Women are confusing, men are simple

[andrewducker]

Yesterday I posted a link to the page which tried to use your browser history to work out if you were male or female.

Today I found myself discussing the vagaries of research into female sexuality with marrog.

Strangely, these two things seem somehow linked together in my mind, along with the results of some of Simon Baron-Cohen's research into systemising/empathising functions in brains, and the male/female split therein. I exchanged an email or two with him after his research was covered in some newspapers, pointing out that while men did, statistically, seem to have a tendency to be focussed systemisers, lacking in empathy, women tended not towards empathy, but towards balance between the two functions. The papers were, of course, reporting it much more one-sidedly than that.

This linked into the poll yesterday, where it's obvious that the (very basic) algorithm can tell that a man is a man 2/3 of the time - but is no better at telling that a woman is a woman than a coin toss would be. Which would, again, tend to indicate that men are more likely lean over in one direction, making them easy to spot, while women are spread all over the place.

This tends to be picked up by reporters as "Men tend to be X, and women don't." and then reported as "Men are X, women are the opposite of X.", which is clearly nonsense.

(This then tends to be interpreted by a large chunk of people as "_all_ Men are X, _all_ Women are Y", which is beyond nonsense and into gibberish.)

Comments

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

it's obvious that the (very basic) algorithm can tell that a man is a man 2/3 of the time - but is no better at telling that a woman is a woman than a coin toss would be.

Well, not for your friends list. But since you're a man who tested as one, is it surprising that your online friends also visit male-categorised websites?

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

This tends to be picked up by reporters as "Men tend to be X, and women don't." and then reported as "Men are X, women are the opposite of X.", which is clearly nonsense.

This is one of the things that particularly infuriates me with any kind of research misreported.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

While we're on the topic of association...

I was thinking about X and Y chromosomes. Now, this is something I know absolutely nothing about, but I was wondering what effect the Y chromosome might have on "Men tend to be X, and women don't."

[zz]

girls smell. girls do *skipping*.

wait, that's systemising isn't it? :D

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Yes! Thank you for writing down something I have been thinking for a long time!!!

[0olong.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure you can possibly draw any conclusions about men and women in general from those stats. Surely if the researchers had found the same they'd simply have shifted the results a bit in the female direction, so that they'd identify 50% of randomly-gendered people as female, and I think that would inevitably lead to exactly the same inaccuracy in male-detection as in female-detection, as long as we're assuming those are the only two possible results.

I think it's much more like 'maleness' and 'answering Andy's poll' are both positively correlated with something that for want of a better name I'll just call 'geekiness'...