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The Wikipedia article picks one of many pieces of research to quote. Your criticism are fair as a criticism of that specific research paper. But after you've

by btilly 7y ago

The Wikipedia article picks one of many pieces of research to quote. Your criticism are fair as a criticism of that specific research paper. But after you've looked at a dozen of them, continuing to say that it is just an artifact of terrible methodology (even though most actually are terrible) becomes much harder to support. But that said, here is a classic test showing strong gender differences accidentally discovered by Piaget. Draw two cups, one tilted. Assuming that both are halfway full of water, ask the subject to draw the water line. Until puberty, neither gender can perform this task well. After puberty around 90% of men and 30% of women find it trivial, while the rest do not. (The most common answer that I have seen from women is to tilt the water line with the cup. The second is to tilt it double!) Performance on this task is not particularly correlated with education. Ask a few friends and family, and it isn't hard to verify for yourself that a gender gap exists. Interestingly I have yet to encounter a programmer, male or female, that doesn't find it trivial. I have no idea why programming would select for people who find this task easy. but it apparently does. And the population of people who find this task straightforward has 3x as many men in it as women.

zozbot234 7y ago
If I were presented with the task, I would first draw a tilted water line to figure out what the "halfway filled" amount looks like. Then I would "undo" the tilt, taking care to keep the represented amount of water the same. It could be that women are simply being more methodical in their approach.
- btilly 7y ago
  Try it with actual women. Their reactions make it clear that they recognize the right answer when presented but have no way of calling up “water is horizontal” from the problem itself. Try it.
abathur 7y ago
Thank you for taking the time to read this; it took me long enough to write that I was afraid it would be for naught. I think you are reading me more narrowly than I want to be read, but I don't fault you there. I am not good at communicating this concept yet. I picked the first study because I start at the beginning, and look for loose threads. I didn't pick on this study because I think its methodology is terrible. I just picked on the first few loose threads I found, and pulled. I pulled on the threads to (try to) model and promote how I go about searching for things that aren't facially obvious, and to demonstrate how applying this process (showing my math) leads me inexorably to one conclusion: it is very hard to think and communicate about things like this in a sound, lucid manner. I'm not here to poke holes in individual studies or "prove" anything, but to encourage you to look for loose threads in the epistemic fabric, here. In closing, and to be more specific: listing a bunch of issues with the study doesn't make it wrong. Proving the study wrong is not the point. The issues highlight some of the epistemic hubris in the study, and hopefully to expose how that sort of hubris can compound as we summarize work like this and weave it into higher-level narratives. It may help to see this as laundering unearned/unexamined assumptions at lower levels.
- btilly 7y ago
  If you haven't already, you may be interested in the Replication Crisis and various related research on metascience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis has an overview and you can dig in from there. That said, I've run across enough lines of evidence, both from anecdote and research, that this particular phenomena seems likely to be real.
  - abathur 7y ago
    Last fall, my father asked what I thought about a video on YouTube that took a passage from the Book of Revelation, upcoming astral events from Stellarium, and interpreted them into an end-days prediction. I said that it held about as much water as predictions based on numerology. And then he asked what I would think if the astral event happened when and as described in the video. I said I had no reason to assume Stellarium was wrong, but that the fact of some arrangement of astral bodies doesn't inherently validate any interpretation that the arrangement is significant, nor any subsequent interpretation of what its significance is.
    - btilly 7y ago
      And the relevance of your example is...? Hormonal differences are known to cause a host of physical differences between the genders, a host of behavioral differences (have you read the research on what testosterone does?), and a tremendous amount of mental differences in other species. But political correctness causes us to reject out of hand the idea that biology could cause modest differences in average mental abilities and interests in homo sapiens. There is no question that a few decades ago people casually accepted conclusions about gender differences that we today recognize are fallacious. But the current consensus is an absurd overreaction.
      - abathur 7y ago
        It feels like you're lobbing points from trench to trench. I am not in either trench, and wouldn't like to be (there are weird things in both trenches), so I'm doing what I can to avoid the established battle lines. I am not trying to debate or argue or win, so there is no satisfying crunch. I am just hoping to say a few things you can chew on (without being too much of a jerk along the way).

by btilly 7y ago

zozbot234 7y ago

If I were presented with the task, I would first draw a tilted water line to figure out what the "halfway filled" amount looks like. Then I would "undo" the tilt, taking care to keep the represented amount of water the same. It could be that women are simply being more methodical in their approach.

btilly 7y ago
Try it with actual women. Their reactions make it clear that they recognize the right answer when presented but have no way of calling up “water is horizontal” from the problem itself. Try it.

abathur 7y ago

Thank you for taking the time to read this; it took me long enough to write that I was afraid it would be for naught. I think you are reading me more narrowly than I want to be read, but I don't fault you there. I am not good at communicating this concept yet. I picked the first study because I start at the beginning, and look for loose threads. I didn't pick on this study because I think its methodology is terrible. I just picked on the first few loose threads I found, and pulled. I pulled on the threads to (try to) model and promote how I go about searching for things that aren't facially obvious, and to demonstrate how applying this process (showing my math) leads me inexorably to one conclusion: it is very hard to think and communicate about things like this in a sound, lucid manner. I'm not here to poke holes in individual studies or "prove" anything, but to encourage you to look for loose threads in the epistemic fabric, here. In closing, and to be more specific: listing a bunch of issues with the study doesn't make it wrong. Proving the study wrong is not the point. The issues highlight some of the epistemic hubris in the study, and hopefully to expose how that sort of hubris can compound as we summarize work like this and weave it into higher-level narratives. It may help to see this as laundering unearned/unexamined assumptions at lower levels.

btilly 7y ago
If you haven't already, you may be interested in the Replication Crisis and various related research on metascience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis has an overview and you can dig in from there. That said, I've run across enough lines of evidence, both from anecdote and research, that this particular phenomena seems likely to be real.
- abathur 7y ago
  Last fall, my father asked what I thought about a video on YouTube that took a passage from the Book of Revelation, upcoming astral events from Stellarium, and interpreted them into an end-days prediction. I said that it held about as much water as predictions based on numerology. And then he asked what I would think if the astral event happened when and as described in the video. I said I had no reason to assume Stellarium was wrong, but that the fact of some arrangement of astral bodies doesn't inherently validate any interpretation that the arrangement is significant, nor any subsequent interpretation of what its significance is.
  - btilly 7y ago
    And the relevance of your example is...? Hormonal differences are known to cause a host of physical differences between the genders, a host of behavioral differences (have you read the research on what testosterone does?), and a tremendous amount of mental differences in other species. But political correctness causes us to reject out of hand the idea that biology could cause modest differences in average mental abilities and interests in homo sapiens. There is no question that a few decades ago people casually accepted conclusions about gender differences that we today recognize are fallacious. But the current consensus is an absurd overreaction.
    - abathur 7y ago
      It feels like you're lobbing points from trench to trench. I am not in either trench, and wouldn't like to be (there are weird things in both trenches), so I'm doing what I can to avoid the established battle lines. I am not trying to debate or argue or win, so there is no satisfying crunch. I am just hoping to say a few things you can chew on (without being too much of a jerk along the way).