Tweeting politics and science.

[sumskilz]

Well, I didn't know you have both invasive raccoons and raccoon dogs in Europe. There are a lot of raccoons in Seattle. People feed them so some get pretty bold. A few of them got into my kitchen once and rearranged the place. The back door was open, but I don't know if I had left it ajar or just unlocked and they managed to open it.

That same door had a cat door in it, which was too small for an adult raccoon to fit through, but I discovered from tracks in the snow on my deck, that a possum had been coming into my house. Which explained why hobo spiders kept disappearing off of the trap I had put out to catch them. It was basically a piece of cardboard with adhesive and spider pheromones on it. Sometimes I'd see a big hobo spider or two stuck on there and then later I'd notice that all but a few legs had disappeared. Evidently the possum found these delicious. Not sure how he managed to avoid getting bitten, since they weren't always dead. Also, just in general, swallowing venomous spiders doesn't seem like a recommended activity.

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

I have no problems with spiders or harvestmen as i have two young and one senior watchcat.^^

[Septentrionalis]

I had no problems with harvestmen just a few moments ago, as I knew them as daddy longlegs. Now that I know them as harvesters, they actually sound scarier.

[Cyclops]

Daddy Longlegs can't hurt you, I've seen Mythbusters so let me tell you. I handle them happily.

Those Raccoon Dogs are real? Jeez Japan is taking this kawai nonsense too far, its leaking into RL. The bizarre badger scrotum magic in Pom Poko is clear evidence of civilizational decline and the Kali Yuga.

Australian possums are fat arsed things that barge into your roof space and make weird noises. The brushtails poo everywhere and can give you a (relatively clean-no rabies here) scratch, the wee ringtails just give you the big eyes until you feed them bits of apple.

Sadly if they get a scratch from a cat they seem to die from the toxoplasmosis (eg puff up and fall out of the trees). Cats seem to find them delicious too, my sister had an utterly stupid placid sweet tom called "Barry the Terrible" who would murder a ringtail (yeah the cute ones, fml) and eat the whole thing, something like a third of his body weight. You'd find him spreadeagled on the mat looking partially inflated next to a neat pile of intestines and maybe the tail. He ate the rest, horrorshow man.

[Aexodus]

I was looking for information on heavy goods vehicles in my country earlier, and came across this.

https://www.infrastructure-ni.gov.uk...istics-2016-17

Historically, for the practical driving test, the pass rate for males is higher than the pass rate for females. This year continues the trend with 58% of males passing the practical car driving test in 2016-17 compared to 50% of females. In contrast, for touch screen theory tests, the pass rate for females is historically higher than the pass rate for males. In 2016-17, 49% of females compared to 45% of males passed the car touch screen theory test.

I thought it was very curious that the different tests had different pass rates. I was wondering if it is the same in other countries, or is Northern Ireland unique?

[sumskilz]

I was looking for information on heavy goods vehicles in my country earlier, and came across this.

https://www.infrastructure-ni.gov.uk...istics-2016-17


I thought it was very curious that the different tests had different pass rates. I was wondering if it is the same in other countries, or is Northern Ireland unique?

I expect that it would be the same elsewhere, because it matches up with the fact that males have on average better visuospatial skills and females have on average better verbal skills. Although, females tend to be safer drivers on average due to being more risk averse. I suspect the visuospatial differences come into play with things like parallel parking.

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

As Sumskilz said, men have in average better visuospatial skills, women have better learning and memorial skills and are more risk averse in average.

But the keyword is in average.

You always have exceptions:

Like Melitta von Stauffenberg, aeronautical engineer and testpilot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melitt...n_Stauffenberg

(the german wiki version is better and more detailed)

[Aexodus]

That's interesting. Explains a lot of my day to day experiences with this sort of thing. Like in school when we played sports in teams of girls v boys.

[sumskilz]

Most sex based trait differences have distributions like this (or the reverse):



But some have distributions like this:



Which is the same average, but more variability among males, so that males are more prevalent at both the top and the bottom of the distribution. Probably the majority of this is due to X-linked genetic traits, since males only have one copy, but females have two copies that average out.

[Iskar]

The interesting question then is, how much of that difference is based on difference in upbringing and subconsciously internalised cultural expectations and how much can actually be traced back to physiological differences. I'd wager that epigenetics also causes a large grey area where influences based on upbringing/culture create a feedback loop with physiology.

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

The interesting question then is, how much of that difference is based on difference in upbringing and subconsciously internalised cultural expectations and how much can actually be traced back to physiological differences. I'd wager that epigenetics also causes a large grey area where influences based on upbringing/culture create a feedback loop with physiology.

