We've had enough generic flamewars. The enduring goal is curious conversation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It can lead to prejudice or worse. But the solution is not less knowledge, the solution is greater humility in applying it.

So let's keep learning, but not let the latest findings justify things we know are really wrong. As we learn yet more, it will add nuance and eventually vindicate what we knew was right all along: respect people as individuals.

One of the things you rapidly conclude is the things that SJW's tend to foam at the mouth about things that probably don't matter. In particular the general assumption women avoid male dominated occupations because they like working with men is just as wrong as saying you don't find in men in child care professions because they don't like working with women. Unfortunately they don't like you saying that.

Worse, when you say the differences are real, and the best way to attract women is probably to give them roles they like doing, they go ballistic as your suggestions tend to undermine whatever justification they have for their crusade. An example of such a proposal is since women tend to like working with other people, we do have tasks that tend to focus on working with people like help desks and finding business requirements and doing the design work is a good idea. (But I admit that idea is just a wild guess from a man, and really we need women to prod us in the right direction.)

Unfortunately, it's even worse than that. The loud, aggressive, chest thumping way the SJW's seem to operate in when championing women's causes appear to me to be the very antithesis of the way women prefer to interact. (I guess that's no saying much - I can't say I like it either.) But in any case the irony is bitter and hard to swallow. Here we have people claiming to be working to attract more women to the profession, yet their action in pursuing that goal seem to be almost deliberately calculated to drive them away.

Anyway, enough of the rant. To answer your question, the research is an obvious starting point when you want to address gender inequality - whether it be women in IT or men in teaching.

I am very skeptical of any claim that such vague and abstract behaviour descriptions can be measured with accuracy. The cited studies are claimed to have been conducted cross-culturally, but I really doubt that different cultures would really assign the same meaning to these words. Even people within the same culture would understand what "sensitivity" or "dutifulness" means differently. For instance, if I like flowers, am I "sensitive"? If I cry at weddings? If I cry at Game of Thrones? At MMA fights? [1]

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[1] It's not a joke. I cried at the end of the Coleman-Emelianenko fight. When they hug at the end, with Coleman's face a bloody mess? I cried my fucking eyes out. Does that make me "sensitive"? "Appreciating of beauty"?

I am worried that even though skepticism is good, skepticism from people outside of a field can lead into a downward spiral of rejecting all conclusions made by serious practitioners of that field.

How many other endeavors would be impossible to undertake if people constantly disregarded the methods and practices of researchers and specialists within these disciplines?

At what point are we merely finding ourselves skeptical of research which contradicts our preconceptions?

How do we know when we are going too far in picking apart methodology that we don’t even understand that well?

All I’m saying is it’s not reasonable to take such a stance selectively against findings that you personally disagree with.

Humans are complicated and unpredictable. Any field with 99% noise 1% signal requires different methodologies compared to, say, physics and computer vision ML. But you can still make some inferences and predictions (which, even if 100% "correct" will still only predict the 1% of signal, not the 99% of noise).

What I mean about "methodology" is the current trend of quantifying human personality traits, like that damned "agreeableness". I understand the aspiration to quantify the human personality (although I also personally find it a little off-putting) but it seems to me that it is very difficult to do with the tools with which it is being attempted. In fact, I think it's impossible to do what psychologists are trying to do, i.e. to do statistics on the human personality. Because the things you are trying to measure are impossible to define clearly and observe objectively since they have no physical substance.

So why do it at all? Why does psychology _need_ to have statistics on personality traits, when they are not really personality traits but complicated proxies for things we think may be representative of personality traits? Wouldn't the same effort be better spent on a different project? Can't psychology be taken seriously as a science without trying to do maths with things that don't really exist?

What they mean by sensitivity, is " is someone who experiences acute physical, mental, or emotional responses to stimuli." This isn't very vague or abstract compared to things we measure all the time like "GDP".

>> The cited studies are claimed to have been conducted cross-culturally, but I really doubt that different cultures would really assign the same meaning to these words.

It really doesn't matter if they assign the same meaning to those words, or even have words to describe the concept. You're not measuring whether they are sensitive relative to their own meaning of the word, but if they are sensitive relative to a specific trait that psychology professors are interested in measuring. A baby has no concept of weight but I can still weigh them.

>> For instance, if I like flowers, am I "sensitive"? If I cry at weddings? If I cry at Game of Thrones? At MMA fights?

What would make you sensitive is if you are "someone who experiences acute physical, mental, or emotional responses to stimuli." Of course people are different. Of course they find different things emotionally salient.

Image we ran an experiment. And we asked two people, Person S(ensitive), and person R(ock) if they found 10 situations emotionally overwhelming. S tells you every time they were extremely overwhelmed.(Weddings, deaths, criticism, something unfair happens) R tells you they didn't feel overwhelmed at all.

Now if we ask S and R if they felt overwhelmed about an 11th scenario what are they chances they say yes? Previous studies have said S is much more likely to answer yes than R. This correlation is the thing they are measuring.

Btw the criticism you are making is called construct validity and is a something that psychology professors study and worry about all the time.

Thank you, that is a very clear explanation. And "construct validity", from its name and from a quick look on wikipedia is exactly my concern.

Neither. I am aware though that whole fields of research periodically go through upheavals and abandon previous methodological orthodoxies, and that happens only because there is a debate on those methodological orthodoxies. For example, if I understand correctly, experiments with rats in a maze used to be the mainstay of psychology experiments in the past, but they are now not so much.

Is my criticism really that hurtful?

Edit: I'm also aware of the fact that whole fields can be stuck in a rut and continue work that pays off now, in terms of publications, but is later dismissed. In machine learning we talk of "low-hanging fruit". It means that, you can publish a paper now that pushes the state-of-the-art a bit further but does nothing to address the limitations of whatever technique you are using. The result is noise.

For example, in the Mac Giolla and Kajonius study [1] the data came from an online questionnaire.

I'm finding it very hard to criticise the methodology of this sort of study without [edited out] being extremely rude and dismissive to a whole field of research. But, I really don't understand how all this is supposed to make sense. I look at the plot in the middle of the Scientific American article that is marked "Agreeableness" on the x-axis (with a score from 1 to 5). I look at the papers cited. There's plenty of maths there, but what is anything calculating? What is "agreeableness" and why is it measured on a scale of 1 to 5? It seems to be a term that has a specific meaning in psychology and sociology, and that ultimately translates to "a score of n in this standardised questionnaire".

But, if you can just define whatever quantities you like and give them a commonly used word for a name- then what does anything mean anymore? You can just define anything you like as anything you like and measure it anyway you like- and claim anything you want at all.

At the end of the day, is all this measuring anything other than trends in filling up questionnaires? Can we really draw any other conclusions about the differences of men and women than that the samples of the studies filled in their questionnaires in different ways? Is even that a safe conclusion? If you take statistics on a random process you can always model it- but you'll be modelling noise. How is this possibility excluded here?

All the statistics are quantifying the answers that respondents gave to questionnaires and how the researchers rated them - without any attempt to blind or randomise anything, to protect from participant or researcher bias, as far as I can tell (I'm searching for the word "blind" in the papers and finding nothing). In the study I link below, participants found the website by internet searches and word-of-mouth. The study itself points out that this is a self-selecting sample, but what have they done to exclude the possibility of adversarial participation (people purposefully filling in a form in a certain way to confuse results)?

There is so much that is extremely precarious about the findings of those studies and yet the Scientific American article jumps directly to d values. Yes, but d-values on what? What is being measured? What do the numbers stand for?

This is just heartbreaking to see that such a contentious issue is treated with such frivolity. If it's not possible to lay to rest such hot button issues with solid scientific work- then don't do it. It will just make matters worse.

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[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ijop.12529?

It is true that these are self-report questionnaires, but as such they are small samples of behaviors of the people in question. Samples of how they perceive themselves, how they think about life, how they think about others, and what they value.

The Big Five, and the measures used in studies such as this, has been validated (in the sense that the ratings have been associated concurrently and predictively) over decades in many ways, with regard to daily reports of behavior, emotion, and life events, diagnoses, work ratings, performance on tests, ratings by peers and colleagues, ratings by strangers, just about everything you can imagine. These self-reports aren't perfect, but they do provide a fuzzy snapshot of someone at a given moment in time. Yes, it would be better to obtain all sorts of other measures of behavior, but they would be too expensive to obtain on large enough samples to be representative.

A major paradox in understanding human behavioral differences is that the more specific and "real world" you get, the less and less they generalize. That is, you can get a very concrete measure of a real-world behavior, but it ceases to be representative of that person across a large number of contexts and situations. Say you want to measure theft, for example. Do you set up a honeypot? Is that representative of that person? Do you use police reports or records? Is that representative? It turns out self-report on online questionnares is a very good measure of things like this because people are less self-conscious, and report things that don't go on the official record.

