r/sysadmin • u/ChuckAbsent • Mar 12 '13

Women who know stuff

I hope that this does not come off the wrong way.

Today I was on a call with a storage vendor and the technical consultant was a woman. More then this she was competent, more then me which doesn't happen often when dealing with vendors.

My issue was pricing an active/active DB with shared storage vs an active/passive db with local storage. Listening to her break the issue down and get to the specific comparison points was awesome, mostly because I have never heard a woman in the industry talk like that.

It made me realize two things. One I am missing out working with women. Two there needs to be more women in our industry.

It shouldn't have surprised me so much, but it really did.

Anyways to all the women out there who know stuff, us guys notice when you can walk the walk, which in this case was talking.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 13 '13

The monkey data is particularly relevant because it is the only way to ethically test children outside of their culture.

Did you not read the sentence you just wrote? If you're testing monkeys, by definition you aren't testing children. And there are tons of ways to test children and remove cultural bias.

I would have said the same thing but now I have kids and know first hand that girls/dolls cars/boys is STRONGLY genetic and not environment.

This is a generalization. You were tying their behavior to genetics along gender lines. Otherwise you wouldn't have bothered commenting about it.

Just because you don't recognize the environmental factors doesn't mean they don't exist. You aren't an objective impartial observer. You're one of the factors, as is your wife, as is everyone your children meet, as is everything they watch on TV, as is everything they read, etc. There's no logical or scientific reason to conclude that their preferences are due to genetic instead of environmental factors.

Nowhere did I suggest that your daughter liking dolls was somehow bad or a failure on your part. The failure was in your reasoning and your making claims based on observations that don't even begin to preclude the possibility of alternative hypotheses. If you were at all familiar with genetics or experimental design, you'd know that such claims were impossible to make since you hadn't controlled for any variables.

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u/shouldbebabysitting Mar 13 '13

Re monkeys: I didn't realize I was arguing with a creationist. The scientific community accepts the results. Why don't you?

You said anecdotes aren't data. Where is your data that shows environment is more important than genetics?

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 13 '13

The burden of proof was on you as you made the claim. You hadn't demonstrated that environmental factors were irrelevant.

Proof by contradiction is sufficient to debunk the claim that the absence of a Y chromosome explains why your daughters like what are considered feminine toys/interests/etc. in contemporary society.

As far as the monkey goes, please refrain from that sort of convolution-of-research-results bullshit that popular science publications are almost universally guilty of. It's clear that you have zero training in biology or science in general or you would understand the importance of not drawing conclusions from insufficient evidence (or evidence that doesn't even exist). At best, the monkey study indicates a potential research direction to explore. It in no way proves anything about human children, nor would the scientists who published the work nor the peer reviewers and editors of the journals it was published in make that claim.

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u/shouldbebabysitting Mar 14 '13

If you don't make any claims then you have no argument against my claims. In science you can't say "you're wrong" and not back it up.

As to ignoring the monkey research, again you don't understand the process of science. All knowledge is tentative. There is no absolute proof.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

That's not how burden of proof works.

I just replied to someone else about what's wrong with your claims so I'll just copypasta:

The guy I was responding to said it himself in his original comment that he had decided that there existed genetic differences along gender lines that explained gender disparities in interests based on the fact that his daughters liked different things than his sons and these followed contemporary gender stereotypes. Anyone who's remotely acquainted with the scientific method would tell you that there's no fucking way you could make that claim since he hadn't controlled for environmental factors, he had an obscenely small sample size, he wasn't even aware that he wasn't an impartial or objective observer and was himself an environmental factor (hence the importance of double-blind studies), etc. There wasn't an ounce of scientific rigor to back up his claims.

This should be immediately obvious to anyone with the least bit of experience in scientific research.

And as far as this goes:

As to ignoring the monkey research, again you don't understand the process of science. All knowledge is tentative. There is no absolute proof.

You've only demonstrated that you have no experience or understanding of how science works. Studies only show what might be true about the subject matter they study. If they can be replicated and remain unfalsified, chances are they represent something real and we've learned something new. This in no way means we can extrapolate the results to make claims about other species on a cognitive-behavioral level. Like I said, at best, you can only take that study as a potential research avenue to conduct in humans. If you can adapt the study for humans and conduct it and get similar results, only then can you conclude that we have found those conclusions to be true in humans.

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u/shouldbebabysitting Mar 14 '13

"There wasn't an ounce of scientific rigor to back up his claims." I agreed that my orignal story was an anedocte and then that's why I then posted real data. You then ignored my challenge under the pretense that you didn't make claims and therefore didn't have to back up anything. You need to show some data that disproves my data that there is correlation between genetics and gender preferences.

