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?

#201

Post by BurningFrog » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 4:03 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…

Height is a good example to explain this with.

Everyone knows men are taller than women on average, and that a lot of women are taller than a lot of men.

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

#202

Post by logfromblammo » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 4:05 PM UTC

6502nerdface wrote: post #184

logfromblammo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how statistics works. This is how you reverse a conditional probability (Bayes's Rule): P(B|A) = P(A|B) * P(B) / P(A) If A is "female" and ~A is "male", and B is "good engineer", then what we know , including ancestor post's assumption, is this: P(A|B) = 0.4 (the population of known-good engineers is 40% female) P(A) = 0.5 (the population as a whole is 50% female) We can further assume, arbitrarily, that…

Thanks for presenting this so clearly. However, note that, as you show in this scenario, males are, on a relative basis, 50% more likely than females to be good engineers, knowing nothing else about them other than gender (P(B|~A) = 1.5 * P(B|A)). While the absolute probabilities (and difference in probabilities) are small, the relative improvement in classification error rate attributable to knowing the person's gen…

If you were writing an automated Bayesian classifier to find good engineers, males would get one measly additional point towards the refer-to-a-human threshold.

In contrast, there are many other hypothetical rules that would be better predictors. Liking Star Wars, 4 points. Star Trek, 9 points. Knowing how much mana a Lightning Bolt costs, 6 points. Owning a 3-wolf shirt, 2 points. Being left-handed, 15 points. Reading HN, 40 points.

Anything you can glean statistically from a population of known-good engineers can be transformed into Bayesian classifier rules, in exactly the same way you can predict an e-mail is spam if it has certain strings in it.

But even including the one point for knowing the sex could be considered sex discrimination, even though it would be totally supported by the math. But since you likely want your threshold value to be high enough to weed out false positives, while still low enough to avoid false negatives, that one point rule is practically a waste of time. The cases where that one point makes a difference will be just those people who barely meet the threshold. If you have two people who are only just barely good enough to be considered good engineers, and otherwise exactly the same, the statistical argument says to prefer the male.

I have never met anyone that is content to hire engineers who are likely to be only barely adequate in preference to those who are likely much better. That hypothetical person is the only one who might care about male or female. Everyone else will be looking for the highest point totals, gained from criteria that are better predictors.

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

#203

Post by graycat » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 4:05 PM UTC

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

Really the article explains how on some measure two populations can have the same average on the measure but still be different.

The answer is obvious: The two distributions are different, e.g., the two standard deviations can be different.

Not mysterious.

But the stuff in the article about human female brains and calico cats is really nice to know.

But the article is one in a series, and one of the articles there, maybe the next one, discusses how the distribution and mean of number of children per person is different for men and women. Okay. But the article has some graphs of distributions, and, very sadly, insists on drawing the distributions as bell curves. Yup, bell curves and in particular Gaussian densities were swallowed whole at about 1930 by much of the social sciences and educational statistics and is often still accepted.

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

#204

Post by drzaiusapelord » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 4:09 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…

I fully agree with this and often make this argument, usually to 100+ downvotes on reddit and elsewhere. My only addition would be that there's probably as much deviation within the genders as between them. But that doesn't make gender a meaningless thing. The frequency of those aspects is important too. Only, say, 10% of women are "butch" personality types but 90% of men are. So holding up a butch woman as an example and going "See, see gender is meaningless" is unconvincing.

I think eventually society will sober up and realize that when we talk about social aspects, more than likely we're talking about personal types. Certain ones simply exist with higher frequency per gender.

I feel like we're on this long path of migrating away from "default brain" assumptions made about race, nationality, gender, etc and will probably settle on something like the modern day understanding of personiality types. Its scary how well I fit the INTJ mold. The idea that I represent all men or am part of masculine culture is fairly ridiculous. Ladies, I find male ISTJ's and ESTJ's hard to deal with as well.

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

#205

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 4:09 PM UTC

dgabriel wrote: post #157

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.

Some aspects of gender expression are social constructs, but certainly hard-coded gender identity is real. This is a spectrum, and there are many people who don't identify as either gender, but somewhere between. You don't have to be a TERF to say that something as vague as "science ability" can't possibly be measurably linked to sex or gender. (one of my children is transmasculine, but he also likes to paint his nai…

[deleted]

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

#206

Post by EGreg » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

A great article that goes into the effect of differences between men and women is this:

http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm

I have found it to agree with my experience and explain eg why there are so few women in tech and women entrepreneurs. (Hint: it has to do with desire for risktaking, long hours, and long periods of silent work with abstractions)

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

#207

Post by zxcvvcxz » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 4:13 PM UTC

> However, if it is simply a fact that males are generally more variable than are females on many traits, why is this true?

> Since a male can have more offspring than a female--but also has a greater chance of being childless... natural selection favors a slightly more conservative and reliable baby-building process for females and a slightly more ambitious and error-prone process for males.

This is on the money. Women are generally the choosers when it comes to sex, since eggs are expensive, and sperm is cheap. Nature therefore needs to try many different "keys" to see which ones are good at fitting into the "lock", to draw a crude analogy.

Men may seem more "privileged" as they dominate the top of most fields. But one must also realize that many men are nature's failed experiments, and live lives of despair, filled with homelessness, crime, and drug abuse, as well as downright social failure. Problems occur when policy makers selectively see the former, and disregard the latter.

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

#208

Post by BurningFrog » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 4:14 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?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-mad...

Yeah, it's long. It's worth it!

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

#209

Post by jcmoscon » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

geomark wrote: post #44

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…

Having lived through so much of the polictically correct conditioning about equality of everybody I became pretty numb to it. Then having a child and seeing the stark difference between play habits of boys and girls made me think about it again. Anecdotal, of course, although consistent with many other people's anecdotes, which starts to look like data after a while.

Yeah, are you going to believe in your eyes or in what the left is telling you?

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

#210

Post by chi-sq » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 4:19 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #87

geomark wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived through so much of the polictically correct conditioning about equality of everybody I became pretty numb to it. Then having a child and seeing the stark difference between play habits of boys and girls made me think about it again. Anecdotal, of course, although consistent with many other people's anecdotes, which starts to look like data after a while.

Check out the work by Simon Baron Cohen at Cambridge, which includes studies on newborns showing clear differences between genders. http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/godis/sex.pdf Also check out the work of John Money, who popularised the concept of 'gender as a social construct', and wrecked the life of a young man whose penis had been destroyed by trying to raise him as a girl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_…

(currently finishing Masters in Methodology/Statistics in Psychology) There is evidence of inter-sex differences (and in many areas girls are at advantage), but the provably innate part is small, and the intra-group variance coming from other factors (that may include elements of culture) is much bigger. This allows for conclusions on population, not individual level. On a related note, affirmative action programs seem to work to societies benefit.

Another comment that phrased it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845165

And absolutely regardless of John Money being misguided and vilified (I don't think I even heard of him before recent Catholic backlash), gender is a legitimate and in depth academic topic.