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How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
161–170 of 297 posts
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#162I'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…
> there should be no surprise when you see gender disparities across different occupations.
On the one hand, anyone that ignores/denies the influence of different hormones [1] on body and mind is simply ignorant. On the other hand you can question how relevant hormones can be to a deeply cultural concept as 'career choice'. On the one hand tiny differences can accumulate over a lifetime, but on the other hand tiny differences can also cancel out and its hard to say what it will add up to via so many layers of indirection.
Accepting the existence and influence of physical differences does not imply having to accept all cultural differences. Some may indeed result unavoidably from the physical differences, while others may be impossible to link to physical differences.
Given differences in the relation between men and women, and career preferences, across cultures, I suspect the distribution of men and women over careers is often dominated by contingent cultural factors. I definitely believe this is the case for STEM careers.
[1] As an example of an undeniable physical difference, not the defining difference
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#163Earlier 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.
I'm not sure who's doing the harassing: http://terfisaslur.com
That site is lies and propaganda run by a hate group.
"TERF" is no more of a slur than "Neo-Nazi" or "rapist", and all those groups are the scum of the earth.
There is no moral difference between a TERF and a member of Stormfront or a known rapist.
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#164Earlier 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.
So can you explain what gender is, then? I've always viewed gender & sex as being an issue of parts or lack of parts a human is born with, and gender is their sexual personality or preferences. Do you believe there are specific (limited in quantity) genders?
Gender is the sex of the brain.
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#165Is it generally accepted in the relevant scientific communities that male IQ's exhibit more variance than female IQ's? I imagine this type of thing would be easy to verify via e.g. standardized test scores.
The weak point in all of this is the definition of IQ - since there is no obvious one the motivated researchers can manipulate it to have more or less difference in both value and variation between the sexes (or other groups).
One can certainly argue that "IQ" is just whatever IQ tests measure. Despite this there are a lot of correlations involving IQ that mean that IQ tests are at least partially capturing something that's interesting. And IQ tests are fairly standard which means that it's not so easy for researchers to manipulate them.
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
No doubt there are scientific flaws in Fine's work, but even as this article states:
"…popular books are written to appeal to a broader audience, and in that respect both Jordan-Young and Fine have succeeded. Prompting laypeople to adopt a more critical view of overly simplistic views of complex data sets is a goal any scientist can support, and for that we applaud their efforts."
The "overly-simplistic views" referenced by the reviewers are exactly the ones approvingly quoted in this article by Psychology Today, and to which Fine is, appropriately, being offered as a counterpoint.
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just "academics". It's anyone who can take an idea and successfully run with it, without stopping to notice all the signs that are yelling at them "Stop! This isn't working as you expected!" Academia merely happens to have a large concentration of such people, for structural reasons. (The "ivory tower" is a real effect, and it is both a good thing because it permits concentration and focus, and a bad thing,…
Academics have approximately zero power. This is the craziest conspiracy theory I've seen in a while, because it's just so obviously wrong. Oh yes, college professors need to be kept in check because otherwise they'll go out and kill all the Jews. WTF?
Go research where Lenin came from. Go research who did eugenics, and where they got their ideas from. Go research the origin of a lot of the Nazi figures and where their ideas came from. (Not just Hitler.)
Express all the humorous strawmen you like. How do you think these things happen? In the 20th century, the only bad social engineering event I can think of that could even remotely be considered the outgrowth of a broad movement of the masses is sort of Nazi-ism. Everything else was led by somebody with an idea from academia. "The masses" don't originate many ideas, and in the era of the all-powerful State (which the 20th century is firmly in), "the masses" don't run around committing genocide, or doing any of the things they may have done in previous social systems, because all that power is now reserved to the State.
And the State and academia have always been attached at the hip, as they are today. How else would it be? Do you think it's some sort of bizarre coincidence that the dominant ideology of academia today and the dominant ideology of the State are exactly the same? Of course they are... they're causally connected. (Where do the "technocrats" in technocracy come from? Certainly not the farm!)
As for this being "conspiracy" theory... no, it's just an understanding of how the world actually works. It may happen to explain this opinion of mine, but that's only because as a ground fact of the current world it explains lots of things. Academics wield power through the State. It's clear as daylight... it would be some sort of bizarre theory that they don't. What would that even look like?
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#168I'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…
There's a slightly stronger argument to be made in this space. Signs of technical competence "screens off" the effect of gender. That is, once you've had that five-minute conversation with someone, learning their gender doesn't give you any additional information about their engineering competence.
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thought exactly: we've gone so far afield with this ridiculous notion of "sameness" between sexes that we actually now need "serious" research to "debunk" what was so obviously never true. "This just in: women and men are not exactly the same!" The real problem is that our society tends to equate sameness with acceptability as its preferred mode of "tolerance". This has the paradoxical effect of re-inforcing the n…
The problem is that while on average there are significant differences between men and women, the individual variation within men and within women is so much larger than these sex-based differences that sex is not a good predictor for behavior in the majority of the cases.
It depends on the difference. For grip strength, the median male is approximately equivalent to an elite female athlete.
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
It appears you're right. However, I find it puzzling that it's mentioned here, since the gulf between "there are some genetic differences between the sexes" and "let's attempt to improve the human gene pool by murdering any group we find displeasing" is so great that they barely have any relationship at all.
There's also the eugenicist argument that the undesirables shouldn't be permitted to procreate.
For example, Margaret Sanger didn't want to round up people and exterminate them but she did want to keep them from reproducing.