5 ms·

The article mirrors my beliefs quite well; but on a meta level, I can't believe we are still having this conversation. Why can we describe sub-atomic particles,

by manmal 10y ago

The article mirrors my beliefs quite well; but on a meta level, I can't believe we are still having this conversation. Why can we describe sub-atomic particles, but not settle this cultural divide with conclusions based on data that we have abundantly gathered? Is it because results are forged? Or are metrics (e.g. IQ Tests) unstable (not reproducible)? Are we pulling conclusions out of thin air? All these gender studies should be put under review.

darfs 10y ago
I think the discussion will occur for ever, if we continue searching for arguments for "why are these men so {dumb,angry,bad}?/ Why are these womans so {plastic, Feminine,dumb}". I think we should stop thinking in that categories and Start thinking:"this One (Wo)men is so dumb!". Categories for humans(behavior) where never a good idea. EDIT: It may be easy, but easy isn't good anytime. Just take a look at programming. Writing the good old "jump" was easy. Was it a nice idea?
- berntb 10y ago
  You want to stop assigning absolute moral/mental characteristics to people because of their skin color, facial features or other physical specifics? You modern people with your statistics and correlations, that don't remember the good old days before 1861. :-)
- laichzeit0 10y ago
  Are you saying that testosterone and estrogen levels play no part whatsoever in a persons behavior? Because one could argue that there are biological differences between men and woman which might result in behaviors that are to some degree "different". Perhaps it even justifies certain generalizations.
  - Radim 10y ago
    There's no question about it! If you take OPs argument of "only consider the individual, never groups of people" one step further, there is no such thing as "one woman" either. She's a collection of trillions of cells. And each cell... trillions of jiggling atoms! The horror. All life evolved to operate by perceiving the world through efficient abstractions. Photons as shapes, chemicals as smells, cells as individuals, individuals as species, people as societies, whatever. These are all leaky and ultimately unfair generalizations! But the "exact" alternatives are typically outcompeted by more efficient approximations. It's just too tedious to consider everything in its uniqueness. Internalizing the right abstractions -- concrete enough to be useful but not too raw to be overwhelming -- is a fine energy-balancing act. There's no reason why the abstraction ladder should suddenly stop at the level of "trillions of cells". That would be very suspicious indeed. To suggest that the (evolved, leaky) abstractions along the line of sex are suddenly not useful IN ANY WAY is... preposterous.
    - darfs 10y ago
      Taking that joke, look at yourself. Do you take yourself as unique or a general version of a men/woman, that follows only the one path that everyone else takes and you feel in every situation as every other human, and you dont even try to be different in your behavior, and your neurons are trained like everyone else? Ff you look at my point, I want to stop the generalization about behaviors in sexes context. Everyone can be dumb. That doesn't need an abstraction to the sexes. As you can obviously see, that doesn't say that you have to stop the abstraction at cells. :P And: I didn't call "ANY WAY". I called the context BEHAVIOR.(EDIT: as you pointed out yourself :-))
- lmm 10y ago
  There are over seven billion people on this planet. Knowing all of them as humans is simply impossible. To function in the modern world we have to be willing to categorize, to make snap judgements, to, putting it bluntly, be prejudiced. I mean you could pick who you talk to at a conference (say) at random, and there's certainly value in talking to a spread of people. But ultimately there are people you'll gain more or less from talking to, because your interests and theirs align or don't. So you'll look at superficial characteristics like what they're wearing, because that's all the information you have to go on, and you'll try to make the best guess you can about who would be best to talk to. And it's inevitable that you'll sometimes get it wrong. But there is no alternative; making judgements based on incomplete information is just life, all we can do is try and make those judgements as well and as fairly as possible.
