I am not too sure about autism being directly a further male brain than the normative population. As a counter, the number of Male-to-Female transgender people in the speedrunning community is staggeringly high, and should be given some thought.
Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced
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Re: Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced
#72A quick look at Simon Baron Cohen's tweet[1] (linked from the article) shows that this topic seems extremely divisive and inflammatory to people. Is this retraction and resulting modified study seen as an important victory for people promoting that there are no differences between the "male" and "female" brains? [1] https://twitter.com/sbaroncohen/status/832490232721371136
> Is this retraction and resulting modified study seen as an important victory for people promoting that there are no differences between the "male" and "female" brains?
Not especially - more like an averted defeat. It's certainly not a win for gendered-brain theories, but it's not much of a loss either. Cohen's work is hugely controversial even after taking the existence of "gendered brains" as a given. He makes his claim from two directions: first, that most autistic people are male, and second, that most autistic women have 'male brains'.
Rejecting first claim is obviously compatible with sex differences. The basic answer is that autism in women is underdiagnosed and Cohen is mistaking test error for base rates. There are lots of possible reasons which are indifferent to brain sex (gender stereotypes, clinician expectations), plus the claim that autism presents differently in men and women, which is compatible with both socialization and deep-seated gender differences.
His second claim basically requires brain sex differences to exist, but it's still possible to accept that while disputing that autistic women have "male brains". For one thing, a lot of the debate about brain sex today works from the same underlying framework (e.g. the 2015 'mosaic brain' work) while reaching very different conclusions about how substantial sex differences are, and that whole model is largely incompatible with Cohen's. For another, lots of people charge that Cohen's data is simply wrong - that his stats on autistic women with 'male brains' come from botched studies which should be discounted regardless of what brains are like.
People who reject major sex differences like Cordelia Fine aim at Cohen a lot, because his model would largely invalidate theirs. But lots of people claiming major sex differences also reject Cohen, either because their models don't match (e.g. "higher male variance" versus Cohen's "male brains"), or because they simply think studies like these are methodologically weak independent of that question.
Re: Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced
#73I personally know the author of this paper who conducted these analyses. He is my office mate. He discovered his own error that then led to this retraction. The error involved under-documented statistical code which expected the coding of male and female (0,1) to be reversed when training a classifier on each group, is my understanding. He kept the coding of sex the same across both training regimes. This created err…
Please ask your office mate to put everything from images to code to data on-line in the spirit of open and reproducible science. That way others can check the conclusions and the statistical methods, etc.
Re: Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s uncontroversial to say that on average, men are taller than women. But other characteristics such as nutrition and genetics matter more: the average German woman (5’5”) is significantly taller than the average Peruvian man (5’1”). My point here is that the difference between men and women on most metrics tends to be more heavily influenced by other external factors.
> the difference between men and women on most metrics I think that's the problem part of your argument. There's no qualification of what "most metrics" includes, much less whether that holds true for must neurological effects (which is more to the point), and that's before we even get around to discussing the fact that I'm sure there's a bunch of metrics we don't even know about. Your statement might be entirely tru…
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Re: Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s uncontroversial to say that on average, men are taller than women. But other characteristics such as nutrition and genetics matter more: the average German woman (5’5”) is significantly taller than the average Peruvian man (5’1”). My point here is that the difference between men and women on most metrics tends to be more heavily influenced by other external factors.
> the difference between men and women on most metrics I think that's the problem part of your argument. There's no qualification of what "most metrics" includes, much less whether that holds true for must neurological effects (which is more to the point), and that's before we even get around to discussing the fact that I'm sure there's a bunch of metrics we don't even know about. Your statement might be entirely tru…
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Re: Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced
#76I am not too sure about autism being directly a further male brain than the normative population. As a counter, the number of Male-to-Female transgender people in the speedrunning community is staggeringly high, and should be given some thought.
Escapism might just be the case. I know from my own experience gaming was just a way to focus on something else besides a cruel reality. Eventually moved to programming and realized later what was happening. I'm sure if life had been different, I would have done a different career and one that's more social with the focus in a social aspect.
Re: Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only a political thing in the minds of the politically-inclined. Since when was autism a cornerstone in anybody's ideology? I think the only reason this is riling people up is that it involves gender in the title.
> Since when was autism a cornerstone in anybody's ideology? Anti-vaxxers?
This isn't really political. Both the left and the right fall into this camp.
Re: Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced
#78A quick look at Simon Baron Cohen's tweet[1] (linked from the article) shows that this topic seems extremely divisive and inflammatory to people. Is this retraction and resulting modified study seen as an important victory for people promoting that there are no differences between the "male" and "female" brains? [1] https://twitter.com/sbaroncohen/status/832490232721371136
> Is this retraction and resulting modified study seen as an important victory for people promoting that there are no differences between the "male" and "female" brains? Not especially - more like an averted defeat. It's certainly not a win for gendered-brain theories, but it's not much of a loss either. Cohen's work is hugely controversial even after taking the existence of "gendered brains" as a given. He makes his…
While autism is under-diagnosed in females, there is no good evidence that this sufficiently explains the different rates of diagnosis in males and females.
Re: Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Not related to this specific study: > Meet the neuroscientist shattering the myth of the gendered brain > Are there any significant differences based on sex alone? The answer, she says, is no. To suggest otherwise is “neurofoolishness”. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/24/meet-the-neu...
The studies underlying that article are really interesting, and it's frustrating to see science journalism butcher them so badly. (Everywhere, not just The Guardian; New Scientist did the same thing.) There's a lot of great work demonstrating the lack of a physical gender dichotomy, and I hate watching the 'AI winter' pattern where people dismiss that work because stories like this one use it for completely inapplica…
It seems to be a core reluctance to address the mathematical aspects of reality. Sex differences are not binary, like different OO classes in a programming environment, but there are noticeable statistical poles, like correlating sex and height.
The problem it seems is that they can't understand that, yes, saying females are shorter than males is a valid heuristic, but it is not an absolute relation and should be integrated with actual observations and individual differences.
Re: Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same way a diagnosis benefits anyone who requires medical treatment.
This pretty much sums it up. As always, just replace with "cancer" and see if you sound dismissive or callous. "How does being diagnosed help the cancer patient?"
Does that work with allergy to electricity as well? Not all doctors here believe in that so it’s a hot topic