Pigeon
coo coo
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User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
Stereotype accuracy is one of the strongest results in social science. The word stereotype is not a synonym for 'myth'.
I'm curious as to how good stereotypes are in terms of magnitude of belief (compared to...directionality/descriptive accuracy?). I suspect it is still somewhat accurate, but less so than the qualitative aspect of stereotypes.
Interest is a prerequisite to being good at something, at least if that something requires you to put in the hours, as is the case for language learning. But it actually does look like there are differences in how men and women's brains process language, not just a difference in interest.
I agree with this, I just am unsure about how it translates to learning foreign languages in particular -- at least to the extent that the effect size is huge.
See my other comment. This has been shown empirically.
A brief perusal of pubmed gives me much more mixed results. I'm not convinced.
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
[...] If your incremental progress towards snatches lasts more than 4 hours, seek urgent medical care at the nearest Emergency Department. [...]
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
MTG/Warhammer/tabletop looks almost as bad as gaming
There's board games, then there's those. I suspect the people playing things like Dominion or Seven Wonders generally would have a more limited relationship with the hobby than dedicated MTG and Warhammer players.
I do wonder if there is a way to both participate in "lifestyle games" like these without it being an undue weight on everything else in life.
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
I knew kids who's parents put everyone on strict 15m time limits, and it drove me up a wall when I'd be having a really good run in say, Super Mario Brothers, and they booted me off in World 5 with 4 lives left. I do want my kid to have that sense of accomplishment that video games can give you, and not cutting her legs out from under her with arbitrary limits. But I'll cross that bridge when I get to it I suppose.
As a child I was given a restriction of 10 minutes a week with a Gameboy, including starting up the game, and the only game I got was one of the first-gen Pokemon games. It was not fun. I don't think I ever got past Erika before the Gameboy or the cartridge died.
I kind of made up for it by binging the shit out of different Pokemon games later when I had access to a computer and learned what emulators were.
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
Due to differences in skeletal muscle composition, differences in metabolism esp. re lipids, and difference in anatomical structure mean that women are often more suited for endurance compared to bursts of physical activity. Men still top the charts when it comes to endurance running and swimming but it is a closer call than it is with sprinting, where there is just no hope for women to ever catch up with men.
In particular I think this would come into play more than we would expect from looking at competitive results when we consider the endurance required for e.g. farming.
Better at learning foreign languages. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever taken a language class.
I'm not sure how true this is, and how much of it is a reflection of interest rather than aptitude. At least even if there's a skew, I don't think it's blatantly obvious.
Better at multi-tasking/task-switching. This one is well known.
I'm pretty sure this is false; pretty much everyone other than rare savants suck hard at multi-tasking/task-switching almost equally.
Better fine motor control. Women are faster typists and have neater handwriting.
Are women faster typists? I think I type faster than every single woman I know.
In any case, I suspect that this stereotype has two components, and the advantage might disappear as soon as these are controlled for:
- For skills that are learned during formative years, differences in earlier development of girls might lead to e.g. better handwriting; boys that learn handwriting a little later IIRC also have relatively neat writing (I am not entirely certain that this "disproves" superior female fine motor control -- if the boys took longer rather than simply later to be able to learn these properly it would be still be indicative of a difference. Likewise I think girls are quicker to learn to hold chopsticks than boys do very early on in life)
- For skills involving small components e.g. sewing and knitting, women are smaller generally and have smaller hands and thinner fingers in particular; I think more recent studies have generally shown the increase in motor control in these tasks to be more related to the size of the hands/fingers, with differences disappearing when controlled for (hand/finger) size, implying that this isn't really a difference in neurological control. Though this does still lead to a practical advantage with regards to motor control in daily tasks that matter.
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
In particular, China didn't adopt this particular vice despite being home to small but significant populations of Jews throughout history, with enclaves in many Chinese cities (with the Kaifeng Jews being the most famous of the bunch), while also hosting significant numbers of Christians and Muslims. There has been some suggestion in the official records that the earliest of them arrived mid-Han dynasty approx. two thousand years ago, and there are independent observations by e.g. Persian travellers noting established Jewish merchants operating in China by the Tang dynasty.
Interestingly I have noticed an uptick in a bizarre sort of antisemitism in some of the wackier corners of Chinese popular culture very recently -- some sort of combination of classic Da Jooz tropes imported from the West, combined with the perception that the West is trying to contain China, resulting in various syncretic conspiracy theories about how (((they))) are puppeteering Western institutions to control China (or have in some nonsensical way done so in the past). But on the whole the Chinese remain philosemitic.
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
Many of these also vaguely comport to similar benefits non-Han have vis a vis the Han Chinese in the PRC, yet I think most of us would hesitate to label the PRC as being anti-Han.
(This is despite probably more worthy historical reasons to call the PRC “anti-Han”, actually, starting with the targeting of the Four Olds during the cultural revolution.)
My understanding — I think from an old pornhub survey? — is that women consume much more gay porn than men do, and also more lesbian porn as well. So gay men probably still consume more gay porn that straight women per capita, but there’s still a large female straight contingent. And this is in a medium where it’s inherently unfavourable to female titillation; the porn vs erotica thing remains salient.
I’m not convinced that women self-insert as the uke when looking at gay porn or BL, this doesn’t match my experience talking to fujos at all.
