Live data from Hacker News

Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

121–130 of 199 posts

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you hope that more people will do this? Do you see any possible downsides at the individual or societal level?

I hope more people do this because for me it feels really right, and I find it beautiful. It’s also helping me understand women more. I think our society would benefit from a better understanding of the experiences of the opposite sex, and people who do this can help share this with others so we all have a better understanding. I don’t see any downsides to more people doing this.

Apologies for what may be perceived as everybody jumping on you.

It’s also helping me understand women more.

I disagree. I think you're understanding your own experience more, but then you've trying to fit that to what you see or hear about from women based on a lot of assumptions that probably aren't valid.

Since we have no direct access to the internal mental state of others (and scarcely that of ourselves sometimes!) we can never be sure that we're experiencing what others are. There's a millennia-old thought experiment about imaging how we each experience the color red. How can I know that what you experience when you see an apple or a fire engine is anything like what I experience? If we could stimulate the same neurons in the optic nerve or in the various brain structures, would we each understand the stimulus as "red"? And I think that modern observations of phenomenon like synesthesia suggest that our internal qualia really do differ a lot.

That leads me to believe that it's wrong to think that hormones have changed you to experiencing things "the way a woman would", and more strongly, I'm skeptical that there's any set of qualia that can be placed in a bucket as how a woman experiences the world - I think it's absolutely individual.

(this also, by the way, makes me question how anyone can believe that their internal experience more closely matches "being a man" or "being a woman")

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#122
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.

Many many people claim there is no inherent difference in men and women above the neck, and that any observed difference is purely culturally caused. By extension, it could be eliminated in a single generated given total control of the socialisation and schooling process. This is not a meme or a rare view - Steven Pinker wrote a book countering this worldview 20 years ago.

I thought that I should have made a note about this in my comment, but I didn’t because the author declares that the article isn’t about the cause of these differences, or whether these are inherent differences. That’s why it’s strange for me. I think the discussion is about the inherent nature of these, and not whether these exist.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#123

Taking sex differences in personality seriously involves taking the reality seriously that women are treated radically differently than men in almost every society on earth, and that radical difference is generally that women are a permanent lower caste, and are victims of violence far more than they are perpetrators of violence. These goofy exercises in the eugenics of common sense and the obvious all require us to…

That's a very one-dimensional analysis of a complex problem. You can't ignore the obvious physical differences and roles in reproduction. These factors affect how you relate to a larger society and to what extent you depend on it.

The problem is not of one isolated mouse but a society of mice and how your physical size, vulnerability (men don't have period pains or pregnancies) affect how you relate to society and thus your personality.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our eyes lie all the time and experience is wide open to interpretation. That's why we have science so we can objectively and progressively determine what is true and what is not. Relying on our gut like our ancestors, who for example believed in the obvious reality of witches, is the best way to be ignorant of what is really true.

Witches were and are real. I know some personally. You may be refering to their alleged supernatural abilities, which are no more real or unreal than the prayers and rituals of any other religion. Some of the greatest scientists of all time were also alchemists and spiritualists, borderline witchcraft imho.

There are people who call themselves witches... but witches in the sense of women who have made a pact with Satan in exchange for supernatural powers are not real.

Indeed, if they were real, we would be quite correct to persecute them.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#125
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 disagr…

This argument, that it’s the trans community that is intolerant and not those who don’t fully accept trans gender identities as legitimate, is simplistic and in bad faith. The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated. The classic examples of these are ba…

[dead]

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#126
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument, that it’s the trans community that is intolerant and not those who don’t fully accept trans gender identities as legitimate, is simplistic and in bad faith. The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated. The classic examples of these are ba…

> Trans people want to use the bathrooms and compete on athletics teams corresponding to their identity. I know I'm not the first person ever one to bring this up, but it's unclear to me how letting someone with (largely) the physique of a man compete against women is acceptable. There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female, and that reason still overall holds for someone who is trans.…

