It matters because there's more to living a life free of prejudice than just thinking you're too smart to be susceptible to it.

People do what they want to do, and what they're good at.

People do NOT always do what they want to do, and not necessarily what they're good at -- often times there are limitations and a lack of opportunity for innovation/ entrepreneurship.

I've always believed entrepreneurship is possible -- but then again I've been raised in a University town, so a startup would not be extraordinary.

But Camden, the poorest city in the US, (which also has the highest Puerto Rican concentration, at 37% of the population) and do you think a minority has the same chance of a startup?

I'm not looking for controversy though, just continued (including your comment) intelligent discussion and maybe even potential solutions.

YC News seems like a pretty smart crowd -- why not leverage that for thoughts, comments, suggestions and even complaints?

I am just an outsider to this whole problem, not coming from the US. But some things I heard - like maybe for blacks the best shot at being admitted to college is the sports stipend? Just guessing... I seem to remember that there were so many black jazz and blues musicians because it was one of the few professions that was open to blacks (a bit similar to the jews all becoming money lenders, perhaps). So I don't know the actual causes, but if I was an outsider seeing this anomaly, I would at least investigate.

Also, what do you mean about people doing what they're good at? That seems to imply white people are genetically inferior at some sports, and black people genetically inferior at startups?

This just in: boys and girls are different.

Also -- the human brain naturally forms generic pattern responses based on little information. Almost every time these prejudices are counterproductive in modern social context, but evolution has wired humans this way.

Later, we'll have breaking news that people actually have different abilities in different areas, and those abilities can be statistically related to random factors such as toenail size, skin color, or number of nose hairs. Expect massive protests to follow.

I was just saying I don't think it's a worthwhile idea to try and make everyone the same. We're not. Why aren't there as many women founders? Why should there necessarily be. Why aren't there as many male midwives as women... is that a problem?

Sure if someone is actively preventing someone from doing something based on their race/gender/etc, then of course it should be solved if possible.

I think the main thing is for people to grow up with self belief that they can do whatever they want to.

When this comes up, I always like to point to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIBA_World_Championship

Professionals started participating in 1994. Since then, the U.S.A. has won exactly once (in 1994). If you look at team photos of recent medalists, you will see many pigmentally challenged individuals (Spain, Greece, Argentina, Yugoslavia, etc.).

Further anecdotes: the last three NBA MVP awards went to a white German guy (one time) and a white Canadian guy (two times).

This is definitely a big problem, and the lack of woman founders is a good signal to get us to look at the area and wonder what is being done to women to prevent them from being founders.

The fact is, the probability that a male will 'do a startup' is going to be greater than the probability that a female will. Why try to blame that on society? Why try and change that?

One reason to question the notion of specialized hardware (brains) for boys and girls is the concept of universality. The easiest, by far, way to be able to do many computations, is to create a computer that can do all computations. Similarly, the easiest way by far to create a system capable of creating a variety of kinds of knowledge, is to create one capable of creating any knowledge.

One reason to believe culture would be behind these kinds of differences is we know that our culture transmits vast quantities of knowledge to children. Far more information than is in DNA, just in terms of bits. But also in terms of importance. We also know our culture believes boys and girls are different, and treats people different for many reasons.

Do you have children? A girl and a boy? I do. I can tell you categorically that they most definitely without a doubt are 'wired' differently. Regardless of what you do. Treat them absolutely identically. Even before they have outside influences. Before they start nursery/school. Before society/friends influence them. They act very differently indeed. I didn't get that before I had kids. I thought girls liked dolls because people give girls dolls. They don't. It's a reflex. It's how they're built. Just like boys love cars and doing outside stuff.

I seriously don't know what else to say here if you think men and womens brains are identical and work the same.

Did they have any contact at all with other people? Family, friends, random strangers in grocery stores who come up to coo at your baby, etc. The first question most people ask (if it is not already obvious by the clothing) is 'girl or boy?' They then treat the child accordingly.

The way people coo and talk to boys and girls is different. The toy that they are most likely to pick up and offer to the baby differs according to gender. (So, just having both boy and girl toys available isn't enough.) They hold girls more gently, and play rougher with boys.

Oh, and, fwiw, I do have children, a boy and a girl. But, I do not think this make me an authority. More likely, having children would make me biased -- I have a vested interest in believing I treated both of my children equally. An outside observer would be more likely to see my subtle biases. In the same way, parents often favour one child, without realizing they are doing it, even when it is obvious to other people around them.

