Taking sex differences in personality seriously (2019)
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Saloni Dattani, another brain researcher, points out there are strong measures of gender-based brain development and that Rippon (mentioned in OP article) appears ideologically biased to assert that the brain is "unisex." Dattani's podcast with Julia Galef on this is worth listening to: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-239-saloni-datt.... It is pretty meta and doesn't fall strongly on one side, but it does dissect the lack of objectivity in the greater discussion.
This review by Saloni Dattani tells exactly the issues I've had with Gina Rippons book, The gendered brain. The introduction goes into detail on how a lot of statistical analysis is prone to biases and massaging of data etc. It is fairly comprehensive. But after that, the section where the author makes her case, she puts forth a lot of studies without going into why these studies are robust compared to the other studies she criticised in the introduction. It's pretty hard to just take her word for it especially when you have been primed to look for issues in studies after finishing the introduction
1. Do you believe that hormones like testosterone have large impacts on a person's behavior?
2. Do you believe that men have roughly 20x more testosterone in their blood serum than women?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Testosterone_levels_i...
Asserting that there are sex-based personality differences is not incompatible with gendered behavior being mostly social or learned.
All knowledge of these objects, what they're used for, and who uses them were learned from societal influences. A kid doesn't have to care about social norms to tell that most people they see playing with sticks or driving dump trucks are men, and most people they see pushing strollers and playing with dolls are women. It's like that from out in the park to within picture books.
2. Yes.
Doesn't change the fact that most comportments and interests are mainly ruled by social environment and upbringing, and biology only have this little impact (and it is still probably less that my brain will attribute, but at least i'm self-aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
Unless you think poor people are biologically less interested in space, earth crust, plants, sailing, horseriding, i'd be pretty confident in saying that most differences between children are in fact solely based on culture. This might evolve later (puberty hit!), but considering childhood is the crux of so much of your later choices
I've been a youth camp counselor, and in my country, classes are not always segregated when going to those camps (they are more and more tbh), and with this experience i can say: you tell me your child hobbies and dreams, i can tell you your income quintile (or social class rather, as cultural inheritance is not always correlated to income), whether it's a boy or girl, and if his family emigrated recently. Only work if you're from my country, but i'm sure if you talk to any youth camp counselor in your country who cared and worked this job for six+ years, he'd be able to do the same.
> Doesn't change the fact that most comportments and interests are mainly ruled by social environment and upbringing, and biology only have this little impact (and it is still probably less that my brain will attribute, but at least i'm self-aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
Twin studies disprove this. Separated twins, in different parts of the country, end up doing the same sort of jobs and marrying the same kind of people.
We're willing to assume different dog breeds -- all the same species -- have different temperaments, why wouldn't this apply to people. Even Dobermans can be trained to be nice dogs, but that means the training is overcoming the urge to bite.
This may be an unconventional take, but I think society would benefit greatly if people stopped seeing sex/gender as something you are, and rather saw it as something you have. I.e., you happen to have an X or Y chromosome which lead to a certain anatomy and hormonal profile. Seeing it as some fundamental component leads to "othering" of the opposite sex and its predictable consequences.
I'm personally hoping that radical advancements in sex reassignment technology, along with their acceptance, will eliminate most of the ideological battles concerning sex and gender.
I guess your anecdata makes me ask the question of whether the trans guys you know felt that way b/c of the change of hormone ratios or because they were impacted by the same social expectations of how guys are supposed to feel and act.
After we'd helped the poor guy into a taxi the news broke.
What he didn't know was that the bar had a policy of one beer per id card, so the guy how'd ended up buying for him had gotten alcohol-free beer for our underage mate in addition to the real beer for himself, not telling our classmate of course.
For the rest of that year he was known as Claus[1]...
So I don't think you can come to any conclusion about how it will affect one person based on how it affects another.
On testosterone I’m definitely more motivated. Hell, one time when my estrogen went too high I had an intense craving for chocolate.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d9KKqP9IHa5ZxU84a_Jf...
Of course hormones do have effects on the brain, but "chemical X affects our mood, therefore chemicals Y and Z must mean there are huge inherent differences between the genders" feels like a pretty weak argument to me.
Even if some of these are temporary and fluctuate, they'll still be part of "who you are".
But our general's health, socioeconomic context, influence of discrimination (or privilege), peer and society's pressures, etc, also impact our personalities in big ways, so it's pretty tough to separate one from the other. Heck, even what you eat can change it. If you google around, you'll find how people who eat a lot of trans fat were found to be generally more aggressive.
A perfectly egalitarian society would eliminate all societal influence on decision-making, leaving people perfectly free to do whatever they want with their life, not pushed in any particular direction. What happens when you manage that? Well, the only thing that will be impacting decision-making becomes your innate characteristics. And what is arguably the biggest single variable you can change to guarantee large differences in innate characteristics? Sex. In terms of lived experience, an X man and a Y man (e.g. short and tall) will be closer together than an X man and an X woman. As such, your gender gaps will only get larger as you remove societal influence from the process, not smaller, because gender is the single biggest discriminator when comparing two people.
Are those people of really different income levels? Class trumps ethnicity, and gender self-segregate within the class.
Note that maybe gender segregate since a long time and this is indeed a genetic code. But this is impossible to test against. So it is not really interesting, and a more philosophical debate right now.
I'm curious who you think forced Chinese to become Chinese and Aborigines to become Aborigines, etc... You could define race away and say we are all human, but that is also not interesting.
You think the lived experience of a fat man and a skinny man is further apart than the lived experience of a fat woman and a fat man? Or a black man and a white man vs a black man and woman? Of course if you go to excessive extremes those will start to outshine others, e.g. if you have two 700lbs people who (due to their weight) are – not walking, not having sex, not showering, not able to see their feet, not doing much of anything but eat, then yes probably the man and woman will be closer in their 700lbs lived experience. But that's the exception that proves the rule.
The key of course is that something we typically pretend is one variable (man vs woman) is actually a collection of 100, where as any of the other things you mention are typically much smaller in scope.
Where you are born is literally only societal influence, that's not an innate property at all. In fact it is almost as far as you can get from an innate property.
