
Sex Differences in Visual Motion Processing - jessaustin
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30776-0
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elil17
It’s improtant to remember that this study isn’t being done just to prove that
men and women have different brains. It’s primarly designed to help understand
neurological phenomena like Autism which are sex differentiated.

Also, this study seemed to do a good job avoiding sexist stereotyping. This is
an example of the _right_ way to do research about neurological differences
between men and women.

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dubya23
It's critically important to admit that there ARE differences in the first
place. Something that inexplicably has become taboo to many on the left.

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torstenvl
There definitely _are_ differences. A lot of them.

In what way do you see this as taboo on the left? Among U.S. progressives, the
complexity of sex differences seems to be very important; whereas my
experience with U.S. conservatives is the opposite.

For example, given the following two statements:

"If you have a penis, you are male. If you do not, you are female."

"If someone has a female brain but male genitalia, that person should be free
to align their gender appropriately."

Is your experience really that conservatives are more likely to agree with the
second statement? If so, I'd be curious to know where, from a sociological
perspective.

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dubya23
You can look up countless instances of Social Science professors and students
saying unironically that for instance superior Male performance in sports is
entirely due to social upbringing. These people are overwhelmingly on the left
politically. James Damore was fired from Google for publishing a relatively
straightforward reading of sexual difference research. So yes it is a taboo.

I don't think your example demonstrates my point at all. Accepting that there
are sex differences has little to do with acceptance of Trans people.

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Geee
Does this have implications for user interfaces in any way? I would guess that
for women it could be harder to find fast moving objects (mouse cursor) or
make sense of quick transitions on a screen.

~~~
dcre
Interfaces should probably avoid working on the threshold of human perception.

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hosh
This stuff matters for VR technology and the "uncanny valley". Early versions
of the technology that crossed the uncanny valley for men did not necessarily
cross it for women, and so women still get motion sick.

Some people have tried to study this with transgendered people who are
undergoing hormone replacement therapy. There is enough of a difference to
warrent further study.

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macinjosh
I didn't know the uncanny valley had anything to do with motion sickness.
Interesting.

~~~
hosh
Yeah. Found the article about it: [https://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-
designed-to-be-sexi...](https://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-
be-sexist/)

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The_rationalist
This studie should be added to
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition)

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tabtab
For most of human history, men were pretty much forced to be the warriors and
primary defenders of a village. Thus, there was strong genetic pressure to
react quick (or die). But women seem better at "find Waldo" kind of tasks, so
perhaps there's a tradeoff. We are tuned for different specialties.

~~~
presscast
It's worth mentioning that the cognitive science community generally shuns
evolutionary arguments, as they tend to be "just so" assertions.

It's not that it's necessarily wrong, but rather unfalsifiable as such.

~~~
weberc2
Who is “the cognitive community”, and does it include the evolutionary
psychologists?

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Symmetry
The way you do evolutionary psychology scientifically is that you think about
which physiological traits ought to have been produced by selective pressure
and then check your predictions. Coming up with a _post hoc_ justification
after the evidence is in just isn't science.

~~~
weberc2
So the distinction is post hoc reasoning, not evolutionary explanations? I
interpreted the OP’s comment as condemning the latter.

~~~
Symmetry
The vast majority of people making evolutionary psychology arguments in Hacker
News threads or newspaper op-eds or such are also doing the later so the bad
associations are understandable, even if they're not really the fault of
evolutionary psychology the academic field.

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Uhhrrr
Could this lower motion perception threshold explain male dominance in
e-sports?

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sonnyblarney
That's the first thing I thought of, granted, there must be so many factors
involved in that one ... FYI it wouldn't just be 'e-sports' \- it would be
'all sports'. Everything from football to downhill skiing requires that kind
of hyper aware processing.

~~~
Uhhrrr
I agree, there will be many other factors, like fine motor reaction time, and
the most important is probably being able to outguess one's opponent. But a
small gender-specific edge could well be sufficient to make the top ranks
homogeneous.

I don't know that it would apply to all sports. For soccer, more inertia and
bigger muscles at play might mean that that edge is insignificant.

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amanaplanacanal
I can't tell much from only reading the summary, but I would think that any
differences might be environmental, rather than genetic.

My general take is that there has been so much bad science throughout history
around sex differences, I need very hard evidence that something is not
environmental before I will buy into it.

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dubya23
Yeah the sexes are exactly identical. Males lack ovaries because of
environmental effects... /s

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sctb
If you won't stop trolling we'll ban the account.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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jnovek
Why all the wasteful discussion about gender politics? Read the last sentence
of the abstract —

“Overall, these results show how sex differences can manifest unexpectedly,
highlighting the importance of sex as a factor in the design and analysis of
perceptual and cognitive studies.”

...which implies that some studies in the past may be in error because they
didn’t take into account otherwise innocuous differences in behavior between
the sexes.

This is cool and interesting, right? Good, then take the gender politics chat
back to reddit where it belongs.

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21
This line of thinking leads for example to studies on differences in risk-
taking behavior between genders, which then leads to people saying "of course
most companies are run by man, because men being more risk-taking start more
companies". This kind of sexist thinking has no place in academia.

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DoreenMichele
It leads to that only if your agenda is to go there. If your agenda is to
figure out how to make life better for people generally, it can lead to
discussions of "Given that women tend to have this trait or circumstance that
hinders their performance in our current cultural paradigms, what might work
better to help them accomplish X, Y or Z should they so desire it?"

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anon49124
Interesting. I'd like to know why I can't remember people's names but can/have
identified faces reverse aligned with path of travel with a glimpse
(anecdotally; the brother of a roommate).