Faking is also controversial in this area. You're right to bring it up as an issue, but to understand the research on it it's important to think about why someone would fake. That is, what's the motivation for large proportions of people to systematically fake in one direction? And if they do do go to the trouble of doing that, what's "real" and what's "fake"? That is, let's say people make themselves look more dominant than they really are -- what does it mean if one person does that and another does not? It turns out that the person who wants to make themselves look more dominant often is more dominant, all other things equal, because it means they value that.

Also, strangely enough, it turns out that people who are callous and aggressive don't really care about that, especially on online questionnaires, because they are callous and aggressive.

This has all been very thoroughly researched and it turns out to be much more complicated than it seems at first glance. It doesn't mean things can't be better, but it does mean that over very large samples of persons answering questions on a low-stakes questionnaire (in the sense there aren't real consequences to them answering one way or another), a lot of these things average out. It's not the end of the story, but it's not something to be dismissed either.

In the end, questions of sex differences in behavior are about sex differences in behavior. And that's what this research addresses.

But these claims aren't extraordinary in this scientific field.

They may of course seem extraordinary to those not familiar with the science.

You don't, but it's also not necessary. It's impossible to objectively assess someone's subjective experience, the best we can do is look at groups of people and attempt to find reliable indicators.

The point is that some people will over-emphasize any given trait, and others will under-emphasize it, so on average it evens out.

Think of color perception for a similar conundrum. How can you be sure that the red you see is the same as everybody else is seeing?

I can't, but my understanding is that if we all agree to call a certain frequency of visible light "red", the frequency won't change because some people perceive it in a different way than others. Neither will measuring the frequency depend on how people perceive it.

That seems to me to be a more consistent definition of "red" than the definitions of personality traits that are discussed here.

>> There are whole fields of research devoted to the questions you're raising. As such, it's hard to reply with anything that would do justice to them. This isn't to say your questions aren't important, just that your lack of answers reflects your ignorance more so than that of the researchers. I say this not antagonistically but to suggest that it's important to understand that what you see is not always all there is to say.

Another comment brought up the term "construct validity" and it seems to match my concerns exactly. I am glad there is debate on that.

I study for a PhD in AI and I have similar concerns about research in my field. For instance, in AI, research often claims to have modelled human abilities such as "reasoning", "emotion" or "intuition". I'm personally uncomfortable even with well-established terms like "learning" (as in "machine learning") and "vision" (as in "machine vision")- because we don't really know what it means to "see" or to "learn" in human terms so we shouldn't be hasty to apply that terminology to machines.

This tendency has been criticised from the early days of the field but we seem to have regressed in recent years, with the success of machine learning for object classification in images and speech processing taking the field by storm and leaving no room for careful study anymore, it seems. But that's a conversation for another thread.

In AI, I'm worried that calling what algorithms do "attention" or "learning to learn" etc, gives a false impression to people outside the field about the progress of the field, and, in the end, about what we know and what we don't know. This is certainly not advancing the science.

I think the same about psychology and studies like the ones we're discussing here. If psychologists are happy measuring the correlations of the answers in their questionnaires, and they call the quantities measured in this way with names like "agreeableness" and "sensitivity"- doesn't that just give the entirely wrong impression to people outside the field who have a very different concept of what "agreeableness" etc means?

I say that this is "not advancing the science". You could argue that the science is doing fine, thank you, even if lay people don't get it. But, if the way the science is carried out creates confusion and influences real behaviour and decisions, as studies like the ones discussed above have the potential to do- is that really a beneficial outcome of research?

To put it plainly: as a researcher I don't aspire to create confusion, but to bring clarity in subjects that are hard to understand. Isn't that the whole point?

>> In the end, questions of sex differences in behavior are about sex differences in behavior. And that's what this research addresses.

I understand this. But, my concern here is that asking people "what do you think about sex differences in behaviour" is likely to return results tained by ungodly amounts of cultural bias that would be impossible to disentangle from any other results. How is this addressed in such studies? How do you account for people answering questions about sex differences in behaviour based on what they are used to think about sex differences in behaviour, rather than what they actually observe?

P.S. Hey, your answer does do justice to my questions. Thanks for your patience, again.

Essentially, it is a linguistic approach to personality. The original 5 categories were found by asking people if they would describe themselves with a certain adjective. They did this for hundreds of adjectives. After doing a Factor Analysis, surprisingly, the found 5 independent groups of adjectives. In each group, the adjectives correlate with each other. So for instance, someone you would describe as assertive you would also be likely to describe as proactive. Both of these traits happen to correlate with describing someone as extroverted. The particular group is then given the Big Five name. So technically speaking, extroversion is a whole class of attributes you would be likely to describe someone as.

To me, the amazing thing about the Big Five is that we can reliably extract information about types of people using ordinary language.

EDIT: To add just a bit more, of all the replication scandals in psychology today, the Big Five is one of the few frameworks that has withheld the storm.

Will different people answer these personality questions differently?

Do some people have similar personality traits?

Can specific viewpoints be predicted, to some rational degree of error, based on how they answer these questions?

Assuming the people answering do not get any feedback from answering in a specific way (i.e. the questionnaire is a black box), and correlations can be found in the data, and predicted viewpoints can be tested against the answers, then the scientific method here is sound. From an engineering point of view, it makes sense that the results of such a questionnaire can be useful in understanding the way that people think. Of course some people will be fuzzy or erratic and not conform to a regression, but we see that all the time in every practical scientific branch (excluding most maths, in my experience).

In either case you will detect consistent differences between the sexes for the different traits, and the predictive power of the results remains unchanged.

Quote from the article https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.0017...: "Agreeableness comprises traits relating to altruism, such as empathy and kindness. Agreeableness involves the tendency toward cooperation, maintenance of social harmony, and consideration of the concerns of others (as opposed to exploitation or victimization of others). Women consistently score higher than men on Agreeableness and related measures, such as tender-mindedness (Feingold, 1994; Costa et al., 2001)."

> why is it measured on a scale of 1 to 5

Quote from the article https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.0017...: "Participants rate their agreement with how well each statement describes them using a five-point scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree."

> But, if you can just define whatever quantities you like and give them a commonly used word for a name- then what does anything mean anymore? You can just define anything you like as anything you like and measure it anyway you like- and claim anything you want at all.

> At the end of the day, is all this measuring anything other than trends in filling up questionnaires? Can we really draw any other conclusions about the differences of men and women than that the samples of the studies filled in their questionnaires in different ways? Is even that a safe conclusion? If you take statistics on a random process you can always model it- but you'll be modelling noise. How is this possibility excluded here?

Not that simple. There is a whole field called Psychometrics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics

If you really care to answer those questions you need to take a complete psychometric theory course such as https://personality-project.org/revelle/syllabi/405.syllabus...

Before you learned the whole thing, don't assume the field is as superficial as you imagined.

> All the statistics are quantifying the answers that respondents gave to questionnaires and how the researchers rated them - without any attempt to blind or randomise anything, to protect from participant or researcher bias, as far as I can tell (I'm searching for the word "blind" in the papers and finding nothing).

Your searching for the word "blind" means you don't know anything about psychology research. We don't use this word in our research. In psychology studies, we care about "reliability" and "validity" and we have extensive methods to test those.

> In the study I link below, participants found the website by internet searches and word-of-mouth. The study itself points out that this is a self-selecting sample, but what have they done to exclude the possibility of adversarial participation (people purposefully filling in a form in a certain way to confuse results)?

Maybe there are a few people try to do that. But with a sample size of 130,602, these response wouldn't impact the research findings at all, unless it is an organized effort trying to influence the research.

> There is so much that is extremely precarious about the findings of those studies and yet the Scientific American article jumps directly to d values. Yes, but d-values on what? What is being measured? What do the numbers stand for?

The ScientificAmerican article does fail to clear this up. But the first linked study using "D" clearly stated it is "Cattell's 16PF (fifth edition)". https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jopy.12500

> This is just heartbreaking to see that such a contentious issue is treated with such frivolity. If it's not possible to lay to rest such hot button issues with solid scientific work- then don't do it. It will just make matters worse.

Maybe the ScientificAmerican article is not flawless, but I think you need to calm down a little bit.

Please remember that asking someone to calm down can be heard as insulting. It's attacking the speaker, not his position.

GGP needlessly impugned the researchers, in insinuating that they approached important, grave, consequential questions with frivolity.

Can you elaborate on the Feynman thing? I haven't heard anything about that before.

It's really sad and disapopinting to see that sort of close-minded attitude come from such a talented person towards entire fields he knows nearly nothing about.

Furthermore, philosophy extends back thousands of years and spans across many societies and cultures. To dismiss all of it in a handwavy way from a position of ignorance, as Feynman did, speaks of nothing but narrow-minded bigotry.

