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Those of you who downgrade my comment should put that PC stuff aside, and consider reading about the evolution of sexuality. Such as "The Red Queen: Sex and the

by mudil 13y ago

Those of you who downgrade my comment should put that PC stuff aside, and consider reading about the evolution of sexuality. Such as "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller. All your wishful thinking will never make women and men the same.

api 13y ago
Nobody's arguing they're the same.
Fomite 13y ago
That's not what I downvoted you for sparky, nor has anyone particularly made that argument.
acdha 13y ago
You weren't downvoted for making the tautological observation that men and women aren't the same but for attempting to use science as a cloak for shoddy reasoning: There's no question that things like hormone levels are likely to have some sort of effect but your response begs huge questions such as how low-level differences affect incredibly complex higher-level processes like cognition, how much a skill like programming depends on such specific cognitive abilities, and even how important a single area of expertise like programming is to overall success in such a wide field which requires a range of different individual skills as well as complex social behaviour on multiple levels. There is still plenty of Nobel-level groundbreaking research yet to be done for each of those questions but instead you simply chose to ignore all of that hard thinking and simply assert that simple biological determinism explains the gender distribution across an entire profession.
- mudil 13y ago
  Maybe you should educate yourself in general evolution, and evolution of sex in particular, and then figure out the obvious: men and women gravitate toward different things. Women are (generally) not discriminated in tech, they just don't gravitate towards it. They are not discriminated on HN, or in Trekkie conventions, they are practically not present there. They don't play computer games, they do social networking. And when in evolution, we say "they", we don't mean any individual members, we mean proportions. So women in general don't do some things that interest men. Now, if you guys want society to spend effort and probably money to push women in some roles that don't interest them (or vice versa for men), so be it. My opinion is that doing this will not make women/men any happier or even will not be good for society...
  - acdha 13y ago
    Your ignorance of science is matched only by your willingness to flaunt your ignorance of what women do or do not want to do (try listening more). I'm just glad gender is known to be such a small component of intelligence — otherwise we'd have to worry about your posts reflecting on men in general.

by mudil 13y ago

api 13y ago

Nobody's arguing they're the same.

Fomite 13y ago

That's not what I downvoted you for sparky, nor has anyone particularly made that argument.

acdha 13y ago

You weren't downvoted for making the tautological observation that men and women aren't the same but for attempting to use science as a cloak for shoddy reasoning: There's no question that things like hormone levels are likely to have some sort of effect but your response begs huge questions such as how low-level differences affect incredibly complex higher-level processes like cognition, how much a skill like programming depends on such specific cognitive abilities, and even how important a single area of expertise like programming is to overall success in such a wide field which requires a range of different individual skills as well as complex social behaviour on multiple levels. There is still plenty of Nobel-level groundbreaking research yet to be done for each of those questions but instead you simply chose to ignore all of that hard thinking and simply assert that simple biological determinism explains the gender distribution across an entire profession.

mudil 13y ago
Maybe you should educate yourself in general evolution, and evolution of sex in particular, and then figure out the obvious: men and women gravitate toward different things. Women are (generally) not discriminated in tech, they just don't gravitate towards it. They are not discriminated on HN, or in Trekkie conventions, they are practically not present there. They don't play computer games, they do social networking. And when in evolution, we say "they", we don't mean any individual members, we mean proportions. So women in general don't do some things that interest men. Now, if you guys want society to spend effort and probably money to push women in some roles that don't interest them (or vice versa for men), so be it. My opinion is that doing this will not make women/men any happier or even will not be good for society...
- acdha 13y ago
  Your ignorance of science is matched only by your willingness to flaunt your ignorance of what women do or do not want to do (try listening more). I'm just glad gender is known to be such a small component of intelligence — otherwise we'd have to worry about your posts reflecting on men in general.