How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference? • Hacker News Board

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#131

Post by pessimizer » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 1:58 PM UTC

golemotron wrote: post #36

I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time. The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing. Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation. And, it has…

You're just posting your agenda here.

What's in dispute is that there has been any reasonable natural experiment that has had the power to show that women have any functional cognitive differences with men. This is due to 1) the influence of pervasive beliefs in both experimenters and subjects that women are inferior to men (in often contradictory ways with specifics that vary by culture and over time), and 2) the actions of both men and women who subscribe to those beliefs to punish women for deviating from them. These beliefs are part of a large corpus colloquially known as "common sense," which purport to describe what is "obvious" but tend to simply defend what daddy said from the communists at the university.

The Saudis believe that driving is physically and mentally harmful to women. Dr. Pangloss believes that everything is as it should be.

edit: In addition, I doubt that the study that took place in a bubble that excluded or properly controlled for the influence of overt sexism and anti-female suppression was a group of Scottish IQ tests from 1932. 21 year-old Scottish women had been allowed to vote for at least three years by then. Get with the program you nurturers!

edit2: And to go on forever about this, I'll say how shocked I am to discover that a class of people who were constrained to a certain narrow range of education in a certain narrow range of practical skills intended to lead them to a certain narrow range of outcomes have test scores that tend towards a more narrow range than people outside that class.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#132

Post by 0624213997 » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 2:00 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #98

golemotron wrote: post #36

I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time. The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing. Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation. And, it has…

A large part of the problem is the failure to distinguish between the aggregate and the individual. For the sake of argument let's say that the population of individuals who would make good engineers is 60% male and 40% female. From an aggregate level that's a huge difference. Once you gather enough of people that statistical inferences can be made, the difference becomes obvious. In a classroom, for instance. But at…

I'm a female computer scientist / developer, and after my experience both online, at school, and at work, I would really just rather ignore it. I went to a college with 4:1 ratio of male to female.

I've had periods in my life where I felt like I was the beautiful princess at the school, and periods where I feel like a somewhat disfigured monster with an average intellect. It really sucks when culture places so much emphasis on appearance, and I don't have that when I engage in dialogue and activity online.

The fact that I've been able to think about this since I was maybe 14 years old, on a hypothetical and applicative level, shows that there is more that varies to predicting individual differences than what these tests measure, and what causes are inferred, as the act of measuring may change the outcome. Males may take more risks because culture rewards them if they do, supposedly, and I as a female have sought stability, predictability and consistency in my education. When people are trying very hard to either sleep with you, hit on you, or even screw with you (because for some reason, your existence bothers them), it's very hard to know whether you are learning the truth, or whether the truth has been distorted, made easier to swallow, or prepackaged otherwise, because of your teachers' and classmates' perceptive biases.

I take a lot of risks in learning. I try to avoid taking those risks in real life, because while at one point, I did, I found myself on the precipice of losing almost everything.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, that the individual is different from the aggregate. But even myself, I am a hypocrite, because these are cynical inferences I made along the way, about my education, while I was receiving it. And I made those inferences mostly from having a behind the curtain peek into boys clubs, online. I was judging my classmates and peers by assholes on the internet, and that really isn't right, but neither is it right to assume that a person fits on the distributive curve of which they can be categorized into, based on a very small subselection of data.

Thinking about this has led me to the conclusion, that I really don't know a lot of things, and it seems neither does anyone else. Every point in time can be as unpredictable as infinity. People make so many assumptions about what is stuffed up in other people's heads, what guides how they think, what they do with that knowledge, how it directs them, and the resulting thoughts, the determination of envisioning, assisting, and planning the life paths of others.

My greatest comfort level is being an anonymous blob with no face, on the internet, where I learn a little bit of haskell here and there, and maybe find some elegant nuance and subtlety in code, computational theory, mathematics, philosophy. It's a bit hypocritical for me to share my gender willingly, over and over, but at this rate, I go through probably hundreds of aliases in a year.

Thank you though, for clarifying an important point concisely. The last time sex differences came up on a forum, I don't remember feeling quite so calm.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#133

Post by bryanlarsen » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 2:03 PM UTC

golemotron wrote: post #121

bryanlarsen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of the problem is the failure to distinguish between the aggregate and the individual. For the sake of argument let's say that the population of individuals who would make good engineers is 60% male and 40% female. From an aggregate level that's a huge difference. Once you gather enough of people that statistical inferences can be made, the difference becomes obvious. In a classroom, for instance. But at…

Actually, no. When you pick out an individual there's still a 60% chance than one is better than the other given no other information than their sex. That's how statistics works. But I agree that it's better not to make the prejudgement at all. The problem is that there are many things that are true in the aggregate but we can't acknowledge them because we are scared of demotivating people. Is that the best we can do…

Yup, "insignificant" is the wrong word, since it has a specific meaning in statistics, and for that meaning, my paragraph is definitely wrong. How about if I change that word: "But at an individual level, that difference becomes trivial."