Further, you have not addressed well known exceptions to your claims, such as tomboys and males who do not love to be outdoors.

Evidence would not be the right thing to provide, because I am not predicting different human behavior than the mainstream theory, I am simply explaining the same evidence in a different way. So evidence can't resolve this dispute. (Setting aside evidence from analysis of brains which is beyond our present technology.)

Of course you may ask, when is it decided what specialization is chosen, genetically or by nurturing. Clearly we can learn and specialize on things through nurturing, but some things we are also born with, for example a language instinct. So I don't think your argument is an argument at all.

I don't know if you are a woman or a man, but one thing I notice is that women can always tell me what everybody else is talking about in a cafe. I can only concentrate on the woman I am talking to, and blank out all the other people in the room. Maybe it is a personal deficit of mine (bad hearing or whatever), but I could imagine it is a women thing (broader attention). Just an example.

The meaning of one's mind being born specialized is that either it's incapable of some functions (not universal), or it's pre-loaded with enough complexity to make some functions easier and others harder. And further, the claim has to go on to say that we don't put layers of abstraction over this and do whatever we want anyway, low level complexity be damned. Do you have an argument this is the case?

You give language instinct as an example. So, do you have any argument that our DNA contains knowledge to facilitate language in particular? But perhaps more importantly, an argument that this is done differently for different people, in such a way as to cause differences in adult personalities?

Your "image processing is not intelligence" again refutes itself: so you admit that there are some things in which brains might differ. Surely, even if some parts of the brain are universal, the ultimate development must depend on the inputs available. For example, no humans have ultrasonic "vision" like bats, because they lack the respective organs. It follows that it is possible for brains to be different, depending on the body that provides the sensory inputs.

Also, it is not clear in my opinion that apes are not intelligent.

Btw. I am still not claiming that women can not be good at maths - of course they can be, there are many examples.

I guess I am not even claiming that the difference between men and women with respect to founding startups is not cultural. But I am claiming that the culture is not arbitrary, but has evolved because of the biological preconditions. Not arbitrary means it can not simply be explained by "repression through men".

That does not follow. For example, maybe they developed language because it's very useful.

@image processing: There are things inside brains which can/do differ, the issue is what effect this has on adult minds. And personality in particular. For example, how does the difference survive layers of being interpreted to remain a difference in adults personalities?

@ "repression through men" -- My position is that culture is largely transmitted, unintentionally, through behavior of parents. Further, mothers appear to have more influence over children than fathers. And female friends appear to influence young females more than their male friends. And I think the same sorts of things are done to both male and female children, just differently.

Well if you believe that, then you admit that there is a difference between men and women (within your kind of logic).

Of course nurturing has an effect, but the fact remains that men and women are different and have to face different challenges in life. It is not only the 9 months of pregnancy - yes, men could stay at home after pregnancy (now that we have breast pumps for the milk). But there are still several other differences, as I explained elsewhere, not the least the problem of finding a mate to begin with. It is a completely different challenge for men and for women, simply because women can only have a few children, whereas men can have thousands of children in theory. So women have to be more selective etc. Again just one example, but in the sum things like that end up evoking behavioral differences.

If all behavioral differences were only the result of nurturing, then why are there no more random variations? Why are there not more societies where all boys behave like girls in our western world, and vice versa? If boys and girls really were equal except for the nurturing and their visible difference, then we should see such variations, because if a society with our boy/girl pattern is stable then the reverse would be equally stable.

Edit: I think you yourself mentioned tomboys, so there are people with reversed roles. Therefore, all else being equal, whole islands of societies should develop where roles are mirrored (because apparently the reverse strategy is being evaluated on a regular basis - so if it would be equally successful, it should from time to time become dominant). But they apparently don't develop.

Why aren't there more variations in culture on Earth? First, there is a lot of shared culture across a lot of the Earth, like Abrahamic religions. Second, perhaps the logic of the situation (e.g. men being stronger) lent itself to certain simple gender roles. If so, that isn't why they still exist today in any form. Third, the general logic of memes can create common points across cultures. Fourth, Earth is a small sample size.

Consider how much more information our culture has in it.

I know 15megs is enough to implement intelligence, but how much do you imagine is left over to throw in quirks and differences? Certainly many orders of magnitude less information than our culture has it it. Less than our personality has in it.

