It Seems We Are Not Allowed A "wrong" Opinion!

[ToraToraTora]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40859004

[Peter Pedant]

zunger's article

" What I am is an engineer," - well he certainly not Dickens

"Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers. "
no that is sociology or training a choir, not engineering

give him a spanner someone ! ( and the gender neutral instructions)

zuuuuung!

[jim360]

Can you point to some evidence for that belief, Naomi?

[sp1814]

naomi24

You wrote:

//I think men and women are wired differently. However, like Pixie I don’t think the differences are “small”.//

I've always thought that the only way to verify that is to take a group of babies, ten boys and ten girls and put them on a desert island to be raised by robots and see whether children free of societal interference would grow up with the traits that we think of as being hard-wired.

Of course, in that thought exercise the robots themselves would have to be programmed to treat all the children exactly the same.

Before anyone says it - I'm not suggesting that this experiment ever be carried out, just that it would be the only way to really rule out what we teach children and what they pick up from everything around them.

[jim360]

Talbot, pixie -- yes, I'd expect to see that too, but then surely that massively disassociates what the monkeys are doing from what we'd refer to as playing with "boys'" or "girls'" toys, no?

[naomi24]

Jim, I don’t know if there is any ‘evidence’ and I’ve no intention of busting a gut to find some. In my experience women are not only physically weaker - they think differently to men, and I think that’s a product of nature rather than a result of social conditioning.

[jim360]

I'm not asking you to bust a gut. But I was hoping for something to justify your position beyond personal experience; which... well, in my personal experience, I've often found that personal experience is rather limited as compared to, say, actual data or research or some such.

[naomi24]

Jim, you have? Oh well. I didn’t realise I was under interrogation. I thought we were having a discussion.

[jim360]

I didn't realise that asking for someone to provide evidence to support their arguments was an interrogation. I consider it part of a discussion.

[Peter Pedant]

// Jim, I don’t know if there is any ‘evidence’ and I’ve no intention of busting a gut to find some.//

hahaha I love this sort of thing on an evidence based discussion

no there probably isnt then Jim

back to the Google piece
this is just a long op-ed piece isnt it
I re-read it in you honour Jim with More Concentration and didnt get much more out of it - oh, page 1 - TL:DR is 'too long - didnt read'
American dont have much idea about irony then

There was quite a lot of classification I didnt recognise - Left Bias and Right Bias ( left Bias like change ( unstable and Right Bias like lack of change ( stability). and I certainly didnt think " How true! how true! when I read it ( and re-read it).

if s/o said o there is a rain soaked copy of The Memorandum (famous play by Vaclav Havel by the way) at the bottom of the garden: do you want to go and get it? I would probably say - no thanks ....

I am surprised this has taken the world by storm
was it written by Zunger ? then he have zung his head in shame

[naomi24]

Jim, you acknowledge there are differences but that said, I may as well ask you for evidence that the differences are as small as you would have us believe. Does anyone really know?

[jim360]

Here's a few articles for you to look at, if you like:

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468

http://genderandset.open.ac.uk/index.php/genderandset/article/viewArticle/305

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1364661313002325

Sure, there's a long way to go, but in general the differences are "small" in the sense that it's usually well-agreed that you can't point to a given brain and say "that's a woman's/man's brain" with any real confidence.

[Peter Pedant]

Hahahaha I love it even more when someone says, "I think X"
and Jim says - do you have any evidence for that ?

and the reply is - No No jim you tell me the evidence against X - if any!

er - Can I say: Normal Day on AB !

[Togo]

[woofgang]

not actual solid research evidence but doesn’t the changes in the role of women which we see at times like war time, and also the general changes we are seeing in the role of women suggest that any hard wired gender based ability difference cannot be that big?

[-Talbot-]

Well the research with monkeys shown that many young female monkeys would cuddle the soft toys and many young males would ruff them up a bit.

So I think the evidence is males are more likely to be drawn to things that have moving parts.

There is a big difference between boys and girls, why we seem so determined to disprove and get away from that I have no idea.

[-Talbot-]

I think the baby/island thing would be great also ... to see what kind of religion the kids would invent.

[jim360]

Probably. It's about the only real good thing that World War One achieved, in that it forced society to take various issues related to gender inequality seriously.

Before then, famously, women weren't even allowed the right to vote in the UK, presumably because those "innate biological differences" were simply too big to justify giving women the right to vote. I mention this not to be frivolous (well, not entirely) but because even then many people -- and, more to the point, quite a few women -- argued against women getting the right to vote, on the grounds that, among other things, "the spheres of men and women, owing to natural causes, are essentially different...", or because "The admission to full political power of a number of voters debarred by nature and circumstances from the average political knowledge and experience open to men, would weaken the central governing forces of the State..."

I wonder how compelling these arguments sound to modern ears; and, conversely, how easily they could slot in to some of the posts in here without affecting their tone.

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/25th-july-1908/6/the-womens-national-anti-suffrage-league-t-he-wise

[naomi24]

Jim, all very well if you consider people to be something akin to machines. I don’t. We’ve had the discussion before about what a thought is actually constructed of and why emotion can cause genuine physical pain. Neither thought nor emotion can be grasped, prodded, or put under a microscope. Human beings are not solely constructed of that which it can be physically examined. They are far more complex than that.

[jim360]

"Neither thought nor emotion can be grasped, prodded, or put under a microscope."

Not yet, at any rate. And, for sure, the human brain is almost by definition too complex to understand. But there's no harm in trying.

[pixie374]

Sorry, been out. Jim at 17:51- no, because a monkey wouldn't associate a pram with a baby.
That is true, sp- but there may also be reasons why we treat them differently, which are also instinctive and robots couldn't do that.