You're also pointing out extreme outliers as some sort of gotcha when the entire point is talking about population-level discrepancies and averages. Indeed, you can cherry pick whatever you want in order to get desired results. The question is, when you select two people completely at random, and you only look at intrinsic characteristics, will sex be the biggest differentiator on average? You might disagree, but the vast majority of people will not. Said another way, which is more common throughout history – societies that segregate based on sex, or societies that segregate based on weight?
When I say "men are stronger than women", is your response really to say "well I bet I can cherry pick a woman and cherry pick a man and the woman will be stronger than the man"? You can do that of course, but that would clearly not be taking my argument in good faith.
This is the issue, you can't test against "no societal influence". And societal influence is that powerfull of a factor for comportments that any biological factor is negligible. Or maybe gender difference is only a small factor and not a negligible, one but how do you test for that? It is impossible.
FYI: kids don't differentiate themselves until at least 3, sometime it can last longer (a lot longer). Puberty hit betwwen 11 and 15. I have a sightly ethically challenged experiment i would like to run...
A boy from a poor neighborhood will have more in common with a girl from a poor neighborhood that another boy from a rich neighborhood.
How many kid from poor urban area love horses? Compare that to kids from rich urban area? What about sailing? Ask a kid from a poor neighborhood his dream job. Surely, it's the same as your no? something between astronaut, archelogist, scientist. Except it is not. Because cultural environment mold children more than any biological difference.
A man with a small penis and a man with a big penis will still have much more similar sexual experiences than either of them would with a woman. This in turn will influence the way they view the world, which snowballs onwards and onwards.
On average, the brain chemistry of two men will be more similar than the brain chemistry of two women, as hormones have a large impact on this and any two men will (on average) have more similar hormone levels than they would with a woman.
Is this really surprising? Men and women have fundamentally different chromosomes, always. Not so with two random men or two random women.
I totally agree, if there is one biological attribute that can have an impact, it is gender. The other differences are so small compared to gender they don't matter. What i was saying is that gender doesn't have that much of an impact, or at least less of an impact than what society expect from your gender.
I'm suggesting that the opposite is true, because when you remove societal influence you end up lending more and more weight to the intrinsic characteristics, of which I would argue sex/gender is the strongest.
So, sure there's a measurable difference, but it's probably impossible to learn exactly what creates the difference.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B:SERS.0000011068....
Also other primate infants show the same toy preferences as human infants (i.e. male monkey infants prefering trucks, females prefering dolls, etc.)
I am not convinced that culture cognitive differences are even half as strong as biological cognitive difference
There is no way that societies collectively decided by comitee to be patriarchal and hierarchical, rather it is a much simpler explanation that biology played a much more important role in making the world so patriarchal
Cultural-constructivism is way out there
I wonder if they controlled for gender when this model was developed. Such a method would lead to the outcome quoted below.
>For instance, males and females on average don't differ much on extraversion. However, at the narrow level, you can see that males on average are more assertive (an aspect of extraversion) whereas females on average are more sociable and friendly (another aspect of extraversion). So what does the overall picture look like for males and females on average when going deeper than the broad level of personality
The author proposes two scenarios:
> Why do we have all these studies showing that male and female behaviors are so similar, yet people in everyday life continue to think as if males and females were very separable?
So basically intellectual curiosity. Fair enough, but I can see people using this information to reinforce and perpetuate biases instead of treating it like a factoid. I have a hard time thinking of an area where it’s useful to act on the idea of an “average man” or “average woman”.
> I am a strong believer that individual differences are more important than sex differences. Nevertheless, sex differences are also part of the picture, and may be particularly detrimental to a relationship if all partners go into the marriage thinking that they "should not exist", instead of coming to a healthy acceptance of sex differences, even laughing about them and attempting to understand differences in interests and motivations that fall along sex-related lines.
So, basically replacing one stereotype with a more accurate one. I agree with the author that the individual differences are more important, but they might be all that matters. It doesn’t matter if your partner is highly agreeable because of nature or nurture, does it? It just matters that you’re open to noticing your partner’s agreeableness. Plus, if we encourage people to understand these traits beyond the spectrum of sex, they can now understand agreeableness in any form, wether it’s at work, in the community, with kids or with a partner. That’s surely more valuable than only looking for agreeableness in women, no?
The only place I can think of is that it might tell you the probability of finding what you're looking for when dating.
For example, most relatively nerdy guys will stay single forever if he looks for a woman that likes similar things. If you aren't happy with staying single forever you should therefore realize that you need to compromise and accept that you will get a girly woman rather than the woman of your dreams.
In other words, if you like technology, sports and philosophy, it’s not that hard to find a partner of either sex that will share at least one of those interests. Or if your interests are cooking, concerts and wine tasting, same thing.
The compromise needs to come from needing your partner to share every interest. But we do the same things with friends of our same gender. They don’t need to share every interest we have, just one.
And I don’t agree that you will be lonely forever if you want a partner that shares a stereotypically gendered interest. I know men that have fallen in love with women over baseball and others over art and others over fantasy fiction and others over yoga.
Sure, maybe your odds are reduced but they’re a far cray from “staying single forever”.
I'm not trying to say that there are no problems, just trying to point out that there is utility in a frank conversation about stuff like this.
> All of the findings I've presented up to this point are merely descriptive; they don't prescribe any particular course of action, and they do not say anything about the complex interplay of genetic and cultural influences that may cause these differences to arise in the first place.
So I don’t understand why people are interested in this correlation when the causation is still up for debate.
But this analysis is useful pushing back against policies that have as their basis the assumption that gender-based differences in personality do not exist, and set measures accordingly. Those are anti-individualist by nature.
In other words, there are many policies and some laws in place that care only about crude statistics about aggregate groups, and the idea that there could be real biological reasons that more women prefer (plucking something out of the air) teaching early education than higher education breaks those assumptions. Those policies are working against the real choice of the individual.
