Well I have gleaned quite a bit of information here today. Thank you all.
I’m sorry but I pride myself on at least doing the best to form an informed opinion. I hold an intelligent women to be highly valuable, like intelligent men, in use for computers. Maybe because of bias of educators, like I said in my first message, bias women to practice things different than the sciences.
Just as an example, back in the late 90s, I was a partner in a small computer company. It was just the three of us, but we were looking at picking up all of the scanning and equipment needed for Furman University’s departments, and we would definitely have to hire many people. I knew that one of my partners was a very bad misogynist, so I knew I would have get my other partner, have a serious talk with him, then both of us go have a serious talk with the misogynist about his attitude toward women and how we could not tolerate that. (the business was on the up-and-up, everything we did was to the letter of the law, or at least I tried to enforce that with my miscreant partners) I would work with any gender if they were qualified for the job, and I knew we would be hiring women (not that is bad). Things fell apart though
I do assert that the gender’s brains are different in structure, under averages, but now I change my previous assertion(s) that you are not required to know the gender of a subject to know its brain matter’s ratios, to now requiring that. I see that size of the brain itself cannot be used as a measure of gender, because of the huge variance in general size of the individuals.
[quote]“At first glance, studies of the brain seem to offer a way out of this age-old nature/nurture dilemma. Any difference in the structure or activation of male and female brains is indisputably biological. However, the assumption that such differences are also innate or “hardwired” is invalid, given all we’ve learned about the plasticity, or malleability of the brain. Simply put, experiences change our brains.”
“This subdivision, known as the straight gyrus (SG), is a narrow strip of cerebral cortex running along the midline on the undersurface of the frontal lobe. Wood and colleagues found the SG to be about 10 percent larger in the thirty women they studied, compared to thirty men (after correcting for males’ larger brain size). What’s more, they found that the size of the SG correlated with a widely-used test of social cognition, so that individuals (both male and female) who scored higher in interpersonal awareness also tended to have larger SGs.”
“In their article, Wood and colleagues speculate about the evolutionary basis for this sex difference. Perhaps, since women are the primary child-rearers, their brains have become programmed to develop a larger SG, to prepare them to be sensitive nurturers. Prenatal sex hormones are known to alter behavior and certain brain structures in other mammals. Perhaps such hormones—or sex-specific genes—may enhance the development of females’ SG (or dampen the development of males’) leading to inborn differences in social cognition.”
“But here the results were most unexpected: they found that the SG is actually larger in boys ! What’s more, the same test of interpersonal awareness showed that skill in this area correlated with smaller SG, not larger, as in adults. The authors acknowledge that their findings are “complex,” and argue that the reversal between childhood and adulthood reflects the later maturation of boys’ brains, compared to girls. (Adolescents’ brains undergo a substantial “pruning” or reduction in gray matter volume during adolescence, which happens about two years earlier in girls, compared to boys.)”
“In other words, there does seem to be a relationship between SG size and social perception, but it is not a simple male-female difference. Rather, the SG appears to reflect a person’s “femininity” better than one’s biological sex: women who are relatively less feminine show a correspondingly smaller SG compared to women who are more feminine, and ditto for men.”[/quote]
I still do assert that “normal” men and women have different traits that go along with their different brain structures that can be adaptable, but not exclusive, and certainly changeable through hormones, parental upbringing society, and self-discipline. Bottom line that I took from that article quoted above, “Yes, men and women are psychologically different and yes, neuroscientists are uncovering many differences in brain anatomy and physiology which seem to explain our behavioral differences.”
//been up since wendsday lookin at dis and oder tings, mon
His twin brother also killed himself. Money completely lied about his findings, and his “research” paved the way for many well meaning doctors to impose this on other children.
“As Nature Made Him” by John Colapinto reveals how much of Money’s “therapy” was essentially child sexual abuse as well as psychological abuse (ie doing therapy sessions where David Reimer and his brother had to be nude, assume “male/female” sexual positions with each other - and David’s parents were told to never reveal David’s condition to him. Remember - this was the 1970’s and 80’s - not the 1880’s).
[quote=“OtherMichael, post:129, topic:50915, full:true”]
You are coming from a position of privilege where you think everybody thinks like you.[/quote]
Really? You’ve mastered telepathy or have had long, drawn out conversations with me where we’ve discussed the nuances of my thinking process and view of the world? Wow. Dad?
Ok. And?
Not particularly. Usually I help such people out when I get to know them, which is only rarely. Again, you really don’t know a thing about me or my interaction with such people. I have known a few and, in fact, know at least three guys, as I type this, that are living in vehicles nearby.
They also don’t come to Boing Boing to post manifestos on society and how it is all a state of mind with which we’ve shackled ourselves and that money doesn’t exist.
By the way, how’s your position of privilege going?
Now, now - to be fair, I did not say that society is a state of mind. As I keep adamantly trying to explain, it is the sum of our interactions. What you think about it is less significant than what you do. It is others who keep chiming in to say tell me that being responsible for one’s own social networks is fantasy or theory. It’s only theory if you don’t put it into practice. You are also either misunderstanding or misrepresenting what I have said about money.