I think the social sciences are useful and in fact indispensible. I disagree with their methodology and with the practice of copying methods from other fields that are really not suitable to the subject matter of the social sciences.

For instance, if you define a set of answers to a questionnaire as "agreeableness" and assign it a score, you can do maths with it, just like physics can define the measurement on a thermometer as "temperature" and do maths with that. But there are no thermometers in the social sciences and the maths seem to only be measuring the researchers' intuitions (and of course, their cultural biases). [Edit: don't ask me what a thermometer is actually measuring- but I know that if a thermometer shows the water in the kettle is 100°C then the water is boling. If my agreeableness is 1, what does that do? Does it have a consistent effect? Can I measure the effect? With what? Another questionnaire? So it's questionnaires all the way down? Well, I know for sure that whatever thermometers are measuring- it's not thermometers all the way down.]

It would be a lot more informative to hear what the researchers think, their intuitions and conclusions from their careful observations of human behaviour _without_ any attemt to quantify the unquantifiable. We would learn a lot more about the human mind by listening to the _opinions_ of people who have spent their life studying it if it wasn't for all the maths that (to me anyway) are measuring meade-up quantities. If nothing else, there would be more space left in their papers to explain their intuition.

Obviously, there is an entire literature that measures what it does in terms of life outcomes other than questionnaires.

If you'd like to learn something very elementary about a field you're completely unfamiliar with, you might be better off picking up a textbook, rather than borderline trolling of the "this entire field is nonsense, prove me wrong" variety.

It means you are more likely to answer other questions in a certain way. Other studies might even show that you might be likely to behave in a certain way.

> Does it have a consistent effect?

Yes, but like thermometers only work on groups of molecules, the questionnaires are consistent on groups of humans.

> Can I measure the effect? With what? Another questionnaire? So it's questionnaires all the way down?

No, you could easily do a follow up study by finding groups of people that answered the questionnaires in a certain way, and then have them participate in behavioral experiments.

> Well, I know for sure that whatever thermometers are measuring- it's not thermometers all the way down.

The manner in which molecules bump into eachother randomly. The harder they do it the more space they take up. The more people in your group with an agreability score of 1, the more space they might take up ;)

Opinions are not science, maths is. We don't improve the social sciences with more vague intuitions. If you want to read intuitions then maybe read a glossy instead. Science is about making quantifiable statements, and maths is the way you turn samples into those. We certainly don't need any more room for so-called experts to tell us how we should behave in their papers. We tried that, and it was awful.

That's a very well structured passage, thanks for the comment.

However, what I see is that psychology is trying very hard to make quantifiable statements about things that it can't do quantifiable statements about. Yes, maths can be used to turn observations into quantifiable statements. But just because someone is using maths, it doesn't mean they're turning observations into quantifiable statments. You can use maths to quantify non-existent quantities that you have never observed and the maths themselves won't stop you. I will mention Daryl Bem and his measurements of ESP now, but I don't mean that psychology is like parapsychology, only that you can misuse maths if you're not very, very careful. And just because you have maths it doesn't mean you're being careful.

And I think intuitions and personal expertise with a subject are the basis of scientific knowledge. The maths are there as a common language to communicate the intutions gained in a manner that makes them accessible to others who do not have the same expertise. Maths is the language of science, because it's used to communicate scientific knowledge, not because it's a set of magickal formulae that transform eveything to solid science.

That's what nobody ever addresses in these studies.

Even assuming all this linguistic questionnaire stuff passes for a measure of something (certainly not biology, it really falls apart on indigenous populations), the further mathematics gives the joke away. Factor analysis is done just wrong. Questionnaires are mostly positively correlated and no thought is spared to how Frobenius-Perron theorem produces spurious factors, that also are dimensionally invalid to boot (which, one imagines, is not unwelcome, as scaling the data may give a stronger result). Then the methodology manages to fail confirmatory factor analysis on its own terms anyways. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1007/s11336-006-1447-6 Clustering validation is not even attempted beyond trying different number of clusters (anywhere from 4 to 13 results in fits only marginally worse than 5).

Denunciations of Big Five (and friends) go far and wide decades back. Then there's a flood of reassertions as if nothing happened, and again some refutations of that new wave. Ascent of data science made things comical. One year they do a metastudy with one million respondents, some dude asks some basic questions, the next year they do it with two million as if this answers anything. It is an endless war of attrition and not worth anyone's time.

I cite a large passage from the paper you linked to because it's an excellent example ofthe kind of "misuse of maths" I meant:

Consider, for instance, the personality literature, where people have discovered that executing a PCA of large numbers of personality subtest scores, and selecting components by the usual selection criteria, often returns five principal components. What is the interpretation of these components? They are “biologically based psychological tendencies,” and as such are endowed with causal forces (McCrae et al., 2000, p. 173). This interpretation cannot be justified solely on the basis of a PCA, if only because PCA is a formative model and not a reflective one (Bollen& Lennox, 1991; Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & Van Heerden, 2003). As such, it conceptualizes constructs as causally determined by the observations, rather than the other way around (Edwards& Bagozzi, 2000). In the case of PCA, the causal relation is moreover rather uninteresting; principal component scores are “caused” by their indicators in much the same way that sumscores are “caused” by item scores. Clearly, there is no conceivable way in which the Big Five could cause subtest scores on personality tests (or anything else, for that matter), unless they were in fact not principal components, but belonged to a more interesting species of theoretical entities; for instance, latent variables. Testing the hypothesis that the personality traits in question are causal determinants of personality test scores thus, at a minimum, requires the specification of a reflective latent variable model (Edwards & Bagozzi, 2000). A good example would be a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) model.

Now it turns out that, with respect to the Big Five, CFA gives Big Problems. For instance,McCrae, Zonderman, Costa, Bond, & Paunonen (1996) found that a five factor model is not supported by the data, even though the tests involved in the analysis were specifically designed on the basis of the PCA solution. What does one conclude from this? Well, obviously, because the Big Five exist, but CFA cannot find them, CFA is wrong. “In actual analyses of personality data [...] structures that are known to be reliable [from principal components analyses] showed poor fits when evaluated by CFA techniques. We believe this points to serious problems with CFA itself when used to examine personality structure” (McCrae et al., 1996, p. 563).

If I'm not prying too much- what is your relation with the field?

To cope with that problem, science needs to detach the term from everyday use, and put an artificial definition in its place which allows to make repeatable statements. In its wake, the term loses a lot of its meaning. That is the price for preciseness.

Imagine there was a unit for agreeableness, so you could say 'John has an agreeableness of 4.4 Ag'. Then it would be clear that this statement refers to a formal definition (based on a standardized questionnaire), instead of our common vague understanding.

Now you could still argue that this new definition is so detached from what we usually mean with agreeableness that it becomes useless. However, you can't simply dismiss the method, you need to bring concrete arguments why the proposed definition does not capture what it is supposed to capture. For example, you could show that people with agreeableness below 2 Ag are married happily more often than people with agreeableness above 4 Ag. Do you have such concrete objections?

You have something specifically against psychology research, I haven't seen a single argument from you that could not be applied against any other scientific field. They applied a methodology that you didn't initially understand, and now you're refusing to understand it because you're committed to arguing against it. Weird thing is it's not even a controversial finding, just a confirmation of something everyone knows to be true.

It is different in the sense that particle physics quantifies concepts that are not correlated to how someone feels about them, or how someone answers questions in a questionnaire.

And I don't see how I misunderstood the studies we're discussing. They handed people questionnaires asking them how they think or feel about things. I don't see how any concrete evidence about anything can be found in this way, other than how people fill questionnaires.

But the claim is never "X people fill this questionnaire in this way". It's always along the lines of "X people are more agreeable" etc. This is misleading.

- Is it a valid criticism?

- If so, are the social sciences really sciences at all?

And one philosophical question:

- What happens if an entire field of "research" is dissolved as wholly subjective and not repeatable?

This would be much bigger than the debunking of phrenology or astrology as those don't have university departments, journals, or attempt to set social policy.

It's just proper science, no one was hurt, why get emotional about it? Everybody has the intuition that there's general difference between the psychology in men and women. They developed a methodology that shows and quantifies that phenomenon. That's good and proper science.

That the content is not well doesn't dimish its value. When Volt measured electric charge but didn't get what was happening and even got the direction of charge wrong, that might have been heartbreaking, but it also was world changing that he definitely should not have just not done. Even if he made matters a little bit worse.

Edit: woops, was Franklin, not Volt

1) entirely obvious, and

2) carefully studied and discussed in the field, from the first year of undergraduate study all the way to cutting edge research.

The fact that you bring none of the pertinent terms to bear makes me think that you have not the slightest idea what you are talking about. I mean, I would not claim to have any special expertise in the field, but I’ve heard the terms “operationalise”, or the criteria “objectivity”, “reliability”, “validity”.

