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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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And they've had the reigns and got to be the null hypothesis for decades. All of their interventions failed. We can play the snipe down studies game all day but in the end one story is backed up by observed reality and the other is backed up by blind dogma.

pretty much:

https://i1.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ccf_20170201_reeves_3.png?w=768&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C9999px&ssl=1

The black-white achievement gap has proven impervious to all efforts to fix it

same for the gender gap

https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/satnew.png

But individual absolute ability may have increased , but group differences persist. It's intellectually dishonest to claim that enough hasn't been tried. Policy makers have invested considerable money and effort at narrowing such gaps, with piss-poor results to show for it.

Regarding the gender gap in math ability, has any country tried to just make girls take twice as many math classes as boys do for a generation to see if that would reverse it?

Don't most girls not participate in such programs? You can only really expect to have an effect on the ones who participate, so if most don't participate, you are closer to not having the program at all than you are to having it for all the girls.

However, it seems difficult to explain lack of girls' participation in an all-girl coding camp by any form of male behavior. In that sense, code camp intervention has not been tested, but has been attempted, which is itself a test. Of course, motte = "patriarchy is fully general and can be hosted on female brains", bailey = "men are sexist and that's why women don't code".

If we take this entirely seriously, dismantling patriarchy here would require forcing girls to go to code camp.

AFAIK the mainstream hypothesis among child developmental psychologists is a self-socialization theory, where children mimic adults in their culture. The whole patriarchy thing is more of a feminist activist thing that doesn't necessarily generalize to the expert's views. Of course the experts might be wrong too, but I'm just saying, as far as I know nobody has tried whether raising children in a culture where math and technical subjects is more of a women's thing works.

Hm, that seems interesting but unfalsifiable. Even if parents try to pretend really hard that everyone is living in such a culture, can't you always say that the children are picking up on their deep-seated true social beliefs?

That said, it would be fascinating to attempt this. (If all kinds of unethical.) Gonzo homeschooling girlcoder conspiracy when?

edit: Of course, another problem: "We formed a community of 500 female programmers." How do you screen off genetic causes? Everyone adopts?

edit: If self-socialization is correct, but so is sexual preference differences, wouldn't this cause significant suffering as boys and girls attempt to fit themselves to a role they're not suited for in an attempt to fit in with their parents? Then again, plausibly "not much more than ordinary growing up."

edit: I wonder to what degree growing up in a progressive family and school environment already approximates this.

edit: ! Can you test to which degree girls who grow up in prog environments go into programming vs trad? If this thesis is true, shouldn't it have some effect?

edit: I wonder to what degree growing up in a progressive family and school environment already approximates this.

edit: ! Can you test to which degree girls who grow up in prog environments go into programming vs trad? If this thesis is true, shouldn't it have some effect?

The theory is that children mimic same-sex adults, not that children do as same-sex adults tell them to. Doing what adults tell them to would be highly exploitable, so children often contradict instructions from adults.

Masculine/feminine work interests are fairly independent of progressivism/conservativism, so children would not be exposed to more gender-atypical work interests from their parents that way. However I've seen feminists provide a study showing that girls who had more masculine mothers grew up to be more masculine in lifestyle as adults.

But that study seems obviously genetically confounded. However you could adjust for the genetic confounding because the genetic effect should apply to both parents whereas the self-socialization effect should be sex-specific. I considered setting up a study for that once, but I got distracted.

Hm, that seems interesting but unfalsifiable. Even if parents try to pretend really hard that everyone is living in such a culture, can't you always say that the children are picking up on their deep-seated true social beliefs?

For just about any hypothesis, you can of course cook up versions that are unfalsifiable, but I don't think the basic version of the hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Of course direct interventions would be way expensive; but the child psychologists have various experiments they claim supports it that I don't think I've seen a strong HBD response to. (Not to say that I agree with the environmentalists here, I am currently agnostic I think.)

Yes, but that probably says something about female interest in STEM, which is probably somewhat correlated with aptitude. You could of course argue that this, too, is caused by an all-pervasive patriarchy, but given that the presence of such programs in a society has a negative correlation with female interest in STEM (i.e. the so-called "gender equality paradox"), I find that harder and harder to believe.

AFAIK just about all sex difference correlate with gender equality, including obviously-societal ones such as gender differences in names:

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1432940616653152259

(And of course it's been shown to apply to e.g. gender stereotypes too, though that could very well be due to stereotype accuracy.)

I don't know why they correlate like this, but I feel like this gives you something equivalent to the phenotypic null hypothesis for the gender equality paradox: if the paradox applies to some variable X, and X is causally upstream of some variable Y, then a priori you'd expect the paradox in X to create a paradox in Y.

There are more people with an interest in, and a knack for, STEM to be found within the male than within the female population. Given that environmental interventions have rather spectactularly failed to reverse course in this regard, Occam's razor would suggest that biology plays a factor here.

