Science, sex, brains and gender

[GreyICE]

Double blind has some problems in the real world, and it may have run into some of those.

It's frequently very easy to say that the researchers will not know, but end up in a situation that the researchers actually do not know. Medicine can run afoul of this very badly.

Can you better explain what you mean here, GreyICE?

Yes. Take as a simple example, a medicine. Double blind suggests that the researchers should not know who was control and who was not control.

Now say the medicine has a fairly harmless side effect - it gives you a slight redness of skin in the mornings and turns your urine light green for a few days after you start.

Betcha it ain't double blind anymore. This is a reasonably common failing of the methodology.

[GreyICE]

Also, to expand further, the double blind methodology should not even be attempted in such situations. Imagine that the side effects I describe happen in 95% of the test population. Of the 5% where they don't, 30% develop a nasty complication as the direct result of the drug.

In a double blind, the researchers will tend to unconsciously assume that the 95% who have side effects (who are 47.5% of the test population, in true 25/25/25/25 double blind) are the entire population of people taking drugs. And thus they'll miss the fact that the drug is dangerous for the 5% who DON'T get those side effects, and in fact that should be a reason to immediately discontinue the medication. It's unethical to even run the study as double blind.

[SpeedOfSound]

Not sure if I can make it through that interview transcript.

There damned well better be differences by gender in the human brain. It has been accepted for some time that corpus collosum in females is thicker. However this has been changed in the wiki for some reason.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_cal ... dimorphism

Now I don't know whether I was hoodwinked or if I am being hoodwinked now. I would have thought that they actually did anatomical studies on corpses but now I am just not sure.

But WTF? Wider highways are a good thing. Larger cortical sheets are not highly correlated with intelligence. Wider highways may well be. This idea that intelligence and thinking can be separated from emotion is another judeo-christian hangover. Take an aspirin and get over it. You couldn't start to solve a problem without emotion and 'female intuition'. You probably wouldn't be able to feed yourself or empty your bladder in the right spot wither.

There are likley to be differences in neurotransmitters and pathways associated with violence and sex. There certainly should be if we are to have the two-gender world we all know and love.

[Mr.Samsa]

Not sure if I can make it through that interview transcript.

There damned well better be differences by gender in the human brain. It has been accepted for some time that corpus collosum in females is thicker. However this has been changed in the wiki for some reason.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_cal ... dimorphism

Now I don't know whether I was hoodwinked or if I am being hoodwinked now. I would have thought that they actually did anatomical studies on corpses but now I am just not sure.

But WTF? Wider highways are a good thing. Larger cortical sheets are not highly correlated with intelligence. Wider highways may well be. This idea that intelligence and thinking can be separated from emotion is another judeo-christian hangover. Take an aspirin and get over it. You couldn't start to solve a problem without emotion and 'female intuition'. You probably wouldn't be able to feed yourself or empty your bladder in the right spot wither.

There are likley to be differences in neurotransmitters and pathways associated with violence and sex. There certainly should be if we are to have the two-gender world we all know and love.

There certainly are valid reasons for thinking there might be anatomical differences between the sexes, but obviously the problem is that we have to find them before we can discuss them.. As for there being different pathways for violence and sex, I don't see why this would be. Studies demonstrate that there is no difference between levels of aggression in males and females (and rather it's their outlet which differs), and as for sex, I imagine any differences are the result of our religious hangover in society, rather than women not being into sex as much as guys. (An effect which is worsened by the cultural belief that men are sexual beasts that think about sex "every 6 seconds", or whatever the current myth is).

As for the corpus callosum, you might be interested in these:

The Caring Membrane in the Brain - for a general overview. And,

Sex Differences in the Human Corpus Callosum: Myth or Reality?

The results of this study also showed that, once brain size has been considered, there are no sex-specific differences in the size of the corpus callosum.

The corpus callosum is actually a good example of how myths can get started based on bad research methodology.

[SpeedOfSound]

So you claim that there are no gender differences in the brain and that females are exactly like males in all personality traits? How about that hypothalamus?

[SpeedOfSound]

I don't think I have the heart for this sort of thing right now. The nerve bundles in the CC are countable. Volume has fuck-all to do with it. We either count them or we don't know. Jesus Christ. Every anatomy book I have talks about this as if it were fact.

[SpeedOfSound]

I have decided that women are identical to men hence I don't need to have a thing to do with them anymore. They are of no interest any longer.

[Mr.Samsa]

So you claim that there are no gender differences in the brain and that females are exactly like males in all personality traits?

I didn't say that. I just said that we had to find these differences before discussing them - unfortunately a lot of discussion on gender differences rely on flawed studies and erroneous conclusions to make their points.

And as for "females being exactly like males in all personality traits" I'd say that on average this is probably false. But eliminate culture, and learnt differences, and different experiences.. then I imagine most, if not all, of those personality differences would disappear. It's obviously difficult to say for sure as it's unethical to raise them this way, but we know a few things that help us make educated guesses; for example, we know that male and female babies are treated significantly differently, we know that our judgements about the personality of males and females are affected by our opinions of how they should be behaving (e.g. boys actions are viewed as aggressive, when a girl performing the same behavior generally is not), etc etc.