> such vague and abstract behaviour descriptions

Maybe these terms are not vague and abstract descriptions, but carefully defined and embedded in a comprehensive theory including measurement apparatus? You can safely assum that every single of the terms you mention has had at least, say, five professors and many more PhD students (and their theses) obsess over that term alone, and define and operationalise and measure and validate and embed in the theoretical edifice.

(Side Note: That was a big problem in the reception of the Damore memo: many people that had so little understanding of the underlying field that they didn’t even know the Big Five, but felt that they were qualified to weigh in, and evidently misinterpreted many things, for example what “neuroticism” means.)

Just to reiterate: the questions you raise are enormously important and difficult and, sure, in parts controversial. What annoys me though is that your comment sounds as if you assume that researchers in the field have not grappled with them, when in fact they have, carefully and comprehensively, for over a century!

If a study found more men among the ambitious and risk takers men may still be more conforming to hierarchy on average. It's not necessarily contradictory.

Replication crisis is a real phenomenon that will likely never go away unless we accept that social sciences will never have the rigor of hard sciences. More often than not it’s wielded as a political tool to support pre-existing biases and positions.

Also it doesn’t help that academia doesn’t reward those who seek to replicate studies which likely hides the magnitude of the problem.

“ According to a 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist's experiment (50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments). In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

The replication crisis afflicts hard science too.

Yet social sciences are particularly affected by this and there is currently no incentive to try to replicate existing studies.

One kind of research bias is p-hacking where you basically mine your data for spurious correlations and only form a theory to explain the correlations once you find them. The problem with that is that, to paraphrase the philosopher, if you look hard enough into the noise, the noise turns up correlations. You can always find a signal if you look hard enough.

(I think this is a better answer- sorry for the multipl edits).

Which actually makes sense. if we are made up of influences from nature and nurture and you remove one of those influences, differences in the other becomes more clear. its not rocket science but somehow people are still surprised by it.

It's not clear that differences in nurture are actually being removed, though. Just because people are free to do what they want regardless of their sex, does not mean that nurture has been removed as a variable. What people want has very much to do with their experiences in life and how people have treated them based on preconceived notions of what they 'should' do.

In more plain terms: from birth, males and females are treated differently and live with different expectations. Teasing the effect of those differences out from the effect of biological differences does not seem possible without unethical controlled experiments that would involve raising a group of children without any influence from adults who already have preconceived notions and expectations of differences between sexes. You'd need computerized parenting that treats all the children the same from birth, without exposure to the culture and history of humanity. That would give us a better understanding of inherent biological differences between the sexes, but it would be horrifically unethical. I don't think we're anywhere close to being capable of doing it technologically, not to mention the technological and sociological challenges involved in having humans create something that could raise human children without any of the human biases we all share.

I'm not saying I don't think there are inherent biological differences in personality between the sexes, I'm saying they're inevitably conflated with non-biological differences, and our science is nowhere near advanced enough to reliably distinguish the true origin of any given difference we can detect.

Scientists around the globe shouldn't fear political attacks due to the current political climate and modern trends, nor should humanitarian scientific publications allow unreasonable gender "studies" to be published, which were shown to be scams.

I stopped taking "The Female Brain" seriously when I read the stuff about how young men think about sex once a minute and young women think about it once every couple of days. Both those numbers are pretty ridiculous :^)

And indeed, none of the papers she cited contain any evidence to support that statement. Source: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003668.h...

In fact, that article presumes that Dr. Brizendine's footnotes provide any source for that particular statement you're concerned about, when in fact it doesn't. Her book is clear in her footnotes to which of her statements they apply, and none are cited to that.

Given that she places this statement among others that ARE cited, it should also be cited.

I wonder how much of the heat in this conversation generally comes from the assumption that group level tendencies are prescriptive to individuals, though in reality individuals can display a high level of variance within the group.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

If one group of humans (sex, race, whatever) were to be _vastly_ more intelligent than the other, then we may well simply not care about the question at all.

Consider animal welfare. We may care about the treatment of animals to some extent, but the idea that a cow should, say, be able to become a computer science major is laughable. It's not even on the radar.

However, even more, if say, not a cow but a crow (a plausibly intelligent creature) was being helped through the steps of learning computer science, I suspect the reaction would be fascination rather than the anger characteristic of racism.

Indeed, the notable thing for me about racist responses is how far they are from a rational response to hypothetical situation of biological variation between types. The core racist position is overall fixated on avoiding race-mixing yet any animal breeder could tell you that a hybridized type is often a stronger individuals than either antecedent. So racist reactions might be a biological responses then but not responses that strengthens humanity but responses from a single selfish but not superior gene.

That seems quite optimistic. One crow would be a curiosity. A million crows would be seen as competition and there would be torches and pitchforks.

Pedantics aside, it still seems quite optimistic that a hypothetical crow graduating in computer science would be fine with being treated like a domesticated animal. Perhaps it is possible, but ethically that would be uncharted waters.

They used to be treated very poorly, sometimes exceedingly poorly. In the modern era they are generally treated with more respect than they were historically, despite almost everybody having lower expectations of them.

As cruel as it seems to us now, if you're struggling to survive and there's no social safety net, infanticide or child abandonment start to become much more attractive options in comparison with being burdened by taking care of a dysfunctional human for the rest of your life.

(around 70 IQ I think, but sources are very much in disagreement on this, claiming it's more around 25-50 [1]. Taking tests on animals is hard)

Last I checked they were all in the "critically endangered" category [2].

[1] https://www.quora.com/Using-human-standards-what-would-be-th...

[2] https://www.iucnredlist.org/

I may be very confused here, but are you saying that there are genetically separated people that have a 35 pt IQ difference? If that is true, I would love to see the source.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligenc...

You can't just compare two samples without controlling for confounding differences.

Science can't even fully explain the Flynn effect, in which industrial nationals have had IQs going up 3 points per decade on average within the country, and people are trying to use IQ to talk about differences between sample populations.

I do agree with you that there are questions regarding to measurement issues and confounding issues. But it is hard to believe all the group differences can be explained away by solving these issues.

Check out the studies in polygenic analysis that's showing how cognitive ability, personality and health rely on common genetic pathways.

There are overwhelming correlations between intelligence and real life measures.

https://dspace.ut.ee/bitstream/handle/10062/47823/strenze_ta...

https://archive.ph/PCvgk

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/11/10/031138

Usually, it's racist elitist assholes who hold IQ up as this important measure, mostly because malnourished people from different cultures who aren't white don't tend to do as well, thus confirming their cherished desire for aryan superiority.

Try surviving in the Australian outback and tell me how stupid aborigines are...

In quite a few countries, young men are falling behind young women in pursuing education (for whatever reason, it might just be that modern educational systems are coincidentally better fit for "female" personalities); a teacher who acknowledges these differences might be better prepared to teach boys and encourage them better, or plan classes in ways that help both groups.

I'm not sold on the benefits purported by this article for talking about the statistical variances between different cohorts for people, but I can see how it's very capable of stoking prejudice in ways that are very harmful. The article makes a vague attempt at balance by noting that individual differences are more important than these statistical variances, but it's easy enough to just leap-frog to this conclusion and just treat each other as human beings.

Why do you need to be 'sold' on scientifically verified knowledge?

> The article makes a vague attempt at balance by noting that individual differences are more important than these statistical variances

This is not an "attempt at balance", because individual variance and group averages are not competing ideas or opposing ideologies that must be balanced against each other.

Nothing wrong with scientific inquiry, but when such facts are placed in context of, say, an internal memo at Google, or, an opinion piece in popular scientific press, it has rhetorical impact. You have to wonder 'to what end' they are hoping for with their exposition.

With the Google memo, did they hope to change hiring strategies? Would this have had any real impact on the operations at Google? Did Damore feel that the hiring strategies at the company were having any tangible negative outcomes... if so, he didn't care to mention that. So why then?

Same with this article. What is the author's concern here? What is really lost when we cease to generalize people's behavior by sex? The article gave no compelling answers.

I think the difference between scientific mindset and political mindset is that the former doesn't ask this question or consider it relevant.

> With the Google memo, did they hope to change hiring strategies? Would this have had any real impact on the operations at Google?

Yes, this was kind of the reason this memo was written - and remember, it was written in response to Google soliciting ideas on the topic.

> Did Damore feel that the hiring strategies at the company were having any tangible negative outcomes... if so, he didn't care to mention that. So why then?

Did you read the memo? It's whole text was arguing that diversity efforts at Google are misguided and harmful, and what should be done instead.

This article is a rhetorical play, for the average person to consider more this point of view. It's arguments to do so were weak at best.

> Did you read the memo? It's whole text was arguing that diversity efforts at Google are misguided and harmful, and what should be done instead.

Did you? Because I don't recall him stating any actual harms, but speculation. No even an anecdote to back his claims.

