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New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

psychologytoday.com

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Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#11
post #6

This is a great example of the type of question-begging and junk science "deep learning models" enable. The methodology is to take time series MRI of hundreds of regions of the brain and, labeling each data point as "male" or "female", train a model to differentiate between the two, then pick out the most determinative bits. The issue, of course, is that you are searching for what you want to find. With so much data,…

Last paragraph of TFA:

> But “different” doesn’t necessarily imply “better.” As I stressed in the second edition of my book Why Gender Matters, apples and oranges are different. That doesn’t mean apples are better than oranges. Men and women are turning out to be different, more different than we may have imagined. That doesn’t mean that women are better than men, or vice versa. But it does suggest that if we ignore the differences, we may disadvantage both women and men.

In my experience, men and women have different ways of approaching problems. Given all of the other things that go along for the ride in male vs female bodies, it's not at all surprising to me that brains would be different between the two genders as well.

Why is it such a problem to acknowledge difference? People are different from each other and have strengths and weaknesses that don't overlap. vive la différence!

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#12
post #6

This is a great example of the type of question-begging and junk science "deep learning models" enable. The methodology is to take time series MRI of hundreds of regions of the brain and, labeling each data point as "male" or "female", train a model to differentiate between the two, then pick out the most determinative bits. The issue, of course, is that you are searching for what you want to find. With so much data,…

Last paragraph of TFA: > But “different” doesn’t necessarily imply “better.” As I stressed in the second edition of my book Why Gender Matters, apples and oranges are different. That doesn’t mean apples are better than oranges. Men and women are turning out to be different, more different than we may have imagined. That doesn’t mean that women are better than men, or vice versa. But it does suggest that if we ignore…

[deleted]

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#13
post #8
post #4

A fascinating article but I'm not entirely clear on what is being measured. What are tSNE 1 and 2?

Dimension 1 and dimension 2. They reduced a multidimensional vector output to 2 dimensions to make it visualizable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neigh... IMO this study feels like it's saying "facial recognition AI model outputs vectors where female and male faces cluster closer to each other than not". Which to a typical human is stupid obvious. The author is spinning up drama to get more e…

> This study feels like it's saying "facial recognition AI model outputs vectors where female and male faces cluster closer to each other than not".

In this analogy, it would be like concluding that "androgyny does not exist."

I'm curious how they handled some of the complicated selection and coding issues around trans and intersex people. Were those groups excluded, or directed in responding in one way or the other? The study is large enough to expect a few of these cases.

The ability to perfectly separate the groups makes me suspicious of a data leakage or methodological error. Perfect accuracy rarely is.

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#14
post #2

> The researchers found no overlap between male and female That's kind of a bold claim... EDIT: Interesting that I'm getting massively modded down by people who have clearly not even read the article. There's a bunch of graphs that show "no overlap" without any explanation of what they are actually even showing on the graphs. And then they make claims like "found no overlap between male and female" when what they act…

It's a psych paper from a major US university. The odds of replication are low.

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#15
This research goes into a lot of new details relating brain structure to cognitive fuunction, which I'm sure is ground breaking. But the ability to identify gender by examing the anatomy of a brain is not a new phenomenen. It's been true for decades.

> Men and women are turning out to be different

? Did anyone ever really think otherwise?

It's really sad that people are latching onto to social stigmas, like whether one wears a skirt or a business suite, and infering from that, that their physical bodies are "wrong".

The only thing wrong is monkeys mistreating each other. Correcting that doesn't require any surgery, but somehow seems much farther out of reach.

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#16
post #6

This is a great example of the type of question-begging and junk science "deep learning models" enable. The methodology is to take time series MRI of hundreds of regions of the brain and, labeling each data point as "male" or "female", train a model to differentiate between the two, then pick out the most determinative bits. The issue, of course, is that you are searching for what you want to find. With so much data,…

Why is it an issue to search for what you want to find? You're saying that it's not surprising that they found a way to differentiate male and female brains, but some/many people don't believe any such differences exist full stop. Why wouldn't this be surprising to those people?

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#17

I don't know how legit the source is, but if this is to be believed then it's a pretty interesting finding. It seems likely to spark off some pretty big social conversations and a lot more research into this particular area I don't have time to dig deeper at the moment but I'm very curious about this topic

stanford research

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#18
I for one am old enough to remember when this was widely accepted. It seems it's out of fashion now, but I remember progressive people talking about male and female brains and how transgender people are born with the opposite brain, and it's proven, and if you don't believe it youre a science denier. I find it just a little suspicious that nobody is willing to admit that they said this out loud, almost as if it was not about science at all.

This just in: new research finds differences between male and female anatomy.

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#19

I for one am old enough to remember when this was widely accepted. It seems it's out of fashion now, but I remember progressive people talking about male and female brains and how transgender people are born with the opposite brain, and it's proven, and if you don't believe it youre a science denier. I find it just a little suspicious that nobody is willing to admit that they said this out loud, almost as if it was n…

You're misrepresenting things. Many of your comments are like this.

Re: New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

#20

I for one am old enough to remember when this was widely accepted. It seems it's out of fashion now, but I remember progressive people talking about male and female brains and how transgender people are born with the opposite brain, and it's proven, and if you don't believe it youre a science denier. I find it just a little suspicious that nobody is willing to admit that they said this out loud, almost as if it was n…

You're misrepresenting things. Many of your comments are like this.

How so?
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