Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Curious to see no mention (in the paper or comments here) of previous neuro-imaging experiments that showed that brain networks associated with empathy and those associated with logical thought are antagonists, and it does not appear to be possible to have both active at the same time:

http://blog.case.edu/think/2012/10/30/empathy_represses_anal...

There's a long pop-science suspicion of this, dating back to Jungian psychology (where Thinking vs. Feeling was considered a primitive dichotomy). It's enshrined in many of our stereotypes about socially awkward nerds, and also in the structure of the tech industry (which has separate departments for sales vs. engineering, and common wisdom that you need a hustler & a hacker for startups).

This seems much more likely, as an explanation, than ideas that poor math performance may be transmitted socially, although of course it'd need to be rigorously tested in an experiment to be proven.

View on HN

That assumes facts not in evidence - namely, that the Empathy/Logic split is set and unchangeable. Specifically, that

a) the split is not influenced by societal pressures b) the split is fixed, neither math nor social skills are learnable beyond some innate abilities. c) it is indeed impossible to have both abilities and merely utilize them in a mutually exclusive way.

While this _is_ a very interesting finding, it's in no way saying anything about the nature vs. nurture debate. In fact, the paper quotes several sources on the fact that "This is, in part, due to the fact that there is little evidence of significant gender differences in math performance in elementary school"

- which still somewhat strongly implies social factors.

Fact of the matter is, we don't know. We do know that society currently discourages girls from pursuing "math-y" things. It'd be nice if we stopped that.

That doesn't mean that all girls should now pursue STEM careers, but it'd be good if we were open to that idea.

It doesn't actually assume those facts - the study I linked to showed that empathy and logic cannot be active at the same time. Indeed, it concludes with the suggestion that healthy adults tend to cycle rapidly between the empathic and logical brain networks, and that pathologies like autism or Williams Syndrome occur when people get "stuck" in one neural network or the other.

It does have implications to how we might address poor math performance or poor social skills (if this theory is correct, which still isn't proven yet), notably by training people to recognize when one skillset is called for or the other, and encourage them to concentrate on the task at hand regardless of whether the other skillset may be more natural for them.

The study from the original post didn't find evidence of the E-S split. It's possible their SQ test was flawed. It's also possible practicing math causes your social skills to atrophy.

The conclusion of the authors could be accurate, but we definitely don't really know the whole picture yet.

The idea that it's a social thing rather than a biological thing feels like a weaker claim. At the risk of sounding a bit reactionary, it seems a bit like claims relating to sex or race: there's a lot of pressure not to discover "natural" rather than socially-constructed differences.

I love how the discovery that humans are not all the same species has been completely glossed over. Humans are at least three separate genetic lineages (maybe more) comprising of Africans, African and Neanderthal hybrids (all non-Africans), and a third hybrid made up of African/Neanderthals/Denosovians (Melanesians).

For what definition of "species" is this true? (The definition I know is, a male A and a female B belong to the same species if B can give birth to A's children who can then themselves reproduce. By this definition, all humans are the same species. This is not to say that there aren't significant genetic differences between groups of humans coming from different lineages, just that it doesn't make them different species according to the definition I know.)

The definition of a species is not limited to being able to produce offspring or even fertile offspring. Lions and tigers can have offspring (ligers) who are sometimes fertile yet I doubt anyone would consider them the same species.

More fundamentally even if we decide that all homo lineages are the one species, it is the ignoring of all these lineages and the interbreeding between them that is the interesting observation. We now know that Neanderthals did not become extinct yet this is total ignored.

My role involves both analysis and creativity (marketing). I personally find I can't shift from tasks heavy in one to the other multiple times through the day and offer my best work at both. If I need to be creative I try and make my day creative and vice versa for data analysis. I imagine if you consistently stay in one state you get an element of burn-in that makes shifting harder.

This is my struggle! I write fiction and it is excrutiating switching to analytical intensive tasks while managing to be sociable.

I have the exact same issue. I've done well with trying to structure my days similarly, but there are inevitably times where something needs to be done immediately and of course it's never in tune with how I planned the day heh. Trying to explain exactly how disruptive task-switching across domains is for me personally is not something I've been able to communicate effectively to non-technical peers and superiors.

Sure, I can switch from programming to InDesign today! I didn't want to finish that this week anyway. (I exaggerate for effect, but not by much.)

Would be very interesting to see how this affects live poker. Like do the good players cycle as mentioned elsewhere? Or maybe using both networks at once is learnable? Or maybe they learn to pick up empathetic cues with other networks (the logical ones)? Or do they just disregard empathy?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com