To be fair, the memo argued that the specific way Google goes about in trying to increase diversity was not going to work, because the underlying assumptions of the cause of the differences was wrong, and proposed specific other ways to increase diversity.

Scientists don’t need to have an end goal in mind to dispel myths or discover new truths. Sometimes they do, and that’s fine, but it’s hardly a requirement. Reducing ignorance is itself A Good Thing.

I agree. Also, the article isn't a scientific paper.

I think you're being quite sanguine here. The two ideas are not perfectly orthogonal, and I've already explained why in other comments. If you were to, for example, use these 'brackets' to inform company policy, or city planning, you'd be only reinforcing the stereotype by increasing the activation energy for people to chose different.

We can live in a pluralistic, cosmopolitan societies, where people are truly judged by the content of their characters and find their way to where they fit best. Our ability to personalize services and institutions to the unique abilities of the individual has been bolstered by modern information technology. Why bother using the blunt tools of prejudice? We've already been down that path. And how can we predict that society, and the brackets, would not shift in the future if given half the chance?

Once again, what's the utility of this kind of thinking? And further to that, what could we be missing out on by reasserting this mode of thinking?

Here:

> First and foremost, I think this requires a recognition that none of the findings I presented in this article, nor any findings that will ever come out-- justifies individual discrimination. We should treat all people as unique individuals first and foremost.

Here:

> I am a strong believer that individual differences are more important than sex differences.

And here, on the topic of male-female classification based on whole brain data:

> In fact, some recent studies using the most sophisticated techniques have consistently found greater than 90% accuracy rates looking at whole brain data. While this level of prediction is definitely not perfect-- and by no means do those findings justify individual stereotyping or discrimination-- that's really high accuracy as far science goes.

Group level analysis is also useful as a backdrop before diving into specifics even when discussing a specific individual and has been shown to have predictive power at every level.

Happy to go with archive.md.

I get that people =/= averages, but I don't want to bet on myself being even MORE of an outlier than the men who achieve what I want to (become a great programmer, found a wildly successful startup...)

Just want to get a sense of whether my reaction is normal. Bonus points if you can tell me how the hell you cope with seeing stuff like this.

>Bonus points if you can tell me how the hell you cope with seeing stuff like this.

I think the solution is simply not to engage with it. The topic is indeed worth discussing, but only when women are given an equal part in the conversation. As you can see by the fact that I'm commenting here though, I've failed to take my own advice...

>but I don't want to bet on myself being even MORE of an outlier than the men who achieve what I want to

FWIW I don't think you need to worry, I've yet to see any evidence that women in tech are any less capable than men. Most of the discussion seems to revolve around men trying to justify why we're underrepresented.

To address your last point, I meant "more of an outlier" in the mathematical sense: if for a given trait that's beneficial to, eg, startup success (like dominance or risk-taking), the distribution is overlapping bell curves with similar SDs but a higher mean for men, then I am by definition less likely to have a high level of that trait. Obviously a simplified model, but the article seems to say it's a valid one.

Part of me says you're right and I shouldn't engage - the other part wants to gather more data to reason about this properly, but worries I'll see stuff that I'll wish I hadn't.

My working guess is that social dynamics in highly individualistic countries tend to be more competitive, while less individualistic countries are more ritualized -- arranged marriage being a prototypical example of collectivist norms. It seems like a more competitive culture (on both friendly and romantic levels) may lead to increased pressure to express gendered traits -- or it may simply lead to higher levels of stress in social situations, which causes unconscious influences to have more effect. But do these hypotheses fit the Russia datum? I'm not sure.

The reason this question is interesting is because natural selection only cares about the big picture (did the individual survive and reproduce or not?), not the fine details (does the individual have empathy, take risks, etc.). So, perhaps males and females are different in many fine details, but evolution has forced us to have the same overall capabilities?

That, in turn, might explain how a man and woman might make different decisions -- as long as both decisions seem likely to lead to survival and reproduction -- even when their capabilities qualify them for either decision equally.

Politically on the left, I encounter hostility when mentioning innate differences as an explanation for anything. (I always thought I leaned left politically...) I now self censor myself and it feels horrible. Everything is just attributed to deep cultural expectations and similar.

Me, I think outcome = nature * nurture. It makes no sense to try to argue which is more important when they are both directly proportional to outcome!

Individuals break "typical" all the time.

If I'm interviewing you for a job, I shouldn't apply "group stereotype" as I'm specifically looking for your individual traits that break the norm. I don't want the "average" from your group--I probably want someone far from it.

So the arrow from individual to aggregate group is generally strong. The reverse arrow from aggregate group to individual, however, has nowhere near the same strength.

Obviously there are nuances here. If the groups are actually job qualifications (hiring a singer based on vocal range, for example), then none of this applies. There are surely plenty of gray areas, too. Gender doesn’t fit cleanly into a pair of groups. Sometimes it might be very hard to measure actual aptitude, and proxies of various quality are needed. College admissions are an example of the latter — you can’t measure how well someone can do, so admissions departments use proxies of varying quality and social acceptability.

As for gender differences, if I’m hiring someone, I believe that it doesn’t matter whether one gender is likely to be more qualified for any reason — if I’m hiring, I have an obligation to consider the applicant as an individual regardless of gender.

Since it's illegal to hire based on the results of an IQ test in the US, we have to come up with other proxies for it. So, we use stereotypes that are associated intelligent individuals as filtering criteria. Gender provides one of those stereotypes - in both directions. Men have traditionally not been considered for jobs like nursing or caretaking. Women have traditionally not been considered for jobs which require physical strength or analytical skills.

But back to your original premise: when you're evaluating hundreds, or thousands, of applications for a single opening, you're going to fall back on stereotypes, because it's too much work to do otherwise. Gap in employment longer than a few months? Skills have expired. Lots of job hopping after 6-18 months? Unreliable. Only has worked for companies known for their physical labor? Not capable of working in an office. A short job history with no college? Not smart enough.

Even though every single one of those is potentially wrong, it's also potentially correct. If you need to weed 100 applications down to 10 for phone interviews in the next hour, can you really afford to give each of the 100 applicants the benefit of the doubt?

EDIT: Removed "intelligence", replaced with "the results of an IQ test", which is what I meant originally. Apologies.

Source? This article says it can be legal. https://www.hiresuccess.com/resources/guide-to-employment-te...

> when you're evaluating hundreds, or thousands, of applications for a single opening, you're going to fall back on stereotypes.

You personally might. But that's not what everyone does, not what the most successful people in recruiting do, and definitely not what I do. Why not use far stronger signals? For example:

1. Do they have the exact skills you are looking for or only some of them? 2. Aside from listing the skills, do they give concrete examples of using those skills? 3. How much experience do they have in their role? 4. Do they have experience in our specific industry? 5. If written communication is part of the job, how well is their resume written?

You can do a quick scan of the above in 10 or 20 seconds.

Thousands of resumes? Scan the first hundred that arrived and skip the rest. For most companies, your job isn't to find the one best person out of thousands of applicants, which would be a huge cost. It's to find someone qualified for the job.

Why use stereotypes when you have much stronger signals already available and it's just as quick to scan for those better signals?

See sibling comment.

> Why not use far stronger signals

These all rely on assumptions that an exhibited trait - a well polished resume that is tailored to the job description - have the non-visible traits sought.

Stereotypes work the same way. They're an assumption of someone's internal traits based on an outward trait, and are typically accurate when applied to groups (much as your resume filtering likely is mostly accurate, with a few outliers).

Stereotypes are just typically considered to be negative.

Stereotypes are actually an extremely poor quality signal when hiring. If you use them, you're doing more work than you need to find a qualified person. Test it out and find out for yourself like I did on the advice of someone who does it for a living.

Where are you getting this from? Mental disability is a protected class but not the same as intelligence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co

TL;DR: It's hard to defend an IQ test against a discrimination lawsuit.

Unless there's an explicit business need to concretely identify someone's IQ, a business is at risk of being called out as using the IQ test to discriminate against some protected group, since that protected group is potentially disadvantaged while taking the IQ test by any one of dozens of (legitimate) reasons.

The court ruled that "the company's employment requirements did not pertain to applicants' ability to perform the job". And it was more specific than that. If such tests disparately impact ethnic minority groups, businesses must demonstrate that such tests are "reasonably related" to the job for which the test is required.

That does not make IQ tests effectively illegal. Demonstrate that anyone with an IQ lower than X cannot perform the job in question, and you're good. The actual "problem" is that other tests are far better at determining if you will do well in a job role. So companies use the better tests. If there were a job for which IQ was highly related to being able to do the job, then companies would surely use IQ as the test for that job.

