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Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

71–80 of 199 posts

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#71

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'…

Same kind of thing works with counting the frequency of particular digits (n-digit analysis) in a given position for an integer or decimal. Especially for the higher order decimal digits there's a far-from-random distribution that you can use to infer whether there's been any tampering, given enough values to study.

> Especially for the higher order decimal digits there's a far-from-random distribution that you can use to infer whether there's been any tampering, given enough values to study.

Inversely, the lowest order decimals tend to be evenly distributed, which is also a useful way to detect tampering (trying to make the numbers look "random" does anything but).

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#72

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…

> It’s a real shame that people get so bent out of shape about trans people

The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community.

If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot. It completely misrepresents the definition of tolerance. Tolerance can only exist in a state of disagreement. If we all agree on something then we have nothing to tolerate. Tolerance is really the act of people accepting that some men want to live their lives like women without actually believing themselves that these men are women. That is tolerance and therefore anyone should be allowed to hold the opinion that trans women are not women but that’s okay because we’re still cool in calling you a female name and complimenting you if you wear a nice dress.

It’s like with religion. It’s perfectly fine to tell a hardcore christian person that you think god doesn’t exist. It doesn’t make you a bigot, just a human being with an opinion. As long as we still let people live their own experiences without fear or discrimination then we don’t all have to believe in the same god. It’s the same about gender ideology. The trans community needs to accept that only because they feel they are something that it doesn’t mean everyone feels that way about them. The vast majority of people have no issue with transgender individuals. They just know that a man with a mental health condition is in principle still a man and we shouldn’t be ostracised to state truths like this.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#75
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've also started experiencing monthly cycles where for about one week a month I feel more tired and weepy like I could cry very easily This sounds like wishful thinking to me. In women, the periodic mood changes happen during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, and coincide with the rise in progesterone that is triggered by ovulation. Males don't have ovaries, so do not ovulate, and thus cannot experience the…

It depends on the method of administration of HRT, some methods do show fluctuations similar to those of cis women, e.g. estradiol valerate/enanthate etc.

If they are getting monthly depot injections, that could make sense. But then the periodic mood changes as described would be a function of the frequency of administration of such hormome medication, rather than of taking it in general.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To understand the mechanism, imagine we accounted in binary instead of decimal. What are the odds the first digit of an entry is a 1?

That won't help you understand the mechanism. The reason the first digit of a binary number is 1 is just the anthropic principle. ("You can only observe things that exist.") That same observation will tell you that, just as the first nonzero digit of a binary number is zero 0% of the time, the first nonzero digit of a decimal number is zero 0% of the time. That is what it means to be a nonzero digit! But it won't tel…

those leading digits are suspiciously like looking at equal portions of the scale on a slide rule...

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#77
post #9
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.

This article is saying that the differences are sexual, not due to gender.

> This article is saying that the differences are sexual, not due to gender.

No, it doesn't. It says that there are striking differences in the distribution of personality traits between the sexes, and does not take a stand on the source, besides that it is “certainly” a mix of biological and social contributions.

As gender identity, in the current population, correlates very strongly to “sex” [0] (less than 2% of the adult population reports a transgender, nonbinary, or other identity divergent from their “sex” assigned at birth), any strong gender-based personality difference would also be associated with sex, and vice versa.

[0] a misnomer for what is more accurately an externally-ascribed gender; biological sex is multidimensional, the binary division of “sex” by a subset of sex traits is an imposed social construct.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#78

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…

> It’s a real shame that people get so bent out of shape about trans people. Well, there’s now a conflict of rights between sex-based and gender-based identities. When you say “It’s truly amazing and wonderful that we can do this,” you’re expressing a kind of euphoria [1] over becoming more feminine, but to many female people being feminine isn’t particularly what they want to be or to them what makes someone a woman…

> Well, there’s now a conflict of rights between sex-based and gender-based identities.

Nothing in your post supports, or is even suggestive of, any such “conflict of rights”.

At most, it demonstrates a conflict of preferences for how gender is ascribed to other people with other people's gender identity, but imposing gender on other people is not a right.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#80
post #44

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…

> I've also started experiencing monthly cycles where for about one week a month I feel more tired and weepy like I could cry very easily This sounds like wishful thinking to me. In women, the periodic mood changes happen during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, and coincide with the rise in progesterone that is triggered by ovulation. Males don't have ovaries, so do not ovulate, and thus cannot experience the…

>I think you're seeing this pattern because you want to, not because it has any underlying periodic hormonal cause.

If you're correct, then it's quite possible that all the other subjective feelings experienced by the poster are similar ... psychosomatic, maybe?

The placebo effect is a real thing.

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