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iannis

iannis

Musty Nester
31,351
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Arbitrary_sl said:
Mist's really just a good ol' Catholic girl at heart. We are different than the animals because God made us different.
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No, we're different from the animals because we eat them. Specifically we're better.

Sharks, Tigers, Bears, Wolves. All the other apex predators... they get a lot of respect. BUT WE WILL EAT THE FUCK OUT OF THEM TOO.

Dolphins? Not so much.
 
Lejina

Lejina

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
<Bronze Donator>
4,670
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Mist_sl said:
I think that evolutionary forces in the natural world created lasting, self-reinforcing social structures that caused a mostly beneficial social separation of gender roles.
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Society does it part and then it's self-reinforced and driven by biology. Behaviors have a conscious level where we are in control and use learned experiences to take our decisions, but there's a strong influence that is instinctual and some of your actions are driven by those instincts. It may or may not be conscious and often when it is conscious you will rationalize them after the fact. Still, if a behavior is reinforced by society, eventually it's selected in the biology of the population and next thing you know you have females that have an instinct for nurture and males for breaking and fixing things.

Pickup artistry and interrogation techniques to name two are based around those things. Those two apply in situations where you think your higher brain is in control, but the techniques used push the instinctual buttons that everyone have in order to get the desired reaction.


As for an example of complex behavior driven by instinct: beavers build dams. Even orphans that never saw a dam in their life will pick the right spot with the right current, find the proper trees and branches and build their hut at the right spot. That's quite an involved process and it dwarf bird nests in complexity.

There's obviously not an electrical engineer gene, but complex behaviors can definitely passed down with the DNA, it's a lot more than the me hungry or me horny instincts.
 
mkopec

mkopec

<Gold Donor>
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If Mist ever had children she would see this as clear as day, because roles and certain traits are defined way before society has any role in shaping or molding.
 
Big Phoenix

Big Phoenix

Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
<Gold Donor>
46,370
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Iannis_sl said:
Very rarely babies are born with an innie an an outie. In those cases a gender does have to actually be decided and assigned. And that would be the proper way to define gender dysphoria. Gender, as a concept, is more than what's between your legs. Or it has grown to be.

Overall that's fine. Its even useful. But yeah, it's real easy to take that shit too far. There are types of people that will glom on.

If you told 500 people who don't eat grasshoppers that eating grasshoppers was a sign of a serious, but treatable, mental illness and that no one should be ashamed to eat grasshoppers then at least 1 or 2 of them would start eating grasshoppers just because you said it. And you've just managed to invent the hungry-for-grasshoppers disease.

No idea if any of that applies to this particular person.
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Yeah thats why I said 99.9%. I can understand a very small select few of babies born have some type of medical condition which creates ambiguity. Bradley Manning was not that .1%.
If Mist ever had children she would see this as clear as day, because roles and certain traits are defined way before society has any role in shaping or molding.
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Bullshit 8 month pregnant women can do just as physically demanding jobs/activities in harsh climates/weather as any man! You cisgender fuck HOW DARE YOU TYPE EVERYONE.
 
Mist

Mist

REEEEeyore
<Gold Donor>
31,192
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mkopec_sl said:
If Mist ever had children she would see this as clear as day, because roles and certain traits are defined way before society has any role in shaping or molding.
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I'll take 100-year-old Invalidated Arguments for 800, Alex.
 
Mist

Mist

REEEEeyore
<Gold Donor>
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Arbitrary_sl said:
Mist's really just a good ol' Catholic girl at heart. We are different than the animals because God made us different.
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Yeah the extra 80 billion or so neurons made us quite a bit different. But the real difference is that we developed language and it massively changed how our brains evolved after that. Language doesn't just allow us to communicate with other people, it also gives us the ability to have internal speech, to arrange ideas in sequences within our own minds better than we could before language, to create internal narratives which can themselves be self-reinforcing and influence the development of our brains.

Self-awareness + language is a powerful force for shaping our brain into a very different kind of machine than what animals possess.
 
khalid

khalid

Unelected Mod
14,071
6,775
I mean, I get why Mist wants the nature vs nuture percentages to be 1%/99%. The idea of a sex, race or nationality preferring something or being on average better because of "nature" has been used to justify racism, sexism, colonialism, etc. Hell, Mist even keeps bringing it up herself, when we say that on average someone might prefer something, and she tries to bring it back to what they are "good" at or imply this is saying that women can't be engineers.