To give a concrete example, why would I give a programmer an IQ test when I can give them a programming test? I'll take it further: an extremely high IQ is a deficit for many developer roles. Most of the genius programmers I personally know write code no one else can maintain, and are often condescending - usually without even knowing it, which hurts team moral. I love those guys and they often inspire me, but many of them would make bad employees if the job required writing average business programs on a large team. A programming test would reveal that when you see their code is very clever, and also includes an internal compiler so they can write the solution in a high level language they invented... There is good reason my very smartest programming friends are often unemployed. When a genius programmer is called for though, boy do they shine.

So it's not a case of companies avoiding the use of a good test due the law and replacing that good test with less effective proxies, as you first suggested. The real effect of that ruling and the law is that companies use tests that can be proven to demonstrate whether or not you can perform the job. That's better for everyone.

IQ tests might be illegal under some circumstances, but I would point out that they are not a reliable measure of intelligence anyways, making this all a bit of a moot point.

I'm glad I don't have to worry about hiring. Seems like employers are caught in a catch-22.

As the article quotes: "People might be more reasonable than you think"

Or in other words: Citation needed.

Please check out Lee Jussim's work on Stereotype Accuracy[1]. His research shows that not only are stereotypes highly accurate (according to him one of the strongest effects in social psychology), but people only use them when they have no other information available. As soon as they obtain information about the individual in front of them, that information takes precedence over the stereotype.

[1] http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-res...

> To put this number in context, a D= 2.10 means a classification accuracy of 85%. In other words, their data suggests that the probability that a randomly picked individual will be correctly classified as male or female based on knowledge of their global personality profile is 85% (after correcting for the unreliability of the personality tests).

The parent's concern is that, given you know someone is male or female, you will make further assumptions about them based on their group membership rather than their individual traits, something that is not supported by the article.

> I am a strong believer that individual differences are more important than sex differences.

Would you run up to a lion or a tiger in the wild and try to hug and kiss it? I'm guessing you have a stereotype of big cats as dangerous predators, and you'd steer well clear, even though there are countless friendly lions and tigers in captivity that have never hurt anyone.

I don't want to appear too argumentative; it's just not exactly clear what you mean when you write

> .. difference here is strong enough that you can do that

How would you approach someone who doesn't fit the norms - for example a male bodybuilder in drag? Does your brain hiccup for a moment when considering how to greet them? Mine does.

Especially if I work with them or have some influence over their future.

Plenty of people still use average and trends as an excuse to claim a gender (or race) is not as capable at some skill or career. It's not even that hard to find. Probably pretty easy actually in the US states that require creationism to be taught in public school.

> and thus must be silenced

Where did the parent comment say discussing averages must be silenced?

Also, most auto insurance still discriminates against men, especially young unmarried men, and we know for certain that’s not because every actuary with authority at every insurance company is under the impression that the increased risk is applicable to every single member. Likewise for life insurance that asks about age and smoking.

In case it needs to be said, there is a major difference between believing traits are universally applicable (which nobody believes) and believing that because something is true on average, that this is valid justification to discriminate against the whole group.

If someone makes the claim that a given trait is true on average, and therefore discrimination against a group is justified, only then should the discussion focus on that. Otherwise, it’s logically inconsistent, hypocritical, and even a little ironic to suggest or even suspect that individual’s line of inquiry is in any way connected to them suggesting or even suspecting a diminished capability from you (or any other specific person) as an individual.

> Plenty of people still use average and trends as an excuse to claim a gender (or race) is not as capable at some skill or career. It's not even that hard to find.

I’ve never seen this claim being made personally, and I don’t believe it happens with any significant prevalence, at least in the US. I could be wrong of course. I have seen many cases of people claiming that someone said it, only for the truth to come out that they actually did not.

Hah, you can even find this in neighbouring comments in this very thread.

Conversely, people assume that any studies or discussions that even tangentially touch upon this are meant to encourage extrapolation from group to individual (even if they explicitly state the opposite, this is dismissed as lip service).

If you read the article, though, it isn't. The article claims that sex differences are large; it explicitly makes no claim as to what causes them.

"Contrary to what one might expect, for all of these personality effects the sex differences tend to be larger-- not smaller-- in more individualistic, gender-egalitarian countries. "

This finding, which apparently surprised and puzzled everyone, is very difficult to square with the idea that it is the societies/cultures that are creating these effects, because then you would expect the correlation to be the other way around. So not a magnitude difference, but a sign difference. Again, that observation, which has been replicated repeatedly with ever larger sample sizes and larger effect sizes, just isn't compatible with a cultural source.

Let's take a non-gendered example of someone (we'll call them Kris) who loves creating art, but is also capable of being a computer programmer.

If Kris lives in a country where being an artist means being poor and mocked, Kris would be smarter to chose the path of a computer programmer.

However, if Kris lives in a place where an artist can live a good, and perhaps even a great life, and be encouraged while pursuing that path, why would they go into computer programming?

Coming back to the topic at hand, if Kris has the capability of expressing compassion and will not be punished for doing so, why wouldn't Kris do that? A more individualistic and gender-egalitarian country is less likely to punish such expressions of compassion.

- I know more women who knit than men

- I know more men who follow football and basketball than women

- I know more women who write novels than men

- I know more women who enjoy romance novels than men

- I know more men who enjoy horror films than women

- I know more women with an interest in fashion than men

- I know more men who play computer games than women

- I know more women who play cellphone based games than men

EDIT: To underscore how exceptions matter: I know how to knit, but I find it interminably boring. I don't follow football; my mom does. I enjoy romance novels and hate horror films. I'm an oft-maligned cis-het male.

There are likely lots of historical, social, and cultural reasons why knitting happens to be more popular among women than men -- reasons that might go back to our hunter-gatherer days, when the stronger, more physically capable men were the ones going out to hunt while women stayed home and took care of, among other things, the creation of clothing.

I wouldn't describe knitting as a flow state in the same way. I frequently listen to podcasts, watch movies, listen to music, etc, when I knit. Knitting is... I dunno... rhythmic?

Now granted that depends. If I'm working cables or some sort of motif or whatever, it can require a bit of focus. But it's definitely not the same as coding. And if the fabric is simple stockinette or something, I don't even need to look at my hands.

It's also not at all solitary unless you want it to be. Knitting circles are a very common thing and I personally love hanging out with my other friends while we each work on projects.

In short: my guess is your confusion is mainly borne of a misunderstanding of the hobby.

My suggestion? Give it a shot! YouTube has made it easier than ever to learn, and a pair of sticks and a ball of yarn will cost you less than ten bucks. You never know, you might love it!

Creative hobbies do tend to be a bit male-coded or female-coded for various reasons. For some hobbies I suspect that the very single-sexiness of the hobby is part of the appeal — women join knitting circles as an excuse to hang out with other women, men go golfing as a way to hang out with other men.

The data, however, indicate that, at least in sum, culture contributes negatively to differences, that is it makes men and women less different than they would otherwise be.

That apparently was expected by no-one.

Yeah but it's not like one side is claiming it's 100% nature and the other is claiming it's 100% nurture. One side is claiming it's 100% nurture and the other side is claiming it's some mix. The side claiming it's 100% nurture is 100% wrong. But somehow it is verboten to state this publicly or you are shamed.

However, this doesn't say anything about individuals. A group of people might be more likely to have trait X, but it doesn't say that any member of that group has that trait.

The problem is that people are not very good at thinking probabilistically, so emphasizing differences between groups will lead people to make unwarranted assumptions about members of those groups.

That is an often-repeated line but as an absolute statement it is not true. Statistical differences do have predictive power. It's just that they are weak predictors and trumped by concrete information. But you don't always have that information at hand and in that case those heuristics may be better than nothing. The problems arise when people stick to their heuristics (stereotypes) even when better information is available.

> so emphasizing differences between groups will lead people to make unwarranted assumptions about members of those groups.

Yes, that may be a problem. But denying the existence of heuristics and demanding that every single person you ever interact with should be treated as a carefully analyzed individual seems unrealistic.

That's highly unlikely aside from a few genes having to do with appearance. Race is determined by society, and is not a grouping of similar genetic populations. A Kenyan can have far more in common genetically with an Irish person than that Kenyan does with a Pygmy. But according to society, the Kenyan and the Pymgy both belong to the same race and the Irish person is a different race.

If you want to say there are innate differences between different genetic populations, then sure. But genetic populations must be far smaller than anything we would call race to start to see interesting differences. For example, many of the world's best runners come from one Kenyan tribe.[1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/11/01/241895965/...

Sure, and "species" is defined by taxonomists, but it is not based on any formal, rigourous analytical division of intrinsic properties. In both cases, such arbitrary divisions can still serve as useful analytical tools.

Actually it often is. For example one way to determine species is as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring. That's a far more rigorous and biologically based definition than race is. And taxonimists are looking at actual genes now. That is a formal, rigorous, analytical division based on intrinsic properties. So already there it is a poor comparison. Species is far more useful as an analytical tool because it is based in biology.