Exactly.

[Cyclops]

The interesting question then is, how much of that difference is based on difference in upbringing and subconsciously internalised cultural expectations and how much can actually be traced back to physiological differences. I'd wager that epigenetics also causes a large grey area where influences based on upbringing/culture create a feedback loop with physiology.

Oh its very complex I think, the feedback loops are nested out the wazoo. I think they get reinforced but my own experience of smart women and strong men in my family (complete with counterexamples) reinforces this.

I have a sister who as a teen effortlessly set state records in certain sports: she'd be 10/10 as a female athletic specimen and I think she could have represented her country in a number of sports. Social norms as well as personal choices meant she wasn't directed into those channels. One bro was an overall 9/10 and the systems picked him up and easily directed him into the correct pathways, and he enjoyed elite success through talent and hard work. Head to head physically my bro beats my sis in any sport they contest because female outliers are less extreme than male. Vs me she gets a lot of wins as I am slow and clumsy albeit strong (overall I'd be a 5 or 6, too fat and blind to be good at sport). She can spar with her husband who has a blackbelt in a sensible martial art, he would be a 7/10 male body. Its funny to see because I'm not used to women being able to even live in the ring with a man. If she trained she'd be able to knock most of us untrained men cold.

There's been a move to introduce a Women's Football League in Australia, with the usual minefield. it was terrible at first, there simply weren't enough fit skilled young women (because they hadn't had the money to train...etc etc). Straight away the question of pay disparity appeared, which meant a difficult economic discussion about advertising ("duh, they are worse so less money" "but why to people pay more to advertise with a male athlete? people are sexist?") and so on.

Fortunately the sport has been given life support and now its viable, in that its watchable and advertisers get bang for their buck. The critical mass of skilled fit women exists and games aren't half-jokes, they are actually sustained narratives and I happily go (before I dutifully went and put up with it for a good cause).

Its worth noting the "men bad/women good" and "men skilled/women hopeless" narratives get undermined because some of them are poorly constructed. The sporting cultures vary across sports, with womens' soccer seeming to involve less petty cheating and sooking than mens' (they are more "manly" about their sport). Peak netball in Australia has some poor cultural aspects with bullying and elitism similar to men's cricket.

Women's footy (Australian or real footy I mean) is less violent than men's: I think this relates to cultural norms and physical trends as expressed by that bell curve. There are less "freaks" in the womens' game, and you can't base your game around stars: teamwork is supreme to a degree not seen in the men's game.

Recent successful men's clubs have tended to surround a handful of stars with enough of a team to get them to the finals, and then the stars win the cup (I guess the Alexander method, make sure the elite make it to the critical point, then they win it for you). The women's game is much more about machines and even-ness (the Marius method, everyone does their job and you grind the enemy). Obviously its more subtle than that and there are variations within the games too but it does seem to be a truism that women's sport is played more in the head. it means women's football s interesting for sports nerds, even though there's less jumping on other player's heads (which is the greatest beauty of our game), there's a universe of tactics to please the eye and mind.

Trans women have been effectively barred, which reflects a serious question in broader society. The peak body danced around T level and weight barriers to competing, and basically bullied a trans woman out of applying to join. I have no answer here, its bloody difficult. The woman in question was a wrecking ball, and was dominating minor leagues to the point administrators were worried about insurance as well as 'the look" (it was obvious advertisers would be put off), so the poor person got kicked into the "too hard" basket.

The same sort of uncomfortableness was used to kick women out of football in the past. Traditionally the girls played Aussie rules with the boys until just pre-menarchy, somewhere between 9 and 12 was the cutoff. They would be physically on par and sometimes mentally ahead so they were valued team-members. The moment there was some weirdness about boobs they'd be booted and no provision made for the women who wanted to play on, it was all too hard to deal with.

[sumskilz]

The interesting question then is, how much of that difference is based on difference in upbringing and subconsciously internalised cultural expectations and how much can actually be traced back to physiological differences. I'd wager that epigenetics also causes a large grey area where influences based on upbringing/culture create a feedback loop with physiology.

Well, we know what types of societies produce greater average sex differences in personality and aptitude:

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development--including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth--were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality.

Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures

Mental rotation and line angle judgment performance were assessed in more than 90,000 women and 111,000 men from 53 nations. In all nations, men's mean performance exceeded women's on these two visuospatial tasks. Gender equality (as assessed by United Nations indices) and economic development (as assessed by per capita income and life expectancy) were significantly associated, across nations, with larger sex differences, contrary to the predictions of social role theory.