It seems to me that the only fair way to let trans and cis athletes compete on level ground on the same event is to have a competition that completely ignores both sex and gender.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#127
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument, that it’s the trans community that is intolerant and not those who don’t fully accept trans gender identities as legitimate, is simplistic and in bad faith. The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated. The classic examples of these are ba…

> Trans people want to use the bathrooms and compete on athletics teams corresponding to their identity. I know I'm not the first person ever one to bring this up, but it's unclear to me how letting someone with (largely) the physique of a man compete against women is acceptable. There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female, and that reason still overall holds for someone who is trans.…

> There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female

This division is arbitrary. The reason for this is the premise of fair competition that identical people should compete. Yet white males dominate male swimming whereas black males dominate male sprinting. There have been physiological explanations based on center of mass things afaik. Knowing that, why don't we split the competitions accordingly? Martial arts have categories based on weight, why shouldn't we have categories based on arm-length or blood volume? It's easy to see that the whole premise of fair competition is very naïve: where do you stop? What are the criteria for determining if competitors are "identical enough"? Choosing these criteria will be a political choice. Transgender people in sports are disturbing the status quo, but they just made apparent the inherent instability of the thing.

Now i don't know about you, but when i personally do sports, for one i'm not good enough that physiological characteristics make the greatest differences: this problem mostly appears when we reach the limits, by "optimal training". Second, i'm playing as an amateur, that is for entertainment and for the art of it, which means that i will mostly play to be part of a good game, show off and see nice skill displays, and share this experience with other people, some of them with different levels of training and physical capabilities.

I just wanted to say that this thread is imho unrelated to the issues of transgender and more to the fact that competitive sports is broken and the political struggle between professional and amateur sport.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#128

Taking sex differences in personality seriously involves taking the reality seriously that women are treated radically differently than men in almost every society on earth, and that radical difference is generally that women are a permanent lower caste, and are victims of violence far more than they are perpetrators of violence. These goofy exercises in the eugenics of common sense and the obvious all require us to…

Yes, although our instinct to raise boys and girls differently is itself genetically programmed. Which is why all human societies do it, as well as all primates. So the origin of the difference is genetic, even if some of its influence is mediated through culture.

The question of how genetics causes us to mold our children according to gender norms might be at least as interesting as the question of how genetics directly influences preferences.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#129

Taking sex differences in personality seriously involves taking the reality seriously that women are treated radically differently than men in almost every society on earth, and that radical difference is generally that women are a permanent lower caste, and are victims of violence far more than they are perpetrators of violence. These goofy exercises in the eugenics of common sense and the obvious all require us to…

There is so many things to comment here on. There are important social problem with gender roles, but we should also recognize what the problems area are and where they aren't.

Women are not a permanent lower caste. In term of their social status (and social economic status) their median are similar, even slightly higher than men. Their variance is much smaller, with few women at the very high and and very few at the very bottom. This difference in variance do causes problem for society but the fixes are less obvious than in cast societies where one demographic fully dominate the bottom of society. When looking at household social status, women have much higher in average social status than men (for the above reasons).

Women are also not victims of violence more men. The opposite is true. Men are much more likely victim of violence then women. Women are much less likely however to be perpetrators of violence towards men. In term of behavior there is also the slightly less known fact that in domestic context, violence from a man to a woman, man towards an other man, and woman towards an other woman is identical in violent domestic disputes per household. This is why the full title of those reports tend to be called "men's violence again women and violence in same sex relationships". The implication in terms of genetics is that either a person sexual preference influence violence, or women and men are equally violent but in different contexts.

(Edit: To pull down some statistics from Sweden as an example. Men are the most common recipient to need social support. Single men without children living below poverty line are more than twice the size of the next group below, which is single women without children living below poverty line. The group after that is single mothers, and the one after that are families with two married adults and at least one child.)

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#130
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.

> I’ve never heard anybody who thought that there was no differences in women and men behaviours on average. It usually takes the form of insisting that underrepresentation of women in $profession is proof of discrimination and/or a hostile environment.

Because we don't want to blame our wonderful education system and society. Why is very hard to find little boy clothes in other color than blue and little girls clothes in other color than pink ?
Post reply on HN