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Comment by mikorym | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate the objective behind the study, it's kind of disappointing that it is even done.

"Serious" mathematicians are hopefully like "serious" coders, they read the math and when they happen to meet the person they are like "Oh, hi black/indian/asian/white/A man/woman/X not that I want to chit chat but what does this line here mean exactly..." The analogy does break down due to the sheer number of mathematicians being men, which is probably why some people need these kind of headlines in the first place (to challenge their bias).

I personally believe that all mathematicians have poignantly different ways of going about their work, so my real issue with studies is that personally, I wouldn't like being a test subject.

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It is only disappointing because it found the expected result. If Galileo had drooped his rocks and found the big rock fell faster than the small one it would be a disappointing result. That is wasn't expected changed the course of science. In short, we sometimes need to go back and prove the obvious really is obvious just in case our ideas are wrong.

Of course the above is causes a lot of false results to be published: it isn't real but by statistical fluke happened.

That isn't at all an expected result. Given the range of physical differences between men and women it is quite surprising if there are no mental differences on average and potentially even in extreme situations. Hormonal differences alone could cause any sort of strange divergences and it might have turned out that the ability to pump blood to the brain (ie, raw physical fitness - which is clearly a divergence between the sexes particularly on the tails of the distribution) is a contributor to peak mental processing ability.

It isn't expected that men and women are the same in how they do things. We just don't think the differences are important to what outcomes get achieved when it comes to real-world problems.

EDIT

And something interesting, my understanding is that where men are more likely to be red-green colour blind women go in the opposite direction, sometimes even as far as having tetrachromacy/a 4th type of colour receptor. Maths always seemed to me to be linked to vision, that sort of thing might trigger all sorts of strange results.

Biology is really messy.

> the ability to pump blood to the brain

I'm not sure if such an assertion is rooted in directly measurable and observable science (I somehow doubt it is).

It would not be unreasonable to assume that the ability to get blood to the brain of men is significantly reduced compared with women because of its constant redirection to inflating the penis.

I hope you can recognize the implicit sexism in your comment. There's really no need for it.

I do not think there is anything implicit about it.

And yet a quick google search shows that there are indeed gendered differences in how much blood flows to the brain, although not linked to athletic performance.

"... women's brains seem to be more active than men's brains, in terms of blood flow ... [w]hile there was more blood flow in women's brains overall, male brains had more blood flow in certain areas, including the visual and coordination centres of the brain." [0]

> It would not be unreasonable to assume that the ability to get blood to the brain of men is significantly reduced compared with women because of its constant redirection to inflating the penis.

I'm pretty sure that is a real fact, or very close to one. The blood in the penis had to come from somewhere, and could easily be causing reduced brain functionality.

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/women-s-brains-are-more-active-...

I've never met a person—"serious" or not—that didn't harbor some sort of unconscious bias. The difference has always been how they acknowledge and work to counteract such bias.

I notice the people who attack these studies are often the same people who want to claim there isn't any genetic difference between women and men in the same breath. That's the kind of claim that requires evidence.. such as these studies.

Whether or not there are genetic differences doesn't mean you should treat anyone differently. But, if say we know that brown eyed people are wired so that math is harder for them then we have a good case for giving them additional advantages (scholarships, tutoring, etc) to help overcome that disparity. On the other hand, if there are no genetic disparities but in wealthier countries brown eyed people prefer to avoid math if they can, well, that's also informative (maybe the math field isn't welcoming to them, or maybe work in that field doesn't engage them well)

I disagree with the notion that we should give additional advantages to people who are bad at things, at least genetically. Math is not a vital part of life, so I wouldn't equate it with accessibility measures like ramps or braille, etc.

In the case of economic or societal disadvantages the argument is that if the environment changed, both the rich and the poor, the white and the black, would perform equally, justifying "leveling the playing field". Genetically, all "leveling the playing field" does is provide an artificial equity which will go away once the advantages are taken away.

This seems similar to the argument that women should have different physical fitness standards in the special forces. Nobody should care about gender proportions in the special forces, they should care about the effectiveness of the teams, same with other non-trivial pursuits. (This is provided that the differences between groups are indeed genetic).

Hardy said the famous "all mathematicians are isomorphic" which means there basically only one way of doing math. And I tend to agree.

There is certainly only one math (if you subscribe to this idea -- it is also the truth) but many ways of doing it. Given doing math (at least at the research level) requires a staggering variety in thought and being able to make connections through training (some might call this intuition), trying to understand the sensitivity of ways of thinking about abstractions, to neurochemistry, is definitely a nontrivial question. Now whether or not one is interested in answering this question, it is definitely complex enough to investigate.

I think math is separated into two parts—the scientific and the language—and the scientific part is where I think mathematicians show a lot of variation. The language has to be standard, otherwise it could be ambiguous or even incorrect.

For example, back when we were doing our MSc degrees, my one colleague would start his day reading Mac Lane's old and new testaments [1]. I would start my day usually obsessing about the same things—what time is and its relation to space and orientation, whether everything can be expressed in a self-dual way, learning or improving language skills, writing music and playing soccer. Whenever I read mathematics I find it somewhat stressful and I've realised that I should write more than read. The "stress" part is maybe actually just the fact that in general I often don't like skimming things—not even story books. I also have Mac Lane's books, but I try to focus on one thing at a time.

Whether you replace every group by its permutation group as a habit or not, they may be isomorphic, but they are constructed differently—as are mathematicians.

[1] This was his joking way to refer to Algebra (old testament) and Categories for the Working Mathematician (new tastament).

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