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We know that boys and girls are conditioned by society to be more interested in certain fields than others. It's why my cousin asked me to get a robot for her s

We know that boys and girls are conditioned by society to be more interested in certain fields than others. It's why my cousin asked me to get a robot for her son's birthday as opposed to a dress for her daughter. Do we want our biases embedded in AI? Or do we want a model that hopefully can eliminate some of the subjectivity that humans add (which in some cases we absolutely need)?

ultrablack 7y ago
What do you mean “conditioned”? I see no evidence of this. Kids here i scandinavia are free to do or pursuit whatever they want. And from a very early age, before they are able to talk, boys like things, girls likes people.. And later, they choose accordingly.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  A simple example is toy stores usually having "boy toys" and "girl toys" areas, with tech-related items included in the former more than the latter.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Is that boy toys, or tech related? Girl toys area or doll area. Hard to tell the difference. Yes the dolls will have more princesses, but is that demand or conditioning?
    - loopz 7y ago
      According to the Vedas, mind gets conditioned simply by living life. It is so ingrained, we don't even notice it, but we can't live a life without it either. It's not a negative, but an awareness thing.
- rvense 7y ago
  I am also in Scandinavia, have small kids and am around a lot of parents, and I see plenty of evidence for this. I am also around a lot of nerds, and I also see plenty of reasons why young women opt out of nerdy circles.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Don’t dance around your point, make it. What are the reasons?
- CJefferson 7y ago
  Here is a simple example. Everyone, including most children, agree pink is a girl colour. There are times and places in history where everyone, including children, agreed pink was a boy colour. Society shapes children even before they can speak.
waterhouse 7y ago
From what I've read[1], there are studies indicating that higher levels of androgens in the womb are correlated (within each sex) with higher levels of male-typical behavior, in humans and in other primates. They have also directly established causality in other primates by increasing or decreasing the androgens and observing the result. I don't think they've gone as far as tweaking androgens in human fetuses to see what happens—I suspect it would be hard to get the experiment approved—but I know what I expect the result to be. The next step is establishing just how much of the male-female difference is explained by biology. I haven't studied that part of it. But the "null hypothesis", that all gender differences in behavior are due solely to social conditioning, is wrong. [1] Consult https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778233/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778233/ and the studies it cites in the second paragraph.
- gbrown 7y ago
  > The next step is establishing just how much of the male-female difference is explained by biology. I haven't studied that part of it. But the "null hypothesis", that all gender differences in behavior are due solely to social conditioning, is wrong. This is interesting and important science, and you're right that clearly there are some gender differences... BUT 1. Given the history of (pseudo)science in justifying and worsening disparities between groups, incredible caution is needed - especially when making policy. 2. The existence of biological phenomena in no way discounts the strong social cues and pressures which shape young humans. 3. The existence of detectable, biologically originating average differences between genders in no way justifies the use of algorithms in such a way that individuals are punished for their group membership. On HN, these threads always seem to go straight to "BUT THERE REALLY ARE DIFFERENCES!!", which in my mind is completely missing the point.
  - waterhouse 7y ago
    The flip side is going straight from "The fraction of women in X group is much less than 50%" to "Therefore someone is discriminating, creating a hostile environment, socially conditioning people, and/or otherwise behaving badly—and if everyone involved appears to be behaving well, then it must be due to either someone unconsciously doing these things, or someone hiding their bad behavior, which we will proceed to expose by calling out a scapegoat, applying the worst interpretation to all the ambiguous things they do, and attempting to ruin their careers." I would say that incredible caution is needed on that side too. In terms of algorithms: What do you want your algorithm to produce? Gender parity? A distribution that matches what would be reality if biology were an influence but social conditioning weren't? Maybe what would be reality if biology were an influence, and people were encouraged to follow their passion, whatever it is, but scrupulously avoided recommending any particular activities to particular children until after learning what their passion was? ... Or do you want it to analyze reality as it is and produce decisions that are useful in this reality? Ideally, the algorithm would be fed enough data about the people it's judging that it could make a properly fair decision. If all the algorithm gets is "Male, 22, minored in CS; female, 22, minored in CS", then the only thing it has to go on is the sex difference, which is probably a significant one, and then we can argue about what it should do. However, if it gets "Female, 22, minored in CS, majored in math and was top of her class, has spent 400 hours on personal programming projects / Project Euler / Topcoder / chatting about data structures with her friends, has been using the Unix command line on a regular basis since age 12", that looks like a much stronger candidate—and, importantly for this discussion, a male with those same qualifications would probably be an equally good candidate. I think that, if you have the same level of intelligence (perhaps specifically the math/symbol-manipulation areas), the same level of enthusiasm, and spend the same number of hours on the same activities, then you should get roughly the same results no matter what your sex is; sex is only useful to guess at the enthusiasm and hours spent when those variables are missing from the inputs. That's the solution as far as I'm concerned: More input data so the algorithm can be fair. It'll consider all the people who've spent 1000 hours studying and practicing programming and achieved the same level, and it'll judge them the same, and that is fair, even if it happens that 80% of those people are men. Unfair would be if the algorithm only gets the superficial data and has to guess, based on group averages, on everything important, and penalizes the truly capable women because it's unable to distinguish them from the average woman.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> conditioned by society The only conditioning I've ever seen any real evidence of is _against_ what would be called "social norms": teachers, parents and media work overtime to try to get girls interested in math, science, and programming and if anything actively _discourage_ boys from it.
- delecti 7y ago
  If the "quiet part" beneath that "loud part" is that girls are being encouraged and boys discouraged because STEM is "boy stuff" and girls need to be pushed into it, kids will pick up on that. And it only takes a tiny bit of a "boy's club" atmosphere before things start getting hostile to the women present, and that quickly snowballs.
bcrosby95 7y ago
Yeah, and it's not necessarily an overt thing. As an example, we were very gender indifferent with our first daughter. She loved "boy" and "girl" toys. And colors. She loved snakes, reptiles, bugs, spiders, etc. She loved to get dirty and roughhouse, which we were fine with. She was mostly the opposite of the girls our local parent friends were raising, whom weren't even allowed to play in the dirt. For her 4th birthday, we had a reptile guy show up. She was the only girl child that would touch any of them, let alone let snakes slither around on her. She loved it. It's not like we shut her off from girl stuff - her only cousin was an older girl that liked "girl stuff", and our kid looked up to her. We just always presented them as equal options for her. Once she got into preschool things started changing. After a year, now there are boy toys and girl toys. Colors are gendered. Bugs and reptiles are icky. Dirt is yucky. And so on. I'm not going to make a claim that any girl I've never met has or hasn't been affected by society to like "girl" things. But it would take an act of god to convince me our daughter wasn't.

