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Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

>There's a strain of far left ideology that claims men and women are mentally identical

I've never seen anyone actually claim this. Often, people on the right want people on the left to be claiming this because it would be easy to refute. But in fact what people on the left are usually doing is expressing skepticism that various aspects of the status quo (such as the distribution of genders in various professions) are explained primarily by the - typically small - average cognitive differences between men and women.

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I've definitely gotten into some very heated discussions about this point, with some very intelligent and well educated people on "the left" who attended prestigious universities. Their position is that "all of the behavioral differences between men and women are purely societal; none are based in biology at all."

That's not the point of view under discussion. The question is whether there are cognitive differences between men and women. One can acknowledge that there are without thinking that it is these (usually quite small) cognitive differences that are primarily responsible for behavioral differences.

That being said, I would be surprised if you could find an example of anyone at all prominent or influential on the left expressing in writing the position that you quote.

> I would be surprised if you could find an example of anyone at all prominent or influential on the left expressing in writing the position that you quote.

How about this for a prominent and influential source:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00677-x

The headline is "Neurosexism: the myth that men and women have different brains"

Under the sub-heading "Cultural paths":

"So if it’s not brain hard-wiring, how do we explain the often stark differences in behaviour and interests between men and women? Here is where we get to Rippon’s thesis on the impact of a gendered world on the human brain."

You can inject people with testosterone and estrogen and observe behavioral changes (as people attest to in this very thread), so it's certainly a pretty strange position to have. Neuroscience is too important for these nonfactual statements to be accepted, let alone be published in Nature. There's a pretty thorough counter argument here: https://quillette.com/2019/03/29/denying-the-neuroscience-of...

That's the headline. The actual content of the article consists in discussion of various instances in which male/female brain differences have been exaggerated.

The brain is a bit of a red herring here. We know little about the brain -- far too little to be able to draw any conclusions from whatever differences there may be between average male and female brains. We do, however, have reliable behavioral evidence of small cognitive differences between men and women on average. My point was that there are few if any people who deny the existence of such differences.

Why does the headline get a free pass?

Because it typically wouldn't be written by the author of the article.

It feels like you keep moving the goalposts and your initial argument was "I have no personal experience with [x] so I don't believe [x] is a thing."

I can't leave links to my life experiences, but as I finish my undergrad I have heard every type of teacher and student maintain that the only differences between men and women are socially constructed. It is common knowledge and thus not really debated. The one time I saw a teacher maintain otherwise, it was a guy in the biology department who was retiring. The class session dissolved into a shouting match between students with the teacher looking on.

If that is a common point of view, it should be easy to provide a reference to someone expressing it in writing.

I suspect that you weren't listening very carefully to what people were actually saying.

You've been given evidence ITT and you've shifted the goalposts. From your posts here it is very clear that you are making a concerted yet subtle effort to minimize an issue at least 4 other posters and myself have had direct interactions with. I'm sure you have subjectively good reasons for playing this game.

This isn't a problem, though. This is probably what happens when it turns out the Russian bogeyman was just a fever dream. Indeed, being in a public University in the North East as well as 2 of my 3 concentrations being in the liberal arts, I'm quite used to people ignoring actual fires as they continuously harangue everyone about potential fires.

I don't know what ITT stands for. Which evidence are you referring to?

I cannot see any connection between the second paragraph of your comment and what we're talking about.

> You can inject people with testosterone and estrogen and observe behavioral changes (as people attest to in this very thread)

If sex-linked behavioral changes at explainable by hormone differences and can reproduced by in vivo manipulation of hormone levels, that supports rather than refutes the idea that intrinsic brain differences are not responsible for the differences.

In any case, though, the article does not support the upthread claims of either a view that there are no sex differences in mentality or that there are no physically-based differences in behavior, and all are social, because it addresses not behavior or mentality but brains.

@foldr, You bring up a good point/distinction. When discussing differences between the sexes, one should be careful not to conflate cognitive/brain specific differences and behavioral differences in general. There are biologically based non-brain things (i.e. hormones) that can affect behavior. In your original comment, you were specifically referring to the brain; my reply conflated that with other behavioral differences. I apologize for the confusion on my part.

I get into debates about this topic all the time. There are definitely people on the left who claim that sex isn't binary, and that the existence of intersex people somehow disproves the idea of male/female sexes.

That seems like a separate topic. The question at issue is whether people who can be clearly classified as "men" or "women" according to general consensus show some cognitive differences on average. I have not seen anyone deny this.

In a similar way, one might argue that "races" don't really have any objective existence, and yet still acknowledge that e.g. African-Americans are less likely to go to college than Asian Americans. Such stats aren't invalidated by the lack of any objective biological definition of "race", or by the existence of some people with mixed African/Asian heritage, etc. etc.

You seem to mix up binary with bimodal. Sex is indeed not binary, as illustrated by the many cases of "it's complicated". You can try to define a strong line, but the resulting rule will be quite arbitrary and mostly be based on your feelings. Accepting the distribution to be bimodal obviously still allows most of us to easily be categorized as either male or female. Same for gender roles, by the way, though with a bigger focus on behavior than biology.

> There are definitely people on the left who claim that sex isn't binary

It fairly obviously is not. That sex traits are multidimensional and that there are more than two ways that that they present in combination is...not really a matte about which there can be serious, fact-based debate.

> and that the existence of intersex people somehow disproves the idea of male/female sexes.

It (and a number of other phenomena that aren't typically labelled intersex, including, but not limited to, the way certain physical sex-linked traits other than external genitalia in transexuals are, on average, more typical of the sex corresponding to their gender identity than to sex identified by their at-birh genitalia or combination of sex chromosomes) obviously disproves the idea of exclusive stereotypical male and female sexes.

But none of that is relevant to the upthread issue, which was the supposed claim that males and females are mentally identical. That is a rather distinct claim from “sex is more complex than a male/female binary distinction”.

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