Comment by _0ffh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _0ffh | Hacker News Reader

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>all the evidence points to the former

That is patently false, and you should not make factual claims under these circumstances. These claims add to the noise, not the signal.

The scientific evidence for innate psychological differences between girls and boys is overwhelming. There is a clear scientific consensus on this. I cannot fathom how this can still be controversial.

Specifically about your "cars vs dolls" example, I'll give you two quotations right of the bat:

- Shown two pictures, one of a mobile (physical-mechanical object) and one of a face (social object), there is a clear gender difference how much a child will look at the mobile vs face. (Yes, boy likes mobile, girl likes face.) In newborns btw. so that is hardly an artifact of human societal norms. [1]

- Offered a choice between a toy truck and a doll, there is a clear gender difference how much an adolescent will play with the truck vs doll. (Yes, boy likes truck, girl likes doll.) In monkeys btw, so that is hardly an artifact of human societal norms. [2]

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.627...

[2] https://www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-truck...

{Ed. spelling}

You are correct that narrowly speaking, it is false to say that "all evidence" points in any one direction.

However, your claim that there is a "overwhelming", "clear scientific consensus" is lacking in citations, your one broken link to what I assume was supposed a scientific study and one link to a pop science blogpost (which links only to other posts on the same blog and not any actual scientific papers) notwithstanding.

In fact the overwhelming scientific consensus is that the opposite is true. Check out this blogpost with working links to 22 different peer-reviewed scientific papers on how social priming can differentially affect how men and women, or white students and black students, etc perform at various academic and cognitive tasks (there are actually 27 links to such papers but 5 are broken; there are also links to 9 more scientific papers besides, just to flesh out the argument): http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s...

I challenge you to find working links to 22 different peer-reviewed scientific papers arguing that women's underrepresentation in STEM is not due to systemic discrimination but is explained wholly by other factors such as innate psychological differences.

In fact, I'll give you a head start. The blogpost I linked to already links to 6 such papers, so if you can find 16 more, I'll concede that maybe there isn't the scientific consensus I thought there was.

As noted by the other reply to GP, even if your links worked and were to actual, peer-reviewed scientific papers, they do little to support the argument that women's underrepresentation in STEM is not due to systemic discrimination. I think it would be an uphill battle for you to argue that they count towards the 16 in my challenge.

The scientific consensus is real, it's just not the one you seem to make it out to be. It's about the claim that there are "innate psychological differences" between boys and girls. I did not claim that these differences are solely responsible for 100% of observable statistical variations between genders. To try to ascribe all effects to a single set of causes, be it nature or nurture, is really a fool's errand. The blank slate is out of the window. Humans come into the world primed, and boys and girls are primed differently.

That notwithstanding, I wouldn't think of claiming that societal norms do not at all affect outcomes. Because it would be next to impossible to prove, and I'd give it a rather low a priori probability. Just what these effects really are and how big they are is a matter of ongoing debate. C.f. "The Norway Paradox".

This is true and I read a book based off of this study. However, how does this prove that a female is less capable of being a good software engineer?

I don't think it makes that claim? Clearly women can be capable and competent software engineers. I think the study was showing there is an inherent preference for different interests among large population of the sexes and then people who are concerned about the gender gap take this study to argue that the differences (and others) may manifest later in life as choices in career path.

Sure, clearly that was hyperbole. All the evidence never points anywhere. This means the vast majority of actual peer reviewed science.

It's good to hear that. I guess that was a communication problem then. I'd be careful with any kind of hyperbole on the net because, just as with sarcasm, it will be taken seriously. People will read what you wrote and take it straight and it will mislead and confuse them.

So I guess we're roughly on the same page then, that the observable variation in outcome is caused by a mix of innate and societal factors, and the real discussion to be had is about how to tease them apart and quantify their respective contributions?

just to be clear, they're not dolls, they're action figures!

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