9 ms·
Many of your points are completely new to me. Some references for these points would be very helpful. I'd like to learn more. men tend to have more varia
by gricardo99 5y ago
Many of your points are completely new to me. Some references for these points would be very helpful. I'd like to learn more.
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 games
- etrabroline 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis The 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoThe wiki article seems pretty inconclusive.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- patmcc 5y agoI think "winner take all" refers to certain areas, where being 20% better than a competitor can bring you 80% of the market share. (I'm not sure if this is an accurate way to view the world, but I think that's what OP was getting at)
- eindiran 5y agoI think the claim about "winner take all" games is about things which follow power law distributions. If a large fraction of all possible rewards go to a small fraction of participants, its not too out there to imagine a small number of extreme outliers dominating. Lots of things appear to work this way; eg income or number of streams to songs or book sales. Relating this back to OP's point, almost everything where network interactions come into play appears to be power law distributed, due to the Chinese restaurant process[0]. So as the world scales, we see the effects of power law distributions for larger and larger networks. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_restaurant_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_restaurant_process
- inopinatus 5y agoIt's a bad take on the variability hypothesis. GP starts with "outliers exist" and through a parody of inference gets all the way to "there are two tiers of men", a train of thought that Joseph Goebbels would be proud of.
- etrabroline 5y agoStealth edit, the above post used to compare the author with Joseph Goebbels, now it makes a self-aware reference to "Godwin's law". Still a bad argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
- inopinatus 5y agoSure, okay, let's put Goebbels back in. I'd swapped him for an irony monad whilst double-checking the list of archetypal bigots that'd promoted a similarly distorted view. Lothrop Stoddard is another candidate. Choose your monster. Pretty much any politician appropriating Nietzsche qualifies.
- FredPret 5y agoAn interesting thing to research after this is to look at other species. In humans, men get fewer copies of genes (hence also more colourblindness). 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.
- waterhouse 5y agoRegarding "men tend to have more variance in everything due to having only one X chromosome": So, there are lots of recessive genetic conditions: for a particular gene, if you have two copies of the common A allele, you're normal; if you have one copy of A and one of the rare lowercase "a"—written as Aa—then you're normal; but if you have "aa", then you have the rare genetic condition. 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 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.
- ckosidows 5y agoI thought every gene needed a pair of alleles? 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?
- dudeinjapan 5y ago"winner-takes-all games" > read about the Pareto Distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution