Science, sex, brains and gender

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Ronja
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Re: Science, sex, brains and gender

Post by Ronja » Tue Nov 23, 2010 8:05 pm

GreyICE wrote:Patterns. More efficient patterns are more efficient solutions, brains are not linear.
Yes. If I understand the term pattern correctly in this context, this learning mechanism/strategy is also called perceptual chunking, which of course both genders do. I wonder if any studies exist that search for gender or cultural differences in chunking strategies? I have not found any yet.

I've also had quite some trouble in finding a good, not overly long or overly academic introduction to chunking in general. These are the best I have found thus far, and only the slides are good IMO:
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/rowangroup/docume ... /gobet.ppt
http://www.codedanger.com/caglar/?p=339

Any thoughts, especially on the gender & chunking angle?
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Mr.Samsa
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Re: Science, sex, brains and gender

Post by Mr.Samsa » Wed Nov 24, 2010 12:03 am

SpeedOfSound wrote:
Mr.Samsa wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote: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.
I agree. There are facts of the matter. These facts have been misinterpreted by bad methodology and mistakes - this isn't necessarily a result of an evil conspiracy or politics, but simply a result of ignorance. As our science progresses, we correct our mistakes and make technological advances which disprove old theories.
SpeedOfSound wrote: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.
And that's the great thing about psychology: common sense is rarely right. By the time you met those kids, they would have received massive amounts of cultural input and learning. Again, this doesn't mean that there isn't a biological difference, but it does mean that such data at that point is useless and doesn't help us separate nature from nurture.
SpeedOfSound wrote: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 the problem is that these "clusters" have slowly been teased apart over the years, and they aren't as clear cut as we thought. Like I mentioned with the "violence" studies, science no longer accepts that there is a difference between males and females. As for impulsive/risk behavior, I think it's quite easy to explain why it's so pronounced in males without having to resort to biology there..
SpeedOfSound wrote: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?
Exclusively? Of course not. Nobody would argue that. But this doesn't mean we should assume that the differences we see are biologically determined. We used to think that males were better at spatial awareness whilst females were better at emotions and communicating - now we know that is just based on bullshit research too.

I like this comic, I think it sums it up quite well:

Image
“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.” - B. F. Skinner.

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GreyICE
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Re: Science, sex, brains and gender

Post by GreyICE » Wed Nov 24, 2010 4:43 pm

Ronja wrote:
GreyICE wrote:Patterns. More efficient patterns are more efficient solutions, brains are not linear.
Yes. If I understand the term pattern correctly in this context, this learning mechanism/strategy is also called perceptual chunking, which of course both genders do. I wonder if any studies exist that search for gender or cultural differences in chunking strategies? I have not found any yet.

I've also had quite some trouble in finding a good, not overly long or overly academic introduction to chunking in general. These are the best I have found thus far, and only the slides are good IMO:
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/rowangroup/docume ... /gobet.ppt
http://www.codedanger.com/caglar/?p=339

Any thoughts, especially on the gender & chunking angle?
Not necessarily perceptual chunking, though that's part of it. It's processing chunking. What differentiates hearing from sight? You may think that a vast number of things do, but to the brain, the answer apparently is 'bandwidth of input' (eyes are high, ears are lower). Everything after that is the brain associating patterns in the input data and feedback to establish what you believe that the output is. Two examples. First, you have no color vision on the edges of your eyes. It doesn't exist. You cannot see color in your peripheral vision. But you perceive color? Yes. Your brain has decided that the pattern of vision exists with color, and fills the color in based on nearby patterns and past patterns. Second, synesthesia? It's what happens when you chuck ear packets into eye processors, language packets into color processors, etc. At a high level, with savants, it allows high-speed pattern interpretation and mathematical recognition at levels that approach computers. At the highest level, it allows us to recognize the solution to complex differential equations and interpret that into muscle motion at a rate that shames computers.

The operation of this is so very different from computers that we do not even have a good handle on how it works, muchless the differences in gender and other differences in processing. We are far too low level of understanding to have a good grasp on how 'rate of processing' compares to obtaining adequate solutions. It may actually indicate slower solutions - the brain has slammed into a pattern it is not good at, and is starting the basics of a new pattern. It may not indicate anything at all. We are unsure.
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