Your attempt to rephrase his question to try to suit a silly ideology has nothing to do with "science", is merely your own appeal to emotion, and isn't doing a thing to advance the discussion, moldburg.
Now, do you have anything at all cogent to say about the obvious cultural and economic forces that create differences?
It is incredibly difficult to untangle the effects of culture from those of biology, especially when dealing with the measured psychological differences between men and women. But when the effects are purely biological, as in this article, a cultural explanation is extremely un-parsimonious. The burden is on the proposer if he wants me to believe that the age of brain structure maturation is determined by which toys a child plays with.
"...incredibly difficult to untangle the effects of culture from those of biology..." followed a few sentences later immediately by dismissal of consideration that "the age of brain structure maturation is determined by which toys a child plays with".
Sigh.
Honest question: do you even read what you fucking write?
change it to "incredibly difficult in general" in the first sentence to get at the poster's real meaning.
And the attitude of your post is completely out of line for HN. I'm getting really sick of people with the attitude of "I'm right so I can verbally abuse people who are wrong". You should be ashamed of yourself for writing like that.
Now, do you have anything at all cogent to say about the obvious cultural and economic forces that create differences?
Let's think about this.
We know there are differences in brain chemistry between males and females, and those difference surge around puberty when sex hormones are flooding the system (rather than appearing gradually over time as a result of playing with different toys).
That said, the fact that males and females have different brains doesn't preclude other culture differences.
But why are these differences so similar across nearly every culture?
A close relative of ours might explain this: Monkeys! Male monkeys prefer playing with traditional male toys, like trucks and balls, while female monkeys prefer playing with traditional female toys, like dolls. Predisposition to prefer certain types of stimulus is quite likely hardcoded in every one of us. The study was conducted on two different species of monkey:
"Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences."
It takes pretty huge step to get from there to suggesting that human girls are genetically predisposed to liking barbies and kitchen toys.
Those differences aren't so similar across nearly every culture. Gender differences vary widely by culture. Stuff like gender differences in IQ is wholly inconsistent across different racial groups. Nearly every metric related to gender differences varies substantially across different cultures. For instance in some countries it's women who test better in math.
Sex differences in juvenile activities, such as rough and tumble play, peer preferences, and infant interest, share similarities in humans and monkeys. Thus if activity preferences shape toy preferences, male and female monkeys may show toy preferences similar to those seen in boys and girls.
We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization.
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Male monkeys preferred roughhousing and toys that developed their spatial intelligence. Compared to boys, female monkeys preferred dolls that developed other forms of intelligence.
Gender differences vary widely by culture. Stuff like gender differences in IQ is wholly inconsistent across different racial groups.
Interesting. I can't really find anything on this, and Wikipedia doesn't have anything either:
Are you referring to a study about a village where women were able to solve a puzzle faster than men?
For instance in some countries it's women who test better in math.
This would be shocking if it weren't true.
I'm curious to here what countries those are, because I suspect the countries that women test better in math will be the same countries that spend a disproportionate amount of time and money trying to improve women's math scores.
A possibly relevant example: Men and boys tend to have better spacial intelligence than women and girls. But as an Israeli (I think) study showed us, spending extra time instructing students how to pass a specific type of spatial intelligence test resulted in everyone doing well on those tests, not just the boys.
Specifically in the U.S. asian women score better in math than asian men.
"I'm curious to here what countries those are, because I suspect the countries that women test better in math will be the same countries that spend a disproportionate amount of time and money trying to improve women's math scores."
You'll note Sweden is approaching parity between men and women in math and they are consistently ranked #1 in the world in terms of gender equality. Is it really ridiculous to suggest that gender differences would be minimized in a more equal society?
Is it really ridiculous to suggest that gender differences would be minimized in a more equal society?
It depends on how we define "equal". Imagine a human society in which the physical strength of men and women are equal, and are kept equal through academic and government policy.
On one hand, that's an equal society. On the other hand, that's a tyrannical society which forcibly boosts girls and women at the expense of boys and men.
I think the Wikipedia article you linked to tends to support the theory that girls are receiving special treatment—countries in which girls are closing the gap in mathematics also tend to be the countries in which girls are extending their gap in reading.
You specifically mentioned Sweden as an example of equality. In Sweden, girls slightly outperform boys in mathematics, AND girls outperform boys in reading by a much larger margin than boys outperform girls in mathematics in any country.