orblivion 10y ago
Imagine if the results were that men were inherently smarter than women. Could you conceive of a way that this would go over well? Nobody (men or women) want to deal with that. It's understandable that it's controversial.
- placebo 10y ago
  One of the problems is that we think there's only one kind of "smart", and even if we manage to see past this myopic assumption we tend to accept the arrogant assumption that only this type of "smart" is really worthy of pursuing and rewarding.
  - Pyxl101 10y ago
    Indeed - a lot of research into this topic has been focused on breaking down and identifying many different types of competence and intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#... However, as I pointed out in my other comment, specific measures do show considerable, consistent differences in performance between males and females. For example, males and females have had significantly different average SAT math scores since the 70s: http://www.aei.org/publication/2015-sat-test-results-confirm-pattern-thats-persisted-for-40-years-high-school-boys-are-better-at-math-than-girls/ http://www.aei.org/publication/2015-sat-test-results-confirm... This is only one measurement, however, and there are many others, with one sex or the other performing better in different areas. > Imagine if the results were that men were inherently smarter than women. Could you conceive of a way that this would go over well? Nobody (men or women) want to deal with that. People are individuals. As long as we treat people as individuals and evaluate them based on their merit, and their own behavior and performance, and make opportunities equally available to everyone, it doesn't need to be a problem.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
facepalm 10y ago
It's because feminism is a self-serving ideology. They are not trying to clarify or resolve anything, they are trying to turn more people into believers of the ideology. And it won't change, because feminism itself is an expression of female privilege. Stories about rape of women will always have more pull than stories about men being killed. Feminism has found these psychological loopholes (like more empathy for/willingness to help women) and is exploiting them as much as they can. A man who is being killed was simply too weak and has rightfully been weeded out of the gene pool. Women do always have to be protected and are always victims. That is how society secretly feels. The rest is just confirmation bias.
- placebo 10y ago
  I take feminism to be a healthy reaction to a historical warped perception of women that created unjust conditions and treatment. As with every ideology, it holds the unfortunate risk of some losing the big picture and eventually taking the means to be the end. This does not mean that the end is not a worthy cause.
  - facepalm 10y ago
    Well you believe the premise of the ideology, so you are a part of it. Unsurprising that you think it is useful, that is what it claims.
    - Thiez 10y ago
      If the premise is that there was a > historical warped perception of women that created unjust conditions and treatment then I'd like to see you argue against that premise. Let's take a very specific instance: voting. Historically there have been many countries where men were allowed to vote before women were allowed to vote. Do you think men being allowed to vote, while women are not, is: a) A clever lie in our history books, where men were allowed to vote, women were also allowed to vote b) Not unjust
      - facepalm 10y ago
semicolon_storm 10y ago
We don't pursue those questions because we don't really want the answers to them.
spiritofenter 10y ago
You may be underestimating how difficult it is to make good and correct strides in social science, compared to hard sciences. To a large extent progress in sciences like sub-atomic physics depends on ability to (1) simplify the problem down to mathematical laws, (2) conduct repeatable, randomized controlled experiments to rule out hypotheses about them. Social sciences deal with phenomena that are extraordinarily complex, so hypotheses usually have to be qualitative rather than mathematical, and devising good experiments is very hard. Falsification is hard. Most hypotheses can be "generally true" yet have specific counterexamples in some times and places. As for empirical data, you can use data to tell a million plausible stories, and many of those probably have some nugget of truth. But without randomized trials, how do you falsify any of these stories? It's hard.