ultrablack 7y ago

What do you mean “conditioned”? I see no evidence of this. Kids here i scandinavia are free to do or pursuit whatever they want. And from a very early age, before they are able to talk, boys like things, girls likes people.. And later, they choose accordingly.

crooked-v 7y ago
A simple example is toy stores usually having "boy toys" and "girl toys" areas, with tech-related items included in the former more than the latter.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bluGill 7y ago
  Is that boy toys, or tech related? Girl toys area or doll area. Hard to tell the difference. Yes the dolls will have more princesses, but is that demand or conditioning?
  - loopz 7y ago
    According to the Vedas, mind gets conditioned simply by living life. It is so ingrained, we don't even notice it, but we can't live a life without it either. It's not a negative, but an awareness thing.
rvense 7y ago
I am also in Scandinavia, have small kids and am around a lot of parents, and I see plenty of evidence for this. I am also around a lot of nerds, and I also see plenty of reasons why young women opt out of nerdy circles.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Don’t dance around your point, make it. What are the reasons?
CJefferson 7y ago
Here is a simple example. Everyone, including most children, agree pink is a girl colour. There are times and places in history where everyone, including children, agreed pink was a boy colour. Society shapes children even before they can speak.

waterhouse 7y ago

From what I've read[1], there are studies indicating that higher levels of androgens in the womb are correlated (within each sex) with higher levels of male-typical behavior, in humans and in other primates. They have also directly established causality in other primates by increasing or decreasing the androgens and observing the result. I don't think they've gone as far as tweaking androgens in human fetuses to see what happens—I suspect it would be hard to get the experiment approved—but I know what I expect the result to be. The next step is establishing just how much of the male-female difference is explained by biology. I haven't studied that part of it. But the "null hypothesis", that all gender differences in behavior are due solely to social conditioning, is wrong. [1] Consult https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778233/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778233/ and the studies it cites in the second paragraph.