The thing is, as kids, boys will look at what men do and mimic that, whereas girls will look at what women do and mimic that. I don't know whether it is the sex difference in programming etc. that is biological, or if it is the sex difference in mimicry that is biological. I wouldn't expect it to be both, because what would that lead to if you took all the world's female programmers and male elementary school teachers and had them create a society where they raised a generation of ordinary children? Would the boys in this society do programming (and thus be mimicking women), or mimic men (and thus do teaching)?

Since I don't know the answer to this question, I can't tell if the sex difference in programming is innate or not.

"Just about all sex difference correlate with gender equality"

I don't think that's close to right -- it's much too strong, but I admit I haven't seen a lot of data. What I have seen is consistent differences across multiple cultures:

Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests

Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures.

The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality

Note that the differences tend to be actually larger than many of these suggest at first glance, as there tend to multiple, at-least-partially-independent, so if you take multiple traits at once, the means move further apart.

Scott also has a great discussion on it in Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences

I don't think that's close to right -- it's much too strong, but I admit I haven't seen a lot of data.

Idk, I might be wrong, it's just the impression I've gotten from scrolling through twitter and seeing lots of random variables being linked to gender equality. Sex differences in waist-to-hip ratio, in values, strength of gender stereotypes (yes really, more gender-equal countries have stronger gender stereotypes), stuff like that. Maybe there are other variables where this pattern doesn't hold, but I would want to see the oddities explained before I grant this type of argument.

What I have seen is consistent differences across multiple cultures:

Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests

I would like to see more measurement invariance studies done of vocational interests. I downloaded a dataset of vocational interests from the Eugene-Springfield Community Sample, and the MI looked kind of problematic there. But I didn't really like ORVIS, and I didn't investigate the MI very thoroughly, so I'm not sure.

If sex differences in interests are not MI, then that raises questions about the reasonableness of summarizing them using variables that are supposed to be valid within the sexes too. In particular it may be indicative that the self-socialization hypothesis is true, because the self-socialization hypothesis proposes a different mechanism for between-sex variation in interests compared to within-sex variation in interests.

I tried to search for other MI studies, and I found some that were kind of opaque. I need to spend more time on this at some point.

Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures.

Personality potentially makes a good example for the phenotypic null hypothesis as applied to sex differences.

There's an absolutely humongous sex difference in strength and general physical formidability. Thus, if there's even a slight within-sex effect of physical formidability on anxiety - such as feeling anxious and fearful about being around big dangerous men - then this effect would generate a substantial sex difference in anxiety. Is that a biological sex difference in anxiety? Yes, in a sense. But is it in contradiction with blank slatist worldviews? No, not really.

This is a testable question. Currently, typical personality tests ask about anxiety in the abstract, e.g. with questions such as "I worry about things". (See for instance N1 in IPIP-NEO.) However there is no reason you cannot ask about more concrete things, such as "I am afraid of drunks in public", "I get anxious when having to talk on the telephone", etc.. recently asked a bunch of people what things they were anxious about, and used this information to construct a set of 60 items asking about concrete types of anxiety. I then collected data on these items. Unfortunately, since the data was not collected to test a sex difference hypothesis, it's quite noisy and hard to be sure about the sex differences, but e.g. the drunks question was the one with the second-largest sex difference, while the telephone telephone item was an item with a sex difference on the smaller side.

I don't plan to do a proper test of this with anxiety specifically, but I do have plans to do a proper test of it with personality more generally. I have been working on a set of personality items that are far more narrow than what is usually used in personality tests, and I plan to collect a ton of data on those items. They may end up overturning the standard HBD view of sex differences in personality by revealing rich sets of phenotypic null hypothesis and cultural associations.

The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality

Note that the differences tend to be actually larger than many of these suggest at first glance, as there tend to multiple, at-least-partially-independent, so if you take multiple traits at once, the means move further apart.

I don't think the multivariate sex difference thing is nearly as important as people make it out to be, because it relies on an extremely careful alignment of the axes, and that would generally not show up in practice.

I mean, they obviously don't, see, e.g., grip strength.

Just for reference, do you have data on sex differences in grip strength not correlating with gender equality?

As for the gender equality paradox, that is, that there is less interest in STEM among women in countries that score higher on a variety of gender equality, indices, the correlation is negative.

I realize the correlation is negative and don't see how that's a relevant response to my point about names.

Well, given that a whole host of environmental interventions targetting the mimicking effect that we tried for decades seem to have had - at best - virtually no effect, chances are that these proposed environmental causes don't explain the whole picture, or even large part of it.

Have code camps actually changed girls' perceptions of whether men or women are more likely to end up as programmers? If not, then even if the mimicry hypothesis is true, you wouldn't expect it to change their behavior, and therefore the failure of the intervention is of no evidentiary value for the validity of the mimicry hypothesis.

It seems to me you have created a completely generalisable dismissal against virtually all arguments proposing a biological cause, given that you seem to treat the failure of environmental interventions as a knock against biological explanations. I am not even sure what you are saying here?

?

I don't think I said that failure of environmental interventions is a knock against biological explanations. I just questioned whether the relevant environmental interventions had been tried.

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