Sex differences in mental rotation and line angle judgments are positively associated with gender equality and economic development across 53 nations

Men's and women's personalities appear to differ in several respects. Social role theories of development assume gender differences result primarily from perceived gender roles, gender socialization and sociostructural power differentials. As a consequence, social role theorists expect gender differences in personality to be smaller in cultures with more gender egalitarianism. Several large cross-cultural studies have generated sufficient data for evaluating these global personality predictions. Empirically, evidence suggests gender differences in most aspects of personality-Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self-esteem, subjective well-being, depression and values-are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity. Similar patterns are evident when examining objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure. Social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations in men's and women's personalities. Evolutionary theories regarding ecologically-evoked gender differences are described that may prove more useful in explaining global variation in human personality.

Personality and gender differences in global perspective

In summary, the evidence is precisely the inverse of what one would expect to see if the differences were largely due to subconsciously internalised cultural expectations.

Likewise, the biological basis of the differences is well-supported:

All sex-dimorphic psychological traits vary substantially within each sex and overlap considerably across the sexes. It is therefore meaningful to assess each individual’s level of any sex-dimorphic trait in order to study, for example, relations between such traits or group differences. There is evidence that these differences are in part mediated by hormones, such as androgens, and they can therefore be described as being biologically influenced (Cohen-Bendahan et al., 2005), consistent with evolutionary psychological models (Hines, 2010a,b). For example, testosterone differs between the sexes on the order of 2–4 times in foetal amniotic fluid, two times in pre-adolescents (Dorn et al., 2009), and about 10 times after puberty (Vermeersch et al., 2008). It seems that interests and preferences are more affected by prenatal hormone levels (e.g., Beltz et al., 2011), behavioral tendencies such as aggression more by circulating hormone levels (e.g., Pajer et al., 2006), and abilities such as mental rotation by both prenatal (e.g., Burton et al., 2005) and circulating hormone levels, at least in women (e.g., Hausmann et al., 2000). Reviews of the relationship between hormones and psychological functioning cover several hundred empirical papers that report medium to very large effect sizes (Cohen-Bendahan et al., 2005; Hines, 2010a,b).

Females with more male-typical personality traits tend to have signs of male typical prenatal exposure to testosterone, most notably:

The feminist movement purports to improve conditions for women, and yet only a minority of women in modern societies self-identify as feminists. This is known as the feminist paradox. It has been suggested that feminists exhibit both physiological and psychological characteristics associated with heightened masculinization, which may predispose women for heightened competitiveness, sex-atypical behaviors, and belief in the interchangeability of sex roles. If feminist activists, i.e., those that manufacture the public image of feminism, are indeed masculinized relative to women in general, this might explain why the views and preferences of these two groups are at variance with each other. We measured the 2D:4D digit ratios (collected from both hands) and a personality trait known as dominance (measured with the Directiveness scale) in a sample of women attending a feminist conference. The sample exhibited significantly more masculine 2D:4D and higher dominance ratings than comparison samples representative of women in general, and these variables were furthermore positively correlated for both hands. The feminist paradox might thus to some extent be explained by biological differences between women in general and the activist women who formulate the feminist agenda.

Feminist activist women are masculinized in terms of digit-ratio and social dominance: a possible explanation for the feminist paradox

That said, there is quite bit of overlap in the distributions of most traits.

Regarding the gene/culture interaction, one thing to consider is individuals' roles in shaping their own social environment. For example, it seems to me that if parents tune their interactions with individual children based on what achieves the most positive results, they will on average treat male and female children somewhat differently despite taking an individualized (rather than gendered) approach.

[Cyclops]

...

Regarding the gene/culture interaction, one thing to consider is individuals' roles in shaping their own social environment. For example, it seems to me that if parents tune their interactions with individual children based on what achieves the most positive results, they will on average treat male and female children somewhat differently despite taking an individualized (rather than gendered) approach.

My own experience support this, I'm getting to know a class full of my son's schoolmates and its a bloody rainbow. Its a Steiner school (I think Yanks say Waldorf?) all wool and finger paint and faceless dolls, but my boy has his mates forming shield walls and pike squares so they don't get flanked by gesatoi etc. They drew the line at marching drill though.

Without going all Karen I'll also observe screens raise a lot of kids. Had to cut Cyclops Jnr from any any Youtube Kids as its all advertising and it changed his personality and play habits in a startlingly direct manner. I'm pretty laissez faire as a parent but I felt I had to act there. Still gets 4 hours screen time a week, but YTK is out. I reckon a few mores and attitudes get drilled in through media.

