Thank you both of you for the links. After reading up and doing a bit more research into this, I find AS to be a very dangerous organization.
We have a 2 1/2 year old girl who has a significant delay in communication, everything else she pretty much excels at. We started speech therapy and she is definitely improving. We've asked the therapists about autism since we read quite a bit of scary stuff on Autism Speaks site. The therapists both stated that while she may have an issue that can be associated with the spectrum, they do not recommend labeling her as autistic. They did mention that some parents prefer the autistic label because that will open up more resources for them with local school districts which in a way, inflates the autism numbers.
But the weird part is that there isn't a Halo character called Asimov. The author's own potholed link to the Halo wikia just shows an "Asimov Center" as a briefly mentioned location in one short story. And even the tiny article for it takes time to explain who it was named after.
Linking the name "Asimov" with the Halo games seems to be a bizarre speculation/research failure on her part, as far as I can tell.
What a bizarre connection to make. Maybe I'm out-of-date on my Halo lore but I don't think there's even anyone/thing significant in that universe named after him. Indeed, the search on the Halo wiki she links only reveals an "Asimov Centre" briefly mentioned in one short story and a quarter of the tiny article is a sentence explaining who Isaac Asimov was.
The disguised gender experiment reminds me of similar ones into whether or not sugar makes children "hyper". It turns out that if you tell parents that their children have had sugar, they're much more likely to describe the kids' behaviour as unruly or hyperactive, even if the kids haven't been given anything at all (http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4142 - the Skeptoid article provides a nice summary and cites a few studies).
The fact is, the human brain isn't anywhere near the objective, rational computer and recorder it likes to think of itself as. We project our expectations on to everything we see, from the facial expressions of a monkey to random clumps of noise in datasets and it's important to keep that in mind whenever you read articles like this one. The information presented in a typical piece of science news has gone through the mental filters of researchers, university PR departments, editors, and a writer before you even start interpreting the first word. Even if every person at every step understands what they're doing and has the best intentions (and isn't, for example, deliberately twisting facts to fit their linkbait article for a pop science blog), that's a lot of room for a convenient narrative to obscure the basic, potentially important facts.
I'm calling bullshit on the title (which, in the hopefully likely event it gets changed, is currently "Hormones Explain Why Girls Like Dolls and Boys Like Trucks"). One study showing a correlation might suggest something worth looking into further but it hardly "explains" anything.
The results with the monkeys are interesting, if both the research and the reporting of it are accurate. However, animal models, while certainly useful indicators, are still just animal models and can't say anything definitive about human biology and psychology.
And as for those studies on young children, it's a mistake to think that just because a child is only a few months old they haven't been exposed to enough cultural influence to skew what they prefer to look at. If just a few of those parents have put a football mobile above their baby boy's cot or decorated their little girl's room with Disney princess wallpaper, that familiarity could easily explain the results.
Do biological differences exist between genders? Absolutely. Are some of those differences driven by ancient evolutionary pressure rather than modern culture? It's a reasonable hypothesis, worth investigating. Have those differences now been explained by a single factor and a few small studies, half of which were on monkeys, and do they just happen to line up with traditional gender stereotypes? You'll have to do a lot better than a Live Science blog that cites nothing but other Live Science blogs to convince me of that.
EDIT: Well, at least the title was changed to better fit the article, even if it still doesn't line up with the actual science.
What are these studies? The metadata studies I've heard about say otherwise. That is, some studies say one thing, other studies say the opposite, and so it's impossible to really conclude anything by choosing a subset of the literature.
They talk about male babies who were sexually reassigned at birth and given female hormones. However many of them decided to reidentify as males later on life, showing that even with female hormones and a female upbringing, it was not enough to make them adopt a female gender identity.
I wouldn't say this is conclusive evidence. But I think it's enough to show that people should keep an open mind about this subject.
Can you show me some of these studies? I just pointed out the problematic lack of citations in the article and your dismissive comment alone isn't going to change my mind. If there's solid evidence one way or the other, I'd be genuinely interested to see it.
And even if they do happen to agree with actual good science, the few studies presented here still don't "explain" anything and this Live Science post is decidedly shonky science reporting (and calling it that is frankly generous).
> If just a few of those parents have put a football mobile above their baby boy's cot or decorated their little girl's room with Disney princess wallpaper, that familiarity could easily explain the results.
This cannot explain how prenatal hormone exposure can predict toy preferences better than "socialized" gender.
