

Boys and Troubles in School - tokenadult
http://educationaloptions.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/boys-and-troubles-in-school/

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radu_floricica
I find it a bit disappointing when people, even on HN, argue on such topics
like they are a method of opinion or life experience. If you read even a
couple of books on evolution, even at a science popularization level (Richard
Dawkins being a good example) it's pretty clear genders are far from
identical. And that has been so since the first living things separated in
genders. Everything, of course including behavior, is influenced by gender.

This of course doesn't mean we should "let things be" and trust mother nature.
Some evolved behaviors are better then others in modern society, but it's
really surprising how few they are compared to the mass which still apply.

------
xenophanes
It advocates Nature, and supports it based on anecdotal evidence involving
people who'd had over 5 years of exposure to Nurture, and the assumption that
since they are young it must be Nature at work.

~~~
jerf
Do you have any children?

I've got an eight-month old boy. I can't claim to be the world's expert and I
won't pretend this isn't an anecdote, but still, it's a data point. I'm also
30.

If you are 16 and you think you know what raising a baby is about, you're
probably wrong, but if you make it to 30 without having some sort of good
idea, you're... well, I won't call you an idiot but you've not been paying
attention. So I had a good idea about how helpless babies are and a pretty
good idea of how they got their needs met. I've not been surprised by the
midnight feedings or anything else like that.

But I will admit to some surprise at just how mind-bogglingly stupid babies
are. My son is toying with the idea of beginning "separation anxiety", which
psychologists think is not merely "a phase", but the point at which the baby
_begins to distinguish between himself and his parents_.

Think about what that means for a moment. We're talking about an entity _too
stupid_ to realize that other people are not himself. This is a level of
stupidity we can only comprehend symbolically; we can not really grasp this
degree of stupidity.

My son is too stupid to realize that he is not me. He is _way_ to stupid to
pick up on subtle social messages about what it means to "be a man", were I
even trying to give any. There is simply no way that Nature is not the
dominant force here; there's simply nowhere for Nuture to be living!

And yet... _he is a boy_. He likes to be loud, and I don't mean "cry", I mean
be loud when he's happy. He likes to move and squirm. He likes cars and
construction equipment, spurns the dolls of other babies (when he loves their
other new things), and _really_ loves my laptop, which means there's a lot of
fun to be had keeping him away from that in my future. (As in, "I don't want
him to destroy it"; we're _years_ away from any actual use of a computer.) He
likes to move around, and he likes to smack his toys to make them do things.

I've also seen several other girls of this age cohort now, and even the ones
that are high-strung and nervous when it comes to crying play radically more
calmly, have clearly different preferences for toys, and so on.

What social signals can we _possibly_ be sending a four-month old baby to tell
them how their gender behaves? Screw "not understanding gender", a four-month
old doesn't understand that things persist when they move out of their vision!
How is a being that was only recently introduced to "color" (not that they can
articulate it) picking up on these social cues? How can something so stupid
that he doesn't respond to his own name suddenly get so socially smart that he
realizes that the doll I just placed in his hand is a parent-being-funny trap,
and he's supposed to drop it and pick the truck up again? (Which is what he
did.)

Maybe a five-year old has picked up on it by then, but what accounts for the
gender differences between 5- _month_ -olds? Until you have a baby, you can
not comprehend the astonishing levels of stupid we all start out with.
Actually, scratch that, _nobody_ can truly comprehend it; it's like trying to
imagine being a fish or something, you can't really do it. The idea that all
the parents I know have managed to educate our babies about their place in the
social order despite them not responding to their name or indeed much of
anything else is just absurd.

I have every intention of letting my boy, and any future children I may have,
grow up to be whoever they are most suited to be, regardless of gender roles
in society. But whether or not I bring gender roles to the party, it is pretty
clear to me that the child will anyhow.

~~~
xenophanes
Why do you think impassioned personal appeals are worth posting in reply to a
comment saying anecdotal evidence is worthless?

It seems more like you are trying to convince yourself than trying to convince
me.

~~~
jerf
A lot of people have the wrong idea about anecdotal evidence. There's the
people who thinks it substitutes for proof... but there's also the people who
think it's worthless.

 _Both_ are wrong.

A universal claim can be disproven with a single counterexample. A nearly
universal claim like "Almost all gender role is social" can be disproven with
nearly a single counterexample. (Or, if you want to get technical, rendered so
improbably as to no longer be worth considering.)

I don't need to convince myself. I never bought into the transparently-false
idea in the first place. Having kids just made it more transparently false.

Don't buy into the "anecdotes aren't data" line so hard that you go around
living life with your eyes closed. That's no more rational than ignoring
science entirely.

~~~
xenophanes
No one has any anecdote which disproves "all gender role is social". For
example, parents saying they didn't treat their opposite-gender kids different
is useless. They did treat the kids different: different names, different
clothes, and many other things. What they really mean is they didn't treat the
kids different in any _relevant_ way. But how do they know that? Now they are
making a philosophical and non-evidence-based claim. Hardly a courter example.

~~~
jerf
I actually cut you some slack and upgraded the point to "Al _most_ all gender
role is social." To disprove "All gender role is social", it technically
suffices to show only one example of a gender role that could not possibly be
social. I actually cite many (as I consider each child I know a separate data
point). It should also be pointed out that it's non-trivial, which is why I
shared it in the first place; even very knowledgeable non-parents (such as I
was) can be surprised by the reality.

I thought I might be overstretching with that bit about not buying into the
"line", but maybe not. Logic 101, universals can be disproven with a single
counterexample. Logic 301 or so, very-nearly-universals can be rendered
implausibly unlikely with just a few counterexamples with little regard to
distribution. That only works on very-nearly-universals, but it's perfectly
sound. (I'm not out to show that gender is 100% biological, only that 100%
social is an absurdity.) Anecdotes may not be "data", but there are logically-
legitimate uses they can be put to.

~~~
xenophanes
Do you understand that an anecdote where you interpret a situation (possibly
according to some bias or mistake), and a _valid_ data point which can be a
counter-example to a universal, are different things?

