So a [gigantic meta analysis](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342...) of thirty years of studies on sexed structural and functional differences in human brains found zero evidence of any differences, a completely overlapping distribution, but as soon as "big data AI" is used suddenly not only are there differences, there's literally zero overlap? Count me suspicious. I think I'm going to trust the meta-analysis of 30 years worth of wide-ranging scientific study over the brand new study that's just throwing whatever fad is currently in the vogue at the problem to see what happens.
I have to assume you haven’t bothered reading this, because section 2.3 points out flaws in the methodology of the studies looked at which the methodology in this study kind of tries to address (whether or not it’s a good job of it is left for everyone else to figure out). You shouldn’t dismiss a result out of hand because it doesn’t fit preconceived notions, but it’s absolutely a reason to try to dig in to the methodology of the new study and make sure it’s not flawed.
That said, this meta-analysis is also filled with some crazy statements. It seems to imply sexual dimorphism is only really visible in repro organs but women necessarily need to have wider hips to facilitate child birth among other differences.
This obvious point should have also been noted when comparing differences in organ mass, since mothers of babies with larger heads are more likely to die so this is selected against. Not an issue with lungs, heart etc., hence larger % differences in sexes there.
These aren’t egregious omissions in and of themselves, but it’s certainly useful context I’d like to have were I not familiar with sexual dimorphism.
The dismissiveness of a 1.6 fold increase in SDN size of human males compared to human women is bad. That’s enormous! Not something I would prepend with “only” and repeatedly call “small”, even when not comparing the differences between M/F humans and M/F rodents.
Bizarre that none of the authors objected to this phrasing, because it’s poisoned reading the rest of this paper for me. How am I meant to trust the authors’ opinion of what a “small” difference is?
Some of the points are a bit more compelling, like in section 5.1 where they point out that a difference attributed to M/F was replicated in much smaller size by concentrating on volume instead, or in 5.2 where they point out a few papers that missed crucial nuance.
But overall after reading a few thousand words of this, the nicest thing I can say about it is that I agree that it is indeed gigantic.
Update: had a friend with access send me a PDF of the study and looked through it. It seems that the big breakthrough is only half AI — the other half being looking directly at time series of fMRIs instead of static images with features in them manually selected for relevance, because how the various circuits in the brain operate and circulate over time is important information. Also they got this to replicate well with the same people at different times, and also generalize to two other cohorts, consistently, and also used XAI to check what the AI was keying off, to make sure it wasn't going off something nonsensical, and directly used those features with success as well. It seems like an extremely carefully controlled and designed study tbh.
Without making any claims about gender or non-binary people (not my wheelhouse, I simply don't know), there's ample evidence to suggest statistically significant population-level differences between males and females on a many cognitive measures.
I don't see how it's surprising that an new generation of signal-detection tool finds population-level differences in the brains that produce these cognitions.
I think the linked news article is a little misleading, although I share your skepticism. I'd like to see these results replicated rigorously on still new sets of data by independent researchers; I wouldn't be surprised either way, if the results did or did not replicate.
However, the news article seems to spin this as "male and female brains are totally different entities that bear no relationship with one another." Although I haven't reread it carefully, it seems like the article is saying something more like "you can identify gender-specific patterns, and those gender-specific components relate to things like cognitive ability gender-specifically". It's not that you can't find overlap — that that wasn't the focus of the study — it's that if you go looking for differences, you can find them.
When your study contradicts reality, your study is wrong. That there are major mental difference between men and women is obvious to anyone who interacts with both.
If your study can't find those differences it's your study that's wrong, not that the differences don't exist.
It’s not the first study to find differences. And that’s not the only meta study in existence. I don’t see why one would be surprised given other literature around the subject.
BTW, note how the article you cited doesn’t argue against differences between male and female brains but makes a rather pedantic point about “dimorphism”.
The article seems to conflate sex and gender while the study is paywalled so I can't tell how they defined male and female. The study does seem specific to sex and doesn't mention gender at all in the abstract.
Without those definitions it's basically saying "things we grouped a certain way ended up grouped that way" which isn't really a useful result.
Really, I understand the human rights aspect of calling people whatever they feel they are and I am all for it. I think we should call people by their pronouns and whatever. Sex is one thing and gender is another.
But definitely, pretending that innate differences between sexes are influenced by the social construct of gender is going to far into a rabbit hole.
Let's just accept that we can still have medical research based on sex, and understand that it doesn't invalidade the idea of gender. It is just a different matter.
Looks like they _might_ have been in the study set, but weren't separated out and focused on? At any rate, the author is hoping for the same:
"In the first edition of my book Why Gender Matters, published by Doubleday in 2005, I devoted a chapter to kids who are psychologically “gender-atypical.” I suggested that these kids are somewhere in between male and female. But the Stanford study provides little support for that claim. I am hopeful that the researchers will do follow-up studies specifically looking at individuals who are gender-nonconforming, gender-atypical, and who have gender dysphoria, to see whether and how those characteristics influence these findings."
the sample was "roughly 1,500 young adults 20 to 35 years of age" so, in today's environment, I don't think it's possible that there were not at least a few who self-identify as non-binary and nonconforming.
The difference has two components: genetic, personal. Genetic does not depend on self identification. Personal is very similar these days. Same families, same schools.
