Butthurt white guys, an Asian virgin and an angry lesbian walk into a bar...

Mist

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And you're a lesbian who was likely exposed to higher than normal fetal androgen levels. Interesting

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If we're going to start getting personal, technically I've made out with a bunch of girls who were mostly straight/bi and had a lot of bad experiences with men. I'm completely uninterested in having actual sex with anyone (would have made an exception for Olivia Wilde but now she's not aging well.) And I doubt I had a lot of androgen exposure during early childhood development given that I was raised without any males in the home until I hit school age, and my mom was extremely isolated for the entirety of her pregnancy, because my bio-dad dropped her like a hot potato when he found out she was pregnant, because she had a horribly complicated miscarriage the first time they tried to have a baby. It's possible that the miscarriage somehow fucked up my fetal hormonal levels, but it was years prior and the miscarriage was another girl so I dunno.
 

Mist

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First you said there were no differences in the structure of the brain between men and women.
I never ever said that. This is the first thing I said:
The problem is that once you start going down the rabbit hole towards that type of primitivism, you put everything in modern society up for grabs. Soon you're questioning why did we get rid of slavery, I mean, it worked so well for so long...

We *know*, on an intellectual level, that not everyone is actually equal. We also know on an intellectual level that societies that treat everyone as basically equal, even though we know they're not, work a whole lot better and progress a whole lot faster than the ones that don't, and certainly better than all the ones that didn't, historically.

Specifically on the point of the first part of the documentary, professions have stayed relatively gender specific largely because of mentorship. Men frequently don't stay in fields where they don't see a lot of male mentors early on in college, and females don't stay in fields where they don't find female mentors.
There are of course gender-specific structural differences in the brain, and I never said there weren't. But there's also compensatory structures within the brain designed specifically to counteract those structural differences in the brain, and also to override lower brain functions (a small consolation prize to Freudian id-ego-superego theory.) The resulting differences aren't completely a wash, but they still pale in comparison to the external forces of socialized gender roles.

Cad's point was that those socialized gender roles evolved because of biology, to which I didn't disagree, but stated that then we're talking about social evolution and not biological evolution. I did say that just because the science supports a specific role for a given class of persons, doesn't mean it's morally right to try and coerce all members of that class into those roles. I then brought up the hypothetical example of "what if science said black people were only good for being slaves."

I was never trying to prove a specific scientific hypothesis, merely present a counter hypothesis that fit the documentary's supposed evidence, and also evidence that for every correlational study that supposedly points towards biological links to human behaviors, there's more, better information (decades worth) that points more strongly towards the impact of society and other external conditioning on human behaviors.

My main point is that humans continue to evolve and society continues to evolve. By sticking to agrarian-age social roles that were themselves based on pre-agrarian primate biology, it's possibly we're limiting the potential of both our continued social evolution and our biological evolution.
 

Jive Turkey

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I mean, even if we pick apart her attempt to shoe horn the homosexuality question into her hypothesis, we still end up with a biological cause. The fact that a biological "misfiring" to cause someone to mirror the wrong sex implies that it's a biological mechanism that causes people to mirror the right sex. So even if mirroring had any validity whatsoever, the mirroring itself would be predicated on biological terms, not societal.
 

Cad

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There are of course gender-specific structural differences in the brain, and I never said there weren't.

Cad's point was that those socialized gender roles evolved because of biology, to which I didn't disagree,

I was never trying to prove a specific scientific hypothesis,

My main point is that humans continue to evolve and society continues to evolve.
Cad_sl said:
Things Tanoomba and Mist have in common:

#1 Post absolutist bullshit that is clearly wrong: check
#2 Cherry pick replies to only address points made by idiots: check
#3 Express point very poorly and continually change it so that people don't even really know what the fuck you're talking about: check
#4 Claim to be winning the argument the entire time: check
#5 Wait until you are totally cornered and then change argument to match what everyone is saying and is clearly different than what you started with: check
#6 Claim this as some kind of victory: check
#7 Act exasperated afterwards that people would disagree with you even though they finally agreed even though nobody agreed with you: check
ALERT ALERT ZONE 5 HAS BEEN BREACHED
 