Kinda like certain arguments about climate change or early covid (yeah let's make this even more politically charged), in a state of so much uncertainty, it's useful to look at the potential harms of being wrong one way or the other. The potential harms are asymmetric, so I think it's wise to default to treating people the same in terms of potential. Empirically, it seems like most of history has defaulted the opposite direction ("science says we're different and X is natural") causing a lot of harm to various groups.
Buss. 1989. Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures
Feingold. 1994. Gender Differences in Personality: A Meta-Analysis
Grijalva et al. 2014. Gender Differences in Narcissism: A Meta-Analytic Review
Hall, Canterberry. 2011. Sexism and Assertive Courtship Strategies
Joseph, Newman. 2010. Emotional Intelligence: An Integrative Meta-Analysis and Cascading Model
Lukaszewski, Roney. 2010. Kind toward whom? Mate preferences for personality traits are target specific
Oliver, Hyde. 1993. Gender Differences in Sexuality: A Meta-analysis
Snyder et al. 2008. The dominance dilemma: Do women really prefer dominant mates?
Su, Rounds, Armstrong. 2009. Men and Things, Women and People
Wood, Eagly. 2002. A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Behavior of Women and Men: Implications for the Origins of Sex Differences
I think this depends on what popular media is to you. My wife is a big time feminist who hates any discussion of gender differences in personality, and going by the sources she reads, pretty much all differences that we can observe today are just due to culture. This is not an uncommon position within progressive circles.
Somebody's “lived experience” is their personal anecdotes. It's often in contrast with “quantify or discard”-type bad-at-science academics who make blanket assertions about things they don't know very much about.
It's clear to me that many social progressives find the idea that there may be average biological differences in personality between genders to be unacceptable.
> holding the opinion of biologically driven personality eats away at the concept of free will
Eh, I don't think you'll find many people who dispute that there's individual variation in personalities due to biology/genetics. Hell, "born this way" (for being gay) was practically a rallying cry on the left.
So sure, hormone differences seem to lead to different brain chemistry. But then people draw wild and incorrect conclusions like gate keeping women out of tech. And the fact that their conclusion is wrong is more important than the fact that some differences do exist.
Edit: I worked at Google when the memo came out. Personally I didn’t think the memo was that bad... until I spoke to my female friends that worked at Google. They told me a lot about how women are treated in tech. And they showed me how things said in the memo that I thought were harmless actually perpetuated beliefs that they believed did cause them harm.
So the people saying I am misrepresenting the situation... are you a man? Maybe you can’t recognize the harmful statements the way women do and so you do not remember them being harmful? I certainly got a lesson in my own bias after that memo came out. My close friends sat me down and we had some difficult conversations about it. If you’ve never done that, consider what you might be missing.
But, that doesn't preclude there also being sexism present that needs to be dealt with.
That's something he never said, and even explicitly said the opposite multiple times. The fact that people like you continue to repeat lies about what he said without ever reading what he said (or worse, willfully lying in spite of actually reading it) is why we can't have honest conversations about this.
Most people don't have a strong enough grasp of statistics.
No matter how careful one is with the wording, some can only hear what they are capable of understanding, because they lack the frame of understanding.
It was journals like Wired, TechCrunch, the NYT's technology board, Ars Technica, the whole tech media came out of the woodwork to create a false narrative about what Damore wrote and succeeded in getting him terminated. They may have even ruined his life, just some random autistic engineer who accidentally violated their taboo.
And Damore isn't the first person mainstream journalists have done this to, they did it with Jordan Peterson, as another example, and they'll make up all kinds of lies if it fits their ideological goals to do so.
The sooner people realize that they need to consume "mainstream" journalism with the same skepticism they bring to "alt" journalism or "tabloids," the better off we'll be.
In the meantime, the journalists I trust most are the ones that have seen through this game: Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, to name a few.
The Damore memo sounds very different to women than to men. I didn’t see that much of a problem with it until I spoke to my female friends. And they pointed out how work like that reinforces serious problems they already have at the workplace.
Honestly I think the downvoters remember it differently because men remember it differently from women, and I am remembering all the conversations I had with women while working at Google when the memo came out.
The problem is that people like you will say people say things they didn't say and won't acknowledge the things they actually did say.
No one is gatekeeping women out of working in coal mines or driving trucks or heavy equipment or welding or garbage collection or any of those jobs either.
Why tech?
Why? Because it's not.
There is an overabundance of oppression in the world and it has nothing to do with gender, race, class, etc. There are oppressive people and they ruin life for many of all genders, races, classes, etc. Oppressive people are going to find any reason at all to insult, degrade, and disrespect others to oppress them.
Blaming other people for your own situation that you largely control, I would argue that the individual has more control over their life than anyone yet, responsibility of the self is completely absent from the discussion.
That, itself, is a form of oppression. It is oppression that we need to focus on. Not gender, race, class, wealth, geography, nationality, etc, etc, etc.
Oppressive people need to be rooted out and removed from society until they are rehabilitated.
If you define cultural influence as broadly as pre-historic shared origins, I fear you've stepped into the territory of unfalsifiable claims. Interesting conversationally, but useless scientifically.
Moral monstrosity aside, it should be possible to answer nature-vs-nurture questions by raising humans from infancy in a robo-nursery where they only interact with other such "culturally pristine" humans. Seed a dozen such communities and watch their culture evolve over several generations, and you'd have a pretty good basis to draw conclusions on nature vs nurture.
The problem is even more insidious - good science is prevented from being conducted for political reasons largely by extreme progressives. It is unsettling to me that we have so much politics mixed in with scientific understanding of humans.
The chilling effect of this is that no professor or researcher would these days attempt to conduct good science around gender differences - they fear their life, liberty and right to pursuit a prosperous career.
Just look at the number of gray comments in this thread - it shows how intolerant, childish and absolutely infuriating it is to discuss something that should not be contentious or confrontational. We're not acting like adults.
At least from these studies, genetics play a far larger role than expected.
We should, instead, talk about personality as affected by gender, and behavior as influenced by personality and culture, including assumed or adopted gender norms.
What the article says is that personality is affected by gender. Behavior is influenced by more than just personality. These are distinctions in cause and effect, which tend to be blurred together when using political language. Personality (ex ante) and behavior (ex post) distinctions keep getting wrapped around the axle of these attempted redefinitions.