- Ended 10y ago
  I totally agree. In fact the systems studied by social sciences are so complex that the notion of an experiment in the classical sense (hypothesis, observations, repeatability, etc) can break down completely. This is partly why the concept of qualitative research exists [1]. Some physical scientists look down on such research methods; this is a category mistake on their part. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research (not a great article IMO but I lack the experience to give a better reference)
beefhash 10y ago
Assume the result yields that one gender is effectively superior in all relevant areas. This could easily lead to a basis for genocide, people tossing their children with an unwanted gender out right after birth/aborting them. That seems like a pretty awful prospect to me. Furthermore, discrimination would then just be waiting to happen at an even greater extent, with the stakes not just being yet another minority, but almost half of an entire population. Those are huge stakes, and few want to tread that path.
Sacho 10y ago
The experiments social sciences would need to conduct in order to achieve the same level of data quality and volume as physicists are completely unethical. It's not surprising that they are unable to progress at the same pace. This problem amplifies itself, as the inability to acquire good data leads to a politicization of the science. Without the ability to perform, replicate or refute experiments, the scientists focus on convincing their peers through prose and essays.
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  There's still quite a lot of data out there. For example, SAT tests since the 70s show gender differences in mathematical ability as measured by that test: > Continuing an uninterrupted trend that dates back to at least 1972, high school boys outperformed girls on the 2015 SAT math test with an average score of 527 points compared to the average score of 496 for females, see chart above. The statistically significant 31-point male advantage this year on the SAT math test is the same as the 31-point difference last year, and just slightly below the 33.9 point difference over the last two decades favoring boys. > (...T)here were 165.3 boys with SAT math scores between 700-800 points for every 100 girls with scores in that range. For the next highest 100-point range between 600-700 points for the 2015 SAT math test, there were about 121 boys with scores in that range for every 100 high school girls (55% boys vs. 45% girls). There's quite a lot of data out there. I suspect there's not a lot of research into the topic because it's so politically charged. http://www.aei.org/publication/2015-sat-test-results-confirm-pattern-thats-persisted-for-40-years-high-school-boys-are-better-at-math-than-girls/ http://www.aei.org/publication/2015-sat-test-results-confirm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...
  - peeky 10y ago
    Nobody's ignoring this data, it actually poses a lot of interesting questions like why is that difference only present in about half of OECD countries, why does the difference only occur after a certain age (that varies per country), why do boys overpopulate both ends of the bell curve, how much is biology vs society, etc. The data isn't politically charged, but the interpretation can be.
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
I've got, I've got it, I've got it! Here's the freaking problem, from tfa: But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as __"an abstract system that competes against rival systems"__ (emphasis mine). Why! Why is everything a bloody competition. This Baumeister character can't even escape this construct. The problem is that we are told that live evolved by natural selection and survival of the fittest by out competing other rivals in it's niche. Or at least that's how the popular story goes. And we've internalised this as a structure and caused it to permeate every bloody thing we do. Why is everything a competition? Until we develop and internalise a world-view that sees that life thrives where it cooperates we will continue to decimate everything on this planet in an effort to out-compete our rivals. We will turn everything into a competition between everyone, the Left & Right sides of politics, male against female, all competing for limited resources.