Mist

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I mean, even if we pick apart her attempt to shoe horn the homosexuality question into her hypothesis, we still end up with a biological cause. The fact that a biological "misfiring" to cause someone to mirror the wrong sex implies that it's a biological mechanism that causes people to mirror the right sex. So even if mirroring had any validity whatsoever, the mirroring itself would be predicated on biological terms, not societal.
You're arguing the wrong point again. I specifically said that humans have a powerful biological urge to model same-gender behaviors. But that doesn't make the behaviors themselves biological. As I said before, if you raise a boy in an environment where all the men are prancing around in pink tutus, that's what the boy is going to want to do. If you want to get into anecdotes, we see this all the time, where limp-dicked pussies raise their kids to be limp-dicked pussies.
 

Jive Turkey

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If we're going to start getting personal, technically I've made out with a bunch of girls who were mostly straight/bi and had a lot of bad experiences with men. I'm completely uninterested in having actual sex with anyone (would have made an exception for Olivia Wilde but now she's not aging well.) And I doubt I had a lot of androgen exposure during early childhood development given that I was raised without any males in the home until I hit school age, and my mom was extremely isolated for the entirety of her pregnancy, because my bio-dad dropped her like a hot potato when he found out she was pregnant, because she had a horribly complicated miscarriage the first time they tried to have a baby. It's possible that the miscarriage somehow fucked up my fetal hormonal levels, but it was years prior and the miscarriage was another girl so I dunno.
First off, mentioning someone is a lesbian is not getting personal. It's just factual. I mentioned before that I work in photography and occasionally the fashion industry. There are normally more gay people on set than there are straight people. The social circles I run in are highly diverse and I've got a ton of friends who just happen to be gay (I hope you can see that as being a different than "hey! I'm not homophobic. Some of my best friends are gay". But literally one of my best friends IS gay and tells me all the time how he wants to bang me (mostly in jest... I think). The softball team I play on happens to have a big percentage of gay guys). I was merely making a point that, being a lesbian/bisexual/whatever, it would make perfect sense that, given a biological mechanism related to fetal testosterone levels, you'd have some innate talent for what most might see as "male" mental traits. It's not a bad thing. It's just a thing. It's not early childhood androgen levels we're talking about, it's fetal. So whatever social issues there were, they wouldn't have affected you just yet.
Anyway, I honestly wasn't getting mean and personal with you, so I hope you can see that. It's not my style. Despite the more than occasional "no, you're a retard" between some of the people here, I'm sure you're all fine people in real life. Discussions can get heated sometimes and that's okay. I'm willing to take as good as I give
 

Mist

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It's still personal when you bring specific personal traits into a scientific argument. I didn't say it was mean or unfair, I just meant it wasn't scientific.
 

Jive Turkey

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You're arguing the wrong point again. I specifically said that humans have a powerful biological urge to model same-gender behaviors. But that doesn't make the behaviors themselves biological. As I said before, if you raise a boy in an environment where all the men are prancing around in pink tutus, that's what the boy is going to want to do. If you want to get into anecdotes, we see this all the time, where limp-dicked pussies raise their kids to be limp-dicked pussies.
I was responding to what I felt was a weak argument with a "well even if that were true" scenario. I may have been reaching a bit, but I don't think it supports your argument still.

And limp dicked pussies raising limp dicked pussies could just as easily be genetic. Just sayin'
 

Jive Turkey

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It's still personal when you bring specific personal traits into a scientific argument. I didn't say it was mean or unfair, I just meant it wasn't scientific.
You're the one who mentioned your adeptness for a male trait. It was fair game after that. But regardless, the point stands.
 

Quaid

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It's still personal when you bring specific personal traits into a scientific argument. I didn't say it was mean or unfair, I just meant it wasn't scientific.
You brought your personal shit into this discussion. Not Jive.
 

Mist

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But why do we find it pleasurable? Why does pleasure exist?
This line of argument doesn't have anything to do with gender differences in occupational choices.

Absolutely no one is saying that humans don't have any biologically driven behaviors. No one ever made that argument. It's that no one has ever shown how relatively small gender differences in biologically driven behaviors can have such an extreme impact on occupational choices without some large multiplying factor (society.) Nor how those biologically driven behaviors influence occupations that involve only forebrain functions.

