Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#511

Post by pseudalopex » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 12:18 AM UTC

da_big_ghey wrote: post #504

TeMPOraL wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amphetamines aren't magic. There are qualitative differences in response between people with and without ADHD, that manifest across the board, not just on few school metrics - and a psychiatrist will be able to see them. The "young unruly boys without enough PE" is a well-known trope, and modern school is very much kid torture - but I'm not willing to say yet that we're medicating children too much, when the world is…

"By high school, nearly 20% of all boys will have been diagnosed with ADHD." Either 1. we are medicate children too much and schooling is very screwed up or 2. 20% of boys defective to extent that they require amphetamines. I am not see third option. I am not believe 20% of boys defective to such extent. So I believe we are medicate children too much. [0]: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32858/drugging-of-the.…

20% is how many boys that age were ever diagnosed with ADHD. 89% of children ever diagnosed have a current diagnosis. Only 62% of children with a current diagnosis take any medication.[1] So much fewer than 20% take a specific medication probably.

Almost 40% of boys that age need vision correction.[2]

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15374416.2017.1...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6644a12.htm?s_cid=m...

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#512

Post by dennis_jeeves » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 12:20 AM UTC

supergirl wrote: post #478

dang wrote: post #249

Discussed at the time: Boys are being outclassed by girls at both school and university - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158812 - March 2015 (70 comments)

> HN is not mature enough to hold a discussion related to gender issues. underrated comment from the old thread

Agreed, on HN most members are castrated/low testosterone/nerd boys.

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#513

Post by wassenaar10 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 12:25 AM UTC

hvJ4kN wrote: post #476

wassenaar10 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern progressivism has apparently solved that issue already. I'll demonstrate: Whenever statistics show an imbalance that benefits men, say in earnings, prestigious jobs, or positions of leadership, then the modern worldview dictates that this must be a result of a nefarious bias on the part of society or men as a group, aka "the patriarchy". On the other hand, whenever the statistics show an imbalance that benefit…

I'm not sure what your point is. I agree that all of your examples are just further cases where being sloppy about innate vs. learned differences results in bad policy. The statement "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them" doesn't imply men are responsible for their own misfortune; this seems to misunderstand how society affects its members. In the context of violen…

> I'm not sure what your point is. I agree that all of your examples are just further cases where being sloppy about innate vs. learned differences results in bad policy.

My point is that there is a pretty clear tendency for people to attribute sex/gender discrepancies to societal factors when it benefits men, but less so when it benefits women. The reasons for this are likely varied, but you can draw your own conclusions on that.

> The statement "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them" doesn't imply men are responsible for their own misfortune

I think it does in some cases, but I suppose it depends on the speaker's definition and characterization of this nebulous term, "the patriarchy". I think some people do indeed feel that all men are complicit in "the patriarchy" and so if the system ends up hurting them, they are at least partially responsible.

Perhaps that's all the more reason that characterizing all gender issues as "our society is a patriarchy unconditionally, in which women are always oppressed and men are always the oppressors" is not all that great.

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#514

Post by websites2323 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 12:27 AM UTC

waterheater wrote: post #197

hcurtiss wrote: post #162

I realize that this isn't terribly PC, but isn't it possible that testosterone is negatively correlated with attention span and compliance and positively correlated with risk taking? You certainly see it in other species. Without any value judgment at all, I would expect this would manifest in different outcomes in academic settings versus competitive markets. That is, it seems likely to me that some of this is due t…

PC or not, academic literature supports your views. http://psych2.phil.uni-erlangen.de/~oschult/humanlab/publica... "Thus, high levels of testosterone are associated with willingness to incur greater risk in both sexes." In my experience, this view has loose ties to ADHD, specifically regarding the hunter-farmer hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_vs._farmer_hypothesis Doesn't say it in the article, but…

I don’t have any background is psychology. This information you provided increases my skepticism of ADHD as being a thing at all. In short, I’ve felt since becoming an adult that ADHD is simply the result of forcing people into situations that are poorly suited to their brains, implemented by people who happened to fair well in those situations. That is, the humans themselves aren’t broken, just a different neuro-variant.