This American Life did an episode on the subject that's worth a listen.
This is the real source of the problem. Not that multiple kind of sources exist (religious, scientific, fiction work, etc.) but that one kind try to pass as something it is not. This is particularly pervasive in fields like sociology where political essays are masquerading as science when it is in fact not. Sooner or later reality will come back, but a lot of time and money is wasted in the process, both by universities and public policies.
The "is vs. ought problem" strikes again, it seems. There are plenty of politically-motivated folks in "soft" social studies who can't quite tell the difference between talking about the world as it is, vs. what we might want it to be like. The more rigorous social sciences are a lot clearer on always striving for a clear distinction between "positive" (i.e. "descriptive") and "normative" talk.
This becomes a circular problem, in that our lack of understanding means that we propose the wrong solutions for attempting to move towards the "ought" often with many undesirable results in direct opposition to the intentions.
Somewhere there's an entire Wikipedia page on people debating whether this is legitimate research or somehow sexism. I thought all of their arguments were pretty poor though. It's kind of a scary situation though that some people are so hostile to even looking into it at all.
I think it's going to be really hard to figure out how much is biological vs. cultural but I suspect society may get to some of those experiments before science at this rate.
Many if not most progressive ideals are predicated on "the blank slate" theory being true. It's not a matter of common/uncommon opinion, it has to be true. It's an axiom of modern progressive theory. What happens when one of your axioms is anything other than rock solid?
This is why the claws come out so fast when you bring up genetics in progressive groups.
> hates any discussion
hates. Hate is ruining us. She hates discussion. Discussion?
"We are not discussing this. My belief is correct. There will be no discussion. My way or the highway."
It's destroying us. Just like feminism. Feminism is not about equality. It's about power, mostly about people who feel entitled to more power, who already have more.
Feminism, in its attempt to give women more power, has eliminated their power... to not work. Now, they are forced to go to work, in a dual income family, just to raise a child. That wasn't necessary 50 years ago. Women have always worked if they wanted to. In their attempt to fight the corporataucracy they have given it more power by doubling the work force, increasing the supply of workers, and thus suppressing wages.
Same reason there's a push to get more women in tech. To make tech workers cheaper -- not empower women. It's a lie.
Women blamed the patriarchy for "eliminating" their right to work. Now they have to. Do you think it's a coincidence that, since the 70's, feminism has increased dramatically, while wages have remained flat? Wages should be twice as high right now and women should still have the choice to stay home with the kids -- or men. It's been like that since human history, all the way back to hunter gatherers, and now suddenly, in a geological blink of an eye, kids are home alone for hours a day. Cared for the rest of it, mostly by people who are paid to, with no familial relationship or incentive to care for them and help them succeed.
Why do we think this is good?
It's not good. It's a real tragedy.
> These numbers dovetail with a number of studies showing a similar level of classification looking at whole brain data. By applying a multivariate analysis of the whole brain, researchers are now able to classify whether a brain is male or female with 77%-93% accuracy (see here, here, here, here, and here). In fact, some recent studies using the most sophisticated techniques have consistently found greater than 90% accuracy rates looking at whole brain data (see here, here, and here). While this level of prediction is definitely not perfect-- and by no means do those findings justify individual stereotyping or discrimination-- that's really high accuracy as far science goes [7].
What's really interesting to me is if it's feasible to conduct a large scale study on transgender people to see what their clustering is like, statistically, with respect to personality. And whether that changes before or after a medical treatment, such as taking hormones.
As every function of the society scales more and more, more things become winner-takes-all games and end up being male dominated. However, it is hardly useful to frame it as some kind of sex warfare since, unlike many feminists claim, this doesn't help most men at all since they never had any shot at the top anyway. It's more like we have three "sex groups": all women, normal men and extreme outlier men. The only way to prevent the extreme outlier men from dominating everything is to prevent winner-takes-all games.
Which is why we should focus on infinite wealth creation games, rather than zero-sum status games.
Throwing away equity while chasing equality is a recipe for ushering in the next dark age.
For example, at least all developed societies have 'chased equality' by providing free, decent-quality public education for people at least until adulthood. Does anyone think dropping that and just leaving poor families to their own devices would actually increase total economic output?
As a teenager, I tried briefly to play basketball. But I was lucky to hit the backboard, much less the basket. Yet I had just as much opportunity to play basketball as Michael Jordan had. But equal opportunity was not nearly enough to create equal outcomes.
Nevertheless, many studies today conclude that different groups do not have equal opportunity or equal "access" to credit, or admission to selective colleges, or to many other things, because some groups are not successful in achieving their goal as often as other groups are.
The very possibility that not all groups have the same skills or other qualifications is seldom even mentioned, much less examined. But when people with low credit scores are not approved for loans as often as people with high credit scores, is that a lack of opportunity or a failure to meet standards?
When twice as many Asian students as white students pass the tough tests to get into New York's three highly selective public high schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech — does that mean that white students are denied equal opportunity?
I don't know about you, but as someone that played a lot of basketball in my youth, I did not have equal opportunity to play basketball the same way Michael Jordan did. Could I go out to a hoop at a park and play around? Sure. But at 5'-8", my opportunity to play at any real competitive level was limited by genetics long before things like drive and skill.
I'm confused why you would think this is a good analogy at all, unless you were trying to link it to intelligence (which is its own can of worms), which doesn't seem to be where you were going. Using competitive sports, which are extremely cutthroat when viewed through the lens of careers and those that make a living doing it, is almost never a good way to equate equality and regular access for the masses.
I would argue trying to enforce equity to chase equality is your actual recipe for ushering in the next Dark Age.
Look at your Scandinavian societies for a model of what happens when you allow men and women the choice to live their lives as see fit without interference from the state, in the form of 'quotas' - you get some very interesting distributions. Something like 90% of all engineers in those societies are male, and something like 90% of women are nurses. Would anyone have the gall - to border on sheer stupidity - to claim that Scandinavian nations are holding back their women and oppressing them? Or is that equity isn't a very good goal... and that when you maximum equality, you'll also get massive differences in occupation because different occupations appeal to different personality traits and men and women do not have the exact same traits in the exact same quantities?