Equality isn't about eliminating differences across different groups. When I argue for a more equal society, I'm not saying everyone should be made to be identical, I'm saying everyone should be treated equitably.
If you read the last article I linked. Pay close attention to this part:
"When participants were told that they were about to perform a working memory task (which included math operations as a kind of distractor) to get norms for student, men and women performed equally. But when the same test was given with the information that this was a test of complex mathematics in order to compare males and females, performance in female participants dropped almost 30 percent."
This suggests to me an inequitable society. A society where at a young age women are already taught that they aren't supposed to be good at math.
The top five countries where women scored better than men are Malta, Albania, Trinidad and Tobago, India, and Kyrgyzstan. Do you have any evidence of educational policies favoring women at the expense of men in these countries?
As to the reading gap, of course this is an issue. Just as much effort that is put into bringing math scores to parity should be spent on the reading gap. Sweden is an example of equality, because even though there are plenty inequitable parts of their society they actively work to make those equitable. What is your preferred model of an equitable society, or do you simply think that equality inevitably means oppressing the dominant class?
As to the reading gap, of course this is an issue. Just as much effort that is put into bringing math scores to parity should be spent on the reading gap. Sweden is an example of equality
Sweden is an example of girls doing 20 points better relative to boys in both math and reading compared to the US. And the pattern generally holds for the other countries as well. Take the sum of the math and reading gaps, and that value is more stable (min 29, max 64), compared with the gaps for math (-15 to +32) and reading (10 to 72). If anything, this data raises the probability that I assign to the proposition that girls and boys on average have different natural aptitudes.
Quinnchr, I can't reply to you, so I'll reply here instead.
This suggests to me an inequitable society. A society where at a young age women are already taught that they aren't supposed to be good at math.
The article you linked had a different take—that women are more adversely affected by pressure than are men.
The article had a different take, because I don't think your hypothesis is true: And I went through the American public school system very recently. There wasn't a single year in which it wasn't drilled into our heads by predominantly female teachers how much better girls are than boys at everything. Boys were the victim of daily jabs. There wasn't a single year in which we weren't told that the only reason girls have been traditionally worse at math is because mean boys make girls think they're worse.
...mentions something that I witnessed personally. Teachers tend to despise boys who act like traditional boys. Those boys are treated more harshly. Their answers are never given the benefit of the doubt. They're mad to feel like failures.
So I think the meme of "girls are taught they suck; boys are taught they're great" doesn't apply to the United States, and opposite has likely been true since the 70s or 80s.
Sweden is an example of equality, because even though there are plenty inequitable parts of their society they actively work to make those equitable
I think they spend a lot of time and money giving special treatment to girls and women, trying to close innate performance gaps. If they wanted to be truly equitable, they'd do the same for boys (and maybe they're starting to, and we'll soon see results).
But even if Sweden were to do that, what then? They've spent a lot of time pursuing equal results, as though it's a goal in and of itself. Why should it be?
If you have two people, one of whom innately excels at math and the other innately excels at editing prose, why not encourage and foster those skills instead of fighting against them? Specialization isn't a bad thing; it's necessary for real progress to be made.
If it was a result of pressure why would the disparity only show when they were told it was a math test? Are you suggesting women have an innate anxiety to doing math?
I'm going to shy away from the anecdotal as that will get us nowhere, I will say though my experience was very different than yours.
As for teachers discriminating against men. This is absolutely a legitimate men's issue, but it's largely an intersectional issue. Middle class white men in general aren't the ones being discriminated against, it's largely an issue of race and to a lesser extent class.
Sweden has a ton of social programs specifically for men as well. In what ways are Swedish women receiving special treatment? Do you consider anything other than the status quo special treatment?
I'm not sure why equality isn't a legitimate goal in itself. Would you say the same thing in the 1960s about the nascent civil rights movement? I'm generally of the opinion that no class or group of people should be treated as inferior. If you still need a reason, economically speaking there is a strong positive correlation between gender equality and GDP per capita.
What purpose does proving that women/men are innately better at certain things hold? At best it's a generalization, there will always be women and men who preform better in non-standard ways. What purpose does a generalization like that serve? Of course women and men can have innate differences, but why must it depend on the biological sex? There are huge variances in hormonal levels and physiology across a single sex, do you really think there are innate characteristics common to all women?
