I'm reminded of the research from decades ago on the size of infectious particles for airborne disease transmission. Animals were exposed to droplets containing tuberculosis, producing a model for whether other diseases could be transmitted through the air.
That model said COVID-19 could not, which we now know is entirely wrong. As it turns out, tuberculosis must travel deep into the lungs to produce an infection, which is not true for every pathogen.
It's important to check the assumptions underlying new research and make sure they really apply.
> The model predicted COVID-19 could not be transmitted through the air. The model was wrong; COVID-19 is highly transmissible through the air.
I'm not sure if that's the best way to put it. IIRC, the controversy was if COVID could spread through the air in the form of an aerosol or if it could only spread in the form of droplets. Droplets can't travel as far in the air, and their limitations were the basis of the "6ft social distancing" rules. It turns out COVID can spread as an aerosol, even though that was strongly denied during the early phases of the pandemic.
"… Men and women's brains are connected in different ways which may explain why the sexes excel at certain tasks, say researchers. A US team at the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of nearly 1,000 men, women, boys and girls and found striking differences.
Male brains appeared to be wired front to back, with few connections bridging the two hemispheres. In females, the pathways criss-crossed between left and right. ... "
This seems like a wicked study. By starting with 8 year olds, you've selected people who have already developed somewhat. It's quite possible these differences are developed. Partly by reinforcement of norms. We believe boys are more spatially oriented, so we treat them as such, and we implicitly train them to be, this then begins developing those pathways.
But you can't run the study to see if you could develop girls in similar ways. The amount of controls and isolation required to run the study properly is a bit inhumane. You'd need 24 hour control over everything that child learns and encounters.
So while the conclusions may be true, it's possible that it's not an inherent difference due to initial biology.
One option to investigate this would be to study children from highly varied cultures around the world. In fact it seems almost obvious that the study of brains is nearly worthless without such diversity. But that would be difficult and expensive.
Also: how much diversity is enough? I strongly suspect that the invention of agriculture had major effects on the social differences between men and women. You would have to include hunter-gatherers in your study to account for this possible effect, and I’m not sure how you would find enough left to do that.
One thing I wonder about whenever "the brains of men and women have systematically different structures" comes up, is what structures do the brains of trans people demonstrate?
> For this purpose, we analyzed a sample of 24 cisgender men, 24 cisgender women, and 24 transgender women before gender-affirming hormone therapy. We employed a recently developed multivariate classifier that yields a continuous probabilistic (rather than a binary) estimate for brains to be male or female. The brains of transgender women ranged between cisgender men and cisgender women (albeit still closer to cisgender men), and the differences to both cisgender men and to cisgender women were significant (p = 0.016 and p < 0.001, respectively).
Why do you wonder that? Because if brain structure is shaped by environment then it tells us nothing. If it’s not shaped by environment and brain structure is a fundamental biological difference then it provides some signal.
I don't think it matters so much to me why someone has a particular gender identity — if that's physiology or environment — but I think it would still be interesting to be able to determine independently of self-identification.
Seems like another deceptive statistical study that probably doesn't even control for brain size. It also seems to have discovered that women probably mix up their logic and "intuitive modes", as we always thought.
And why would they further show statistics by race rather than by brain size? Brain sizes affect the density of connections and proportions of white matter to grey matter, so comparing small-brained women and men to large-brained women and men would seem like an obvious thing to do if you have the data [edit: but this is obviously me just desperately looking for a control.]
Instead, I suspect they were fishing to find out some headline-grabbing result, hoping that (for example) black women were more masculine than white women, or Asian men were more feminine than white men.
On the mis-presentation and misinterpretation of gender-related data: The case of Ingalhalikar’s human connectome study
> Instead, I suspect they were fishing to find out some headline-grabbing result, hoping that (for example) black women were more masculine than white women, or Asian men were more feminine than white men.
That’s quite a bomb to throw with zero evidence. Like, why does your mind even jump to that?
> “People have been making this assumption that we can use male mice to reliably make comparisons within and across experiments, but our data suggest that female mice are more stable in terms of behavior despite the fact that they have the estrous cycle,” Datta said.
Isn't this quote mixing up two uses of "stable"? They stuck with male mice to be able to compare to other studies, not to reduce variability within the study (which should not be a goal in itself).
