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Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

11–20 of 199 posts

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#11
post #8
post #7

Is there anything in real life which you divide in two groups you wouldn’t get differences in some metrics on average? I’ve never heard anybody who thought that there was no differences in women and men behaviours on average.

Well, but what this article is stating, is that those differences you pointed out being connected to gender, are actually due to the sex of the individual, not due to the gender an individual chooses to identify with.

Where I came from, this notion is basically non-existent. I meant sex. And also, the article didn’t state anything about gender. There is a specific footnote about this.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#12
post #7

Is there anything in real life which you divide in two groups you wouldn’t get differences in some metrics on average? I’ve never heard anybody who thought that there was no differences in women and men behaviours on average.

The fact that there may be differences in the abstract is very different than claiming that there are specific differences.

We have hundreds of years of claimed differences which today sound a bit silly.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#13
post #8
post #7

Is there anything in real life which you divide in two groups you wouldn’t get differences in some metrics on average? I’ve never heard anybody who thought that there was no differences in women and men behaviours on average.

Well, but what this article is stating, is that those differences you pointed out being connected to gender, are actually due to the sex of the individual, not due to the gender an individual chooses to identify with.

Hmm, I don’t think so.

It’s saying these differences are connected to sex, but it’s not saying they’re not connected gender. Didn’t the article say that research hasn’t been done?

It would be interesting to see whether these differences were more or less correlated with gender rather than sex.

It would also be interesting to see what differences there are between trans and cis men/women, and whether/how these change as a trans person transitions.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#14
post #10
post #5

You can take a gender-based personality test here: https://programs.clearerthinking.org/gender_continuum_test.h... (30 mins with explanations) I found it really interesting and fun.

Beware: this requires your email to get the results. There's no mention of it before taking the test. Edit: Nevermind, you can leave the email field blank.

It does not. Leave the email blank.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#15

In the past 12 months I’ve gone from having normal male levels of testosterone and estrogen to having normal female levels of both. It’s truly amazing and wonderful that we can do this, and I’ve learned so much from the experience. It’s hard to describe the changes precisely, but I’m finding that women make more sense to me and are more interesting to talk to, while I have a lower tolerance for men trying to act toug…

What changed your levels or are you just doing experiments?

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#16
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, but what this article is stating, is that those differences you pointed out being connected to gender, are actually due to the sex of the individual, not due to the gender an individual chooses to identify with.

Where I came from, this notion is basically non-existent. I meant sex. And also, the article didn’t state anything about gender. There is a specific footnote about this.

[flagged]

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#17
post #7

Is there anything in real life which you divide in two groups you wouldn’t get differences in some metrics on average? I’ve never heard anybody who thought that there was no differences in women and men behaviours on average.

Presumably if you divided into two groups by even or odd age, there will be some difference in average metrics, but not a significant one.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#18
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a similar phenomenon you might encounter in language: if you have a text, and you sample one random letter at a time from it, it turns out not to be very difficult to determine what language the text is written in. Does the letter 'i' exist in French? Does it exist outside French? Sure, but nevertheless you can rule French in or out based on how often you sample a letter and get 'i'. French uses the same 'i'…

I could believe this for romance languages. I'd need somebody to explain how this applies in ideograms and non-western languages, and what the outliers are, vowels vs consonant.

1. Non-western languages.

There are no differences; this is not a category of any interest. Urdu is a non-western language, except of course that it is, in a global sense, very closely related to French. (Why do you think we say "Indo-European"?)

2. Ideograms.

The modern language that comes closest to using written ideograms is Japanese. But the language that comes closest to what you're probably thinking of is Mandarin Chinese, where every character is fairly rare.

You have exactly the same options that you do with any other language: you could render the text into an alphabet of interest, or you can do your analysis on the symbols the text is originally written in. That second approach will make some questions much easier; if you sample a letter and get န်, you can be certain you're not reading French.

It will make analyzing Chinese harder because character frequencies are so low. (see https://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/li... - the most common character in written Chinese is 的 at 4.1% of all characters; the second most common accounts for an additional 1.6% of all characters. The top 152 characters collectively account for 50% of all text.)

This will mean that codebreaking requires longer texts.† It won't have much effect on the problem of identifying the language by sampling unenciphered monograms from it; that stays easy, because the commonly used characters are highly informative even if e.g. you're comparing written Mandarin to written Cantonese. You'll probably need more samples (for an equally reliable judgment) than you would for a script that didn't have so many unique characters.

† This problem is significant. Specific content words will all be rare, and we can't really expect a message, even a very long message, to discuss every possible topic at the same frequency that the corpus of written Chinese as a whole does. Even if we could expect that, the amount of ciphertext you'd need to reliably distinguish the 3100th-most common character in this corpus (酱 [noun, 'sauce'] representing 0.09% of all characters) from the 2494th-most common (娶 [verb, 'to marry a woman'] representing 0.19% of all characters) would be quite large.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#19
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a similar phenomenon you might encounter in language: if you have a text, and you sample one random letter at a time from it, it turns out not to be very difficult to determine what language the text is written in. Does the letter 'i' exist in French? Does it exist outside French? Sure, but nevertheless you can rule French in or out based on how often you sample a letter and get 'i'. French uses the same 'i'…

I could believe this for romance languages. I'd need somebody to explain how this applies in ideograms and non-western languages, and what the outliers are, vowels vs consonant.

[deleted]

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#20

In the past 12 months I’ve gone from having normal male levels of testosterone and estrogen to having normal female levels of both. It’s truly amazing and wonderful that we can do this, and I’ve learned so much from the experience. It’s hard to describe the changes precisely, but I’m finding that women make more sense to me and are more interesting to talk to, while I have a lower tolerance for men trying to act toug…

What changed your levels or are you just doing experiments?

I am taking it they are transitioning. I have had very similar experiences as part of this process.
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