Butthurt white guys, an Asian virgin and an angry lesbian walk into a bar...
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Adebisi
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Mist
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Batman | This American Life
Listen.
What's in this episode of This American Life is so relevant to so many of the threads in this forum.
Listen.
What's in this episode of This American Life is so relevant to so many of the threads in this forum.
Mist
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Indeed, but the flipside is also true. If blindness is largely a social construct, then so is gender, so is race.
Mist
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Did you miss the point entirely? Did you listen to it?
It spells out with evidence, plain as day, that expectations are more powerful of an influence than even the physical, biological reality of having eyes.
Which means you're a fucking moron if you think 'women don't do X because their brains are just 'wired' different.'
It spells out with evidence, plain as day, that expectations are more powerful of an influence than even the physical, biological reality of having eyes.
Which means you're a fucking moron if you think 'women don't do X because their brains are just 'wired' different.'
fanaskin
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it means that what people usually think is a direct feed is actually a post production in your brain based of all your sensory inputs. I've always thought people in general have extreme adaptability, if you have confidence and you repeatedly practice anything. I always use asian monks as an example for that. he still can't really use his eye's, it's confidence, adaptability and repetition which is both inner and outer directed.
Denaut
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You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. This story couldn't be any more unrelated to the topic at hand (you also apparently don't know any blind people).
Gavinmad
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Denaut
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You are welcome to explain how neuroplasticity of the visual cortex is related to population scale gender differences. Generally.
Edit: My Bad, I skipped the prologue and listened to the rest. This still doesn't dispute anything we've discussed in this thread. No one has ever said that things are 100% nature (although some stuff like intelligence/height seem to be heavily nature). Just that some differences at the level of a population, like general interests, are influenced by nature and we can't ignore them when discussing "gender imbalance" in certain fields.
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Mist always wants to say everything is 100% social since she wants social change and anything being nature-based would upset her agenda. She always argues as if we're all saying everything is 100% nature which we're not. Thats why it feels like you're talking past each other, because you are.
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I worked with a person that was going blind, he would smash into walls and get hurt constantly because he refused to adapt to his new reality and tried to manage his daily routine very similarly to how he had back when he could see.
One can draw circumstantial findings from unrelated events, call it evidence; and jump to sweeping unsupported conclusions in the same way Mist does, in regards to how Mist continues to smash into logical barriers as she refuses to adapt and evolve to the reality she lives in.
One can draw circumstantial findings from unrelated events, call it evidence; and jump to sweeping unsupported conclusions in the same way Mist does, in regards to how Mist continues to smash into logical barriers as she refuses to adapt and evolve to the reality she lives in.
Mist
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It's like you didn't actually listen to the podcast at all. Again, you're overfixating on the mechanics of the visual cortex.
The fact that Daniel could 'see' but Adam couldn't was not because Daniel had a higher degree of neuroplasticity than Adam. The important part is that plasticity was triggered by the expectations of those around them. One learned to see while the other learned to be helpless because of their social environment.
You also have a lousy understanding of population scale gender differences. Say you're plotting the gender difference of some given neurological attribute on a mean centered scale, and the mean for the male population is 0.15 and the mean for the female population is -0.15. There's still going to be a very large minority of males to the left of the female mean and a very large minority of females to the right of the male mean, meaning that population scale differences aren't particularly relevant when making an assumption about an individual. In other words, most neurological gender differences are measurably less than the standard deviation found in the overall population.
So if social expectations can be the difference between whether a blind man can see or not, and neurological differences are far smaller than something as extreme as the difference between 'has eyes' and 'doesn't have eyes' that means that surely social expectations have a far greater influence on expressed gender differences relating to intellectual aptitude than do any neurobiological differences.
Mist
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I don't really want social change, I'm pretty happy with how society is working right now, (I mean, I'm white, why wouldn't I be happy with society?) I'm not one of those people who thinks we 'need' more female programmers, in the same way that I don't think we 'need' more female trash collectors. And I don't think it's "misogyny" or "patriarchy" that's keeping women out of tech, but I don't think it's biology either. I think society is a lot more subtle than that, and that subtlety comes with it a powerful pervasiveness that few see and even fewer are willing to admit.
It amazes me how readily people accept that they're slaves to their genes yet are so reluctant to admit that they're products of their society, especially given that our genes are immutable and that our society is so readily variable. It reeks of the kind of hopeless, throw your hands up kind of fatalism, as if to say that the problems of our society are not really our fault.
Denaut
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No, expectations did not grant him this ability, practice did. It isn't exactly a shocking revelation that practicing a skill over and over again, for years, will rewire your brain (this is what neuroplasticity means). I am still not certain what you are getting at.
The reason why I asked if you know any blind people is because many (most?) blind people can do what he does, just not nearly as well. I specifically asked my blind friend about him (who works as an advocate for the blind) and she told me as much. She, and most blind people, use the sound from their tapping cane as a crude form of echo-location. His ability to do it as well as he does is rather special, but it isn't some miracle birthed from abstract thoughts of people. Hell, we all use it to some extent, you could probably tell if a wall was right in front of you or far away with your eyes closed from sound alone.
Furthermore you are drastically exaggerating this case, he can't see, he can "see." His echolocation is a crude and significantly inferior sight compared to what he would possess with working eyes. Now, if he were a bat, with bat parts andmost importantly a bat brain, he would be much better at echolocation. Turns out that even in extremely special cases we are still constrained by our biology. Look, I'm really happy for the guy, what he can do has certainly improved his quality of life, but you are way overreaching here.
Yes, population differences don't matter when speaking about individuals. Luckily enough a grouping like "all engineers" is a population and not an individual, so population level gender differences in occupational preference can lead to population level gender differences in "% of female engineers."
The reason why I asked if you know any blind people is because many (most?) blind people can do what he does, just not nearly as well. I specifically asked my blind friend about him (who works as an advocate for the blind) and she told me as much. She, and most blind people, use the sound from their tapping cane as a crude form of echo-location. His ability to do it as well as he does is rather special, but it isn't some miracle birthed from abstract thoughts of people. Hell, we all use it to some extent, you could probably tell if a wall was right in front of you or far away with your eyes closed from sound alone.
Furthermore you are drastically exaggerating this case, he can't see, he can "see." His echolocation is a crude and significantly inferior sight compared to what he would possess with working eyes. Now, if he were a bat, with bat parts andmost importantly a bat brain, he would be much better at echolocation. Turns out that even in extremely special cases we are still constrained by our biology. Look, I'm really happy for the guy, what he can do has certainly improved his quality of life, but you are way overreaching here.
Yes, population differences don't matter when speaking about individuals. Luckily enough a grouping like "all engineers" is a population and not an individual, so population level gender differences in occupational preference can lead to population level gender differences in "% of female engineers."
Gavinmad
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Out of curiosity, why DO you think there are far fewer women programmers than men?