So, fairy tales?
Yes there are externalities.
But value is being added in continually more ethereal ways.
Only ignoring the externalities (including a very real possibility of wiping out billions via climate change).
We simply aren’t all going to die from climate change.
Improvements and growth to what? I'd say only quantity and quality of life counts.
And if the increments of quantity and quality of life are offset by biblical sized climate destruction and the death/life cut short of millions and impact (in worsening life conditions) to billions (which might last for centuries), it might very well not be worth it.
>We simply aren’t all going to die from climate change.
"Not all going to die" is a pretty low bar though...
Grouping Jeff Bezos in with Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan CEO), as both evil because they are both rich, is an extremely simplistic view of the world, but seems common, even on HN.
Bezos has his faults, but he is still responsible in an insane reduction in prices for many items for consumers. Plus he created 400,000 jobs in the pandemic.
Jamie Dimon takes huge financial risks with all sorts of opaque financial tools, an when he fucks up gets bailouts from government.
One creates wealth, the other basically rearranges it into his own pocket.
(and don't get me started about people complaining about Elon Musk being a billionaire, that is just a sad state of jealous resentment that should not be given a voice in society)
For example, if your business is based around an ad model, you are not creating value because that value already existed (people's attention / purchasing power). You are merely redirecting value.
If you take facebook as an example, they are creating value for people by letting them communicate / etc. But they are not capturing a portion of the value they are creating, they are taking value that already existed (the value of your attention) and selling it to someone else.
Or take an investment bank that purely speculates on existing assets. Any time they win, it is not because they created value and captured a fraction of it, it is because someone else lost.
I of course like fb better than the ib in this example, because they are at least creating some value. But I think any business where you're capturing value in a different area from where you're creating it is one that is very likely to end up with lots of conflicts of interesting and exploitation to a certain extent, so best avoided entirely.
It's interesting how frequently this pattern exists where history is silent about class difference and loud about race/gender differences.
That's not a coincidence. The 0.1% would much rather the 99.9% squabble over race and gender than class: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...
At some point, you wanted to ask if he truly thought his salary was worth more than half of the development team's combined salary, and whether he thought that was equitable.
This means that you don't have a set of super humans that extraordinary at everything, but that for any arbitrary scale, the group with higher variance will tend to be over represented at the extremes.
men tend to have more variance in everything due to having only one X chromosome
As every function of the society scales more and more, more things become winner-takes-all games
more things become winner-takes-all games and end up being male dominated
The only way to prevent the extreme outlier men from dominating everything is to prevent winner-takes-all gamesThe other statements I think are false. Men dominate in high IQ areas because more men are high IQ because of the Variability Hypothesis. It has nothing to do with being "winner take all". I'm not really sure what that means.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_restaurant_process
In some other species like - I think - birds, it’s the female who has fewer copies and who also displays more variation in traits.
Regarding the winner-takes-all phenomenon, there’s an interesting workup of the idea in the book The Sovereign Individual. Basically, in every market, there’s usually a winner. Before, there were many local markets. Now, there’s one mammoth global one, or at least a few regional ones. Correspondingly, there are fewer winners, who now win on a global scale.
Then, if we suppose that 99% of people's copies of the gene are A and 1% are a, and that there's totally random distribution, then you can calculate that 98.01% of the population has AA, 1.98% has Aa, and 0.01% has aa. Which means 99.99% will appear "normal" and 0.01% will exhibit the condition.
Now, what happens when the gene is on the X chromosome? Women will have two copies, men have one. What happens when a man has "A" or has "a"?
I think the mechanism for recessive genes is often something like, "Allele A codes for an enzyme/protein, while allele "a" codes for a version of it that does nothing; if your body is producing the normal amount of that enzyme or half of it, it still has the normal result, but if you produce no working copies of that enzyme, then you get the unusual result." Or something like it. So in that case, a man who has "A" will appear normal, and a man with "a" will have the condition.
The result would be that, for an "X-linked" condition, 99.99% of women will appear "normal" (1.98% of which will be "carriers" who are Aa) and 0.01% will have the condition, while 99% of men will be "A" and appear normal and 1% will have "a" and have the condition. Thus, men are enormously more likely to get unusual recessive genetic conditions when the gene is on the X chromosome.
Colorblindness is one such condition, which comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness
So, if we hypothesize that there might be lots of recessive genes that have "some" effect on behavior or personality or whatever we care about... If the genes are on chromosomes other than the X, then men and women will have equal variation. If the genes are on the X chromosome, then men will exhibit more variance, because more of them exhibit the rare condition (while a similar number of women are merely carriers of it). So, if we suppose that there are some important recessive genes on the X chromosome, then we would expect to see higher male variance due to that.
I don't understand much about genetics, so please excuse my ignorance. But I remember making Punnett squares in school. Does your comment imply that some genes don't have Punnett squares and are only affected by one parent's DNA?
Would that mean that some genes are _only_ inherited from our mothers? I remember reading something about how some aspect of our blood is only passed down from our mothers; is it because they always give us an X and our fathers give us a Y? And then genes that are missing from Y always come from the X?
Can some genes only be passed from the Y? Since women don't have a Y chromosome how would that work?
That leaves the "sex" chromosomes, X and Y. Females have two X chromosomes and no Y, males have one X and one Y. (The Y chromosome is very small, has very few genes, and doesn't change much.) A mother passes down one X chromosome, via "crossing over", to a child of either sex. A father passes down either his full X chromosome, making the child a daughter, or his Y chromosome, making a son. (So, yes, it is impossible for a father to pass on X-linked conditions to his sons, while his daughters will always carry a copy. Meanwhile, if a male has an X-linked condition, then his mother must have at least one copy, so she's either a carrier or has the condition herself.)
I think most genes follow a dominant/recessive pattern, where AA and Aa behave the same (by convention the uppercase letter is used for the dominant allele) while "aa" behaves different. There are certainly exceptions to that, though. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(genetics) (in particular "incomplete dominance", "codominance").
