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?

#241

Post by erroneousfunk » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #204

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 exampl…

>>My only addition would be that there's probably as much deviation within the genders as between them.

If you read the article, it makes the point that there that there is FAR more deviation within the genders as between (averages of) them.

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

#242

Post by invisible_dust » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 5:45 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #176

jerf wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh yes, the dominant ideology of academia is the same as that of the state, which is why academics universally agree that anthropogenic global warming is real while the government can't even agree on whether climate is changing at all, let alone the cause. This must be why universities are chronically underfunded and professors are constantly scrambling for their next research grant. This must be why roughly nobody i…

I agree with mikeash on this. It's not the academics that are committing crimes. And anyway, I'm tired of people telling me whether a certain idea is right or wrong. I just want to hear the evidence, and I think that's how most "academics" are.

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

#243

Post by douche » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 5:45 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #238

douche wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you are disadvantaging people that have objectively inferior genetics? Do you actually lose anything? Otherwise, are those people taking advantage of medical advances that prevent their deficiencies from being fatal?

What does "objectively inferior" mean?

Celiacs, for instance, seem to be a group that in previous generations succumbed to their condition, if not directly than indirectly because of general unfitness. To be honest, as a survivor of childhood lymphoma, I ought to be dead, had I been born even 25 years earlier. I question whether my genetics have enough offsetting benefits to counter that predisposition to life-threatening cancer for any of my offspring.

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

#244

Post by cgearhart » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

coverup wrote: post #181

mikeash wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really is the crux of the matter. Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice, and then if population differences still emerge, that's OK. Unfortunately there isn't much room for this middle ground. People who want to acknowledge sex difference want to use sex as a filter, e.g. "no women in combat roles." People who want to give everybody a chance also want to even things out, e.g. "Allow women in…

> Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice, Agreed. But the way it tends to work is that if (say) 60% of all engineers are men and the rest are women, then a man more closely fits the idea of an engineer that those people who are in charge of giving the chances have in mind, and so they're more likely to prefer a man to a woman. You sort of run into this chicken/egg problem though: are women underre…

> simply aren't choosing to become engineers (okay)

It is not certain that this choice is OK, though. While the causes of gender disparity are undoubtedly complicated, there seems to be some persistent factor in engineering & technology that results greater disparity than in other fields like medicine and law. It is unlikely that current participation levels are at their natural equilibrium; the gender distribution was more balanced in the past than it is today. The problem is not merely that women may "choose" not to enter (or that they choose to leave and not return) engineering, but that the status quo of the community might be actively driving them away. Engineering & tech have a reputation for allowing behaviors and personalities that would not be tolerated in other fields that are more gender balanced.

Finding the natural gender distribution in tech will require actively changing the culture to make it more inclusive and inviting, not merely removing explicit barriers to entry for women.

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

#245

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #240

dragonwriter wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately there isn't much room for this middle ground. People who want to acknowledge sex difference want to use sex as a filter, e.g. "no women in combat roles." People who want to give everybody a chance also want to even things out, e.g. "Allow women in combat roles, and lower the standards for women so they have just as much of a chance as men have." I've literally never heard the latter argument made by a…

Where have all the different standards for men and women in the armed forces come from, then? The Army and Navy both have different physical fitness standards for men and women. I didn't look up other branches but I don't expect them to be any different. I wouldn't expect there to be a big push for different standards because that's already where things are now.

> Where have all the different standards for men and women in the armed forces come from, then?

They came when women were first admitted to the armed forces at all, and are contemporaneous with the rules barring them from combat roles. They are not the product of pressure to include them in combat roles.

Roles (including, but not, AFAIK, limited to, combat roles) within the military can have physical standards above the minimum standard for the branch of service, and no one that I know of that has argued for removing the restriction on women serving in combat roles has advocated against gender-blind role-specific standards.

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

#246

Post by dagw » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 6:01 PM UTC

Tuisto wrote: post #73

dagw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you can show a strong causation (or even just correlation) between very high intelligence and holding a high status position

Not hard. http://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2013-kell.pdf

That only really shows a general strong positive correlation between some measures of intelligence and some measures of success. It doesn't really say anything about if small fluctuations in the extremely high end of intelligence has a noticeable effect.

We're assuming that men dominate the tails of the intelligence distribution. So the real question is, does being in the top 1-2 percentile make you much more likely to succeed in so called high-status positions compared to 'only' being in the top 5-7 percentile.