If this shows anything, it is that we know way too little about biological factors underlying behavior, and that variation in other factors (age is an obvious one, but there are also genes that affect this behavior) should be investigated too.
Yes. Say today the mouse engages in 3 behaviors (groom, walk around edge of enclosure, then dart across it) but tomorrow spends the whole day huddled in the corner (1 behavior, not exhibited yesterday). That’s sort of what they mean by within mouse variability.
Expanding the article's scope from "we should study mice of both sexes" to boiling the ocean with "we should IDIC mice studies" doesn't help here. Invoking age makes researchers more resistant to accounting for female biology in their research, because it gives them a ready excuse to say "we can't afford the combinatorial matrix of sex and age, so we're just going to study healthy adult males". In a world of theoretically infinite resources, it absolutely makes sense to widen the scope of mice studies to include all possible variations of mice, by sex and by age and by genetics. In today's actual world, it does not.
But then I don't see why people are willing to draw conclusions from mouse studies in the first place, certainly not medical. They don't even generalize over all mice.
If anyone still takes them more seriously than a mere hint, I can't see why they would criticize them for excluding females. This study at least doesn't show much difference, and many other factors are excluded anyway.
My wife works in the neuroscience field and has done research in this very topic.
A few general thoughts she's expressed in the past:
(1) Research often dismisses the sexual cycles as insignificant or play it down significantly, then generalize behavior they observe during experiments... without controlling for cycles.
(2) Because of this I know she (and many others) will dismiss observational studies without replication.
(3) Studying females requires extra care -- experiments involving females, should measure the cycle of each mouse to keep a record
The issue is rather complicated. Yes, you want to have a diverse sample, no questions here. However, there might be issues with the statistical design. Mice are territorial animals, and male mice get especially aggressive in a presence of a female. Put a couple of male mice in a cage, they'd be fine; add a girl in there, and there will be casualties.
That creates extreme stress in both male and female mice, and stress is an important confounding factor in neuroscience and beyond. Grouping mice by sex in different cages is obviously incorrect - cage effect is a major factor in animal research.
Not sure how these problems are solved now - maybe there are statisticians in the audience who can shed some light on that.
and you see females responding to treatment better than males, what does that mean? It can be any of the following:
0: females respond differently to the treatment due to their biochemistry (say, some Y-chromosome gene is interfering with the treatment)
1: females respond differently to the treatment due to social effects (a male would respond to treatment but not in an environmnet where he has to compete with other males)
2: there is a cage effect (say, it is slighly warmer, or more light, or fresh breeze, or something else mice care about) that causes the animals in one cage to respond differently.
Only with the above setup, you cannot know which answer is correct.
Statisticians have a bunch of tricks to tackle some of the issues above. For example, you can crossover (swap cages after some time) or increase the number of cages and randomise across cage conditions (say, you have 20 cages, 10 all-male and 10 all-female, spread around the facility to cover the variability of the cage conditions). Still, you won't be able to distinguish between #0 and #1.
This is not really my area though, so I want a knowledgeble reader to forgive my ignorance. I am a simple bioinformatician who was never too deeply involved into this type of pre-clinical biostatistics. I'm sure someone on HN has an answer how to properly design experiments like that. My message was that it's a bit more complicated than just 'we need female mice in research' - and I saw way too many irresposible biologists sacrificing 100s of mice in experiments where a correct inference couldn't be made.
Completely agree. Another issue plaguing some animal based neuroscience research is shoddy sample size. Understandable, given that some of the experiments are so damn challenging, but in the long run this does no favors to reproducibility.
That being said, for both of these issues, grants should award more money to fund the expansion in research protocol. Expecting any change without additional resources doesn't help.
Female research is quite harder than males using animals. The sex hormone could affect brain significantly which then ask for much big sample size. Besides due to the lack of previous studies, it might be hard to give a plausible explanation of the findings without test the sex cycle, but even with the knowledge of the cycle, which hormone?
Imagine it being 2023 and you are asking for more animals to torture. We should be demanding advancements in computational chemistry and biology, in vitro methods, and synthetic biology. Minor scientific advancements should not come at the expense of sentient creatures.
