Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

I've read this[1] yesterday on a complete unrelated topic, and I must say that "I don't buy" it's another form of not understanding statistics.

Biology is what it is and controls major aspects of our lives.

If you can be stronger of some of the biological instincts, good, but statistically biology always wins.

We can say for example that "women prefer laudanum, men prefer opium and pronstitues" is 100% a social construction.

"Women are better at social activities while men are better at competitive activities" much less so.

> Like most psychologists who study personality, Peterson believes there are five core personality traits—extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism—and that these traits are universal across most cultures. The taxonomy is also gendered. For example, women tend to be more agreeable than men. The traits have both biological and cultural origins and, as Peterson is fond of saying, the biological factors maximize in places—like Scandinavia—that have strenuously tried to flatten out the cultural differences. Biology is, therefore, in a sense, destiny, no matter how much people may want to deny it. To his mind, arguing that gender is a social construct or a kind of performance or—as the Ontario Human Rights Code says—an individual’s subjective experience is just wrong. “It’s not an alternative hypothesis,” Peterson says. “It’s an incorrect hypothesis.

-- Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.

[1] https://torontolife.com/city/u-t-professor-sparked-vicious-b...

it is controversial only if you assume that

- we can control sex differences more than hormonal differences (in fact it's quite the opposite)

- cultural differences are more controllable than biological differences (same as above)

it doesn't matter how you frame it, the study shows a clear tendency, we can discuss the implications or the correctness of the study, methodology and title

For the first a functioning brain it's enough, for the rest we are subject to burden of the proof.

The point is sex differences exist and are framed in a way that culture or nature have really no meaning anymore.

They are both hard to change and even if we change them in a meaningful way, we can't be sure it will fix what we think needs fixing.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> yet also ensure that girls and women will not avoid mathematics more than boys and men due to mathematics anxiety. Policies must take into consideration that sex differences in career choices are not a simple function of gender equality and equal opportunities; and that, paradoxically, other factors (e.g., sex differences in occupational interests [74–76] and sex differences in other skills [9, 81, 82]) emerge in highly developed, gender-equal countries that might disproportionately affect girls’ mathematics anxiety and participation in STEM.

It doesn't mean of course that one sex is intrinsically better than the other, but the fact that we as individuals have not really existed for thousands of years and our choices in life have always been a cat and mouse game between rules of society and biological instincts, makes the distinction harder to make.

Our DNA tells us what we are biologically, but that's only the bootstrap process, what we become is mostly about the experiences we live and even in the flattest possible ideal society, where every choice is possible, we will all live different experiences and become different individuals.

And we would not see a perfect random distribution of choices, but very clear patterns or clusters, much more clear than they are now.

EDIT: sorry for being verbose.

Another example I can make is universal welfare state in Italy.

It was supposed to help families raise kids with less effort than the previous generations.

The unwanted (I hope) effect has been that it shaped a society of full time men workers and part-time or no-working women.

Because one way or another kids needed to be with their moms more than with their dads, we're talking about 60s in Italy here and a salary or a salary and half were enough. More money meant bigger dreams, moving to the city, in shiny new houses, but away from families that had been the buffer that allowed women to go to work while grandparents took care of kids.

It meant hiring a nanny, but why hire a nanny that costed as much as the woman's salary, when she could stay home, save on money and raise the kids?

This way men monopolized the higher paid jobs and women dominated education and services, because it was more flexible on hours.

It was good nonetheless, my parents couldn't have raised two kids without the free nursery school that the public hospital offered to their employees (having to kids when you work 12 hours night shifts is not really possible without help), but that's how a system created to support natality and to make it possible for women to go to work, have become the disaster of inequalities that it is now.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...