However, I like to think we can have good science and not be sexist or racist. We don't have to try and forget about evolution, simply because it was used in the past to promote racism. I think it is pretty clear that on average women prefer some things over things like mathematics. However, there are some women that really love it and are good at it. I am certainly sensitive to how these behaviors can be used to try and drive women away from the sciences though. My mother had a bunch of stories about how she was told to go into nursing and shit while she was interested in computer science and was essentially laughed at (even by relatives!) when saying she wanted to get a PhD in it. However, we can't do good science if we are unwilling to do studies (or simply dismiss ones) simply because they conflict with what we think is "good" or "right".
 
fanaskin

fanaskin

Well known agitator
<Silver Donator>
55,940
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Mist_sl said:
Yeah the extra 80 billion or so neurons made us quite a bit different. But the real difference is that we developed language and it massively changed how our brains evolved after that. Language doesn't just allow us to communicate with other people, it also gives us the ability to have internal speech, to arrange ideas in sequences within our own minds better than we could before language, to create internal narratives which can themselves be self-reinforcing and influence the development of our brains.

Self-awareness + language is a powerful force for shaping our brain into a very different kind of machine than what animals possess.
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even with this being true and I agree in principle that humans are born earlier in gestation than other animals, our brains have more plasticity and our capacity for learned behavior makes people essentially moldable, this doesn't preclude that given the same environments underlying structural differences would lead to different attitudes between sexes.

You seem to have a pre conceived notion of what you want the answer to be, because it's part of a political agenda, seems to be part of the problem with your viewpoint.
 
Mist

Mist

REEEEeyore
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khalid_sl said:
I mean, I get why Mist wants the nature vs nuture percentages to be 1%/99%. The idea of a sex, race or nationality preferring something or being on average better because of "nature" has been used to justify racism, sexism, colonialism, etc. Hell, Mist even keeps bringing it up herself, when we say that on average someone might prefer something, and she tries to bring it back to what they are "good" at or imply this is saying that women can't be engineers.

However, I like to think we can have good science and not be sexist or racist. We don't have to try and forget about evolution, simply because it was used in the past to promote racism. I think it is pretty clear that on average women prefer some things over things like mathematics. However, there are some women that really love it and are good at it. I am certainly sensitive to how these behaviors can be used to try and drive women away from the sciences though. My mother had a bunch of stories about how she was told to go into nursing and shit while she was interested in computer science and was essentially laughed at (even by relatives!) when saying she wanted to get a PhD in it. However, we can't do good science if we are unwilling to do studies (or simply dismiss ones) simply because they conflict with what we think is "good" or "right".
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But we'vedone the science, and the biological forces at work are tiny and the social forces at work are absolutely MASSIVE. It's not 1%/99%, its probably more like 20%/80%.

But let's go down this rabbit hole. What if we had good, solid scientific evidence that says that the overwhelming majority of black people are, biologically and neurologically speaking, good for nothing but being slaves? (People actually believed this.)

Just because the science supports this, does that suddenly make slavery a good idea? No, it doesn't, because human beings are different from animals. We have the capacity to self-examine, we have the capacity to examine our societies, and we have the capacity to change both ourselves and our societies. We've evolved as a species far faster than biological evolutionary forces would normally allow animals to evolve specifically because our brain has given us the ability tooverride our biology.You can call this a moral argument if you want to.

My other argument against sweeping generalizations about gender or race or whatever is a purely pragmatic one. Any statistical generalizations about an entire gender having some number of percentage point greater/lesser propensity for A vs B does not take into account the uniqueness of a given individual's ability, and it's the contributions of unique individuals that propel the species forward. We have countless historical examples of important works or ideas being suppressed or dismissed because of someone's race, sex or class.

No, we're not all created exactly equal, but when we treat each other as such, society works a whole lot better.
 
Jive Turkey

Jive Turkey

Karen
6,720
9,081
Mist;765561 said:
Just because the science supports this, does that suddenly make slavery a good idea?
No. And we're able to override that, as you say. Yet the fact that it makes you uncomfortable does not make it any less true. Biology and reality are not obliged to make you feel warm and fuzzy
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