It might be true that women like two men getting hot and steamy with each other, but purely as an observer.
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
I mean, straight women fucking love seeing hot men railing each other, so this doesn’t seem like that much of a problem to me.
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
- Note that these are not particularly tied to the patriarchy/matriarchy axis. Monogamous animals are usually egalitarian, but patriarchal polygyny (gorillas, lions), matriarchal polygyny (peacoks), patriarchal promiscuity (chimps) and matriarchal promiscuity (bonobos, elephants) are all common.
Interesting to note that there are also birds that operate with matriarchal polyandry, with very skewed sex ratios and reversed sex roles. (There are other animals that are also polyandrous but I do not know how they work at all — iirc some (but not all) of them were more of a female risk-reduction, either of the female herself or for improved reproductive success)
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
Or if the circle is/stays very small? Then you can have two bisexual + one straight person.
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
I know that there is that one family in Hokkaido that is explicitly a harem, but otherwise I’m kind of drawing a blank.
Unless we are counting the “rich/hot dude screwing multiple women and not committing to any one of them” as similar…?? I don’t think it’s the same though.
I’d appreciate if you could elaborate.
I did note “particularly limited to Southeast Asia”. I don't live in the States, for the record.
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
I’m used to eating watermelon with salt, and I know people who use shichimi for this. I don’t think it’s particularly limited to Southeast Asia.
I mean, it’s definitely more normalised to the extent that APA hotels is owned by Nanjing Massacre deniers and IIRC put books regarding that in hotel rooms, and that Nippon Kaigi, well, exists. I don’t think either would be permissible in Germany (let alone be able to have members in such high positions as in Nippon Kaigi).
My impression is that many people in Japan don’t know many details about Japanese atrocities, to some extent due to the way history is taught (broadly as a list of facts covering a large span of history, rather than historical analysis).l, and — due both to concerted effort by early postwar governance and due to lack of exposure — people don’t really care.
In that sense it is a "nation that ignores its war crimes". I'm not sure it would be better otherwise, but it is somewhat ugly.
edit: a word
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
I might be wrong, but my understanding of Venus colonisation is actually to terraform it enough so that it’s possible to live high up in the atmosphere rather than on the hellish surface.
Whereas if the Politburo demands good literature you can hand them a pamphlet denouncing the latest object of the Politburo's denunciation and even if it's quite bad by what standard, the Politburo isn't a literature department, and even if it's obviously bad can they condemn a condemnation of the thing they wanted condemned?
Not related, but reminds me of a recent Chinese commentary in some newspaper that slobbered praise all over Xi Jinping, comparing him to Mao and Deng — it got pulled very quickly, and the suspected reason for the censorship was that Xi considered himself an equal to Mao only, and superior to Deng.
I believe you misunderstand.
The Kievan Rus' (or Kyivan Rus', I guess, now) is the first East Slav state founded in the 9th century, and the histories of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus start from this point (East Slavs having had no language prior to this point). This state was literally dominated by Kiev during its inception. The names of both Russia and Belarus are etymologically derived after this medieval state, and all three East Slavic nations claim descent from it. Ukraine is literally where Russian civilisation starts*.
Taiwan, on the other hand, is first settled by Austronesians and was relatively untouched by the mainland; the first real attempts at settlement beyond that actually came under the Dutch (who encouraged Han migration over to the island), then the portion of Ming remnants led by Zheng Chenggong who founded the Kingdom of Tungning, until its conquest by the Qing. Taiwan's prehistory lasts well into late Chinese imperial history, it was first properly settled under a European banner, and up until the Japanese invasion it remained a pretty marginal borderland — nobody would think much about it if there wasn't another straggler "Chinese" government trying to set up shop there!
A more analogous comparison to Russia and Ukraine, for (a state of) China, would be if it no longer controlled large swathes its cradle of civilisation — if it "lost" parts of the North China Plain including Anyang and Luoyang, say. Maybe consider an alternate timeline where the Ming somehow doesn't reconquer the North China Plain and the Northern Yuan end up setting shop there indefinitely, or the Southern Song don't fall to the Yuan and no Han-dominated state ever is able to claw back land above the Huai river, or the Northern and Southern Dynasties doesn't end with the Sui, or the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms permanently entrenched a north-south split, and now a modern alt-Chinese government based in the south, claiming descent from those alt-dynasties, is engaging in a little taste of revanchism some few centuries late by appealing to how northerners and southerners are actually one people and should be ruled together.
Edit: better examples. None of those really match exactly; Moscow actually came into prominence during/after the Mongols, so an even better example would be if somehow the Yuan got pushed into a rump Southern state and centuries later the descendant states of the Southern Yuan decide to march back up, but this is a bit too ludicrous
*also where Ukrainian and Belaroussian history starts — I am not making a case that Kyiv is especially Russian, or that Russia has a good case for invading Ukraine
I mean, this would suggest that women should have worse handwriting when it comes to writing in large sizes, which does create a notable exception for "better at handwriting".
In any case I think it does matter. If the difference in dexterity is mostly a matter of size then we could just retrofit many things to be man-sized rather than woman-sized instead; it is contingent on our current circumstances. But if it is really an inbuilt difference then there is no point.
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