by manmal 10y ago

darfs 10y ago

I think the discussion will occur for ever, if we continue searching for arguments for "why are these men so {dumb,angry,bad}?/ Why are these womans so {plastic, Feminine,dumb}". I think we should stop thinking in that categories and Start thinking:"this One (Wo)men is so dumb!". Categories for humans(behavior) where never a good idea. EDIT: It may be easy, but easy isn't good anytime. Just take a look at programming. Writing the good old "jump" was easy. Was it a nice idea?

berntb 10y ago
You want to stop assigning absolute moral/mental characteristics to people because of their skin color, facial features or other physical specifics? You modern people with your statistics and correlations, that don't remember the good old days before 1861. :-)
laichzeit0 10y ago
Are you saying that testosterone and estrogen levels play no part whatsoever in a persons behavior? Because one could argue that there are biological differences between men and woman which might result in behaviors that are to some degree "different". Perhaps it even justifies certain generalizations.
- Radim 10y ago
  There's no question about it! If you take OPs argument of "only consider the individual, never groups of people" one step further, there is no such thing as "one woman" either. She's a collection of trillions of cells. And each cell... trillions of jiggling atoms! The horror. All life evolved to operate by perceiving the world through efficient abstractions. Photons as shapes, chemicals as smells, cells as individuals, individuals as species, people as societies, whatever. These are all leaky and ultimately unfair generalizations! But the "exact" alternatives are typically outcompeted by more efficient approximations. It's just too tedious to consider everything in its uniqueness. Internalizing the right abstractions -- concrete enough to be useful but not too raw to be overwhelming -- is a fine energy-balancing act. There's no reason why the abstraction ladder should suddenly stop at the level of "trillions of cells". That would be very suspicious indeed. To suggest that the (evolved, leaky) abstractions along the line of sex are suddenly not useful IN ANY WAY is... preposterous.
  - darfs 10y ago
    Taking that joke, look at yourself. Do you take yourself as unique or a general version of a men/woman, that follows only the one path that everyone else takes and you feel in every situation as every other human, and you dont even try to be different in your behavior, and your neurons are trained like everyone else? Ff you look at my point, I want to stop the generalization about behaviors in sexes context. Everyone can be dumb. That doesn't need an abstraction to the sexes. As you can obviously see, that doesn't say that you have to stop the abstraction at cells. :P And: I didn't call "ANY WAY". I called the context BEHAVIOR.(EDIT: as you pointed out yourself :-))
lmm 10y ago
There are over seven billion people on this planet. Knowing all of them as humans is simply impossible. To function in the modern world we have to be willing to categorize, to make snap judgements, to, putting it bluntly, be prejudiced. I mean you could pick who you talk to at a conference (say) at random, and there's certainly value in talking to a spread of people. But ultimately there are people you'll gain more or less from talking to, because your interests and theirs align or don't. So you'll look at superficial characteristics like what they're wearing, because that's all the information you have to go on, and you'll try to make the best guess you can about who would be best to talk to. And it's inevitable that you'll sometimes get it wrong. But there is no alternative; making judgements based on incomplete information is just life, all we can do is try and make those judgements as well and as fairly as possible.

orblivion 10y ago

Imagine if the results were that men were inherently smarter than women. Could you conceive of a way that this would go over well? Nobody (men or women) want to deal with that. It's understandable that it's controversial.

placebo 10y ago
One of the problems is that we think there's only one kind of "smart", and even if we manage to see past this myopic assumption we tend to accept the arrogant assumption that only this type of "smart" is really worthy of pursuing and rewarding.
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  Indeed - a lot of research into this topic has been focused on breaking down and identifying many different types of competence and intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#... However, as I pointed out in my other comment, specific measures do show considerable, consistent differences in performance between males and females. For example, males and females have had significantly different average SAT math scores since the 70s: http://www.aei.org/publication/2015-sat-test-results-confirm-pattern-thats-persisted-for-40-years-high-school-boys-are-better-at-math-than-girls/ http://www.aei.org/publication/2015-sat-test-results-confirm... This is only one measurement, however, and there are many others, with one sex or the other performing better in different areas. > Imagine if the results were that men were inherently smarter than women. Could you conceive of a way that this would go over well? Nobody (men or women) want to deal with that. People are individuals. As long as we treat people as individuals and evaluate them based on their merit, and their own behavior and performance, and make opportunities equally available to everyone, it doesn't need to be a problem.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

facepalm 10y ago

It's because feminism is a self-serving ideology. They are not trying to clarify or resolve anything, they are trying to turn more people into believers of the ideology. And it won't change, because feminism itself is an expression of female privilege. Stories about rape of women will always have more pull than stories about men being killed. Feminism has found these psychological loopholes (like more empathy for/willingness to help women) and is exploiting them as much as they can. A man who is being killed was simply too weak and has rightfully been weeded out of the gene pool. Women do always have to be protected and are always victims. That is how society secretly feels. The rest is just confirmation bias.

placebo 10y ago
I take feminism to be a healthy reaction to a historical warped perception of women that created unjust conditions and treatment. As with every ideology, it holds the unfortunate risk of some losing the big picture and eventually taking the means to be the end. This does not mean that the end is not a worthy cause.
- facepalm 10y ago
  Well you believe the premise of the ideology, so you are a part of it. Unsurprising that you think it is useful, that is what it claims.
  - Thiez 10y ago
    If the premise is that there was a > historical warped perception of women that created unjust conditions and treatment then I'd like to see you argue against that premise. Let's take a very specific instance: voting. Historically there have been many countries where men were allowed to vote before women were allowed to vote. Do you think men being allowed to vote, while women are not, is: a) A clever lie in our history books, where men were allowed to vote, women were also allowed to vote b) Not unjust
    - facepalm 10y ago

semicolon_storm 10y ago

We don't pursue those questions because we don't really want the answers to them.