Also bear in mind that to write intelligence in 15 megs, you need a very good programming language. Concise, powerful, lots of libraries, very good abstraction, high level of generality. And it will be targeted towards writing powerful, general, reliable things. On the other hand, these features will be inconvenient when you want to code weird special cases and hacks, so that kind of code will take more lines to write.

You can make things up like how a hormone might umm somehow affect stuff. But that isn't an actual mechanism that goes from start to finish.

You don't have to prove that a particular mechanism is in fact the one used by our bodies. You don't need any scientific evidence. Just make one up that actually could work and makes sense.

No one has ever done that. End of story.

Meanwhile, there do exist possible explanations of how culture could account for the same phenomena (like femininity). They have no rival theories. Thus, all reasonable people should tentatively believe that kind of explanation is correct.

Apparently mechanisms exists, humans are being created from mere genes, with lots and lots of differences. I don't think I need to provide any evidence for that - just go out on the street and look at the people. Nobody looks alike, except for the twins.

May I ask you: are you a creationist? I really don't want to waste my time...

If the hormone level doesn't convince you, let's take body height: can you imagine that body height could make a difference in temper? Again, I don't know, but if there was a study showing it, I would have no trouble believing it.

There are actually studies showing that tall men earn more on average than smaller men.

The world is a complicated place...

Am I a creationist? Umm, lol. No. If I was, why would i talk about evolution of both memes and genes? Since you keep bringing up personal issues, maybe we can put them to rest: I am a very (classically) liberal person, a scientifically-oriented atheist, generally a small-l libertarian. Not a science-hating, lunatic, religious conservative.

body height might control temper? how?

a correlation between height and income doesn't imply height causes income, especially not directly.

I don't know if body height affects temper, I am just giving examples that could e plausible. For example, body height could affect the blood pressure, which would surely affect temper.

What is your challenge again, that genes can affect temper? I don't even feel the need to read any papers, really. Body height doesn't convince you, take something else, say some ugly deformation of the body. Might cause depression?

Maybe those examples sound ridiculous, but so does the notion that a butterfly on the other end of the world could affect the weather on the other side of the world. Actually I think the butterfly really is an exaggeration, but nevertheless, small changes can have big effects on the outcome in a complex system. So I don't think we even have to argue.

Oh yes, and being a woman or a man obviously has a different outcome in temper. You claim that is only cultural, but that doesn't matter: in our current environment (a ka culture), your temper is affected by being a woman or a man. Point proven.

Now, if you take a culture like that as a given, you can say that ugliness causes depression, and call it a fact. And say you've proven your point. I don't dispute the possibility of making very misleading simplifications of this sort which are true in a sense.

But if we want to explain what's going on in our world, it isn't reasonable to take culture as a fixed point. It would be much more fruitful to take our genes as a fixed point, and look at what our culture causes in the context of our genes, and how a different culture would, in that context, cause something else. Doing that, we could come up with some ways our culture should be changed.

One way to see what is the true cause, A or B, is to consider what would happen if you changed only one (at the time of its creation). So if we change genes, thousands of years ago, our culture could very well have developed to have the same results, despite the genes being quite different.

But if you change imagine our culture developing differently, then having the same genes we have today won't stop it from creating different gender stereotypes.

Are you saying that nothing causes depression? Some things apparently do cause depression. I was just giving an example - maybe it is not uglyness, then it is something else. I don't care, but it is something.

And no, uglyness does not cause depression - not getting a mate because of ugliness causes depression. But that again is at least in part biological. I know you will deny that, though, because you did so in another threat some time ago. Anyway, if we deny the biology, we could culturally train ourselves to only be attracted to apes, and humanity would die out.

I never took culture as a fixed point, in fact I pointed out several alternative cultures, both existent and hypothetical.

Now I am waiting for you to describe a hypothetical culture in which things are like you want them to be, so that we can verify that it could really work that way - or perhaps biology would get in the way.

Edit: and I don't get why you deny that being ugly causes depression - on average.

So, our culture has code to have people detect certain traits caused by genes, and act differently in their presence. Just like it detects mountains, and has people act differently in their presence. But no one goes on and on about how mountains control human personalities and determine gender differences (or mountain-raised-near differences).

I live nearby the mountains and I can tell you that people in the mountains have a very different culture from the people in the flatlands, or at least used to have. I am talking about the farmers - they have different problems to face in the mountains than in the flatlands. So I am sorry but yes, mountains control human personalities and culture.