Trying to examine it daily. I’ve got a “normal” mental typology, no brain tumors, and none of my kids have exhibited any particularly “weird” behavior (so far), so I’m very grateful. I like to think I wouldn’t love my children any less if they weren’t neurotypical, and I hope I can be forgiven (if necessary by those who aren’t) for being grateful that we all get the easy setting.
A college friend has a daughter , age 12, that can’t speak and seldom smiles. Ah, but when she does!
Thank you. And, yes, yes, yes. What she (Alexia Tsotsis) said:
But just like Newsweek, which is now back in its print edition, gets to subconsciously influence a bunch of kids accompanying their parents on trips to the grocery, I get to say that this cover is perpetuating what it purportedly denounces — It makes women feel excluded, sexualized and degraded as it tries to point out how bad it is to exclude, sexualize, and degrade women. It’s un-self-aware, even if the people who created it, graphic designers Robert Priest and Grace Lee, are.
I don’t care if you were trying to be provocative and meta. Your efforts failed. . . .
The media business is all about attention, hence the sensationalism, more sensationalism and stunt journalism. I’m not opposed to stunt journalism and meta journalism in some cases. But you cannot pull readbait like this on topics as complex as gender bias in tech. It’s an intellectual and artistic crime to be this simplistic and manipulative on hot-button issues, issues that materially affect the careers and lives of millions of people.
Well, maybe “should not” there, instead of “cannot,” but otherwise, Yes.
Yea, Im going to go ahead and disagree with this statement. It most certainly is designed. Now, I would not say that it simply emerges from nothing- but it most definitely is steered in certain directions.
I think it might be fallacious to assume that normative evaluations are any sort of indicator of health. Norms tend to be merely statistically average. Many healthcare practitioners decry the mediocre state of health of the “average” person. And people tend to favor those who are optimal health, rather than merely average. Not being the norm can be good, bad, or indifferent. When people require cognition and behavior to be normalized they would lower the bar for many people. Not unlike with my physical health, I prefer my mental health also to be optimal rather than normal.
To extend the gaming analogy, is somebody who demands an easy setting generally a good player? It’s probably good that there is an easy setting, but not when it is required of people. It seems especially schizoid encountering this attitude with people who espouse a very competitive philosophy of life, such as implied by capitalism and status games. Aren’t those fairly elitist attitudes? Somebody who claims to be competitive but strives to avoid competing against certain kinds of people just make themselves look like unskilled players. When you can beat those who require the easy setting whilst you use the most difficult ones, it’s hard to take their protests about you seriously.
Ok, so… how is that a reply to my post? The article seems relevant in itself, but I don’t find it relevant as a reply.
With nothing else but copypasta to eat, I suppose I should critique it.
It’s is definitely not a popular argument here, but it’s a bad start when their first two paragraphs need to explain that their thesis depends upon their own idiosyncratic usage of a word which they know is going to be contentious. It is good to start with defining your terms! But it also lazy to overload existing terms when you expect them to be misunderstood.
Here we are assuming a status quo based entirely upon delusional thinking. What is good about this is that it actually tells you how to solve the problem! The fundamental problem is not the US nor money - it is the baseline assumption that social roles actually are “The Real World”. It might be tempting to think so for those with a herd mentality who care what people think about them, but it is also demonstrably delusional to assert that this is in any way a superset of the world at large. Most of the world has nothing to do with humans, still less with whatever they think of each other.
Worse yet, this also denies multiculturalism and any concept of having your own goals. So saying “let’s assume” lots of people elect to play such an admittedly banal game would be assuming rather a lot.
The rest of the paragraphs outline (yet again) the gaming analogy, which I think is a poor one. One of the main reasons why I think so, as I alluded to in my post above, is that completely misses the mark with regards to modelling normative versus elitist social behaviors. I see many examples in culture of these being schizoid - split between wanting to have it in two or more contradictory ways, which is not how such games work. This is probably much of the entire reason for rampant “role playing” in the first place. Not to win a game by having it easy, but disqualifying others from playing against you at all, which is effectively a completely different scenario. It’s also a bogus comparison because the “straight white male = easy setting” conceit would instantly result in these being the worst players. As a competitive gamer I guarantee you, those people on “hardcore mode” will quickly learn to hand you your ass. This analogy makes those put-upon people the elite, which I don’t think was its intention.
Lastly, such a role playing game is an organized competition. Meaning that the entire premise is predicated upon the presumption that people all just happen to share the same goals. In a game, they do. But if you’ve got different goals, then you are not playing the same game. Somebody offering a critique of my deplorable game of rugby whilst I am actually cyclocross training and not playing rugby at all is not demonstrating themselves as being a better player. It is faux-elitism by exclusion - not by handicap!
I am sure this will invite some derisive comments from those who complain that I am unable to understand or unwilling to internalize a precious pet trope. Just because I think it is a bogus analogy does not automatically make me unsympathetic to oppressed people! I explain this in enough detail in other topics that it amazes me how people suddenly find it convenient to forget this when I try to point out what I think presents an ineffective argument. If your arguments effectiveness hinges upon people sharing other ideological points with you, then you are only “preaching to the converted”.