spiritofenter 10y ago

You may be underestimating how difficult it is to make good and correct strides in social science, compared to hard sciences. To a large extent progress in sciences like sub-atomic physics depends on ability to (1) simplify the problem down to mathematical laws, (2) conduct repeatable, randomized controlled experiments to rule out hypotheses about them. Social sciences deal with phenomena that are extraordinarily complex, so hypotheses usually have to be qualitative rather than mathematical, and devising good experiments is very hard. Falsification is hard. Most hypotheses can be "generally true" yet have specific counterexamples in some times and places. As for empirical data, you can use data to tell a million plausible stories, and many of those probably have some nugget of truth. But without randomized trials, how do you falsify any of these stories? It's hard.

Ended 10y ago
I totally agree. In fact the systems studied by social sciences are so complex that the notion of an experiment in the classical sense (hypothesis, observations, repeatability, etc) can break down completely. This is partly why the concept of qualitative research exists [1]. Some physical scientists look down on such research methods; this is a category mistake on their part. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research (not a great article IMO but I lack the experience to give a better reference)

beefhash 10y ago

Assume the result yields that one gender is effectively superior in all relevant areas. This could easily lead to a basis for genocide, people tossing their children with an unwanted gender out right after birth/aborting them. That seems like a pretty awful prospect to me. Furthermore, discrimination would then just be waiting to happen at an even greater extent, with the stakes not just being yet another minority, but almost half of an entire population. Those are huge stakes, and few want to tread that path.

Sacho 10y ago

The experiments social sciences would need to conduct in order to achieve the same level of data quality and volume as physicists are completely unethical. It's not surprising that they are unable to progress at the same pace. This problem amplifies itself, as the inability to acquire good data leads to a politicization of the science. Without the ability to perform, replicate or refute experiments, the scientists focus on convincing their peers through prose and essays.

Pyxl101 10y ago
There's still quite a lot of data out there. For example, SAT tests since the 70s show gender differences in mathematical ability as measured by that test: > Continuing an uninterrupted trend that dates back to at least 1972, high school boys outperformed girls on the 2015 SAT math test with an average score of 527 points compared to the average score of 496 for females, see chart above. The statistically significant 31-point male advantage this year on the SAT math test is the same as the 31-point difference last year, and just slightly below the 33.9 point difference over the last two decades favoring boys. > (...T)here were 165.3 boys with SAT math scores between 700-800 points for every 100 girls with scores in that range. For the next highest 100-point range between 600-700 points for the 2015 SAT math test, there were about 121 boys with scores in that range for every 100 high school girls (55% boys vs. 45% girls). There's quite a lot of data out there. I suspect there's not a lot of research into the topic because it's so politically charged. http://www.aei.org/publication/2015-sat-test-results-confirm-pattern-thats-persisted-for-40-years-high-school-boys-are-better-at-math-than-girls/ http://www.aei.org/publication/2015-sat-test-results-confirm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...
- peeky 10y ago
  Nobody's ignoring this data, it actually poses a lot of interesting questions like why is that difference only present in about half of OECD countries, why does the difference only occur after a certain age (that varies per country), why do boys overpopulate both ends of the bell curve, how much is biology vs society, etc. The data isn't politically charged, but the interpretation can be.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

I've got, I've got it, I've got it! Here's the freaking problem, from tfa: But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as __"an abstract system that competes against rival systems"__ (emphasis mine). Why! Why is everything a bloody competition. This Baumeister character can't even escape this construct. The problem is that we are told that live evolved by natural selection and survival of the fittest by out competing other rivals in it's niche. Or at least that's how the popular story goes. And we've internalised this as a structure and caused it to permeate every bloody thing we do. Why is everything a competition? Until we develop and internalise a world-view that sees that life thrives where it cooperates we will continue to decimate everything on this planet in an effort to out-compete our rivals. We will turn everything into a competition between everyone, the Left & Right sides of politics, male against female, all competing for limited resources.