I guess to start with, you have said living in mountain regions is correlated with different kinds of culture. But you have not said by what mechanism it causes it. Which actually is the same question I kept asking about genes. So please do answer it.

Although I guess also yes, I would have claimed that other things than genes can affect human psychology.

However, you believe that when it is understood, then we will know that genes and mountains do this thing. But how do you know what the conclusion will be, now?

Can you make up a possible mechanism of genetic causation? You don't have to prove this actual mechanism is being used, just invent one that could work.

I understand the causation up to (for genes) causing more/less of a chemical in the body, larger/smaller muscles, causing defects in the eyes or exceptionally good vision, something like that.

But how do you get from there to causing some significant effect in adult personalities? Like causing people to enjoy mountains, be republicans, or consider women bad at business.

I am not saying that women's minds are not wired for startups/maths/whatever (I don't know), but the cultural differences are rooted in biological differences. Women have babies, which is very costly. Hence they need a different mindset (more responsibility, time to take care of kids etc.), they are also very valuable to men, so they can sell their bodies as baby-making machines rather than do startups. Different options in life create different paths... Men have to do something impressive to convince women to carry their babies, hence the startup thing (high risk, but if success, there will be babies).

One of the major questions this position has to answer is: why did that selection pressure result in adapted genes instead of adapted memes?

Prima facie, it would result in adapted memes, because memes evolve faster -- they have much shorter generations.

There actually was one chapter with the theory that men go hunting to impress women (and I would be ready to make the leap and equate hunting with startupping). Gathering would be more energy efficient than hunting, but hunting allows men to come home as bigshots, make a big party, and impress lots of women. That theory was only based on one study of a primitive society, though, so I guess the evidence is not yet very strong. Just a theory... Anyway, a good book to read in my opinion.

Other than that, I am not sure I agree to your question. Men and women certainly have different genes, have they not? I think the asymmetry is inherent in the problem of growing a baby inside of your body. Perhaps it would have been possible to allow both men and women to get pregnant, but it might have been too much overhead (although there are animals that can switch gender, and come to think about it, there are human hermaphrodites).

Most animals seem to have a difference between men and women - for example the spiders that eat their mates...

Men and women do have genetic differences, which they had before culture existed. But the thing at issue is whether modern-day, high-level personality features are a genetic difference, or not.

Even without the technology there are different ways society reacts. Polygamy should in theory raise the value of women (even fewer women available per men if some men have several women). But some societies reacted by putting women behind veils and removing them from the market by force.

I can imagine a culture, for example, where men do nothing and just force women to do startups. So it definitely is possible.

What I claim, though, is that the current situation in western societies might not be due to repression of women, but due to other factors. And those stem from biological differences, which give men and women different sorts of weapons in the gender war.

As the example of life-expectancy shows, it is not clear to me that women are currently getting the worse deal.

You'll probably say the mother will want time to raise her kid. But that could equally well be true of the father -- can't you imagine a culture where fathers are expected to stay home more and raise children, and mothers aren't? There's nothing impossible about that. Or it could be treated equally.

The discussion was about men and women being different, and I still maintain that is true.

Also, I don't think pregnancy is a minor thing. 9 months is 1-2% of the working life time of a women.

Besides, other effects might come to play. There is currently another thread about it on news.yc: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magazine/20wwln-freak-t.ht...

I think effects like that are more likely to be the cause for inequality than repression.

Anyway, isn't the whole discussion completely moot? If you don't accept anything else, then what about physical strength? Can you accept that differences in physical strength can cause differences in behavior, and certainly differences in career choices?

I must apologize, but I am tired now, and we have been talking circles for a while now. Let's let it rest (I'll read your answers, if you give any, but I don't intend to reply).

That you overlook this demonstrate the power of culture. Doing what I described violates taboos, so it's hard to imagine.

However, I think we might not disagree as much as you may think: of course, in theory, since the mind can control the body, it is conceivable to create any kind of culture. Maybe we could teach our children to only walk on legs and feet, so you could rightfully claim that "walking upright is just a cultural thing". The "richer" human societies are, the more wasteful cultural habits like that we could afford.