Scientists (in biology related fields) don't use race anymore as a category because it is an outdated and failed model of ancestry differences in the human population. In fact, race often gets the biology completely wrong. Because society, not science, determines someone's race.

Race is mostly useful to society and so will reflect the various motivations and ideologies of a society. People who choose to continue to use a failed scientific model as a useful analytical tool most often are pushing an ideology, and very often a racist one. The choice to use a failed model over more accurate categorization should always be suspect.

So the comparison to species is a very poor one. Taxonomists are broadly not ideologically motivated in their decisions like society is. And taxonomists continually refine their categorizations based on new scientific information, including genetic information. So species categorizations continue to get more and more accurate and increasingly based in science. That's why species continues to be a useful analytical tool. It is largely based in science and society has no say. Race is the opposite.

That's still rigorous and biologically based. What you've pointed out is a rare exception, where that one methodology breaks. In which case you'd have to analyze the situation in more depth. Which scientists actually do (it's not society doing it), and based on the data (not social pressures), they decide what the species are. The example I gave is one of many factors used to determine species. It's not the only factor and used in isolation, is it? So in the above case, the next step would perhaps be to look at the actual genes involved.

> "Species" is just as much a social construct as race.

Then please provide examples of two organisms that have very little in common genetically but are considered the same species. And where society decided what the species is. Race is exactly that: groups of individuals that have almost nothing in common except for a few genes but society has decided to group them together anyway.

> Let's not pretend that scientists are immune from the prevailing political winds of the day.

Please give examples of species that were categorized due to politics or ideology and where it gets the underlying biology wrong.

> We can't possibly know whether race is a signficant factor until its studied.

It's not studied because it is a disproven and outdated model that is useless to biologists compared to the far better tools we have today. We can look directly at people's genes. Why would you group people using far less accuracy when you want to study heritibility of traits? That doesn't make any sense. Why wouldn't you look at what genes people have and group them according to their genes? That's what will give meaningful results and that is why scientists choose to group based on biology rather than grouping based on what society decides. Grouping based on what society decides what race you are is close to useless for biology.

And the next step after finding a correlation with race is also to figure out why it holds.

> Then please provide examples of two organisms that have very little in common genetically but are considered the same species.

That's irrelevant. The point is you are assigning meaning to genetic similarity, just like people concerned with studying race are assigning meaning to racial classifications (wherever they come from). You are prioritizing one set of properties over another and simply declaring that these are more important, or "real", or "natural" when this simply isn't the case.

If species were truly a natural kind there would be no exceptions like the one I pointed out. If we're not studying a natural kind, then any distinctions we wish to make are arbitrary. Like I said, they may be more useful, or precise, but they're still arbitrary.

> Please give examples of species that were categorized due to politics or ideology and where it gets the underlying biology wrong.

So you're claiming, "an example of this specific political influence doesn't exist in the sciences, therefore political influence doesn't exist in the sciences". Is that your argument?

> Why would you group people using far less accuracy when you want to study heritibility of traits? That doesn't make any sense.

And yet, plenty of correlations have been found. Making sense of these is exactly why racial studies should be allowed. Finding surprising associations and figuring out why they exist is exactly what science is supposed to do.

No one is studying genetics and heritibility of traits using race. It's an outdated model that is broken. We look directly at genes now.

> That's irrelevant.

It's not. You claimed species is a social construct. And then can't provide any categories constructed by society.

> you are assigning meaning to genetic similarity

The only meaning I'm assigning is that we have proven cause and effect with genes and traits. It's simply how things really work. We know that genes result in traits. We can point out the exact genes that make someone tall in a specific genetic population. <-- That's important.

Now let's reverse that to contrast it with a social construct. A social construct would be calling all tall people a grouping. The tall race. And that's scientifically wrong. Because we already know that the genes for being tall in one genetic population can be different from the genes for being tall in another genetic population. The tall people grouping was a good first attempt. But it's a broken model once you have better tools and can look at reality and true cause and effect. Now we can correctly group people: tall people with the X set of genes - common in Norway. And tall people with the Y set of genes - common in central China. Why would you go back to the broken model of saying all tall people should be grouped together as one race when you can see that the cause for tallness is unrelated between the groups? That wouldn't make any sense to insist on a grouping that does not reflect reality.

> If species were truly a natural kind there would be no exceptions.

There are exceptions to which methodologies can help us identify species. The methodology is still based in biology, even if there are exceptions. The methodology does not involve society deciding what is and is not a species. Just because a scientific methodology has exceptions to when it is useful does not prove that it is not rigorous or not based in biology.

> So you're claiming, "an example of this specific political influence doesn't exist in the sciences, therefore political influence doesn't exist in the sciences". Is that your argument?

No that's not my argument. My argument is that you can't show where politics and ideology have resulted in miscategorization of species. Because species, unlike race, is not a social construct and society has no or little influence over how scientists categorize species.

With race it's the opposite. You could come up with a massive list of where someone's race has been decided due to politics, ideology, and power dynamics, and where the underlying biology was never considered for even a second.

You cannot show the same for species. People who categorize species are very interested in the biology and will fix a wrong categorization given better information.

> And yet, plenty of correlations have been found.

So what? Correlation is not causation. That's a fundamental basis of science. We know what causes certain traits in humans. We can look directly at the genes. It's not that "racial studies should be allowed". What you seem to be missing is that we are actually studying genetic populations, genes, and what causes certain traits. We are just using a far better and more accurate model than race. The better model can prove causation. Race can't. Why would you use the broken model for science when you have a better one? Scientists don't use race not because they aren't allowed. They don't use race because it's a wildly inaccurate grouping that was decided by society. Society continues to use it because it is useful to society. Often in bad ways, but still useful.

Who's disputing this? Certainly that doesn't contradict any claim I've made.

> And then can't provide any categories constructed by society.

All of them are constructed by the society of scientists, who are also members of a larger society. That was the whole purpose of pointing out that classification of "species" is arbitrary.

Yes, biologists are interested in biological justifications for classifying species, but again no such classification process is complete because species does not form a natural kind. Frankly, all of your arguments on this amount to a red herring because I've never disputed any of what you're saying, besides the fact that classification of anything beyond the fundamental ontology defined by physics is arbitrary. The point of contrasting these two was never to say that race was equally arbitrary in biology, but that all such classifications beyond the fundamentals are arbitrary, period, and so the common argument of dismissing "race" as socially constructed and arbitrary is not an argument against its use. It would only be an argument against its use in some domains in which there are better metrics, all else being equal.

> The methodology does not involve society deciding what is and is not a species. Just because a scientific methodology has exceptions to when it is useful does not prove that it is not rigorous or not based in biology.

"Based in biology" is itself an arbitrary metric to which you're ascribing meaning. It's useful and more precise for biological purposes, but that's entirely besides the point, because 'biological purposes' is itself arbitrary. What distinguishes it from chemistry or physics? Don't you see that these are all merely useful but fairly arbitrary classifications of varying coarseness, each of which carries their own utility in a strictly limited domain?

Studying causal influence of genes is conceptually no different than asking people to classify their own race and measuring their responses to various life experiences of racism, or even correlating race and IQ. These are all metrics of varying precision, predictive power and cost. I'm concerned with the scientific process as a whole, not biology specifically, so I believe you misinterpreted the point I was making.

> So what? Correlation is not causation.

Sure, and I never claimed otherwise. Race is a far less precise and less useful classification than genetic populations for biological purposes. These aren't our only purposes in the pursuit of truth.

My purpose in pointing out the arbitrariness of species as a class is that we should not be trying to stymie scientific exploration for political motives. Contra your claim, some scientists do have an interest in studying race (though certainly biologists have less interest), and the reasons could very well be have scientific merit, but that's irrelevant in today's political climate. Research whose data counters the prevailing narratives of the day are harshly criticized, and its scientists sometimes even punished.

Does anyone really think that when people say things like men are stronger than women, they believe that literally every single man is stronger than every single woman?

I think it's much more common that someone will say "of course there are some women who are stronger than most men" then go back to tending to, for example, hire men over women for a job requiring the ability to lift 60 lbs, without bothering to strength-test female applicants.

If we are going with anecdotal data, then here's mine: I've almost never heard anyone say it's 100% nurture.

I have heard people claim something close to 100% nature though. Just as one example, the pretty common "boys will be boys" excuse. As in they just can't help themselves because it's in their nature, right?

See (in French, sorry): http://www.slate.fr/story/155300/patriarcat-steak-existe-pas

This ideology is absolutely dominant nowadays in social "science" around the world.

> countless newspapers

You can count newspapers. How many was it? How many of them are from "one side"? How wide is their readership? That's data. You are still in the world of anecdote.

That's why you need data and numbers to prove your point instead of one anecdotal data point. One example is close to useless, and a widespread news story is not evidence of what people believe.