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

#247

Post by geebee » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 6:04 PM UTC

pyre wrote: post #120

jazzyk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has more to do with the pay disparity between nurses and doctors, rather than gender, these days. While only 30% of active physicians in the US are female, the gender split among residents (entering the profession) is close to 50%/50%.

Well, it's not just doctors/nurses. You also have dentists/dental assistants, which in my anecdotal experience is pretty heavily a male/female divide. I will comment, that it seems easier for women to move "up" than for men to move "down." It seems like there is more friction against male nurses/dental assistants than there is against women doctors/dentists.

Where do you think the "friction" comes from? The men themselves?

Honestly, men really should consider these fields. In SF, the median pay for a dental hygienist is almost as high as for a software developer, and median pay is actually higher for a registered nurse (again, in SF, this isn't the case nationally) [1]. Nursing and dental hygiene have less upside, but less age discrimination and better career stability.

If you'd like more career flexibility, would like to be able to work part time, step back from the career track to take care of kids, and get back into it later, dental hygiene and nursing are probably better than software development. This is particularly important if you'd like to be able to have kids and spend time with them, while keeping stable employment and/or not badly harming your future prospects of employment.

[1] US news "best jobs", drill down to pay by region, will provide a summary of BLS data.

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

#248

Post by coverup » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 6:06 PM UTC

cgearhart wrote: post #244

coverup wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice, Agreed. But the way it tends to work is that if (say) 60% of all engineers are men and the rest are women, then a man more closely fits the idea of an engineer that those people who are in charge of giving the chances have in mind, and so they're more likely to prefer a man to a woman. You sort of run into this chicken/egg problem though: are women underre…

> simply aren't choosing to become engineers (okay) It is not certain that this choice is OK, though. While the causes of gender disparity are undoubtedly complicated, there seems to be some persistent factor in engineering & technology that results greater disparity than in other fields like medicine and law. It is unlikely that current participation levels are at their natural equilibrium; the gender distribution w…

Yeah, I agree. Whatever the causes are, the best thing we can do is make the tech culture such that as many people as possible feel included as long they choose to be a part of it, so the decision to pursue it or not comes down to personal interest and nothing more.

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

#249

Post by cgearhart » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 6:06 PM UTC

metasean wrote: post #159

golemotron wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you mean, regardless of wording. People should be seen as individuals. I don't know how we can be blind to aggregate differences enough to not be perturbed when we have unequal outcomes but not so cognizant of them that we demotivate people. But as I write this, I'm arriving at an answer: we need to recognize that people are making choices based upon who they are and what they like.

As I have read this thread, I keep coming back to how we measure competence and ability. For example, at one point in history our IQ tests included questions based on baseball rules. So someone taking the test that didn't know the rules of baseball couldn't do well – regardless of their mathematical or logical ability, i.e. what the question was supposedly measuring. Along those lines, I would strongly: - recommend l…

I recently took an artificial intelligence class that required writing an agent to answer non-verbal IQ test questions. One of the greatest challenges was that some of the questions had ambiguous answers. For example, an axial symmetry in the example frame could be reproduced with either a rotation or a mirror operation in the output frame, and both options were available as candidate solutions.

Naturally, the question came up: how do we define the "right" answer when there are multiple valid choices? As it turns out, the folks who write the test determine the correct answer to these types of question based on the most common response from test takers who get the highest scores on non-ambiguous questions. The thinking goes that if folks who get most of the other questions right largely agree about a preference for one answer over the other, that must be the most correct answer.

The most interesting part of that discussion to me was when a classmate observed that we use human intelligence as a baseline for measuring human intelligence, and then marvel at the extent of our own intelligence; if a machine used more sophisticated logic than a human was capable of to choose a different answer, we would look down on the machine for being less intelligent than man. It reminded me very much of Plato and the shadows in the cave.

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

#250

Post by mikeash » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 6:09 PM UTC

douche wrote: post #243

mikeash wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "objectively inferior" mean?

Celiacs, for instance, seem to be a group that in previous generations succumbed to their condition, if not directly than indirectly because of general unfitness. To be honest, as a survivor of childhood lymphoma, I ought to be dead, had I been born even 25 years earlier. I question whether my genetics have enough offsetting benefits to counter that predisposition to life-threatening cancer for any of my offspring.

Advanced medical care is part of the environment in a first-world country now. I'm sure a fish would think us genetically inferior for our dependence on air to live, but we don't see it that way. A dependence on advanced medical care is ultimately no different. Assuming civilization doesn't collapse, I'd expect various dependencies on medical treatment to gradually arise in the population, but there's nothing objectively wrong with that.