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I can think of many attributes that are likely to affect people more than gender. Age, fitness level, education level, political affiliation, friendships, menta

I can think of many attributes that are likely to affect people more than gender. Age, fitness level, education level, political affiliation, friendships, mental health, ethnicity, political status, etc. I'm not convinced that gender is the most important differentiator.

fastball 6y ago
Not when you remove the societal influence, e.g. pretend you have these people alone on an island. 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.
- bjourne 6y ago
  You haven't offered any evidence on why a random man in, say, the U.S. has more in common with a random man in, say, Sierra Leone than, say, a man or a woman who may be siblings or even twins. You think it is one way and I think it is the other. I guess we have to agree to disagree.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Actually I believe the issue here is that you are struggling to understand what I mean when I say "remove societal influence". 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.
    - orwin 6y ago
      But you can't remove societal influence? 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...
- orwin 6y ago
  You don't have to go this far. 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.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Those aren't intrinsic properties. Those are the opposite of intrinsic properties. I'm not disagreeing that nurture has a greater impact than nature. The point is that if you remove nurture, sex (when thought of as a single variable, which is typical) is going to have an outsized influence compared to other intrinsic characteristics. 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.
    - orwin 6y ago
      Okay, i get your point, i did not understand it at first. 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.
      - fastball 6y ago
        Exactly, but I'm referring to a specific phenomenon I've seen, where people have this (to me) flawed idea that if we reduce societal influence, we will end up with industries that are naturally 50/50 men to women. e.g. if you stop telling men to be engineers and women to be teachers, you'll end up with 50/50 engineering and teaching. 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.

fastball 6y ago

Not when you remove the societal influence, e.g. pretend you have these people alone on an island. 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.

bjourne 6y ago
You haven't offered any evidence on why a random man in, say, the U.S. has more in common with a random man in, say, Sierra Leone than, say, a man or a woman who may be siblings or even twins. You think it is one way and I think it is the other. I guess we have to agree to disagree.
- fastball 6y ago
  Actually I believe the issue here is that you are struggling to understand what I mean when I say "remove societal influence". 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.
  - orwin 6y ago
    But you can't remove societal influence? 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...
orwin 6y ago
You don't have to go this far. 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.
- fastball 6y ago
  Those aren't intrinsic properties. Those are the opposite of intrinsic properties. I'm not disagreeing that nurture has a greater impact than nature. The point is that if you remove nurture, sex (when thought of as a single variable, which is typical) is going to have an outsized influence compared to other intrinsic characteristics. 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.
  - orwin 6y ago
    Okay, i get your point, i did not understand it at first. 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.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Exactly, but I'm referring to a specific phenomenon I've seen, where people have this (to me) flawed idea that if we reduce societal influence, we will end up with industries that are naturally 50/50 men to women. e.g. if you stop telling men to be engineers and women to be teachers, you'll end up with 50/50 engineering and teaching. 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.