For instance, computer programming doesn't actually require spatial relations ability. It requires abstract logical/mathematical thinking, and no studies have ever shown that boys are better at math than girls independent of culture. In some societies, the girls are better at math, and in many, there's no difference. In America, girls get better grades in math but boys do better on individual standardized tests.
 

Quaid

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This line of argument doesn't have anything to do with gender differences in occupational choices.

Absolutely no one is saying that humans don't have any biologically driven behaviors. No one ever made that argument. It's that no one has ever shown how relatively small gender differences in biologically driven behaviors can have such an extreme impact on occupational choices without some large multiplying factor (society.) Nor how those biologically driven behaviors influence occupations that involve only forebrain functions.

For instance, computer programming doesn't actually require spatial relations ability. It requires abstract logical/mathematical thinking, and no studies have ever shown that boys are better at math than girls independent of culture. In some societies, the girls are better at math, and in many, there's no difference. In America, girls get better grades in math but boys do better on individual standardized tests.
Pretty sure the only societies where women perform better in mathematics are non-western/third world. In countries with good educational systems men almost always occupy the highest echelon of mathematics performance. I'm pretty sure I read this anyway. I'll try to find the source.

Edit: either I read some outlier study, or I'm remembering incorrectly. Whoops.
 

Jive Turkey

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For instance, computer programming doesn't actually require spatial relations ability. It requires abstract logical/mathematical thinking, and no studies have ever shown that boys are better at math than girls independent of culture. In some societies, the girls are better at math, and in many, there's no difference. In America, girls get better grades in math but boys do better on individual standardized tests.
And I brought up the point that it might not be the actual aptitude required for that position in particular that is important to the gender divide, but rather, the pre requisite interest in computers/videogames/etc that could be the thing highly favouring males. And you dismissed it with a 3 year old iphone game girls like to play
 

Tanoomba

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This is such a blood bath, I have no idea how either of them can be genuinely claiming victory. Tanoomba seems to not know anything on the subject, has apparently not read a single piece of research, and just wants to join in on the discussion to be a contrarian. Mist on the other hand is intelligent, she's just too caught up in her own field and knows nothing about the biological end of things, so dismisses it out of ignorance.
I studied how the brain learns. I studied the developmental stages an infant's brain goes through as it becomes bore capable of responding to and being shaped by the environment. I studied how language acquisition works. I studied brain plasticity.

I'm not claiming to be an expert neurologist, but there is a basis for the claims I make.


And limp dicked pussies raising limp dicked pussies could just as easily be genetic. Just sayin'
Nope.

article_sl said:
In sum, it is easier to find sociological, cultural, or environmental explanations for variation in human abilities, intelligence, or personality traits. The seeming inheritance by family of some of these traits may well be a combination of something genetic and something experiential or cultural, but when looking for the actual underlying causes, genetics has repeatedly come up wanting while environmental explanations do a good job of addressing a fairly large part of the variation we see.
 

Mist

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And I brought up the point that it might not be the actual aptitude required for that position in particular that is important to the gender divide, but rather, the pre requisite interest in computers/videogames/etc that could be the thing highly favouring males. And you dismissed it with a 3 year old iphone game girls like to play
So, socially driven. Got it. Unless you're really going to explain how boys are biologically predisposed to interact with images projected on screens.

My point was that boys played more video games because video game designers designed games for boys. Once there started to be more gender-neutral games for mobile platforms, girls (actually older women) started playing video games in larger numbers.

There actually used to be a higher percentage of women in computer science in the 80s than there have been in the past decade. In the 80s, exposure to computers was limited to people who had access to computers in office settings, and women were more likely to have access to computers due to working as secretaries. Again, social structures.
 

Cad

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There actually used to be a higher percentage of women in computer science in the 80s than there have been in the past decade. In the 80s, exposure to computers was limited to people who had access to computers in office settings, and women were more likely to have access to computers due to working as secretaries. Again, social structures.
Secretaries didn't have computers in the 80's. They had IBM Selectrics