I am not sure that society can be reprogrammed in an arbitrary way, though. First of all, it still needs to survive, and it must be able to compete with other societies, even other animals. I think you have to take into consideration WHY culture evolved into it's current state - it has an evolutionary history. I read your statements as such that you think that it was a random whim of nature to give us our current culture. If you are convinced that men and women are equal, then there must have been a 50:50 chance for gender roles being exactly reversed. Do you agree thus far?

My claim is merely that it was not random, but that there was a bias due to the differences of men and women, which makes certain cultural habits more effective than others. As you say in your previous post, and I said somewhere else, inventions might tip the scales, and other cultural models could become viable.

Why does our culture have major gender roles that permeate people's personalities, today? It's not because it made logical sense in the past. Whether it did or not then, it does not now. And hasn't for some time. And this has been pointed out on a number of occasions. A particularly well-stated case was made by William Godwin in the 1790s.

What happened? People did not listen. They let their biases and closed-mindedness and unreasonableness get in the way of progress. That is the reason gender roles remain entrenched. If people were more thoughtful during the last few hundred years, then we wouldn't have recognizable gender roles today. That's the sort of cause I consider important and meaningful to explaining the present day situation.

Another fact of the situation is that parents teach gender roles to their children, whether the children like it or not, and without regard for whether it is helpful or hurtful, useful or not, makes sense or not, etc In a culture which does this, it isn't reasonable to say the gender roles exist because they are correct: the mechanism which perpetuates them does not depend on them being correct, and people are unwilling to change it so that it does.

If I had to choose between higher wages and a longer life, I would choose the longer life....

The page I found could not give a definite answer, but I'll throw in theory: men are more expendable than women, and it shows. And for the same reason, men have to try harder. On wikipedia they say "men take more risks" - yes, because they have no choice. Either they impress a woman, or all was futile anyway.

On the other hand, I am pretty sure it is a LOT easier for women to have sex, whenever they want. Check this experiment: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Top/experiments/P10/ (#18)

Men and women were walking across a campus asking strangers flat out if they would like to have sex with them. Men were almost always rejected. Women almost never. I claim that the reason for that is not solely cultural.

Why business and technical areas in particular?

Historically, I'd agree with you. But that effect has completely vanished in many fields: law and medicine are two prominent examples. It also partially vanished in technical fields; physics went from 0% to 20% women in the same way that medicine went from 0% to 50%.

Why do you think that physics and computer science are more anti-woman than medicine? And for that matter, why is experimental physics less anti-woman than theoretical physics? And similarly, why does environmental engineering have more women than electrical?

So I don't know specifically why it is that parents, and others, discourage girls from business and technical areas in particular. And I don't know exactly what kind of discouragement is effective -- probably it is not the straightforward kind that does most of the work. As well, it may be some kind of encouragement that matters more than discouragement. Or the process may be much more complex than English is good at capturing in a word.

One thing I can tell you is that women working in a field does not imply the problem is solved. First, they might be less skillful, on average. But second, they might have had to put in more effort to achieve the same level of skill, and that could be very hard to detect.

Not only technical areas, but also particular technical areas. What makes experimental physics less technical than theoretical, and chemistry less technical than physics?

Also, if you look at the percentage of women in technical fields, it does look like cultural barriers dropped. I.e., over the same timeframe that cultural barriers dropped in medicine, they dropped similarly in physics/engineering, causing women to increase from about 1970-1990. After 1990, the % women was roughly flat in all fields: in medicine at 50%, in physics at 20%.

Basically, womens liberation had the same qualtitative effect on physics that it had on medicine; only the magnitudes differ.

This strongly suggests that some other factor is keeping women out of technical fields. It could be cultural, but it's a completely different type of cultural barrier than the one that kept women out of medicine and physics up until the 1990's. It could also be biological, I don't see much evidence for or against that.

>One thing I can tell you is that women working in a field does not imply the problem is solved. First, they might be less skillful, on average. But second, they might have had to put in more effort to achieve the same level of skill, and that could be very hard to detect.

Lots of difficult to measure things are possible. I'll wait for evidence of them.

(*) By the way, I'm using physics/EE as a proxy for all technical fields, since I've been forced to sit through lots of meetings on that topic. Speaking openly in those meetings was frowned upon...

But for biology, there does not exist a single reasonable explanation that can account for the data. In particular, in must detail by what mechanism the genes effect the personality of adult women. That is, "there is a gene for business" wouldn't suffice, without saying specifically how that gene works.

You still need to explain why this affects physics, but not law.

