Comment by thras | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thras | Hacker News Reader

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That's the way we are. Let me quote Fred: http://fredoneverything.net/HeadSpaces.shtml

It would be fascinating to get Zogby to run a poll which would ask the following questions:

What does a camshaft do?

What is a vertical flyback interval?

What role does expansion play in refrigeration?

What does an address bus do?

Timed delay of arrival is the basis of what common technological service?

What is the role of a CCD in a digital camera?

Name any spacecraft now in orbit around anything.

What does TCP/IP stand for?

What is the purpose of a torque wrench?

The questions measure, I think, the degree to which people understand the physical world in which they live. Now, I may be wrong (almost inconceivable, I know, it has to happen sometime, like an asteroid strike) but I will bet that anyone scoring perfectly on the foregoing will be male. In fact, anyone coming close will be male. Should this prove true, the conclusion must be that men and women inhabit utterly different head-spaces.

I do not doubt the premise--that the vast majority of people who score well on that "quiz" will be male--but I do not see how that leads to the conclusion, namely that there's some sort of biological difference.

That strikes me as the reification of what's pretty clearly a social difference. More men than women know what a torque wrench is, because we teach boys about torque wrenches and let boys know that they ought to know what one is, while we teach girls about other things and let them know that it's okay to be ignorant about torque wrenches.

When I was a kid there was a common party game where the boys and girls would break up into separate teams, and the boys would attempt to come up with questions that they could all answer but would stump all the girls, and the girls would do the same to the boys. It was, at least that I ever saw, always much easier for the girls to come up with questions that would stump us guys than for us to come up with "common guy knowledge" that would stump all the girls. There were always more girls who knew "guy things" than guys who knew (or were willing to admit to knowing) "girl things."

I'm not sure that really proves anything except there was a wider diversity (at least within the relatively limited sample of kids I grew up with) of acceptable gender role behaviors for girls than for boys. Girls certainly can know "guy stuff" when they're exposed to it, that much was pretty obviously clear.

It may be that there's some biological difference between how men and women approach problems, or learn various skills. But I can guarantee you that those differences are, like differences associated with skin color, far less than the differences between individuals in the same group.

But I can guarantee you that those differences are, like differences associated with skin color, far less than the differences between individuals in the same group.

I always chuckle when people trot that one out. Did you know it's equally true for the differences between dog breeds? Body size varies more within dog breeds than between them. Also intelligence. Somehow that doesn't stop dog breeds from being fairly different from each other. (Actually, somewhat more than human races from the genetic studies I've seen.)

As for the differences between guys and girls being taught not inborn...how many kids do you have? Parents get disabused of that sort of thinking pretty quickly.

Body size varies more within dog breeds than between them

I have never understood what this means. "Within-group" variation can be quantified as standard deviation (among other metrics). How do you measure "between-group" variation? Sample the group means and find the standard deviation? But that's obviously meaningless.

Yes, it is fairly pointless. However, they do mean something exact. You quantify the "within-group" variation not with standard deviations, but by measuring all individuals in a group and finding the endpoints.

So you find the tallest white person in the world and the shortest, and note that they differ in height by a number of feet. Then you measure the difference between the white height average and the Asian height average, and note that the difference is only a few centimeters. Wallah! Race doesn't matter. Most variation is within group.

Like I said, I chuckle a bit.

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