You're right, but downvoted because it is much, much harder to do what you're asking. But it's just bad science to ignore or not want to do something because it's harder. Modeling biological or physiological systems is something we do via animal sacrifice as well. My own research uses mice. I think current versions of LLMs could be used for synthesizing the framework of such models, at the very least. It would certainly make for an interesting open source framework, and would be pretty valuable if done right. There are some options already, but they are too specialized and not geared towards systems biology or physiology. Mainly the way I think about it is that a mouse can't reason with you about why you shouldn't do what you do to it. So you, as the more analytically mature being have to make up your own reasons. Is it worth it? That would be a digression for this post.
But more importantly, a lot of bad science is done while wasting away animal life. Regulatory bodies can at least do something to make it less cheap or harder to justify the use of animal models. Or at least ensure a higher standard of expectations for having used animal sacrifice.
Why is the comment downvoted? Animal suffering is a legitimate moral concern, and I don't think the comment is inappropriate. Instead of downvoting, a better approach would be to point out to the author that Harvard has apparently a policy towards animal studies [1] that is worth exploring further.
Most comments on HN on this topic that veer outside of a narrow range of acceptable thoughts, even from those people that generally support this topic, are flagged and killed.
It's very hard for anybody to be persuaded about any set of ideas where you see a large part of the discussion shut down.
I'd be surprised if my comment that doesn't even weigh in on this topic, but merely voices support for discussion to expand mutual empathy, isn't similarly downvoted.
> It's very hard for anybody to be persuaded about any set of ideas where you see a large part of the discussion shut down.
The problem is that any discussion involving gender, sexuality or identity will sooner or later devolve into flamewars, with zero arguments backed by serious research - particularly the "conservative" crowd tends to aggressively stick to "there are only two genders" while ignoring every single research piece to the contrary.
> It's very hard for anybody to be persuaded about any set of ideas where you see a large part of the discussion shut down.
The problem is that any discussion involving gender, sexuality or identity will sooner or later devolve into flamewars, with zero arguments backed by serious research - particularly the "liberal" crowd tends to aggressively stick to "there are more than two genders" while ignoring every single research piece to the contrary.
You talk about "arguments backed by serious research" versus the "conservative" crowd; but AFAI see those types of posts are flagged anyway, possibly brigaded.
Proactively stating that nobody is willing to discuss things and will flag you for saying your opinion is just the weak version of flagging things when you don’t have the majority opinion to actually make it happen.
Yeah no shit you’re going to get downvotes. This post does not read as asking for mutual empathy. It reads as bashing the other side and proactively claiming to be a victim if they dare to do the same to you, which they ought to, because this post does not contribute to the topic as you observe.
I think you’re wrong about people’s willingness to discuss, but even if you were correct, this is not a helpful post.
so weak, in fact, as to be entirely different - the most relevant thing being that flagged comments are killed.
Also, this is a very uncharitable take - It might be a tactic used when "you don’t have the majority opinion to actually make it happen" but that's not always the case, plus the mechanism of becoming the majority, comment wise, requires comments not to be killed i.e. it's possible it is the majority opinion, just unspoken b/c of aggressive downvoters.
> It reads as bashing the other side and proactively claiming to be a victim if they dare to do the same to you
I guess I'm wrong then. Apologies. Who am I to argue with whatever you decide is objective truth.
> "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command... and if all others accepted the lie, which the party imposed, if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth"
You assert A. I assert not A. You end up playing the victim again. And for bonus points, accuse me of claiming objective truth with no grounding and then post a quote which strongly implies the views contrary to yours are orchestrated lies.
This is not a good faith post. It should be downvoted.
Then it should be safe for me to say that I've noticed transmen are less assertive and aggressive than transwomen, and that this tracks with all the research, including crime statistics, showing that human males are more aggressive than human females.
Seems unlikely to me that you’ve personally spent enough time with transgender people and with a large enough sample to justify having an opinion that generalizes across them if you’re so eager to share this opinion.
You have posed this as a question. My answer is yes. But perhaps you don't really mean it as a question, and instead mean it to solicit others to flag my comment to silence my point of view. Is that the case? If so, then logicalmonster was right.
I have spent the past 15 years working in tech in an American west coast city, I have personally known several transgender people in professional and social contexts, and encountered many more. I have also known or encountered innumerable cisgendered men and women. From these experiences, I have concluded that cisgender men are more dangerous than cisgender women, more quick to anger, more prone to aggressive posturing and certainly more prone to physical assault. Do you doubt these observations as well? Will you allow me the ability to conclude anything from my personal experiences, or do you demand that I perform rigorous scientific studies to conclude anything of this sort? I am telling you, in good faith, that it has been my personal observation that I should be wary of cisgendered men and transwomen. Because although both are usually not violent, both exhibit a predilection for aggression that significantly exceeds what I have come to expect from cisgendered women and transmen.