That would be a claim of gene-culture coevolution. Not really "100% nurture" in the generally-understood sense.

For example, upon observing that more women than men tend to take up nursing. Do we conclude that there is a gender bias in healthcare recruitment and a distorted soceital expetation of gender roles, or can it be explained as a consequence of the aggregate personality bias between the sexes resulting in more women choosing that career. The personality science comes in to play when trying to answer that question.

Why do you think nature is completely irrelevant?

What does this have to do with hiring? When did anyone claim choosing one sex over another based on natural sex-based group differences? Of course hiring should be fair and equal opportunity, there's no disagreement there. However if you accept that then you must also agree that both sexes are interchangeable for most jobs and so there's no such thing as a sex imbalance either since anyone can do the job.

"Both sexes are interchangeable for most jobs" doesn't imply "there's no such thing as a sex imbalance" if people have historically believed both sexes aren't interchangeable for most jobs and workforce gender distribution reflects that history.

It's quite disturbing to me.

There's a lot of things that you can't do anything about. I didn't grow up to a rich family and that prevented me from doing a lot of things rich people got to do, for example.

I agree that it can be disturbing that traits that you have no control over make you different from others, but its normal and just part of life. Certainly nothing to lose sleep over.

There are people with unusual levels of willpower. I am one of them and I know others. It is what it is.

You can learn new information, and you can adjust your behavior or habits based on that.

The new things you learn wouldn't have been inside your DNA/genes.

Regarding learning new information, surely the type of info you’re susceptible to, and how to act upon these, isn’t all of your choosing.

I also remember as a child noticing how adults behaved, and particularly how they treated children, or even other adults, and made a conscious effort to develop the positive behaviours I admired and avoid ones I saw as negative. This has been particularly important in bringing up my own children.

Of course the capacity to change may well be something that varies from person to person, I’m sure it does, but I also believe we all have every human capacity to some extent.

The difficulty lies in not succumbing to fatalistic complacency.

Accepting that one simply is of a heavy physique and not needlessly starving oneself sounds healthy to me. There are plenty of activities for which a heavy frame is desirable. On the other hand, giving up in the face of ones perceived insurmountable genetic makeup serves nothing.

The point is, we not only have data of sex differences, we do have an explanation for why those differences exist.

There is comprehensive book about this: Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences https://www.amazon.com/Male-Female-Evolution-Differences-Sec...

I think it makes a lot of sense. Of course there are differences between men and women. This has been used to deny women entrance to universities, to take out loans, to own property, vote, participate in politics, make laws, start companies, become scientists and doctors, run marathons, and make many substantial decisions about their lives. If these differences weren't historically used as justification to deny people the ability to have control over their lives, then yes it would be easier to talk about them. Given the reality of how "focusing on differences" turns out for certain groups, it makes sense why people push for a more complete conversation than just Male != Female.

I have never spoken to a single person who flat out denies that biological differences and preferences exist between men and women. I think it is largely an uncharitable summary of the view that "Men and women aren't as different as society imposes through socialization." I don't think that most feminists claim that men and women have no differences. I also don't think it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that men and women are different and may have different preferences, as long as it is not used in the context to dismiss valid concerns about how women and men are treated socially, politically, and economically.

They didn't push for a more complete conversation. Allowing a thorough examination of the question means giving the sexists a chance to prove themselves correct and that would do nothing but reinforce the sexism. Better to impose a "truth" and persecute those who dare to question it.

Paul Graham wrote about this in 2004:

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

> In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not.

> "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been.

> Take a label—"sexist", for example—and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?

Feminism has nothing to do with the truth and everything to do with politics and power. They are making purposeful moves that advance the interests of women. The pursuit of truth in these matters is secondary at best. It is most likely a hindrance. What happens if they are right?

> I have never spoken to a single person who flat out denies that biological differences and preferences exist between men and women.

I haven't either. I have read their words and seen what they do to those who disagree.

Focusing on the most radical voices and generalizing broadly about feminism doesn't make you a "defender of the truth". In any movement you can find people with extreme opinions and then use that to discredit an entire group. There are many examples where feminism has made a positive impact without "denying the truth".

One area where feminism has pushed for a more complete conversation is in sports. Women like to participate in sports. Until laws were passed that insisted women have an equal right to participate in sports, the argument was, "why fund women's sports when they're not interested?" Women are interested. It took time to get funding, organize teams, get access to facilities, develop the training schedules that are different for women's bodies. It has taken many years. On average, 45.7 percent of American marathon participants are now women. In the 1970's they were banned from even participating. So it's taken about 50 years to get from 0% to nearing parity. This was made possible without denying that men and women have different physical abilities.

In fact, in some sports like boxing where physical mass matters a lot there are even categories within men's boxing: flyweight, featherweight, heavyweight. Manny Pacquiao is arguably one of the most famous boxers today. He primarily competes in the lower weight classes. He is a national hero. Nobody mocks his sport, denies him the ability to participate, or says that he is a poor athlete because he doesn't compete in the heavyweight category. Women athletes want the respect and opportunity to compete within their category, make money, develop a fan base, be broadcast on TV, have watch parties, etc. Manny Pacquiao is not a "truth denier" for not competing in heavyweight boxing where he would lose. The feminists who want female athletes to be respected for their talents are also not "truth deniers".

In the intellectual realm, for a large part of history women have not had the same access to education as men. Now that women do have access, over half of the students at universities are women. It's true that men and women cluster in different majors. Major preferences for both men and women have changed a lot over time with different economic opportunities, hiring trends, what people's friends or parents did, what people see on TV, and what career counselors recommend. How many archaeologists were inspired by Indiana Jones? Is there some biological component to these choices? Maybe? I don't know. There are a lot of factors that go into people's life choices. The problem isn't studying whether this is true or not, but in using this information to dismiss concerns about unequal opportunity to prove oneself and deny opportunities to groups of people because of their biology when it is one of many factors that drive people's choices.

I agree with this. I don't deny the benefits of feminism to women and society in general. I don't deny the historical oppression of women. I do claim that the methods they used to achieve their egalitarian ends were not always clean. This is one example.

> In any movement you can find people with extreme opinions and then use that to discredit an entire group.

Yes. Radicals are so toxic they've been weaponized: having agents infiltrate and radicalize a movement is an excellent way to get it discredited. Union busters have done this. Leaders need to be aware of this move and prevent radical elements from having any influence.

You say people shouldn't discredit the entire movement. Well, I didn't see the other members protest against the vocal minority that openly and directly attacks others on social media. Were they okay with it? Who knows. To the people watching the events unfold, it sure looks like they're okay with it.

Creating change is always hard, especially larges changes affecting large groups of people. Historically, radicals often have lead change. Sometimes you do have to get in someone's face to help them understand why things should change, and IMO radicals deserve some credit for having the courage to fight unpopular battles, even if their extreme views do not represent the majority of their constituents.

I do think it's a shame that most of the debating we see these days seems to be between radicals on opposite ends of the debate. In previous times, when news was more about journalism than about profit and political influence, I think the news helped put things into context and give more balanced, objective presentations of debates and issues. Now, the news itself has become radicalized and instead of helping our society grapple with these complex issues, the news companies just want to keep things as polarized and confrontational as possible. It's not just the news of course: nearly all of politics has become radical, even though my guess is that most people are in the middle.

Isn't the problem here the "deny" part, and not the justification given? That is, had the prevailing attitude been that men and women are exactly the same and therefore they must do exactly the same (backbreaking) work, wouldn't that have been just as bad? Or even worse?

So how about we get rid of the "deny" part and just let people do what they individually want? Then we don't have to suppress scientific truths.

And letting individuals do whatever they want is what western societies have been getting better and better at, partly because of economic prosperity, partly through political, cultural and social liberalisation.

And as Western societies have gotten better at letting people do what they want, men and women have diverged.

> people push for a more complete conversation than just Male != Female

That's not what's happening, because nobody keeps it at "just Male ≠ Female". In fact, the opposite is happening, "more complete" conversations are verboten. The current narrative is that any differences that manifest themselves must be due to oppression, and if you try to have a "more complete" conversation about this topic (yes, like James Damore did), then you are a misogynistic troglodyte and must be removed.

> "Men and women aren't as different as society imposes through socialization."

Interestingly, it is that view (the "society imposes differences" one) that is contradicted by the evidence. That is: socialisation appears to make men and women more similar, not more different. Society imposes convergence, not divergence.

Well, the problem is the deny part. That's why in the context of race we say being race blind isn't helpful. You have to be race conscious, and the same goes for religion, orientation, gender, and sex.

Generally, the core problem is we deny people things and remove their agency based on this stuff. It's fine to acknowledge and even celebrate differences. But when it starts to cause serious problems like the incarceration crisis or the equal pay crisis, then we need to look at systemic biases (because we should've been on the lookout for them the entire time).