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#134

Post by lxop » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 2:07 PM UTC

lsy wrote: post #119

lxop wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cordelia Fine is known for ignoring all finding that contradict her worldview. You make it sound like her position represents the consensus... it does not. http://www.uvm.edu/~tribeta/Articles/Sex%20stereotypes%20Hal... "Cleverly written with engaging prose, Delusions of Gender and Brain Storm contain enough citations and end notes to signal that they are also serious academic books. Fine and Jordan-Young ferret out…

I'm not sure if you read the review you're linking but it's not a "bad review". It points out, as you quoted, where the books are "strongest" and "weakest", and is generally complimentary to the works reviewed. And as the author of the review points out to explain Fine's omissions: "…whereas sex differences are reliably found in several areas of research, none of the differences support essentialist claims that girls…

Halpern is being overly courteous. Fine denies the very existence of evolved human sexually dimorphic psychological adaptations, significant (physical) brain differences between men and women etc.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108906/

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#135

Post by kelukelugames » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 2:07 PM UTC

songshu wrote: post #85

amyjess wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gender is a cultural construct Trans people such as myself are proof that gender is not a social construct. In my experience, the nastiest transphobes are the ones who believe gender is a social construct. They're called TERFs. They can't wrap their minds around the fact that we prove their pet theories wrong, so they stalk, harass, and doxx us.

Stalking, harassing and doxxing is indefensible, but not being able to wrap one's head around gender is understandable I think. Often people want, whether trans or not, to express their gender in terms of constructs like name, language, manner of dress etc which are clearly social (sometimes clearly invented in the last 100 years). We have no easy way of deciding how these seemingly superficial things relate to under…

This is absolutely true. A few years ago the majority of Americans couldn't even wrap their heads around marriage equality.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#136

Post by gavazzy » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 2:07 PM UTC

RodericDay wrote: post #115

nshepperd wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how these links are a relevant counterpoint; they all seem to focus on claims about averages, that the OP deliberately did not talk about.

Her work is critical of various pillars of gender science, and most definitely does not refrain from tackling the "Greater Male Variability" hypothesis that gets so much mileage these days. One such excerpt: > In a Science study of over 7 million United States schoolchildren, Janet Hyde and her team found that across grade levels and states, boys were modestly more variable than girls. Yet when they looked at the dat…

This analysis ignores both the (1) base rate, and (2) practice effect. The problem with using gender-neutral percentiles is that the proportion of males and females may not be 1:1. So, even if the percentage of women in the 99th percentile is higher than that of men, men could actually be more likely to be in the 99th percentile than women.

That is, they found p(women | 99th) / p(men | 99th) whereas they're claiming they found p(99th | women) / p(99th | men).

Regarding the second, it could be that the women were studying more, and thus not represent a genetic trait. In order to settle whether differences are genetic, you would have to compare performance from the same amount of effort.

I'm interested to see how the research continues in the future. It seems there is a lot of taboo around the subject, and I hope that doesn't dissuade scientific debate.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#137

Post by brational » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 2:08 PM UTC

pyre wrote: post #78

golemotron wrote: post #36

I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time. The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing. Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation. And, it has…

> gender disparities across different occupations. I guess it would depend on the occupation. For example, I don't see much difference between nurses and doctors in terms of something that could be quantified as a gender-specific preference. It seems to me that the idea of "nurses are women, doctors are men" came about more from the idea that women were "too stupid" to be doctors and that it was a "man's job." Even t…

>Even today many doctors look down on nurses (as 'below' them; people whose opinions don't matter)

Is that really about gender these days? As a patient, I see it that way too. But that's because the doctor has significantly more education and training.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#138

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 2:10 PM UTC

lsy wrote: post #119

lxop wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cordelia Fine is known for ignoring all finding that contradict her worldview. You make it sound like her position represents the consensus... it does not. http://www.uvm.edu/~tribeta/Articles/Sex%20stereotypes%20Hal... "Cleverly written with engaging prose, Delusions of Gender and Brain Storm contain enough citations and end notes to signal that they are also serious academic books. Fine and Jordan-Young ferret out…

I'm not sure if you read the review you're linking but it's not a "bad review". It points out, as you quoted, where the books are "strongest" and "weakest", and is generally complimentary to the works reviewed. And as the author of the review points out to explain Fine's omissions: "…whereas sex differences are reliably found in several areas of research, none of the differences support essentialist claims that girls…

[deleted]

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#139

Post by Retra » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 2:12 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #130

hiou wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hesitate to bring up extreme cases, but the relationship between social darwinism and the rise of the nazi party make many people, including myself, very hesitant to speak about differences in sex etc. Not because we deny their existence, but because we've seen how far large groups of uninformed electorate can be persuaded into supporting some scary stuff because of it. It's just a very tricky subject when it comes…

What is the relationship between darwinism (what a ridiculous term, by the way) and the rise of the Nazis?

I think they're talking about social darwinism. The idea that "survival of the fittest" can be naively applied to politics is a pretty easy way to convince people to commit genocide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#140

Post by amyjess » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 2:13 PM UTC

tiler wrote: post #91

amyjess wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gender is a cultural construct Trans people such as myself are proof that gender is not a social construct. In my experience, the nastiest transphobes are the ones who believe gender is a social construct. They're called TERFs. They can't wrap their minds around the fact that we prove their pet theories wrong, so they stalk, harass, and doxx us.

Perhaps you could explain how the existence of trans. people is proof that gender is not a social construct?

Because physical dysphoria is a thing.

Whenever I've heard a suggestion that I should just live as a feminine guy, it just makes me feel sick. Even in a world where no gender stereotypes existed, I wouldn't want to be male. I'd rather not live the rest of my life with a masculine face, body hair, a flat chest, male fat distribution, etc. My transition has nothing to do with social roles and everything to do with my body.

Before I transitioned, I actually had problems recognizing myself in the mirror. It wasn't until I'd been on hormones for half a year that I could actually remember my face.

Also, my own hobbies and interests are more androgynous than anything else, but I probably lean towards being more gender non-conforming as a girl than as a guy.