Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

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Men have always been encouraged to have sex with a lot of different partners, not to sire children with them. (Children were, of course, the reason that men developed the urge, but the urge stands separately, as shown by the fact that men do not decrease their mating habits when there is no chance of pregnancy.) That's clearly still the case in modern society. Spend 10 minutes in a high school locker room and you'll see that.

Darwinian theories about women being wired differently than men are perpetuated because science backs them up. We don't know exactly how, or how much of the difference is genetic vs. cultural, but it's just a reality that men and women have different motivations, aptitudes, etc.

Nobody would argue that evolution has made us different physically. Men are much stronger and better coordinated. Women are more able to bear pain and often have stronger senses of smell and taste. Why would it not stand to reason that evolution might make each sex better at some mental tasks than the other, just as it has physical? It's not sexist to point out that male weight-lifters are able to bench more because men have been designed by evolution to be stronger. Why is it sexist to say we show up more frequently in science departments because we have also been designed by evolution to be better at math?

Sexism is not believing that one sex is different than another, it's believing that those differences make it inferior.

Why is it sexist to say we show up more frequently in science departments because we have also been designed by evolution to be better at math?

Because compared with bench-pressing, claims of mathematically ability being better in men (and partially ordered, to boot) is seriously jumping the gun.

We know what's involved in a bench press. We understand how testosterone stimulates the production of muscle. We are nowhere close with mathematical ability. We have no theory of mathematically ability -- we really don't know what it means, or if the simplest metrics are even useful for higher level math. We have no experimental results, because we have no controlled variables. We have few pieces of data, none of which are conclusively disentangled from cultural and historical influence.

In the past two decades, the number of women scoring highly on the IMO, the IOI, the Putnam, and SMPY has gone up by roughly a factor of six. Doubtful that the number of girls with 'math talent genes' have sextupled that quickly. Isn't this evidence that we should hold off on our conclusions?

I don't think anyone would claim that we know or understand all of those differences yet. I don't even really have an opinion on the math one, it's just the most commonly cited so I used it as example.

But we need to be open to the fact that they are there. It hinders scientific and social progress to scream sexism any time someone suggests the sexes might be different in some way.

It hinders progress in the same way to scream anti-sexism when what is really being suggested is a reasoned discussion.

It might be absurd to assert equality, but it's a decent postulate to take while we don't know for sure. And I think asserting the certainty of particular innate differences, without sufficient evidence, is more dubious than the corresponding assertion of equality.

Well, the one thing we know for sure is that we're different. We just don't know all of the why's and how's. So overall equality (in the sense of similarity) is the only thing we know to be incorrect.

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