Re:Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
by acdha on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @03:54PM
(#15395578)
Simon Baron-Cohen has been pushing that idea for a long time but while they’ve gotten a lot of attention for his career, his conclusions are far from definitive. There are various papers contesting his conclusions and review articles have failed to support the bold claims – e.g. https://software.rc.fas.harvard.edu/lds/wp-content/uploads/2...
That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing here but I find it telling that the neuroscientists I used to support were far more skeptical than, say, the Damore fans here. This topic came up a bit and there was a strong consensus that the science was still too early to say anything — there are low level biological differences (e.g. percentages of white matter) but that hadn’t been linked to high-level skills, and the few low-level differences were still being studied to identify the cause. This is all complicated by the plasticity of the brain based on usage so answering even simple-sounding questions is usually a significant percentage of multiple people’s research careers.
That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing here but I find it telling that the neuroscientists I used to support were far more skeptical than, say, the Damore fans here. This topic came up a bit and there was a strong consensus that the science was still too early to say anything — there are low level biological differences (e.g. percentages of white matter) but that hadn’t been linked to high-level skills, and the few low-level differences were still being studied to identify the cause. This is all complicated by the plasticity of the brain based on usage so answering even simple-sounding questions is usually a significant percentage of multiple people’s research careers.