Ah, understood, thanks for the clarification. I’m not sure whether operant conditioning alone is enough to account for gender, but I don’t know enough psychology to make a credible claim one way or another.
I think that learning accounts for gender. Whether that learning originates in modeling, operant conditioning, or observational learning is irrelevant to me.
As I asked you on a different thread, how do you know whether this is true ? If you were to ask me that question, I would say, “let’s go out and run a bunch of experiments”, but you have explicitly stated that doing so would be sexist, so… now what ?
As I asked you on a different thread, how do you know whether this is true ? If you were to ask me that question, I would say, “let’s go out and run a bunch of experiments”, but you have explicitly stated that doing so would be sexist, so… now what ?
There’s one experiment in particular that I advocate—the destruction of patriarchy.
Your current worldview seems to be unfalsifiable without very expensive experiments. (How would you even know if patriarchy had been destroyed anyway?) Maybe we’re doing this backwards. What caused you to become a feminist? What evidence could you have encountered that would have made you a non-feminist?
This is an assertion I’ve heard made a lot by people outside biology and I’d like to hammer it out with somebody who seems well informed.
On what basis can we make this assertion? Biology obviously contributes in a physical sense (people with male gender tend not to have wombs). I assume what you mean is that there are no inherent neurological differences in males versus females. But how can we know that? We have a strong prior (other animals) and lots of circumstantial evidence that it should be true.
I think feminism ought to acknowledge at least the possibility of inherent male-female differences with a simple “so fucking what”. For instance I think that physical abuse of women, by men, probably represents an adaptive, ancestral behavior caused (amongst other things) by inherent neurological differences in men and women. That doesn’t excuse it. We can and have made great progress in conditioning men not to hit women, and hopefully will continue to do so.
My introduction to social justice (as a whole) was through the lens of intersex conditions (wherein people with ambiguous genitalia are assigned a gender at birth, most often female because the surgery is easier). A major problem was that raising male children as female or vice versa ends up causing psychological problems.
The main [unethical] case study was a pair of identical male twins, one of whose penis was accidentally cut off during circumcision, and then got female reassignment surgery, grew up very confused and depressed and eventually committed suicide. (Other case studies are less clear cut but generally indicative of the same problem, not to mention transgender people). Gender clearly has a biological component.
It also does clearly have a environmental component, and I don’t know where those elements interrelate, but ignoring the biological element causes as many problems as ignoring our problems with how we raise children.
...or the knowledge of that child’s parents, doctors, and everyone around him lead to them (the adults) treating that child as a freak rather than a woman.
One of the ideas I like in radical feminism is that masculinity is very much defined by the ability to impregnate women (one of the reasons why intersex infants are virtually always assigned female). Conversely, femininity is defined by the ability to be impregnated. Seeing as this child could do neither, and their caregivers knew that, I would hardly expect this child to have typical gender socialization.
The only experiment that could demonstrate this to my satisfaction is a double-blind study where infants are adopted by parents that know only that infant’s current assigned gender, and nothing else.
ignoring the biological element causes as many problems as ignoring our problems with how we raise children.
Okay, fair enough. It’s very plausible to me that most of our problems relate to socialization rather than biology. But you seem to be implying they are 100% sociological, which seems wrong.
I’m not totally sure, and I notice that it’s a confusing topic.
Okay, fair enough. It’s very plausible to me that most of our problems relate to socialization rather than biology. But you seem to be implying they are 100% sociological, which seems wrong.
Since humans can’t think quantitatively, I prefer to just say “gender is learned” rather than “gender is almost entirely (95-99%) learned but the remaining part is biological.”
In fact, it might be that gender is entirely non-biological. But I’m sure it’s mostly social.
(This is not me setting up a followup ambush argument, just asking)
To what extent would it alter your philosophy if we learned that gender was 70% social? 50% social? Right now, these questions are vague and difficult to test, but they may not always be. And I think it’s much sounder (both from an instrumental and epistemic standpoint) to think in advance about how your philosophy should shift if different facts were confirmed.
I don’t know what the answer is but the existence of transpeople (and genderqueer people and others who don’t fall neatly into the gender binary) suggests to me that it’s unlikely to be 95%+ social. But even if it turned out to be as low as 50% social, dealing with those social issues properly still requires a radical upheaval of the popular consensus on how we should socialize people.
If social learning accounts for gender, what causes gender differences among animals? If your answer is that they don’t have gender in the same sense, what exactly do you mean by gender?
But even then, there aren’t gender differences among animals to anywhere near the degree to which there supposedly are in humans. Do female chimpanzees get paid less than male coworkers? Do they wear pink more so than men?
I think that learning accounts for gender. Whether that learning originates in modeling, operant conditioning, or observational learning is irrelevant to me.
A lot of your claims sound considerably less crazy now. If the comments still existed, I’d suggest edits.
Operant conditioning is notoriously bad at getting creatures to have behaviors that will adapt to changing environments, so is unlikely to be a significant part of the cause of gender behavior.
A lot of your claims sound considerably less crazy now. If the comments still existed, I’d suggest edits.
I said this literally days ago, and have been saying it the entire time I have been having this discussion.
