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> females are worse at handling acute stress Every time this kind of issue comes up on HN there's someone who comes along to mansplain why women are inherently

by spzb 4y ago

> females are worse at handling acute stress Every time this kind of issue comes up on HN there's someone who comes along to mansplain why women are inherently less able to do tech jobs. It's not a good look for our profession and we really should be above this by now.

danieltanfh95 4y ago
What good about being "above this" by avoiding the issue at all. Understanding this fact and owning it means to increase women in tech, we need to factor in stress in the development cycle, we need to make sure that there are more or better avenues to enable social sharing of stress, and that may or may not even be incentivised at the corporate or tax level. This all comes with first accepting that women need help handling stress, so we can actually work on the problem and not hand waving it away by pretending that it isn't a problem.
throw_bin_hat 4y ago
- spzb 4y ago
  And that's exactly the attitude I'm talking about
fxtentacle 4y ago
This is a thorny discussion, but it appears that IQ is unevenly distributed and the differences in variance are even stronger. And the end result seems to be that if you select for IQ > 150 people, then you expect to see 80% men 20% women purely due to biological causes. Whether or not we (the society) should accept that outcome is a completely different thing. But if you average over enough people, there are very real development differences between genders and some of them are related to brain energy supply and/or brain volume. And I believe the GP was right, stress response is also heavily biologically modulated. It kind of makes sense that the average 1.6m women would respond differently to a hungry tiger than a 1.9m bodybuilder... right?
- spzb 4y ago
  - fxtentacle 4y ago
    - spzb 4y ago
      It's hardly science when you try to wave away questions about stress by pointing to studies about IQ.
    - ffguuficc 4y ago
      Putting traps in your comment (Not including sources as bait) just isn’t right. I’ve honestly never seen that before and it makes you look immature. Your argument should be solid enough not to need cheap shots like that.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
dang 4y ago
HN has millions of users, so of course there's a wide spectrum of views. Any view that is sufficiently represented in society as a whole will appear here, regardless of how bad the argument is or feels. Moreover, HN users are all over the world, and geography (as a proxy for background and culture) has a huge influence on how people view these things. Surprisingly many of these disputes on HN come from people in one part of the world arguing with people in another part of the world without necessarily realizing it. So while you're right that someone regularly "comes along to say $X", that's a function of population size and distribution. You can't generalize from that to the community as a whole, any more than to the human race as a whole. In the latter sense, sure, maybe "we" should really be above $badness by now, but saying that doesn't contribute to the hard work of persuasion, and neither does condemnation or name-calling or fulmination—however justified those reactions feel, they just contribute to cementing things as they are. Edit: just for clarity: I understand and sympathize with the frustration when you (I don't mean you personally) feel like a site is 'your' community on the internet and then you run into posts that aren't just wrong but are squarely outside the bounds of what decent people believe or say. It creates a feeling of a hostile environment that is even worse than if you had gone in expecting hostility. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. The problem though is that those bounds are drawn very differently in different subgroups of society (and the world at large) and the population here is large and distributed enough to include all those subgroups. That means it's constantly and unavoidably pregnant with conflict. For most of us, any social conflicts we're implicitly part of are insulated and regulated by the subgroup(s) we belong to. In our world, for practical emotional purposes, approximately 'everyone' agrees. There may be an occasional holiday family dinner where the larger divisions break out, but (at least for a lot of us) that's about it. The population as a whole, however, can't regulate itself that way. A population as large as HN is in the 'hostile family dinner' situation all the time, only orders of magnitude more complex and worse, and spread all over the world. I don't think the solution can be to exclude subgroups. It has to be to communicate across differences. One could call it 'supported communication across differences', where by 'supported' I mean having a scaffolding of principles that everyone is expected to follow (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, in HN's case.) In practice, yes, that does mean going backward and having arguments that "we" should be beyond by now. But that's because there are many different versions of "we" here. If you take all the basis vectors of HN and consider the full opinion space they expand into, I'm not sure it's that much less complex or diverse than the entire world.

by spzb 4y ago

danieltanfh95 4y ago

What good about being "above this" by avoiding the issue at all. Understanding this fact and owning it means to increase women in tech, we need to factor in stress in the development cycle, we need to make sure that there are more or better avenues to enable social sharing of stress, and that may or may not even be incentivised at the corporate or tax level. This all comes with first accepting that women need help handling stress, so we can actually work on the problem and not hand waving it away by pretending that it isn't a problem.

throw_bin_hat 4y ago

spzb 4y ago
And that's exactly the attitude I'm talking about

fxtentacle 4y ago

This is a thorny discussion, but it appears that IQ is unevenly distributed and the differences in variance are even stronger. And the end result seems to be that if you select for IQ > 150 people, then you expect to see 80% men 20% women purely due to biological causes. Whether or not we (the society) should accept that outcome is a completely different thing. But if you average over enough people, there are very real development differences between genders and some of them are related to brain energy supply and/or brain volume. And I believe the GP was right, stress response is also heavily biologically modulated. It kind of makes sense that the average 1.6m women would respond differently to a hungry tiger than a 1.9m bodybuilder... right?

spzb 4y ago
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  - spzb 4y ago
    It's hardly science when you try to wave away questions about stress by pointing to studies about IQ.
  - ffguuficc 4y ago
    Putting traps in your comment (Not including sources as bait) just isn’t right. I’ve honestly never seen that before and it makes you look immature. Your argument should be solid enough not to need cheap shots like that.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

dang 4y ago

HN has millions of users, so of course there's a wide spectrum of views. Any view that is sufficiently represented in society as a whole will appear here, regardless of how bad the argument is or feels. Moreover, HN users are all over the world, and geography (as a proxy for background and culture) has a huge influence on how people view these things. Surprisingly many of these disputes on HN come from people in one part of the world arguing with people in another part of the world without necessarily realizing it. So while you're right that someone regularly "comes along to say $X", that's a function of population size and distribution. You can't generalize from that to the community as a whole, any more than to the human race as a whole. In the latter sense, sure, maybe "we" should really be above $badness by now, but saying that doesn't contribute to the hard work of persuasion, and neither does condemnation or name-calling or fulmination—however justified those reactions feel, they just contribute to cementing things as they are. Edit: just for clarity: I understand and sympathize with the frustration when you (I don't mean you personally) feel like a site is 'your' community on the internet and then you run into posts that aren't just wrong but are squarely outside the bounds of what decent people believe or say. It creates a feeling of a hostile environment that is even worse than if you had gone in expecting hostility. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. The problem though is that those bounds are drawn very differently in different subgroups of society (and the world at large) and the population here is large and distributed enough to include all those subgroups. That means it's constantly and unavoidably pregnant with conflict. For most of us, any social conflicts we're implicitly part of are insulated and regulated by the subgroup(s) we belong to. In our world, for practical emotional purposes, approximately 'everyone' agrees. There may be an occasional holiday family dinner where the larger divisions break out, but (at least for a lot of us) that's about it. The population as a whole, however, can't regulate itself that way. A population as large as HN is in the 'hostile family dinner' situation all the time, only orders of magnitude more complex and worse, and spread all over the world. I don't think the solution can be to exclude subgroups. It has to be to communicate across differences. One could call it 'supported communication across differences', where by 'supported' I mean having a scaffolding of principles that everyone is expected to follow (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, in HN's case.) In practice, yes, that does mean going backward and having arguments that "we" should be beyond by now. But that's because there are many different versions of "we" here. If you take all the basis vectors of HN and consider the full opinion space they expand into, I'm not sure it's that much less complex or diverse than the entire world.