Testosterone etc. exposure predicts toy preferences:
I never said it could. It's just something that has to be very well controlled for and this article showed nothing to suggest it was in the studies it sort of cited.
It's entirely possible that the results in those studies you provided are solid. I don't know, I don't have the expertise or the access to go through them thoroughly, let alone run a replication. I would just urge everyone here to keep in mind that, as pointed out very well in aestra's comment above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7213317), this kind of research is subject to heavy cultural biases, both through the parents and experiments and through poor science reporting in the media.
And, even if it weren't, this Live Science linkbait blog post, the one rapidly climbing the front page of Hacker News with the sensationalist headline, is still uncited bollocks.
"This kind" being the research we've been discussing, which is about socialisation and toy preference. Finger length and other easily-measured physical differences haven't been part of it.
It's briefly mentioned in the article as a possible indicator of toy preference because it correlates well with hormone levels. It clearly wasn't what the research, the discussion, or any of my comments were focusing on.
It's reported in all of the child studies discussed in TFA. Fault the article if you want but "hormones" is in the title, and the whole point of the entire line of research is that it's implausible that prenatal hormone levels could be affected by cultural biases.
The hormone levels are unlikely to be affected by cultural biases but that's not the potential weakness I'm talking about in these studies. It's during the observation, through the eyes of the parents and scientists, of what toys the children are playing with where expectations can affect the results. On top of that, you've got biases affecting what studies get published and which of those then make headlines and get repeated in blog posts like this one.
For any field, there's always some basic knowledge that anyone studying or practicing it simply has to have if they're going to be at all effective. A well-written test should be checking that the students have acquired that knowledge (which can be much of the course content) and can apply it appropriately to problems.
Anyone with an internet connection can easily find out, for example, how to add together two ints in Java. But if someone took an introductory Java course and couldn't do that at the end of it, then they don't deserve to pass because they've clearly not learned what they were supposed to. If they were actually trying to program something and had to look up basics like that every time they used them, they would be so slow as to be completely useless. Or consider someone with a more time-critical job like a surgeon - they can do specific research beforehand but some level of knowledge (surgical techniques, how to use their tools, anatomy, etc.) is simply going to have to be in their head at the moment they need it or their patient could die.
Also, phones and internet access don't just provide knowledge, they're a way to communicate with everyone else in the room. If you want to see if any particular person has actually learned the material, you obviously can't allow that.
> If they were actually trying to program something and had to look up basics like that every time they used them, they would be so slow as to be completely useless
Isn't that the point of timed tests? You can structure a test such that the person who needs to look up how to add two ints in Java will waste so much time that they wouldn't be able to finish the test. And if they can search for and apply this knowledge quickly enough, then maybe they've proven that they won't be slow if they have to do it in the real world.
My favourite exams were open book but still hard/long enough that if you didn't already know 95% of the material, you simply wouldn't have time to complete it.
On the other hand, if you allow outside communication (such as unrestricted access to the internet), you open the door for "I'll pay someone who already knows this stuff to phone in the answers for me" - which isn't generally an applicable skill in the real world.
As an aside, I hated open book exams - if you were talented and knew the material, you could typically blast through a closed-book examination in half the allotted time and get out of there, while the open-book exams were far longer and more tedious.
>"I'll pay someone who already knows this stuff to phone in the answers for me" - which isn't generally an applicable skill in the real world.
I would argue that this is also a valuable skill. Knowing who to hire, assessing the person's abilities, figuring out if they can actually get the job done in the time allotted. Sure it's not at the same level that a hiring manager at a tech company in the real world would have to make, but then again the normal CS test questions aren't at that level either.
Agreed with your reasoning within your framework. But I'm a little skeptical of the utility of this framework for thinking about learning. Why do we test people without communication, when most of what they're going to be doing throughout most of life is going to involve communicating with others, one way or another?
I think there IS utility in assessing people with the constraint of "you can't talk to anybody else", but I'm not comfortable with that being the dominant, primary means of assessment. It should be consistent with the likelihood that you'll actually be forced to work stuff out on your own- maybe 10, 20% at most?
It probably depends on the subject but if they don't have that basic knowledge they're not going to be effective filling in the test either, even with Google it always takes longer.
Ideally tests should check the deeper understanding of the student and not just his memory skills. In that case Internet access is also not a problem.
Just because someone was wrong about the Wright brothers a century ago doesn't mean that someone else is wrong about something completely different today. Carl Sagan said it best:
"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