This idea seems very weak when you look at gender gaps within fields. Most people barely know the difference between physics and chemistry (let alone theoretical vs experimental, or condensed matter vs high energy), yet there are gender gaps between them. Compare also web design to programming.

How can culture cause a disparity between things that the culture doesn't even know about?

>But for biology, there does not exist a single reasonable explanation that can account for the data. In particular, in must detail by what mechanism the genes effect the personality of adult women. That is, "there is a gene for business" wouldn't suffice, without saying specifically how that gene works.

For business, aggression would be my best guess. Testosterone is known to cause aggression, and it is also known that men have more of it.

There is all sorts of knowledge in our traditions, which no individual person understands. So, for example, suppose culture contains a trigger which causes parents to be more discouraging of one type of children's book than another, for girls. They could do this without understanding what's going on at all -- all they have to know consciously is that they like one book more than another.

Even if we don't know what kinds of books encourage people to become chemists, certainly we can imagine some books pull more in that direction than others. Because, for example, the skills they help create are more useful to doing chemistry, or lead to more trains of thought that bring up chemistry, or are more useful to understanding explanations of why chemistry is interesting and important. This is all very plausible, because we already know that books can help learn skills, help bring up trains of thought, etc, and already know that there are skills which help one become a chemist, there are trains of thought which help one see why becoming a chemist would be nice, etc And 'book' and 'chemistry' can be substituted with other things, like game, toy, activity, law, physics, etc, and still have similar effects.

---

By what mechanism does testosterone cause aggressive personalities?

I could consider such explanations plausible for explaining gender gaps between law and chemistry.

But theoretical high energy physics vs experimental condensed matter physics? That sounds way too specific for a diffuse cultural cue that no one can identify.

>By what mechanism does testosterone cause aggressive personalities?

Hmm, I thought testosterone increased aggression, but a quick google search suggests the correlation goes the other way.

Nevertheless, it is known that most male mammals are more aggressive than females. Whatever the biochemical cause, this trait (in humans) could explain greater success/participation in business.

That is hard to explain, with any method. (i.e., the correct explanation appears likely to depend on the complex relationship between lots of details). But I think at least our culture contains knowledge of what different types of physics are, whereas our genes don't.

Edit: And we know our culture created different types of physics and has mechanisms for people to learn about them, and to become interested in learning about them. it wouldn't be a huge shock if they had some quirks and biases in them.

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@testosterone: animals don't have personalities in the sense humans do. I'm asking for an explanation of a mechanism that would work on humans.

The primary issue is that humans have general intelligence, by which they normally make decisions. So the mechanism by which testosterone (or something else) works needs to either bypass intelligence somehow (but then you'd have to explain why it still constitutes part of someone's personality), or harness intelligence and work with/through it. No such issues arise in the animal case.

() I'm not a snobby string theorist, I do computational E&M. But string theorists are the smartest, for reasons I can explain another time.

As for hormones:

First, animals do have personalities, though they are different from humans.

Second, it doesn't need to bypass intelligence. Humans aren't computers with an "emotion" screensaver on the front. Humans make most decisions (partially) emotionally. Starting a business or choosing a field is not a purely rational decision, no matter what most business owners want to think.

Here is a blog that has links to lots of quantitative evidence.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/

For more anecdotal evidence, ask your female friends why they support Hillary for president. When they give the rational (but mistaken) response "she is against the war," point out her actual position. Ask if this changes their view. If you believe people are rational, you might be surprised at the results.

edit: I don't mean to single out women as irrational. Men are too, though in different ways (a comparable example: lots of anti-war men like McCain). But since we are discussing gender differences, the Hillary example popped into my head.

I, and a majority of my friends, are in favor of the war.

Regarding Overcoming Bias, I take it you are referring to the studies about people being very silly, which they have. But those are not relevant to our debate. The issue is not whether people have silly or irrational personalities, but why. And in particular, whether it is best explained as due to ideas, or not.

Edit: To reasonably be so certain I haven't had a girlfriend, you must think I am quite young. What about my writing style makes you think I am young?

I'm not opposed to it either (1). I guess I'm assuming you live on the coast; if you do, it's very surprising if you know multiple people who favored the war.

Regardless, my point is that many women make an emotional decision to support Hillary. They then come up with rational sounding reasons after the fact.

