
Sex Differences in the Adult Human Brain - vixen99
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cercor/bhy109/4996558
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vixen99
Why is a submission with an accurately worded title linking to a paper from
top-ranking institutions contributed by 18 authors flagged on HN?

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flukus
HN only likes science when it has PC conclusions.

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dang
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

HN is divided on divisive issues. Anthropomorphizing it into something that
"likes" what you dislike and "dislikes" what you like is just an illusion, but
has become a rhetorical trick, as cheap as it is common. Please don't do that
here.

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a_bonobo
Title using 'very large' does not come from the article, which gives a more
subtle image:

>Sex Differences in the Adult Human Brain: Evidence from 5216 UK Biobank
Participants

>Males had higher raw volumes, raw surface areas, and white matter fractional
anisotropy; females had higher raw cortical thickness and higher white matter
tract complexity. There was considerable distributional overlap between the
sexes.

Personally I wouldn't call the difference between a mean of 1115.76 with an
standard deviation of 89.68 and a mean of 1233.58 with an SD of 98.31 very
large (all in cm^3)

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vixen99
Please note that 'very large' was indeed quoted directly from the paper.

"The average difference for the 14 subcortical volumes was d = −0.70. A set of
Bayesian t-tests (see Supplemental Materials and Table 1) confirmed that the
mean sex differences were very large, with extremely strong evidence in favor
of the hypothesis that males differed from females "on every overall and
subcortical volume."

You add that in your personal opinion the difference is 'not very large'. What
should be the magnitude of the numbers below to fall into the 'large' category
in your assessment?

Quote: "...total brain volume translates to 92.1% of males being above the
female mean and an 84% chance that a randomly-chosen male will have a large
brain volume than a randomly chosen female" That's pretty significant in terms
of means.

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dang
Cherry-picking a phrase and making it the title is a form of editorializing,
which breaks the HN guidelines.

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

When the topic is divisive, doing this is particularly bad. It can easily ruin
the thread for discussion. If you want to say what you think is important
about an article, please do so in a comment. Then your view is on a level
playing field with everyone else's.

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dvfjsdhgfv
The article itself is not so much interesting to me that the reactions to it
on HN. The articles says nothing on how these differences translate into
psychological traits/abilities etc. Nevertheless, even a hint that there might
be differences, and that they're might be quite pronounced, somehow cannot be
a subject of civilized discussion on HN and people will flag it straight away.
Why? What are you afraid of? Understanding these results might help us to
understand ourselves better. Or do you prefer not to have such research in the
name of political correctness?

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mg794613
Uh-oh this is going to hurt a lot of people. Even if the article did not state
anything about the actual effects of these differences. Just mentioning or
hinting at this nowadays will result in a lot of automatic flack and backlash.
Notice how the incoming comments will be about the title and not the contents
and the subsequent derived meaning of this. They will probably have to change
the title to not offend anyone. Sadly this is our current state of approach on
science.

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pgsandstrom
So far two comments like yours, getting meta-offended by theoretical
complaints.

People getting upset from the actual result: Zero.

Sadly this is our current state of approach on science.

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bryanrasmussen
The first comment I saw when I came in to the post start off:

"Title using 'very large' does not come from the article, which gives a more
subtle image:"

which sounds to me like someone taking offense to the title?

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jjk166
They're taking offense to the title being a mischaracterization of the paper,
not to the result in the paper

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sanxiyn
The title is not the title of the paper, but it _is_ a direct quote from the
paper. The paper does say differences are very large. (Search for "very
large".)

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sanxiyn
Of interest: There was generally greater male variance across the raw
structural measures. They also cite Global Sex Differences in Test Score
Variability (Science, 2008).

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venning
Towards the end of the Introduction, they have a paragraph where they discuss
how the study intends to test the "greater male variability hypothesis",
something I had not heard of before.

They reference other studies which have show greater variability among males
in: cognitive ability, academic achievement test results, personality,
athletic performance, birth weight, and adult weight.

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venning
Mods, perhaps _" Sex Differences in the Adult Human Brain: Evidence from 5216
Participants"_ would be less editorialized while not overly long.

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saagarjha
Not really a fan of the title here…something about it just seems too
editorialized. Maybe "significant mean differences found between mens' and
womens' brains?"

