New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains
psychologytoday.comThis is a great example of the type of question-begging and junk science "deep learning models" enable. The methodology is to take time series MRI of hundreds of regions of the brain and, labeling each data point as "male" or "female", train a model to differentiate between the two, then pick out the most determinative bits. The issue, of course, is that you are searching for what you want to find. With so much data, of course there is going to be some feature that has maximal differentiating power, so it's totally unsurprising to see a result showing maximal differentiation, since that was what the model was being trained for.
However, nothing in this points towards any intelligent conclusion… the highest differentiating region is called "R DLPFC, Subdivision A9l", with "R DLPFC, Subdivision A9/46d" coming close behind. No doubt though this will be passed around as evidence that gender disparities in professional fields and economic outcomes are biologically determined.
Last paragraph of TFA:
> But “different” doesn’t necessarily imply “better.” As I stressed in the second edition of my book Why Gender Matters, apples and oranges are different. That doesn’t mean apples are better than oranges. Men and women are turning out to be different, more different than we may have imagined. That doesn’t mean that women are better than men, or vice versa. But it does suggest that if we ignore the differences, we may disadvantage both women and men.
In my experience, men and women have different ways of approaching problems. Given all of the other things that go along for the ride in male vs female bodies, it's not at all surprising to me that brains would be different between the two genders as well.
Why is it such a problem to acknowledge difference? People are different from each other and have strengths and weaknesses that don't overlap. vive la différence!
Why is it an issue to search for what you want to find? You're saying that it's not surprising that they found a way to differentiate male and female brains, but some/many people don't believe any such differences exist full stop. Why wouldn't this be surprising to those people?
No overlap is rather surprising, though as others have mentioned the article doesn't do a good job explaining what is actually being measured here.
The idea that the male and female brains are identical has always seemed to be more grounded in political expediency rather than in reality. While there are always outliers (which is why the purported no overlap seems odd), when you actually interact with people in the real world it doesn't take long to identify behaviors and ways of thinking that are more common with either men or women.
I suppose the root of a lot of the trouble here is that some people just suck and have to make everything a competition. If men and women are different, then one must be better than the other, right? Surely we couldn't just accept and come to understand our differences and therefore work better together.
This research goes into a lot of new details relating brain structure to cognitive fuunction, which I'm sure is ground breaking. But the ability to identify gender by examing the anatomy of a brain is not a new phenomenen. It's been true for decades.
> Men and women are turning out to be different
? Did anyone ever really think otherwise?
It's really sad that people are latching onto to social stigmas, like whether one wears a skirt or a business suite, and infering from that, that their physical bodies are "wrong".
The only thing wrong is monkeys mistreating each other. Correcting that doesn't require any surgery, but somehow seems much farther out of reach.
Paper (no free full text, alas): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310012121
I don't know how legit the source is, but if this is to be believed then it's a pretty interesting finding. It seems likely to spark off some pretty big social conversations and a lot more research into this particular area
I don't have time to dig deeper at the moment but I'm very curious about this topic
stanford research
A fascinating article but I'm not entirely clear on what is being measured. What are tSNE 1 and 2?
Dimension 1 and dimension 2. They reduced a multidimensional vector output to 2 dimensions to make it visualizable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neigh...
IMO this study feels like it's saying "facial recognition AI model outputs vectors where female and male faces cluster closer to each other than not". Which to a typical human is stupid obvious.
The author is spinning up drama to get more engagement in his article IMO.
> This study feels like it's saying "facial recognition AI model outputs vectors where female and male faces cluster closer to each other than not".
In this analogy, it would be like concluding that "androgyny does not exist."
I'm curious how they handled some of the complicated selection and coding issues around trans and intersex people. Were those groups excluded, or directed in responding in one way or the other? The study is large enough to expect a few of these cases.
The ability to perfectly separate the groups makes me suspicious of a data leakage or methodological error. Perfect accuracy rarely is.
It might not say much about how male and female brains are different, but just being able to measure whether a brain has male or female brain activity could be a powerful health tool. For example, what if we could use this to determine ahead of time who will respond positively to gender-affirming care and who will respond negatively? It could save lives.
> The researchers found no overlap between male and female
That's kind of a bold claim...
EDIT: Interesting that I'm getting massively modded down by people who have clearly not even read the article. There's a bunch of graphs that show "no overlap" without any explanation of what they are actually even showing on the graphs. And then they make claims like "found no overlap between male and female" when what they actually means is "in some poorly specified tests, where they don't actually tell you what they were doing and how they determined this, they found data that was different between male and female". It also seems like the author of the article isn't grounded in statistics or he'd be calling it "no correlation" not "no overlap".
But sure, just carry on down-voting me if you can't be bothered to actually read the article.
Reading through the article - the source data is 1,500 people. Not insignificant, but reading between the lines at some the criticism outlined - it may be the case that those 1,500 people were chosen selectively in a way that could bias the conclusions (maybe unintentionally).
I would love to get data on where my brain is at! I myself have no gender (like how some people just don't have a religion). I have a sex, and an orientation... just no gender.
But yeah, more data is needed to take this study seriously (reproducibility for one).
It's a psych paper from a major US university. The odds of replication are low.
I for one am old enough to remember when this was widely accepted. It seems it's out of fashion now, but I remember progressive people talking about male and female brains and how transgender people are born with the opposite brain, and it's proven, and if you don't believe it youre a science denier. I find it just a little suspicious that nobody is willing to admit that they said this out loud, almost as if it was not about science at all.
This just in: new research finds differences between male and female anatomy.
You're misrepresenting things. Many of your comments are like this.
How so?