In any case, the point is that we know for certain that chemicals in the brain influence emotion and decision making (e.g., Ritalin). And the silliness/irrationality described on overcoming bias is mostly emotion defeating reason.

Regarding aggression specifically, we know that males are more aggressive both in humans and other mammals. Why do you suspect a non-chemical cause in humans, and a chemical one in other mammals?

>To reasonably be so certain I haven't had a girlfriend, you must think I am quite young. What about my writing style makes you think I am young?

I have no idea what your age is. I've never met a person who has had a seriously relationship and also believes women don't make extremely emotional decisions.

(1) I think freeing Kurdistan was sufficient justification, just as freeing Kuwait was sufficient justification for Iraq 1. At this point, I favor either ending it immediately or doing it right (split the country into small pieces, let them merge together if they want).

Regarding aggression, we know that ideas are capable of causing aggression. I don't think this is in dispute: it is a possible cause. But we don't know that chemicals can do it, in humans. No one has suggested a mechanism by which they could.

I also don't agree that emotions are a separate thing from intelligence, which sometimes bypasses or overcomes it. I think that emotions are labels for (not amazingly good) ways of thinking -- they, like personality generally, are a part of ones ideas. In this case too, I submit that there is no coherent explanation for how they could be anything else.

However, we DO know chemicals can in humans. Pot and ecs reduce aggression, while meth increase it. I don't know if particular mechanisms are understood, I'm not a biochemist. But empirical observations do show that chemicals (in some way) affect aggression (and other emotions).

As for ideas, we don't know the mechanism there either. In fact, we understand the mechanisms of thought less than those of emotion. I can predictably make you and other humans I don't know happy or sad with chemicals; I can't do the same with ideas.

Being able to make people happy with chemicals is consistent with emotions being purely ideas. It just takes a subconscious idea to interpret certain sensations, caused by the chemical, in a positive way. And for this idea to be shared by most people in our culture.

Timing and randomization shows that chemicals are the cause. Double blind experiments must have been done at some point, which would show the effect is causative.

As for drug effects being cultural, I disagree. Amphetamines also cause aggression in rats, for instance:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/p2745782608v6558/

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Double blind experiments (with controls, randomization, etc) do not show causation, they show correlation. You need to have an explanation of what the cause is, or that kind of study doesn't get you anywhere. Because without an explanation, you don't even know what you should be looking for, or have any idea why that correlation exists.

BTW, if you know of a reputable, scientifically-oriented source which believes that double blind experiments demonstrate causation in the absence of an explanation, not just demonstrate correlation, I'd like to see it.

Double blind experiments do show causation (ignoring metaphysical discussions).

There are 3 possibilities: Chemical -> Behavior, Behavior -> Chemical, or ??? -> (Chemical and behavior).

A randomized trial eliminates the latter two possibilities (since chemical is correlated only to a coin flip). Double blind eliminates experimenter bias.

Then, it could be that the chemical somehow causes happiness. Or it could be that the chemical causes memories of one's children, and everyone in the study has happy memories of their children.

So, the causation is still in doubt. Many explanations are consistent with the observed data.

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Yes I am proposing that chemicals correlate with "aggression" in humans and rats for different reasons. But I don't accept that the thing called "aggression" is the same thing in humans, and in rats. To help illustrate why not, consider aggressive behavior by video game characters. Same word, but not the same phenomenon -- in that case, no emotion is present, and the cause is some C code.

Now outside the US things may be quite different.

I am 100% certain that if my 10 year old daughter ever decides to start a CS-related business I'm sure there will be plenty of good role models for her. However her current inclination is to become a school teacher.

I think girls just need more exposure to successful women who can act as role models.

It's my belief that time will eventually solve this problem.

It's a problem only if there are women who WANT to be founders, but cannot.

Is the fact that fish don't have legs a 'problem'? Only if they long to have legs. (Please don't think I'm likening women to fish, but you get my point hopefuly).

My first premise is that I think those who achieve success via "fair" competition tend to be better qualified than those who achieve it other ways.

My second premise is that over time successful founders should expect to find themselves in positions of power and influence beyond the scope of their initial successes.

My last premise is that societies avoid the worst types of social injustice when no single culture or way of thinking dominates the others. While heterogeneous societies may not make as much "progress" as homogeneous ones, they also avoid the worst cases.

Based on this, I think we'll have a better society if there are more qualified women at the top, but to have that we need more qualified women at all stages of the competition.