As for trans. Humans, unlike most animals, cannot even have sex without being taught. The reason is humans for many generations, million years probably, lived in groups and learned how to do it. Those who didn't have genetically hardcoded knowledge how to make kids by the time they grew up they knew it any way. It wasn't necessary and with the time it was almost lost. The same with gender identification. Everywhere boys and girls where brought up differently. So, we lost hadcoded self identification. Today human kids may grow up thinking they are dogs, or wolfs, or sheep. If they happened to grow up with animals.
Conclusion is it's parents responsibility to give kids the right identity. Failure to do it, some brainwashed wokes don't do it intentionally, results in miss self-identification. Add to that 'doctors' multi-billon industry preying on them and some schools playing along to keep parents uninformed. There was a couple of months back interesting article about navy seal who had mental problems. He was brainwashed into believing he was a woman, and needs treatment and surgeries, payed by government. Later he realized he was just used to make money, and became a man again. The same happens to kids en mass. Because they are easy targets.
[+] [-] logicprog|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cmcaleer|1 year ago|reply
That said, this meta-analysis is also filled with some crazy statements. It seems to imply sexual dimorphism is only really visible in repro organs but women necessarily need to have wider hips to facilitate child birth among other differences.
This obvious point should have also been noted when comparing differences in organ mass, since mothers of babies with larger heads are more likely to die so this is selected against. Not an issue with lungs, heart etc., hence larger % differences in sexes there.
These aren’t egregious omissions in and of themselves, but it’s certainly useful context I’d like to have were I not familiar with sexual dimorphism.
The dismissiveness of a 1.6 fold increase in SDN size of human males compared to human women is bad. That’s enormous! Not something I would prepend with “only” and repeatedly call “small”, even when not comparing the differences between M/F humans and M/F rodents.
Bizarre that none of the authors objected to this phrasing, because it’s poisoned reading the rest of this paper for me. How am I meant to trust the authors’ opinion of what a “small” difference is?
Some of the points are a bit more compelling, like in section 5.1 where they point out that a difference attributed to M/F was replicated in much smaller size by concentrating on volume instead, or in 5.2 where they point out a few papers that missed crucial nuance.
But overall after reading a few thousand words of this, the nicest thing I can say about it is that I agree that it is indeed gigantic.
[+] [-] logicprog|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] courseofaction|1 year ago|reply
I don't see how it's surprising that an new generation of signal-detection tool finds population-level differences in the brains that produce these cognitions.
[+] [-] derbOac|1 year ago|reply
However, the news article seems to spin this as "male and female brains are totally different entities that bear no relationship with one another." Although I haven't reread it carefully, it seems like the article is saying something more like "you can identify gender-specific patterns, and those gender-specific components relate to things like cognitive ability gender-specifically". It's not that you can't find overlap — that that wasn't the focus of the study — it's that if you go looking for differences, you can find them.
[+] [-] ars|1 year ago|reply
If your study can't find those differences it's your study that's wrong, not that the differences don't exist.
[+] [-] im3w1l|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] LudwigNagasena|1 year ago|reply
BTW, note how the article you cited doesn’t argue against differences between male and female brains but makes a rather pedantic point about “dimorphism”.
[+] [-] grugagag|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aappleby|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hpen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wetpaws|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stefantalpalaru|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] dopylitty|1 year ago|reply
Without those definitions it's basically saying "things we grouped a certain way ended up grouped that way" which isn't really a useful result.
[+] [-] elzbardico|1 year ago|reply
But definitely, pretending that innate differences between sexes are influenced by the social construct of gender is going to far into a rabbit hole.
Let's just accept that we can still have medical research based on sex, and understand that it doesn't invalidade the idea of gender. It is just a different matter.
[+] [-] Flemiklo|1 year ago|reply
We are not able to tell if someone is a logical person or a cool dude or whatever just by looking at it.
And apparently hormones don't make a brain look different either
[+] [-] dryanau|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mouse_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Javalicious|1 year ago|reply
"In the first edition of my book Why Gender Matters, published by Doubleday in 2005, I devoted a chapter to kids who are psychologically “gender-atypical.” I suggested that these kids are somewhere in between male and female. But the Stanford study provides little support for that claim. I am hopeful that the researchers will do follow-up studies specifically looking at individuals who are gender-nonconforming, gender-atypical, and who have gender dysphoria, to see whether and how those characteristics influence these findings."
[+] [-] liveoneggs|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] astromaniak|1 year ago|reply
As for trans. Humans, unlike most animals, cannot even have sex without being taught. The reason is humans for many generations, million years probably, lived in groups and learned how to do it. Those who didn't have genetically hardcoded knowledge how to make kids by the time they grew up they knew it any way. It wasn't necessary and with the time it was almost lost. The same with gender identification. Everywhere boys and girls where brought up differently. So, we lost hadcoded self identification. Today human kids may grow up thinking they are dogs, or wolfs, or sheep. If they happened to grow up with animals.
Conclusion is it's parents responsibility to give kids the right identity. Failure to do it, some brainwashed wokes don't do it intentionally, results in miss self-identification. Add to that 'doctors' multi-billon industry preying on them and some schools playing along to keep parents uninformed. There was a couple of months back interesting article about navy seal who had mental problems. He was brainwashed into believing he was a woman, and needs treatment and surgeries, payed by government. Later he realized he was just used to make money, and became a man again. The same happens to kids en mass. Because they are easy targets.