Why do you make the implicit assumption that innate performance gaps (in things like math and editing prose especially) fall along gender lines? A better null hypothesis is that there is no connection between gender and these skills.
By the way, I'm sorry you felt mistreated by teachers because of your gender. That's wrong.
"On the other hand, that's a tyrannical society which forcibly boosts girls and women at the expense of boys and men."
First of all, as others have pointed out, equality does not mean forcing everyone to have equal abilities. Equality means not pre-judging anyone's abilities based on irrelevant characteristics like sex or race. Second of all, arguments like yours always clue me off that the person making the argument is operating under the default assumption that boys and men are better than women and girls in general and that assuming that they just might be equal for any given task until proven otherwise is tyranny. Let me guess: MRA?
And stop ducking the question, genius. Are you really trying to tell us that the solution to your homelessness problem is to bus people who you magically somehow don't think are from your area clear across the country to a place they almost certainly aren't from?
Save your unsupported observations and your fucking breath.
Your contributions and the contributions of other libertarians in this thread amount to little more than endlessly bleating that (in the opinion of the greedy), greed couldn't possibly have led to financial calamities, and that impediments to greed like democratically elected governments and legislated, popular laws are to blame for financial calamities....the disasters that history has shown repeatedly arise only when those same laws are weakened.
> ~sigh~ Enough. Save your unsupported observations and your fucking breath.
I think this kind of statement speaks for itself.
> other libertarians
I'm not a libertarian. I think libertarians are terribly mistaken.
> the disasters that history has shown repeatedly arise only when those same laws are weakened
That's right. When "deregulation" actually means something like "let's allow private ownership and operation of a coropration that has a government-granted regulatory monopoly," it is a total disaster. You have to get rid of coersion from the market completely for it to function as a market. So I agree with you---a mixed economy is complete and utter crap.
So wonderful to watch this little drama (complete with breathless appeals to get the news media involved) play out today on HN, which appears to have become "Bitcoin News".
A match made in heaven, between this genius financial entrepreneur and this competent, reliable trading platform, seems to at least sum up Bitcoin nicely, if not the brainless economic philosophies underlying this horseshit.
For a split second your comment began to irritate me, until I finished the whole comment. At that point, your comment came off so eloquent written that I couldn't remain mad. Bravo.
Your examples are unbelievably silly, as both Enron and the financial crisis of 2008 occurred in the context of deregulation of those "traditional markets".
Wanna watch Bitcoin absolutely implode and die? You libertarians keep up your adolescent, blind fervor for nonregulation.
> Do you even read your own writing from one paragraph to the next?
Do you even use any semblance of common sense? Even if his daughter was one of the 5% of pregnancies that resulted from failure of contraception, the mother should have gotten an abortion. Not all pregnancies have to result in a birth.
Regardless, my argument isn't specific to this individual. On the whole, 95% of unwanted pregnancies are the result of irresponsibility. And over and over, we see articles like this one about people who have children when they're too young to financially support them and then complain about how they're not getting paid more. That is entitlement.
> How in the fuck do you have any clue whatsoever about what happened to "this guy" before and at the time he had his child?
Regardless of what "happened to" him, he shouldn't have impregnated a woman at the age of 20, and stopped the birth if it happened on accident. That much is clear.
"This guy" has a "sense of entitlement" in your little world....because he's taking care of his daughter, worked at a menial job to make ends meets and while he kept studyting and just got his college degree, programs on the side, just got a new job, and took the time and energy to try to improve conditions for his fellow employees....and then geniuses like you whine about "free condoms" and "entitlement"?
He's complaining about a job that's paying $16/hour an hour when the article clearly states that $16.50/hour is enough for a single person to live on in the valley. He says he has to turn down hours because of his daughter, which means he could probably make enough to survive if she wasn't present. Ergo, his current difficulties are largely brought on by the irresponsible impregnation of a woman when he was not ready to raise a child.
Please. Just stop spouting liberal claptrap for a second and use your head.
And if we just got rid of half the people on the planet, the rest of us could be twice as rich!
A sense of entitlement means you think someone owes you something you didn't work for. This guy is working hard and looking for ways to earn more which means he's not feeling entitled.
> there are large genetically distinct human population groups that correspond ~80% with our notions about race.
Oh really? What exactly are "our notions" about race? Who precisely are you referring to as holding "our" notions?
And why was it so important for you to try to insert [again] your own everlasting axe-grinding notions about "race" into this particular discussion?