Quick Takes – Sexual Dimorphic: Brains; Testosterone; Artificial Intellegence

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: Males are not females; females are not males.

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

     Whenever differences between male and females brains is pointed out, those who believe that there are no sex differences on social constructs even if this means that the belief that there are no sex differences is not science, but rather an article of faith.

“But I reminded [neuroscientist Gina] Rippon that even tests on infants find differences. Baby boys look longer at objects, such as tractor parts. Infant girls stare at faces.

“’A third of the girls actually seem to respond more to the tractor parts,” said Rippon.

“When I pointed out that meant two-thirds of the girls did not, Rippon said that the experiment should be redone ‘with a bigger set of newborns.’”

“Maybe. But scientists shouldn’t keep redoing experiments until they get results they like.”

     
Even provable science, such as the effects of hormones on behavior, is downplayed in an attempt to trick people into thinking that it is irrelevant.

“’Testosterone often gives men a pass for their negative behavior, and a pass for their success. With titans of Wall Street, for example, testosterone didn’t have anything to do with those men reaching the highest level in their field—there are other structures that elevated men and suppressed women. If biology and testosterone aren’t the explanation, then we have the much harder work to do of addressing the social causes.’

“Left unmentioned: why women who identify as men often start taking testosterone supplements, and why men who identify as women often start taking treatment to inhibit testosterone, if testosterone is so inconsequential to masculinity. Also unmentioned: the role of testosterone in athletic performance.”

     Apparently artificial intelligence is transphobic for noticing physical differences between the sexes and not the person’s gender identity.

“University of Colorado-Boulder researchers have a discovered a new danger from artificial intelligence: It’s not always woke.

“In the November edition of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction, computer scientists Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Jacob Paul and Jed Brubaker evaluated ‘gender classification in commercial facial analysis and image labeling services.’

“They found that systems designed to recognize people by their face also recognize them by their sex – as in, the immutable characteristics that make them male or female, reflected in the very construction of their faces.

“This is problematic for individuals who identify as the opposite sex, nonbinary or other amorphous identities not rooted in biology.”

     TTFN.

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