Hacker News Reader

Comment by azaras | Hacker News Reader

I have a question about:

"Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds"

I read "The Female Brain" by Louann Brizendine and all it makes sense to me but I am beginning to think that I (and this book) are wrong.

¿How is it possible that two opposing theses could be maintained in something like neuroscience?

I can imagine that it is possible in Economics, Philosophy, Psycology and other similar sciences but in neuroscience it does not make sense to me.

View on HN

> How is it possible that two opposing theses could be maintained in something like neuroscience

It is very common in neuroscience (and also from experience psychology; but I'd bet also econ and Phil). Popular science books often paint results as ironclad, and gloss over small, or convenience samples, methodological issues that might cause researchers to disagree, etc..

Another big one in psychology and neuroscience (and many areas) is that even if you have a clear result, the interpretation often requires buying into certain assumptions. (E.g. interpreting activity in fMRI when no data from methods with better spatial or temporal resolution; intepreting non human animal studies)

What if neuroscience is an unknown problem space where boids are exploring? Technology, experiments, observations are increasing the problem space faster than it's being mapped.

What if theories of neuroscience are like product development? New bugs are being identified faster than they're being closed. So it'll be a while longer before the bug curve settles down.

What if science and engineering are like software design and architecture? It takes a while, plus lots of trial and error, to identify patterns, to generalize, to simplify. It's normal for code bases to "pulse", growing for a while as solutions are explored, then contracting for a while as dead ends are culled. aka technical debt.

Gender and Our Brains cites studies and data that are selectively chosen to support a predetermined conclusion.

As to why:

> After almost 20 years of hearing the same invalid arguments (like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day” waking up to the same song every day), I have come to see clearly that the real problem is a deeply ingrained, implicit, very powerful yet 100 percent false assumption that if women and men are to be considered “equal,” they have to be “the same.” Conversely, the argument goes, if neuroscience shows that women and men are not the same on average, then it somehow shows that they are not equal on average. Although this assumption is false, it still creates fear of sex differences in those operating on it.

A critique: https://quillette.com/2019/03/29/denying-the-neuroscience-of...

I'm curious: if the male and female brain, from a neuroscientific perspective, are truly the same - can we assume the book's author would be perfectly fine with all neuroscience from now on be done on male brains exclusively and the results then applied to female brains without further research? Somehow I doubt this.

If anybody ever says the brains of men and women are identical, the average brain has

> a volume of around 1260 cm3 in men and 1130 cm3 in women.

It's nonsense, spawned by fear that acknowledging differences will justify discrimination.

Reading the book's blurbs and Kiser's descriptions I don't see anything about the book claiming m/f/intersex brains are all neurologically _identical_ in their developmental origins and trajectories... just that they aren't "gendered" (e.g. aren't structured in ways that cause tropes or stereotypes) and that there are many old myths related to the genderedness assumption in brains to be debunked.

The Amazon description indeed reads "A breakthrough work in neuroscience—and an incisive corrective to a long history of damaging pseudoscience—that finally debunks the myth that there is a hardwired distinction between male and female brains" -- but it's basically a 0% that the author wrote that bit!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com