When you have one copy of a gene (usually because it's on the X chromosome—"X-linked"), if it is of the dominant/recessive pattern, then I would expect "A" to behave like "AA" and "a" to behave like "aa".
Note that, since crossing over never happens on the Y chromosome, it's passed down fully intact from father to son, and the only changes that can happen to it are mutations—a very slow process, compared to the mixing that occurs on the other chromosomes. Evolution on the Y is thus rather slow. Also, (according to Wiki) the Y is estimated to have only 63 protein-coding genes, while the X has 804. I think the Y mostly just serves to make the child male.
For the sake of conversation, I think it's worth pointing out that we could actually break out yet another group: the extreme outlier men at the low end of the curve.
High male variance means men dominate at both ends of the distribution. This is why "incels" and such are almost exclusively a male group. These people not only lose the genetic lottery, they're then lumped in with the high end outliers demographically and systematically punished for "imbalances" when they're already less likely to win these winner-takes-all games than anyone else.
Edit: or even predominately male?
There are extreme outlier women as well.
But maybe I’m confused as to the point of all this?
It's a bit like investing. Nature takes a more high risk approach with men. High risk can yield high reward, but it also means a higher rate of failure. This is why, when investing, the advice people generally give you is to make conservative/safe investment decisions.
A large percentage of "normal" people, ie close to the median will see those famous people as potential role models. When their internal pattern matching engine detects that 90% of those belong to a class they do not identify with, that can cause a crisis of faith in their own dreams, self-esteem, etc.
At that point, there is no comfort to be found that 90% of the people at the very bottom belong to the same class as those at the top. Not only do they not see those at the bottom, they do not WANT to see them.
So if someone tells a story that explains the difference as a result of oppression, it becomes really tempting to chose that explanation, whether or not it is true.
Oppression may indeed be the main reason for differences in many cases, but even when it is not, it will be attractive to believe it is.
In more egalitarian societies, we consistently see women make "better" choices when it comes to work/life balance etc, where as men are much more likely to unhealthily pursue career / etc doggedly even if it means sacrificing everything else.
It probably only tips the scales a tiny, tiny bit, but when you're talking about 7B people and societies that want to extract maximum efficiency from participants, it shows.
However, statistically men are more likely to be the breadwinners while women are more likely to have the luxury of "better" choices.
Also, romance writing and fiction writing as a whole (self-publish or not) is dominated by women and the hustle they need to do requires a ton of determination and business sense.
Would you say women are pursuing nursing because they want to be the best nurse in the world? That is the kind of behavior I'm saying you see more in men (as an average). I was under the impression that nursing is attractive because you get to work with people, it pays pretty well, you can do it with an associates degree, and you can have a good work/life balance. But yes, of course doing it well requires drive.
Again, the idea here is not "men have drive and women don't", it is "men by a razor thin margin are more inclined to doggedly pursue something to the exclusion of all else, which shows up when you're looking at entire populations and you've geared your society in a way where you elevate people that are the best at one very particular thing". A nurse having more drive than you isn't really the point. It is like when you say "men are stronger than women", it does not mean that any man will be able to best any woman in a contest of physical strength. Of course not.
Nursing requires continued certificate renewal and continued education. It's also competitive to get into any nursing program, so much so that you indeed need a lot of dogged pursuit to get in.
Also, as mentioned in a sibling comment, it used to be that you could find a single authoritative hosting of this lecture/essay, but now it's been ... adopted by the internet. I'd recommend googling and checking sources.
Nature vs Nurture - it's this combined with a lack of scientific rigor that I primarily disregard discussions in this area. At worst discussions become a screaming match of woke.
It used to be that you could find a single authoritative hosting of this lecture/essay, but now it's been ... adopted by the internet. I'd recommend googling and checking sources.
The variability hypthesis is interesting (and old), but I don't follow what you said about X chromosomes and males, or how it pertains to the variability hypothesis.
I'm pretty much ignorant in genetics. Does your assertion follow from this observation: "if X chromosome has a genetic disease gene, it always causes illness in male patients, since men have only one X chromosome and therefore only one copy of each gene"? As in, men exhibit more variability because their genetics are less stable, because they don't have a Barr body?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_chromosome
> As every function of the society scales more and more, more things become winner-takes-all games and end up being male dominated.
That kind of needs some explaining too.
The categories would be 'normal', and 'those that pushed their luck'. The harder you push, the farther you get, unless you blow it. Sometimes it shocks people when their paragons turn out to be reprobates, but it doesn't shock me because to me it's the same category.
After all, if you were to voice that argument in a room full of women instead of a room full of men, it would likely be considered risible. It would also probably make many in the group uncomfortable and resentful.
If you have a mixed gender group, you're still going to instill discomfort and resentment in many of the women present — but voicing opposition will be risky and painful. So many will just quietly disappear — leading over time to a disproportionately male discussion group.
Men are a little more aggressive than women. But the top 1% of the most aggressive people are all men (and not something to be proud of either.)
Women are a little more agreeable than men. But the top 1% most agreeable people are almost exclusively women.
So small differences on average can still mean there are large differences at the extremes.
Worth noting that it's also mostly males who end up at the bottom: homeless, imprisoned, or just plain dead from non-natural causes. The only plausible explanation for that imbalance is uneven distribution of ability.
This statistical outcome only holds for recessive genes on the X chromosome, but it doesn’t make men with the recessive gene “more extreme” than woman with the recessive gene. Just the number of people would be different. So if there is such a gene that makes people excel in their specific field, theoretically we could sequence the x-chromosome of the top women in that field and look for the common recessive gene. They would be more likely to share it if it mattered in that field.
This is interesting, but when you consider the scale by which men across the board receive different societal advantages over women, it feels trivial. The discrepancy should only appear at the top of every game, not with the middle management too.
Because of this I fear it is more likely other societal effects are at play. I try to be mindful of the ones I can directly control.
Looking at it quantitatively, the greater male variability hypothesis mattered less than I expected.