gbrown 7y ago
> The next step is establishing just how much of the male-female difference is explained by biology. I haven't studied that part of it. But the "null hypothesis", that all gender differences in behavior are due solely to social conditioning, is wrong. This is interesting and important science, and you're right that clearly there are some gender differences... BUT 1. Given the history of (pseudo)science in justifying and worsening disparities between groups, incredible caution is needed - especially when making policy. 2. The existence of biological phenomena in no way discounts the strong social cues and pressures which shape young humans. 3. The existence of detectable, biologically originating average differences between genders in no way justifies the use of algorithms in such a way that individuals are punished for their group membership. On HN, these threads always seem to go straight to "BUT THERE REALLY ARE DIFFERENCES!!", which in my mind is completely missing the point.
- waterhouse 7y ago
  The flip side is going straight from "The fraction of women in X group is much less than 50%" to "Therefore someone is discriminating, creating a hostile environment, socially conditioning people, and/or otherwise behaving badly—and if everyone involved appears to be behaving well, then it must be due to either someone unconsciously doing these things, or someone hiding their bad behavior, which we will proceed to expose by calling out a scapegoat, applying the worst interpretation to all the ambiguous things they do, and attempting to ruin their careers." I would say that incredible caution is needed on that side too. In terms of algorithms: What do you want your algorithm to produce? Gender parity? A distribution that matches what would be reality if biology were an influence but social conditioning weren't? Maybe what would be reality if biology were an influence, and people were encouraged to follow their passion, whatever it is, but scrupulously avoided recommending any particular activities to particular children until after learning what their passion was? ... Or do you want it to analyze reality as it is and produce decisions that are useful in this reality? Ideally, the algorithm would be fed enough data about the people it's judging that it could make a properly fair decision. If all the algorithm gets is "Male, 22, minored in CS; female, 22, minored in CS", then the only thing it has to go on is the sex difference, which is probably a significant one, and then we can argue about what it should do. However, if it gets "Female, 22, minored in CS, majored in math and was top of her class, has spent 400 hours on personal programming projects / Project Euler / Topcoder / chatting about data structures with her friends, has been using the Unix command line on a regular basis since age 12", that looks like a much stronger candidate—and, importantly for this discussion, a male with those same qualifications would probably be an equally good candidate. I think that, if you have the same level of intelligence (perhaps specifically the math/symbol-manipulation areas), the same level of enthusiasm, and spend the same number of hours on the same activities, then you should get roughly the same results no matter what your sex is; sex is only useful to guess at the enthusiasm and hours spent when those variables are missing from the inputs. That's the solution as far as I'm concerned: More input data so the algorithm can be fair. It'll consider all the people who've spent 1000 hours studying and practicing programming and achieved the same level, and it'll judge them the same, and that is fair, even if it happens that 80% of those people are men. Unfair would be if the algorithm only gets the superficial data and has to guess, based on group averages, on everything important, and penalizes the truly capable women because it's unable to distinguish them from the average woman.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> conditioned by society The only conditioning I've ever seen any real evidence of is _against_ what would be called "social norms": teachers, parents and media work overtime to try to get girls interested in math, science, and programming and if anything actively _discourage_ boys from it.

delecti 7y ago
If the "quiet part" beneath that "loud part" is that girls are being encouraged and boys discouraged because STEM is "boy stuff" and girls need to be pushed into it, kids will pick up on that. And it only takes a tiny bit of a "boy's club" atmosphere before things start getting hostile to the women present, and that quickly snowballs.

bcrosby95 7y ago

Yeah, and it's not necessarily an overt thing. As an example, we were very gender indifferent with our first daughter. She loved "boy" and "girl" toys. And colors. She loved snakes, reptiles, bugs, spiders, etc. She loved to get dirty and roughhouse, which we were fine with. She was mostly the opposite of the girls our local parent friends were raising, whom weren't even allowed to play in the dirt. For her 4th birthday, we had a reptile guy show up. She was the only girl child that would touch any of them, let alone let snakes slither around on her. She loved it. It's not like we shut her off from girl stuff - her only cousin was an older girl that liked "girl stuff", and our kid looked up to her. We just always presented them as equal options for her. Once she got into preschool things started changing. After a year, now there are boy toys and girl toys. Colors are gendered. Bugs and reptiles are icky. Dirt is yucky. And so on. I'm not going to make a claim that any girl I've never met has or hasn't been affected by society to like "girl" things. But it would take an act of god to convince me our daughter wasn't.