So again, it's possible that there are innate personality differences between males and females, I just can't think of any off the top of my head.

How about that hypothalamus?

How about it? (I don't know much about it?)

I don't think I have the heart for this sort of thing right now. The nerve bundles in the CC are countable. Volume has fuck-all to do with it. We either count them or we don't know. Jesus Christ. Every anatomy book I have talks about this as if it were fact.

Ah, the wonders of science. Where beautiful theories can be destroyed by ugly facts.

I have decided that women are identical to men hence I don't need to have a thing to do with them anymore. They are of no interest any longer.

Good for you! To celebrate you coming out, we'll throw you a party - a big gay bash!

[charlou]

I have decided that women are identical to men hence I don't need to have a thing to do with them anymore. They are of no interest any longer.

Awww .. now that would be a shame.

[SpeedOfSound]

I don't think I'm going to hang out with men anymore either.

[SpeedOfSound]

I don't think I have the heart for this sort of thing right now. The nerve bundles in the CC are countable. Volume has fuck-all to do with it. We either count them or we don't know. Jesus Christ. Every anatomy book I have talks about this as if it were fact.

Ah, the wonders of science. Where beautiful theories can be destroyed by ugly facts.

This same theme has come up for me over and over in this last month. It's meat-eaters on the forum or fructose on Facebook or conspiracy theories among not so well in the head AA people. There are facts to these matters and when something is countable I insist that we get to counting.

The common theme is that there is a conspiracy of men (or even animated philosophical corporation zombies!) that use science or government badly. Many of the solutions proposed sound a little similar to the idea of using science or the government badly, only in another direction.

But. There are facts of the matter and then there are my burning intuitions and my own bad information and of course common sense. I truly want to sort this shit out.

Common sense and experience about some gay friends that I grew up with, screams at me that something was very different about them starting in Kindergarten. I also immediately noticed that something was VERY different about the girls and that was before I saw one naked. I noticed that I liked the girls a lot and I liked the guys that turned out gay more than I liked most of the other boys. I really kind of hated the other boys because they reminded me of either my dad or my cows with a few pleasant exceptions. So the exceptions and the girls and the gay guys ended up in a group of our own. We weren't all gay or all girls or all boys. The two common things I can remember are that we liked books and we didn't like to play with our balls.

We could draw a 2D graph and lay out a lot of traits at the edge and find great variation. But we would also find clusters taking fuzzy shape. Intelligence was not one of those clusters. Neither was 'being emotional'. But girls and boys and gays seemed clustered. Impulsive/risk behavior and violence also seemed to come in clusters. That cluster seemed to hang over the boys.

But that's all I know or believe for the moment. You will have a lot of trouble convinced me that these women things and gay guys, that I absolutely love, are wired up the same as the set of guys that seem of my type; even though I am on the outer edge, tending female, of that set. Had it been up to my school or my parents I would be playing with balls instead of reading and chatting up the gentle souls on the school steps. I have great trouble believing my parents or culture or even my peers exclusively acted to make me who I am.

So where are we?

[camoguard]

I read the transcript.

But more than that, I think there is a risk in reinforcing gender differences if statistically women and men are more similar than they are different. I think women and men are more similar than they are different.

On one hand, there is the science part which should count what is countable and generate the raw data on what is similar and what is different among genders. But you have to appreciate that long before science began to count, our cultures made guesses about gender roles that continue to affect us. In other words, we have manufactured nurture based differences to some extent on top of whatever genetic differences there may be.

In my view, since it will likely be unethical to do long term experiments on children in a lab, the best way to get to the bottom of this is to reduce the frequency that we communicate a gender difference because I think those are just as likely to be false memes as anything. And after some time where people don't hold men to one standard and women to another, we should start to see more crossovers in talents and behavior if there are more similarities, and we should see few crossovers in talents and behaviors if there are fewer similarities between the genders.

[SpeedOfSound]

The problem is similar to the recent studies released about decreased activity in the frontal cortex. A conclusion was jumped to that they think less. All of the important theoretical work indicating that they need less cortex to get the same job done was ignored.

Differences in brain wiring obviously have nothing to do with how well we can solve problems or do our jobs. That's all well accounted for in cortical plasticity. Still there may well be differences that count in how we teach our children and there are certainly differences in sexual matters.

Why and the hell do differences between white males and some other class HAVE TO always be taken as some sort of valuation with white male at the top of the scale? THIS is what's wrong here. This is what makes us want to do studies just for the sake of proving no differences.

[camoguard]

The problem is similar to the recent studies released about decreased activity in the frontal cortex. A conclusion was jumped to that they think less. All of the important theoretical work indicating that they need less cortex to get the same job done was ignored.

Differences in brain wiring obviously have nothing to do with how well we can solve problems or do our jobs. That's all well accounted for in cortical plasticity. Still there may well be differences that count in how we teach our children and there are certainly differences in sexual matters.

Why and the hell do differences between white males and some other class HAVE TO always be taken as some sort of valuation with white male at the top of the scale? THIS is what's wrong here. This is what makes us want to do studies just for the sake of proving no differences.

Yep. That sounds like we're agreeing there.

[GreyICE]

Patterns. More efficient patterns are more efficient solutions, brains are not linear.