The kids do impose certain gender roles among themselves, and older siblings of friends can have a big role too. Little bloke got told pink is a girls colour and he tossed several pink items of clothing and refuses to ride a pink bike. OTOH he has long hair and DNGAF about people thinking its feminine or he's a girl, he cheerfully corrects people who call him a girl and thinks they are hilarious for their mistakes. He's a big brute of a kid and if you know the first thing about kids you can see he's a boy, plus he has a fair ego so it does not seem to get him down. I had half thought school might make him want to cut his hair. I'm stuck brushing it half the time which is a pain.

[swabian]

My own experience support this, I'm getting to know a class full of my son's schoolmates and its a bloody rainbow. Its a Steiner school (I think Yanks say Waldorf?) all wool and finger paint and faceless dolls

Ugh.. crap. You don't desrve it, but your kid does: get your kid out of there. Don't be an :wub:. Steiner was some late 19th century esotericist moron and the schools in Germany are almost like ing cults. I know, because i was at one. Get your kid schooled properly. There are likely to be bullies regardless, don't do the wrong thing by trying to be good.

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

I have linked here the video speech of Brandon Boulware, a lawmaker of Missouri and father of an transgender daughter, against this law proposal in Missouri

https://legiscan.com/MO/text/HJR53/id/2329186

which should amend the constitution of Missouri to prohibit:

Athletic teams or sports designated for "females", "women", or"girls" shall not be open to students of the male sex. Students of the female sex who previously participated in athletic teams or sports designated for "females", "women", or "girls" and who have begun gender or sex transitioning shall not participate in athletic teams or sports designated for "females", "women", or"girls" but may participate in athletic teams or sports designated "coed"or"mixed". Students of the female sex may participate inathletic teams or sports designated for "males", "men", or "boys" if the public school does not offer a comparable athletic team or sport designated for "females", "women", or"girls".

Link to the video:

https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1371...e22430695.html

[Lord Thesaurian]

Despite this advantage, the U.S. government has only made incremental progress in engaging with and incentivizing these sources of private capital to meaningfully support key technologies and capabilities that align with national security priorities. This is especially true in the case of long-lead and capital-intense technologies for space and hypersonics

To forge a working mechanism for the U.S. government to bring the most valuable of these new, innovative companies through the so-called valley of death to deliver meaningful new technology, we propose two actionable solutions. These solutions are designed to bring these companies into the U.S. government ecosystem while also incentivizing private capital to invest in and support companies working on critical national security technologies:

To accomplish this, the U.S. government must provide clear demand signals and structural incentives to industry and investors that will focus technology development on key national security priorities. The U.S. does not and should not have a command economy, but the strategic structuring of incentives can leverage our unique wells of private investment to accelerate innovation and capitalize on our market-led ingenuity to preserve our capability gap over adversaries across key emerging technologies.

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/...hina-in-space/

Agreed. Time to dump some stimmies into space capitalism. TO THE MOON, literally.

[Sir Adrian]

You laugh but space exploitation is the next oil industry.

[Lord Thesaurian]

You laugh but space exploitation is the next oil industry.

I mean, yeah, no joke. China and Russia are coping so hard they’re threatening to take their toys and go home to their very own ISS.

Russia and China have agreed to build a base on or around the Moon, the latest signal of geopolitical maneuvering in space and an apparent rebuke of the United States.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, signed an agreement this week with the Chinese National Space Administration on the joint creation of what they call the International Scientific Lunar Station

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/r...rifts-n1260634

[Mithradates]

I have linked here the video speech of Brandon Boulware, a lawmaker of Missouri and father of an transgender daughter, against this law proposal in Missouri

https://legiscan.com/MO/text/HJR53/id/2329186

which should amend the constitution of Missouri to prohibit:

Athletic teams or sports designated for "females", "women", or"girls" shall not be open to students of the male sex. Students of the female sex who previously participated in athletic teams or sports designated for "females", "women", or "girls" and who have begun gender or sex transitioning shall not participate in athletic teams or sports designated for "females", "women", or"girls" but may participate in athletic teams or sports designated "coed"or"mixed". Students of the female sex may participate inathletic teams or sports designated for "males", "men", or "boys" if the public school does not offer a comparable athletic team or sport designated for "females", "women", or"girls".

Link to the video:

https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1371...e22430695.html

Anti-feminist? Allowing inherently physically superior trans girls to demoralize and discourage cis girls in athletics is ..."feminism"? Really?

“I don’t know of a woman athlete who doesn’t want trans girls to be treated fairly. But the cost of treating her fairly should not come at the cost of discriminating against a biologically-female-at birth woman.”