While I agree with this sentiment and appreciate all the research shared, I'm not sure a flood of scientific studies is going to be clearly accessible to the significant segment of the general public that doesn't have the training or time to process this information. The quickest and simplest way to "face reality" is not to drown people with long detailed academic studies but to engage with people based on their experiences and needs. I don't need to read a scientific article about what females want on average in a relationship to know that my female partner might be needing more emotional connection, I can just ask her, or encourage her to share that with me. I also agree with the author that people can make rigid assumptions based on gender that are not factual (such as the assumption that there are no personality differences across the sexes); but do the public and the people making policies at the institutional level need to absorb a series of lengthy academic studies to consider the possibility that their assumptions might be wrong? Do we really have hope that this is how things happen? It is simpler to be conscious of what is fact and what is assumption in your own mind and ensure that you leave room for the uncertainty, and to ask this of people who have power.
New approaches shed light on the magnitude of sex differences in personality - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21792079 - Dec 2019 (328 comments)
Some examples at the top of my head in the US: women were denied access to most universities, not allowed to become doctors, scientists, lawyers. Even in 1988, until the Women's Business Ownership Act was passed, if a woman wanted to get a business bank loan, she couldn’t do it without the signature of a male relative IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. A witness in a federal legislation hearing at the time had to have her 17-year-old son cosign for a loan since she didn’t have a living husband, father or brother. Again, in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The supposed free-market capitalist center of the world. Apparently women couldn't be trusted with loans, because what if their "woman brains" did something stupid with the money? This sounds like Saudia Arabian levels of male guardianship bullshit. Except it's the United States. In modern times. It wasn't a long time ago. 1988 is a time when many millenials were already alive.
So even though I'm pretty sure there are biological differences between male and female brains, I am even more sure that even the slightest hint of it will be used to screw people over. Why? Because it has happened over and over again to justify exerting control over people. Therefore, I am not surprised some people just refuse to acknowledge it and I can't really blame them. Besides, these differences are on average and people screw people over for "well X group on average is like ____" reasoning all the time. So I find this research mildly interesting from the scientific perspective, and a huge liability from the societal perspective.
Oppression of women has nothing to do with scientific endeavor to study differences in gender. Science has no agenda besides understanding nature. Women's oppression has been going on for many centuries in every single culture independently before we even had scientific literature in this area.
There's a whole class of facts called "hate facts", which are putative facts you would do well to doubt, and even if they were true pretend they are false anyway, because of the ammo they would give to people who want to oppress certain groups if they were true or widely accepted as true. One particularly volatile example is the supposed race-IQ correlations. Even if they were true we would be socially obligated to deny them, because letting that sort of thing become public knowledge would encourage the wrong sorts of people and groups. I suspect the same is true of sex differences in cognition, personality, or interest because it would enable misogynists to enact anti-woman policies in the name of "well, women just aren't interested in/don't have the personality required for that anyway".
My crazy sexist Uncle doesn’t conduct a deep thorough review of scientific literature before spewing his deep contempt for women.
If I were to guess the number of people reading gender studies to bolster their biases, it would be in vanishingly small.
Researcher publishes: "Survey finds that undergrad males with heterochromia are 12% less likely to be leaders of student orgs than their homochromia male peers."
Science communicator simplifies: "Having the same color eyes may make you more of a leader."
News agency runs clickbait: "Eyeing the throne? Here are 5 kinds of people Science says could tank your company."
Online forums spew anecdata: "I knew this one guy with different eyes who ran his org into the ground and also he was a predator. No way, me too!"
The fringe group Securing our Homochromia Future starts getting mentioned by not-so-fringe people: "I don't agree with their methods, but they aren't entirely wrong about heterochromia either; did you read that study? No me neither, but the gist was…"
(BTW if it wasn't already super clear I'm 100% making up these statements about heterochromia.)
Otherwise, you will need to cease conducting science all together. Stop all nutrition studies because some wacko nutritionist is going to spin it off as a magic snake oil cure.
Blaming scientists and impeding scientific exploration is preposterous and dangerous.
Science is science. If you can't deal with the facts that's your problem.
If the facts are difficult, we need to work hard to come up with good solutions to hard problems. Putting your head in the sand and denying the facts will probably come back to bite you later very hard.
Are you going to accept that "science is science" and the people in your group are worse on average, so you as an individual shouldn't get to start a business? If you object are you just someone who "can't deal with the facts", and "putting your head in the sand" and denying the facts that the bank is probably right, someone from your background is going to fail anyway? Or will you just say, "Okay, science is science. The wiser have spoken, I will now give up on my dreams."
2. If there isn't one, you can start a lender that does that, since there is probably a business opportunity if noone is doing it.
3. You can convince friends and family that you are more reliable than your demographic and get angel investments from them.
4. You can convince VCs that you are more reliable than your demographic and get investment
5. You can try and aim for quick profitability and bootstrap your business.
6. You can complain about your victimhood and do nothing.
I don't accept having to jump through additional hoops or having to pay more money because of demographic factors. And thankfully there are laws today that prevent banks from refusing to loan people money because they are black, female, etc.
Turning a blind eye to science isn’t solving the problem. It’s oppression.
> we need to work hard to come up with good solutions to hard problems.
But until such solutions are forthcoming, putting the research out there runs the risk of strengthening or encouraging bigots. Maybe what we need is a policy of "responsible disclosure" wherein research results aren't widely disclosed until social solutions are already in place. But even that is fraught with difficulty and risk. Better to just not touch the radioactive topics of racial and gender differences that may lead to discrimination.
This is human height distribution by sex: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/distribution-1-77... One of the most dramatic sexual divergences in humans. With personality it seems to follow that basic pattern. Even with the men usually having a wider variation, as noted elsewhere in this thread.
Except with psych indexes and metrics, it's usually even more overlapped. So overlapped it's often hard to tell if it's a statistical illusion! In many cases there seems to be no difference at all. So, really it's more like such research points more to that we're close to indistinguishable. Sex alone would not give you a great deal of information about someone's mind or personality or mental abilities.