I’m asking if it’s good faith because it feels like it cannot possibly be.
You can have any opinion you like, but it’s kind of pointless to think that your small experiences are sufficient to generalize. on top of that, I feel like you’re probably just making up your anecdata or exaggerating the size of it to justify your desire to state an opinion you know other people will not like.
I don’t really care what your opinion is either way. But your experiences are about as valuable as my grandparents’ experience with “the Blacks”.
No, you don’t need to conduct a study to state your opinions. But at the same time, your opinion is meaningless, and it’s not “silencing conversation” to acknowledge that and end the discussion there.
But let’s have it anyway.
I don’t have any opinion on whether transwomen are more aggressive than cisgendered women. If I had to guess, yeah, they probably are? Why does that matter?
The reason I mentioned my opinion is because it's an example of opinions which are suppressed. You have demonstrated this, by insisting that nobody could possibly have and express my opinion in good faith (despite your insistence, I earnestly do believe what I've said, in good faith.) Such proclamation of bad faith are an attempt to suppress the expression of opinions like my own, you have tacitly declared my comment to be a violation of the forum rules and therefore deserving of suppression.
Your reaction to my statement has proved logicalmonster's point: "Most comments on HN on this topic that veer outside of a narrow range of acceptable thoughts, even from those people that generally support this topic, are flagged and killed."
You haven't succeeded in getting my comments flagged, but you called for it. I knew you would, and that's why I made that comment. To give you an opportunity to demonstrate your censorious inclinations.
Also Chris2048 is right:
> No, you don’t need to conduct a study to state your opinions. But at the same time, your opinion is meaningless
This is double-speak. You don't require me to have opinions based on scientific studies, but at the same time my opinions are worthless. That's double-speak.
> Such proclamation of bad faith are an attempt to suppress the expression of opinions like my own, you have tacitly declared my comment to be a violation of the forum rules and therefore deserving of suppression.
No, it's much broader than that. It's a claim that your statement is outside the bounds of what a human could honestly think, and therefore that it's invalid anywhere, not just here.
"If you're being honest, you agree with me. If you disagree, you are being dishonest." That's either very narrowminded, or a very cheap rhetorical gambit.
> Given they claimed, at least, to have personal xp on the matter then why is it meaningless?
Because personal experience is highly unlikely to amount to enough evidence to make a claim that anyone should feel comfortable generalizing to a population of humans. Positive or negative.
> Maybe have a conversation and find out?
My dude, I literally said “let’s have [a discussion]” and posed the exact question you are quoting to invite a conversation.
> highly unlikely to amount to enough evidence to make a claim that anyone should feel comfortable generalizing to a population of humans
Then what is the solution? quoting a study after all?
You also didn't explain why you mention all the things you "feel" about the poster, given you have such high standards of evidence - e.g. that they are making stuff up - what is that based on if not xp?
> My dude, I literally said
Saying "sure, let's do this" after making it very clear that their opinion didn't matter, and you think they were making stuff up? I don't think it was inviting a discussion in good faith, whether you said it or not.
Agreed, and one can observe exactly the same dynamic in trans-only spaces. Indeed, it would be very unexpected if males donning feminine attire had any correlation with them acting less aggressively, compared to females.
Trans people feel (often from a very young age) that their gender does not match their biological sex, to the extent that they feel compelled to chemically and surgically alter their sex characteristics to match what they feel is their intrinsic gender identity.
This strongly suggests that gender is not purely a social construct, and has some innate hardwired component in the brain.
So I would break the sex/gender dichotomy into three categories:
* sex: the hardware you got
* gender: a function of your brain wiring (which I suppose is a subset of your hardware)
* gender roles: mostly social constructs, although sometimes influenced by innate sex characteristics (e.g. males are inherently on average bigger and stronger, which makes them on average more suited to certain jobs)
> Trans people feel (often from a very young age) that their gender does not match their biological sex,
I think that’s true of many (most?) people who identify as trans, but not necessarily all of them. I’m sure there must be some trans person out there (probably more than just one) who disagrees with your statement with respect to themselves
> they feel is their intrinsic gender identity.
