encumbered by the status quo? That's like pointing to a lack of EVs and saying see, no EVs, people don't want them. (Talking specifically about women in STEM here)

Re: Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

#148

wtf those “preferences” are a result of history - societies raised women to take care (take care of their family and house chores) while men went out in the wild to play, study and work. - women had to be “empathetic” because understanding one’s mood was vital to their survival throughout history: in times where it was “ok” and even expected that women were beaten up to make them more docile or whatever. - women were…

I don't think anything you're saying contradicts the article? I don't see anything in the article claiming that the preferences aren't a result of history? So I don't see what merits the "wtf".

In any case, "a result of history" doesn't seem very useful or specific as an explanation. If we're talking about the history of our entire species, then perhaps a more specific explanation is "a result of our evolutionary history". For example, you say "societies raised women to take care" -- maybe as a result of this, women who liked to "take care" were the women who passed on their genes, and therefore modern women have genes that cause them to like "taking care", on average. That could explain this result.

If you're referring to recent history, you'd have to explain why the preference difference seems to hold all across the world, given that different countries have different recent histories. You'd also have to explain the mechanism by which recent history (e.g. past decades where being a secretary was a top female career) is exerting such a large influence on the present.

Re: Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advocate for violence is cool again... for people who don't agree with you

That's not what was advocated. He recognised, as a manager, that Damore was that person that provokes people to the point where normal everyday people want to punch him. Part of being a good manager is recognising people's traits.

That is victim blaming.

Recognizing that certain action (e.g. dressing in a certain way or writing an essay about gender difference) would get one in a certain violent-esque trouble.

Re: Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

#150
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's really important to know for practice. Who care where it comes from if the effect is there and you have to live with it? It's not that effect being caused by upbringing makes it somehow unimportant, or unworthy of being there.

because if it's biological then you have to live with it (till you get scalable affordable bioengineering) whereas if it's social imprinting then you don't "have to live with it", for that it's going against our biological encoding. Your comment suggest that we should not question upbringing which I disagree with.

Knowing a concrete cultural mechanism that is causing this could possibly open the way to engineering it (or close it completely, depending on what mechanism that is). But would just knowing "it's culture" help? I don't think (personal opinion) we're particularly good at predictably engineering culture.

Look at Sweden, it's been trying really hard and dumping lots of money into gender equality, but there's still very few women in tech. The fraction of women among Iran's CS graduates is greater than Sweden's. And, ironically, plenty of those Iranian women (I'm saying this offhand) go to do PhD in Sweden, to bring up the "gender balance" of CS departments that Sweden is so concerned about.

I'm really unsure whether society is easier to engineer than biology.

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