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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13634 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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No, all women are women, and all men are men. Take a look at this chart: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9/tables/2

I'm confident that nearly all the men on this forum know almost every word on the left, and almost none on the right. Exceptions to this trend do not exist. There is not a single biological male or female on this green earth who will be reversed on the chart. In terms of writing this means insanely simple tells that definitively determine the gender of the writer for many written works.

For me personally I know the entire left half, and only 2 from the right.

I get all the left side and about a third of the right. For someone who gets more of them, am I right in thinking that the vast majority of the words on the right (not "doula" or "pessary") are technical terms about textiles?

Textiles/sewing/clothing, yes.

And of course all the words on the left are scientific and technical terms as well - I would say "shemale" is the closest to a non-technical word on either side.

The words "freesia" and "verbena" are the common names of flowering plants. I wouldn't say 'yakuza' (a member of a particular Japanese crime organization, or collectively the name for the organization) is a technical term either. I'm not sure "doula" qualifies either.

Datapoint of one, but I don't know every word on the left. One of them I googled and arrived at the conclusion that I need some khan academy to understand, not just a definition.

I knew all the words on the left and most of the words on the right, though I couldn't actually describe in detail the differences between "tulle" and "chambray" without looking them up.

Perhaps most men and women are simply not well-read?

Which fits the trend, you still knew the left much better. Of course well read people will know more in absolute terms and less well read will know less.

They must have gotten guys who work in STEM because there’s no way 58% of men know what a checksum is. Same with many of the electronics terms, 64% know what a gauss is? I had to look it up, it’s a non-SI unit for magnetic flux density, and I am extremely skeptical that the majority of men have even heard of that.

Same with boson, 76% of men are familiar enough with particle physics? Less than 50% of men have even had a single physics class in high school! I’d be surprised if 76% knew what a proton was.

Science-fiction uses it a lot: anyone who knows about 40k knows about Necron gauss weaponry, and that's a lot of men.

There's also a Gauss rifle in Fallout, and a Gauss cannon in Doom.

They must have gotten guys who work in STEM because there’s no way 58% of men know what a checksum is. Same with many of the electronics terms, 64% know what a gauss is? I had to look it up, it’s a non-SI unit for magnetic flux density, and I am extremely skeptical that the majority of men have even heard of that.

Same with boson, 76% of men are familiar enough with particle physics? Less than 50% of men have even had a single physics class in high school! I’d be surprised if 76% knew what a proton was.

Most men have heard of the Higgs boson, AKA the God particle. They may have no idea what it is (I certainly don't), but they know it has something to do with subatomic particles and the Large Hadron Collider.

Gauss is probably recognized as the last name of Carl Friedrich Gauss rather than the unit.

I am familiar with the unit (as of my PhD days it was still the main practical unit among engineers and experimental physicists because the Tesla is so large) but I also read "gauss" as a proper name.

The study explains that the numbers in this table are z-values on a normal distribution, not percentages.

Because the distribution of percentages known was very right-skewed and did not differentiate much between well-known words, it was useful to apply a probit transformation to the percentages. The probit function translates percentages known to z values on the basis of the cumulative normal distribution. That is, a word known by 2.5% of the participants would have a word prevalence of –1.96; a word known by 97.5% of the participants would have a prevalence of +1.96. Because a word known by 0% of participants would return a prevalence score of –∞ and a percentage known of 100% would return a prevalence score of +∞, the range was reduced to percentages known from 0.5% (prevalence = –2.576) to 99.5% (prevalence = +2.576).2

2The specific formula we used in Microsoft Excel was =NORM.INV(0.005+Pknown*0.99;0;1).

A simpler version of this formula is =NORM.S.INV(0.005+Pknown*0.99). The inverse is =(NORM.S.DIST(prevalence,TRUE)-0.005)/0.99. So, for "gauss", prevalences of +0.64 for men vs. +0.31 for women actually mean percentages of 74 percent for men vs. 62 percent for women.