“Operant conditioning” was introduced into this discussion by me, in a comment that says “I think that learning (operant conditioning, modeling, and observational learning) is the cause of gender.”
Have you come into this discussion after those comments were deleted? Or did you never read them?
If you want other people to avoid having the same experience you did, upvote my comments. EY messaged me earlier today saying he was deleting any downvoted posts, which are primarily mine.
Indeed.
I think that learning accounts for gender. Whether that learning originates in modeling, operant conditioning, or observational learning is irrelevant to me.
As I asked you on a different thread, how do you know whether this is true ? If you were to ask me that question, I would say, “let’s go out and run a bunch of experiments”, but you have explicitly stated that doing so would be sexist, so… now what ?
There’s one experiment in particular that I advocate—the destruction of patriarchy.
Your current worldview seems to be unfalsifiable without very expensive experiments. (How would you even know if patriarchy had been destroyed anyway?) Maybe we’re doing this backwards. What caused you to become a feminist? What evidence could you have encountered that would have made you a non-feminist?
This is an assertion I’ve heard made a lot by people outside biology and I’d like to hammer it out with somebody who seems well informed.
On what basis can we make this assertion? Biology obviously contributes in a physical sense (people with male gender tend not to have wombs). I assume what you mean is that there are no inherent neurological differences in males versus females. But how can we know that? We have a strong prior (other animals) and lots of circumstantial evidence that it should be true.
I think feminism ought to acknowledge at least the possibility of inherent male-female differences with a simple “so fucking what”. For instance I think that physical abuse of women, by men, probably represents an adaptive, ancestral behavior caused (amongst other things) by inherent neurological differences in men and women. That doesn’t excuse it. We can and have made great progress in conditioning men not to hit women, and hopefully will continue to do so.
My introduction to social justice (as a whole) was through the lens of intersex conditions (wherein people with ambiguous genitalia are assigned a gender at birth, most often female because the surgery is easier). A major problem was that raising male children as female or vice versa ends up causing psychological problems.
The main [unethical] case study was a pair of identical male twins, one of whose penis was accidentally cut off during circumcision, and then got female reassignment surgery, grew up very confused and depressed and eventually committed suicide. (Other case studies are less clear cut but generally indicative of the same problem, not to mention transgender people). Gender clearly has a biological component.
It also does clearly have a environmental component, and I don’t know where those elements interrelate, but ignoring the biological element causes as many problems as ignoring our problems with how we raise children.
...or the knowledge of that child’s parents, doctors, and everyone around him lead to them (the adults) treating that child as a freak rather than a woman.
One of the ideas I like in radical feminism is that masculinity is very much defined by the ability to impregnate women (one of the reasons why intersex infants are virtually always assigned female). Conversely, femininity is defined by the ability to be impregnated. Seeing as this child could do neither, and their caregivers knew that, I would hardly expect this child to have typical gender socialization.
The only experiment that could demonstrate this to my satisfaction is a double-blind study where infants are adopted by parents that know only that infant’s current assigned gender, and nothing else.
This is the fallacy of gray.
So what is your opinion on transpeople?
Okay, fair enough. It’s very plausible to me that most of our problems relate to socialization rather than biology. But you seem to be implying they are 100% sociological, which seems wrong.
I’m not totally sure, and I notice that it’s a confusing topic.
Since humans can’t think quantitatively, I prefer to just say “gender is learned” rather than “gender is almost entirely (95-99%) learned but the remaining part is biological.”
In fact, it might be that gender is entirely non-biological. But I’m sure it’s mostly social.
(This is not me setting up a followup ambush argument, just asking)
To what extent would it alter your philosophy if we learned that gender was 70% social? 50% social? Right now, these questions are vague and difficult to test, but they may not always be. And I think it’s much sounder (both from an instrumental and epistemic standpoint) to think in advance about how your philosophy should shift if different facts were confirmed.
I don’t know what the answer is but the existence of transpeople (and genderqueer people and others who don’t fall neatly into the gender binary) suggests to me that it’s unlikely to be 95%+ social. But even if it turned out to be as low as 50% social, dealing with those social issues properly still requires a radical upheaval of the popular consensus on how we should socialize people.
If social learning accounts for gender, what causes gender differences among animals? If your answer is that they don’t have gender in the same sense, what exactly do you mean by gender?
Bias in the humans observing them.
But even then, there aren’t gender differences among animals to anywhere near the degree to which there supposedly are in humans. Do female chimpanzees get paid less than male coworkers? Do they wear pink more so than men?
A lot of your claims sound considerably less crazy now. If the comments still existed, I’d suggest edits.
Operant conditioning is notoriously bad at getting creatures to have behaviors that will adapt to changing environments, so is unlikely to be a significant part of the cause of gender behavior.
I said this literally days ago, and have been saying it the entire time I have been having this discussion.
“Operant conditioning” was introduced into this discussion by me, in a comment that says “I think that learning (operant conditioning, modeling, and observational learning) is the cause of gender.”
Have you come into this discussion after those comments were deleted? Or did you never read them?
If you want other people to avoid having the same experience you did, upvote my comments. EY messaged me earlier today saying he was deleting any downvoted posts, which are primarily mine.