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#515

Post by xur17 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 12:29 AM UTC

8note wrote: post #398

hc-taway wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two of my kids (one a boy and one a girl) act absolutely nuts and "must" have something like ADHD... until you make sure they run around outside at least 4hrs a day, consistently. Then they're fine. Unfortunately this is effectively impossible to achieve for 2-3 months every year, with school in session and short Winter days. They're in lower elementary school but I think their total recess time per day is only about…

In a coldish part of Canada, I think I had 2.5hours of outside or PE time through elementary school The same amount of PE, along with became optional through junior high school and high school. In elementary school, recess/lunch were required to be spent outside (unless it's -30C or so) You could spend up to 15min at a time inside to warm up, dry off your mittens, and maybe grab a hot chocolate but after that you wer…

Wait, 2.5 hours per day?? In the US I barely had 30 minutes outside / PE per day.

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#516

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 12:33 AM UTC

hitpointdrew wrote: post #151

aviraldg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rules and grading are different. In school, the rules that students are rewarded for following are "softer" and harder to justify directly. eg. You must submit a project with a cover with beautifully handwritten title of this specific size, or you lose marks (This is real guidance that was provided for my school and college projects.) At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically okay to break them, an…

>At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically okay to break them, and performance is mostly rated on actual impact, not pointless rule-following. Exactly this. Doing something simply because "it's a rule" and doing something where you see actual impact/results is world of a difference.

The word for the former is "authoritarian." Relationships are defined by power imbalances, hierarchy, and superficial displays of conformity, not by outcomes.

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#517

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 12:57 AM UTC

ScoobleDoodle wrote: post #490

chewxy wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Runnning around does not make a child with ADHD more sedate or perform better in the classroom. "Just go do some exercise" is like telling depressed people to "just cheer up". Yes, exercise definitely helps. But it doesn't make one's mind less noisy internally. Buddhists talk of monkey minds. ADHD is like having a zoo of minds. This anti-medication bias is causing a lot of stigma in society for children who actually…

My understanding of the parent and grandparent comments are that they are lamenting that boys are being diagnosed and/or dosed with ADHD medication just because they aren't given time and space to work out their energy. So schools and society are dealing with fidgety unfocused boys by giving them false diagnosis and inappropriate medication. This is all distinct from people who actually really have ADHD and in which…

[deleted]

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#518

Post by dmingod666 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:08 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #154

dekhn wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to imply that at all, although it does seem like the first reasonable target: all job categories, except for ones that require people to be a specific gender for some reason, should have participation roughly proportional to the proportion of that gender (or other attribute) in society. I'm not certain that's the right goal, but what I said above was working a model where 50% women participation seemed…

Where is the free will of individuals factored in? I mean, if people in group A don't want to do job B, should we force them to reach parity? I think it's better to ensure equal opportunities and let people decide.

Funnily proponent of the theory 'make everything 50%' tendd to think of an individuals free will as the most feeble thing that can be broken oh so easily by almost anything.

I don't know if they actually perceive this, but, the fact that some people can automatically assume bias without deeper investigation when their whole fight is, trying to fight preconceived notions, its sort of ironic.

Sure, study WHY certain fields are underrepresented and try to fix systematic problems. But if your blind go to answer is, 'certain group of people are to blame' - just maybe you're exibiting behaviors that you are try to reduce in others and it may not lead to real solutions..

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#519

Post by b0afc375b5 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:11 AM UTC

alexpetralia wrote: post #508

Inu wrote: post #496

Off topic, but why is this thread (207 points | 5 hours ago | 474 comments) on page 2, rank 37, and the thread about Italo Calvino (62 points | 7 hours ago | 19 comments) on page 1, rank 23?

I believe threads which are heavily upvoted & downvoted (i.e. potential flame war) are penalized.

But doesn't this discourage discussion?

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#520

Post by darkhorse13 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:15 AM UTC

chewxy wrote: post #483

zionic wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Future generations will consider us barbarians for dosing our young boys with drugs because we providing them with physical education/exercise was inconvenient to us. They'll also be able to datamine the internet from this time period and use our own words to hang us.

Runnning around does not make a child with ADHD more sedate or perform better in the classroom. "Just go do some exercise" is like telling depressed people to "just cheer up". Yes, exercise definitely helps. But it doesn't make one's mind less noisy internally. Buddhists talk of monkey minds. ADHD is like having a zoo of minds. This anti-medication bias is causing a lot of stigma in society for children who actually…

To me (and a lot of other people), most ADHD diagnosis is clearly not something that should be medicated, especially at such young ages. So this is not a general anti-medication bias, but something that is specifically related to ADHD, and how it is over-diagnosed and over-medicated.