That makes sense. I’ve seen the table reproduced as a graph with percentages, I guess nobody (including me sadly) bothers to read the actual study.

From a quick look, although there’s not a direct easy conversion AFAIK, 0.15 prevalence is about 56% familiarity, 0.5 is about 70%, and 0.8 is 80%, so it’s not the massive gap originally presented.

But I think all the study did was check if the participants knew it was a word or not by having them pick out the real ones from a list of gibberish?

there’s not a direct easy conversion AFAIK

I gave one in an edit.

But I think all the study did was check whether the participants knew it was a word or not by having them pick out the real ones from a list of gibberish.

More or less.

For each vocabulary test, a random sample of 67 words and 33 nonwords was selected. For each letter string, participants had to indicate whether or not they knew the stimulus. At the end of the test, participants received information about their performance, in the form of a vocabulary score based on the percentage of correctly identified words minus the percentage of nonwords identified as words. For instance, a participant who responded “yes” to 55 of the 67 words and to 2 of the 33 nonwords received feedback that they knew 55/67 – 2/33 = 76% of the English vocabulary. Participants could do the test multiple times and always got a different sample of words and nonwords.

But they largely replicated the results by administering three ordinary multiple-choice vocabulary tests, with r = 0.69 vs. the original test.

There is not a single biological male or female on this green earth who will be reversed on the chart.

I've met some absolutely flaming biological males and went to high school with a butch Lesbian who's now a Formula 1 mechanic. I feel like you're exaggerating a bit.

Yes I know a butch mechanic too and I'll still say her interests are surprisingly female coded.

Anyways motorsports isn't even that male coded: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2024/03/11/heres-why-formula-1-racing-is-growing-in-popularity-with-women/

F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali said 40% of global F1 fans were women, up 8% from 2017.

This is bourne out by the word statistics, where none of the left column words have anything to do with automobiles or racing

That chart shows 15% of women and 13% of men know the least common opposite sex's word, and I bet of that minority, a sizeable number know the other words.

Yes a minority will know some of the words. But the probability stacks up as words are added. Many women will know one word from the left. Few or none will know all.

As @aldomilyar points out, the stereotypically homosexual will provide a source of "reversed" people. In addition to the butch tech-loving lesbians, a lot of the female words are about clothing or fabric, and there's a lot of gay male fashion designers. They'll probably know the flowers too.

Heterosexual female motorcycle enthusiasts might also provide some "reversed" people.

butch tech-loving lesbians

Do these elusive creatures actually exist?

there's a lot of gay male fashion designers

The vast majority of gay men are into men stuff, they just also happen to like anal with other men.

I'm not sure about fashion designers in particular but I admit they may know more words from the right side. I would still expect they will know many words from the left as well.

I've run into a decent number of techie (cis) lesbians, and then there's also the trans male contingent that gives similar twists to the bioessentialist perspective. The probabilistic argument still holds up -- you're talking well under a tenth of a percent -- but they do have existence proofs. That said, there's maybe one I know who'd flip this list, since they tend to either also be fabric nerds or be solely software-focused. Pretty much anyone with a EE background deep enough to know thermistor is going to be a renfest nut, and the exception I do have specifically rejected fabric and flowers stuff because her parents were really jerks about it rather than straightforward lack of interest.

Some of the words wouldn't be relevant even to a typical gay fashion designer. I doubt even the femmiest gay guy would consider a chignon, and they don't want to think about a pessary or doula, nearly by definition. On the other hand, taffeta, ruche, sateen, tulle, chambray, those are all pretty mainstream fabric terms, and many of which I'd expect them to have experience both talking about and using if they're even remotely into hobbyist sewing. Maybe jacquard, chenille, boucle, and damask if they do cosplay, upholstery, or embroidery, though they're weirder and I only know from trawling Michael's.

Bandaeu and kohl they might actually wear, if into crossdress; the real big question is whether it'd be something they'd call that rather than a tube top or makeup. Hell, espadrille isn't even a crossdress thing for guys, it's just a slipon.

I know all of them and so does my wife. :)

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