This is the very opposite of a basis to argue for unequal treatment for half of the population. Will some still try to justify an absurd and unjustifiable thing on the basis of such data? Probably. But they could just invent complete pseudoscience too. Misuse by morally deranged actors has never been a too compelling reason to not do social research, surely?
My position is: Yes, conduct the research, but be VERY aware and VERY active in mitigating its misuse.
This is yet another reminder that my generational peers (I'm 32) seem immature with gender issues. Our collective immaturity is a hindrance in discovering truths related to these generationally sensitive issues, just as the Boomer's anti-drug dogma stunted cannabinoid research by decades.
I think the sensitivity to scientific conclusions that sound like they're in the same ballpark is understandable, even if, yes, it shouldn't lead to people just ignoring data that doesn't agree with their beliefs.
I think it's far more common to find people with positions closer to the scientific consensus who get falsely maligned as icky social conservative barbarians than it is to actually find these alleged social conservative barbarians in the wild. See, for example, the entire James Damore fiasco (which happened in spite of Damore's repeated insistence that he was talking about averages and trends etc.)
EDIT: Not to mention several examples in this very thread.
Averages do not apply to the entire population unless the variance is literally zero. You could stamp that on a mallet and beat people with it for hours, and yet if you state an average people will continue to apply it to the entire population. "Women are on average more peripheral" instantly becomes "women are more peripheral period" and by extension "men are not peripheral period."
Even very intelligent and educated people do this.
Our collective insanity about statistics manifests in lots of other context too, like people being afraid of terrorists and mass shooters while they'll still ride around in cars or being phobic of vaccines while continuing to eat horrible artery-clogging fried food.
If humanity were to fail as a species and someone in the afterlife asked me why, the fact that we are seemingly incapable of understanding statistics is something I'd cite as a major contributing factor.
A second problem with open discussions of differences is that human beings seem hungry for reasons to denigrate other human beings. Any difference becomes a reason for some group of people to say they are "better" than another group of people.
Last but not least is the fact that while just about everyone believes there are differences across virtually every axis, people are skeptical about the details. This skepticism isn't unreasonable. Psychometrics is an area of science with one of the worst replication records. Forgive me for becoming skeptical when really strong and specific claims from a science with a terrible replication record are used to try to push arguments that denigrate large groups of people or apologize for injustices against them.
What you'll have are people who argue that if people who aren't as intelligent, or as strong, or as funny just had access to the same set of circumstances as Intelligent Person X, Strong Person Y, and Funny Person Z, the "underperforming" - for lack of a better adjective - people would be just as good.
That's simply not true and we know enough about the brain, about DNA and heritability, and about environment to know it's not true.
But there's a section of people who don't want to admit that, because it'll shatter their worldview completely and they'll have to re-evaluate a lot of things... but really what it'll do is force them to think for themselves instead of just being told how they need to feel, and that's from where the real discomfort comes, because when you're forced to think for yourself - truly think for yourself, not cite some study... not cite some expert, but actually think and reason with only your own capabilities, you may find that 1) it's hard and 2) you come to some thoughts that clash with your feelings.
No, that's not really what most of them are arguing. What most of them are arguing is that we should try to minimize the detrimental effect of the environment and maximize access to enrichment to maximize our "return" on whatever heritable potential we have.
We know phenotype is always a mix of heritable traits and environment. Development is guided by genetics but it is an embodied process. If the environment is shitty, which it is for a great many people, then that's an obvious place to look if said group is under-performing. If a group of people are being constantly told they're inferior or treated worse than others, that's another obvious place to look... especially since we have research on "social self-limitation" that demonstrates that humans will to some extent perform to expectation whether the expectation is high or low.
Improving the environment is the low-hanging fruit. Only then does it make sense to look at heritable traits. By then we might have a better understanding of our own genetics and more precise tools than CRISPR-CAS9.
The signal that population averages tell you about any one person is so little as to be almost meaningless, that it should be immediately overwhelmed by the signal you get from actually knowing and interacting with that person. And yet people still act as though they can learn something meaningful from population averages about their own friends, colleagues, and even spouses.
"There are fewer women in advanced math... could that be related to gender differences in brain structure and cognition?"
The answer is: yes it theoretically could, but it could also be due to the fact that until very recently (like 1-2 generations or less depending on where you are) women were strongly discouraged from pursuing such professions and in some cases were actually not allowed to study at the same institutions or in the same circles as men.
That seems to me to be a more likely explanation. Most institutions have since liberalized their rules and have even engaged in recruitment efforts to bring more women into the field, but even with such changes and efforts it takes a long time for human societies to change. Large-scale human group behaviors, customs, and preferences are really sticky and changing them usually takes generations in the best case... unless there's some extreme forcing function like a war, pandemic, powerful state edict, depression, etc. There hasn't been an extreme forcing function pushing more women into advanced math.
If women continued to be vastly under-represented at the top of mathematics after 100 more years of relative openness and cultural liberalism, I'd start to entertain the possibility that it's a result of gender differences in brain function.
Very true!
As an illustration:
The "Average American"[0] is a 52-year old, white, woman with a Bachelor's degree, who works in "education and health services" and earns about $900/wk (2018 data). She is married, lives in a city with her spouse and together they own a (mortgaged) residence. She lives near Dallas TX and has a 26 minute commute. She is an evangelical Baptist, and considers herself politically independent, but tends to vote Democratic in presidential elections.
...Of course, this describes very few actual humans.
[0] By one method of calculation, at least. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/13/t...
Females get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed after birth.
Prior to modern medicine there was no reliable birth control. Maternal mortality was high, and there was no good substitute for breast milk.
Because of that, a female could expect to spend up to 2 years at a time, where she was primarily responsible for supplying 100% of the nutritional needs of another human being, and at a fairly large disadvantage in finding food or avoiding being eaten.
Compared to other primates, human babies are pretty helpless for a long time.
It would be pretty surprising if tens of thousands of years of this did not produce certain personality differences and brain differences, especially as success at producing new members of the species drives evolution.
Only in the last 50 years have we had fairly reliable ways for a woman to be able to effectively control when she gets pregnant, safely give birth, and have a way to either safely store breast milk or else have acceptable nutritional substitutes (formula).