Do all people who identify as trans believe in the concept of “intrinsic gender identity”? I think that’s a very widespread belief but I doubt it is universal. I’m not convinced a person has to believe in such a concept in order to be trans
> a function of your brain wiring (which I suppose is a subset of your hardware)
Some people definitely have “cross-sex” brain characteristics (various neurobiological features more commonly found in the opposite sex). Definitely these characteristics are more common in trans people-suggesting many cases of being trans likely do have a significant biological component. However, not all trans people have these features. Of course, we can’t exclude they may have other “cross-sex” features we don’t know about yet; but it also seems possible they actually don’t, and while for some (most?) trans individuals biology plays a major role in causation, for others maybe it doesn’t
Furthermore, we also know there is a correlation between these brain features and cishomosexuality. It isn’t clear if (those) trans people and (those) cishomosexual people have some unknown difference in their neurobiology, or a shared neurobiology which can develop in different directions due to random chance or social factors
They have an even stronger drive to change behaviours to match whatever the stereotypical behaviours are of their preferred sex are in their culture. The physical sex change stuff could be downstream of that, and in fact the lack of people who change physical sex without changing behaviours (e.g. dress) points strongly in that direction.
I don’t know about that. There’s a huge difference between simply not conforming to stereotypical gender roles (e.g. being a tomboy) and having full blown gender dysphoria (e.g. getting gender reassignment surgery). People in the latter camp literally feel that they were born into the wrong body; people in the former camp simply don’t conform to behavioral stereotypes.
I agree with the literal wording of your reply but disagree with the connotation.
The vast majority of trans people don't get surgery and basically no one (I don't know of a even one case) gets surgery without socially transitioning.
> gender: how you feel about yourself: e.g. you could feel more masculine or more feminine, or something in between
That seems to be assuming everyone “feels” they have a “gender”. Some people may know they have a biological sex, but without having any feelings about that fact. If “gender” is defined in terms of one’s own feelings, does a person who lacks such feelings have one? And I’m not talking about “feeling genderless” (as in a person who calls themselves “agender”), since that’s still a “feeling about gender”-I mean a person for whom “gender” (or “sex”) simply isn’t among the subjects upon which they have feelings about themselves.
The idea that “sex” and “gender” are distinguishable is only widespread in certain cultures. A person who comes from a culture which doesn’t commonly distinguish them, the question of what “gender” they “feel” themselves to be may not make any sense give their own cultural understandings-they may know they have a “sex”/“gender”, but to them it may be a given about which it makes no more sense to have feelings than “feeling” one was born in a particular year, or born with whatever colour skin or hair or eyes
Not binary, but pretty strongly bimodal. Using a single criteria like height already gets you an 80% accurate classifier in homogenous regions, adding a few more can easily get you to 99%.
Also worth noting that "masculine" and "feminine" are heavily culturally constructed (e.g. wearing make up, long hair and dresses).
Since mice are not humans the gender of the mice might be irrelevant.
So much nutritional studies have been done on animals and yet we know that different animals react totaly different to eg saturated fats and atherosclerosis.
Animals are a garbage proxy for anything human related.
Unfortunately, with political correctness these days, people start whining about "ethics" and "human rights" when you experiment on human brains (fnord).
Depending on what you define as 'experiment', there's quite some recent neuroscience research using invasive techniques in humans. Which as far as I'm aware is approved by an ethical committee, but that's not quite the same as 'whining' :)
Well there's a potential paper right there. Take male/female researcher and pump them full of hormones and see if it also affects the mice behaviour too.
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Gender isn’t a real thing biologically, it is a societal construct. It describes human behavior. So the gender role of the researcher can’t possibly have an effect on the experiment as it is imaginary. Only the sex of the researcher is what can trigger a response, as there is a biological basis.
> Since mice are not humans the gender of the mice might be irrelevant.
Actually, it's not. It's well known that medications can have different effects or different dosage requirements depending on menstrual cycle.
And if you drop out a drug candidate in animal trials because you don't account for genetic and hormonal gender as well as menstrual cycle, you can end up dropping prematurely.
That model said COVID-19 could not, which we now know is entirely wrong. As it turns out, tuberculosis must travel deep into the lungs to produce an infection, which is not true for every pathogen.
It's important to check the assumptions underlying new research and make sure they really apply.