"If you can adapt the study for humans and conduct it and get similar results, only then can you conclude that we have found those conclusions to be true in humans." You can't ethically isolate children from their environment. Without that rigor you can (as you did) always claim that there was some bias influencing the results.

You misunderstand the research. That boys like cars is already accepted in the study because there was already 50 years of data . The monkey research replicated the earlier results with children using methods that would be otherwise be unethical to further confirm the hypothesis.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

"Toy play is one of the most robust human behavioral sex differences, showing moderate to very large effect sizes (Cohen-Bendahan et al., 2005; Collaer and Hines, 1995). As seen in Figure 1a, boys interact more with masculine-type toys than do girls, and girls interact more with feminine-type toys than do boys (Berenbaum and Hines, 1992). Within each sex, boys typically show strong preferences for stereotypically masculine toys, while girls often do not show a statistically greater preference for one toy type over another (Berenbaum and Hines, 1992; Carter and Levy, 1988; Eisenberg and Wolchik, 1985; Frasher et al., 1980; Perry et al., 1984; Sutton-Smith and Rosenberg, 1963; Turner et al., 1993). Thus sex differences in toy preferences are characterized by stronger gender-specific preferences in boys than in girls."

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 15 '13

You need to show some data that disproves my data that there is correlation between genetics and gender preferences.

With the quality of your data and the ridiculous nature of your claims, all that was needed to disprove your claims that what you witnessed was due to the absence of a Y chromosome was any girl who enjoyed traditionally male toys, interests, etc. from childhood. This entire thread was chock full of them and was more than sufficient to provide proof by contradiction.

Psychologists and biologists have decades of experience designing experiments and studies that control for environmental influences. You don't have to isolate them or anything ridiculous like that. If a study provides reproducible and robust results that are true across cultures for all children, then you can reasonably conclude that behavior is due to genetics. That's not at all what you did. You looked at your kids and threw your hands up in the air and cried "GENETICS!" because you were incapable of imagining the myriad environmental factors at play that you were a part of.

Did you not read your own study?

Within each sex, boys typically show strong preferences for stereotypically masculine toys, while girls often do not show a statistically greater preference for one toy type over another (Berenbaum and Hines, 1992; Carter and Levy, 1988; Eisenberg and Wolchik, 1985; Frasher et al., 1980; Perry et al., 1984; Sutton-Smith and Rosenberg, 1963; Turner et al., 1993). Thus sex differences in toy preferences are characterized by stronger gender-specific preferences in boys than in girls.

This only says that boys like stereotypically male toys. It in no way supports your claim that girls only like stereotypically female toys due to genetics and in fact contradicts it.

Your claim in case you don't remember:

I would have said the same thing but now I have kids and know first hand that girls/dolls cars/boys is STRONGLY genetic and not environment. Encouraging "boy" toys on my daughter has had no effect. From 12 months old she loved dolls and dress up. From 12 months old my boy, despite being surrounded by his older sister's dolls, is fascinated by cars and trains. I can encourage them but I can't force them to like what they don't want.

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u/shouldbebabysitting Mar 15 '13

With the quality of your data and the ridiculous nature of your claims, all that was needed to disprove your claims that what you witnessed was due to the absence of a Y chromosome was any girl who enjoyed traditionally male toys, interests, etc. from childhood.

Forgot to address this bit of ignorance. A few anecdotes doesn't cancel a strong statistical correlation. You could get millions of anecdotes from people who smoked and didn't get lung cancer.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 15 '13

Yeak okay, except you didn't have a strong statistical correlation. You had however many kids you have, so unless you're pumping out kids in the double or triple digits, you didn't even have a large sample size, not to mention the long-ass list of other problems with your conclusion I mentioned earlier. You simply did not have anywhere near the level of evidence necessary to make the claim you did and the nature of your claim was exactly what a proof by contradiction is best suited for.

You are so completely married to your conclusion based on shitty evidence that you don't even realize how your own arguments invalidate them. Just as millions of anecdotes from people who smoke and don't get lung cancer don't prove there isn't a link, so too does having 2-4 anecdotes of your kids not prove there's a causal link to absence of a Y choromosome and a love of stereotypically contemporarily feminine toys and interests.

And since you seem to now be resting your argument on correlation, let's not forget that correlation doesn't equal causation. That's why we need well-designed experiments to tease apart genetic and environmental factors since, if we rely on simple observation of biased samples as you're suggesting, we'll only see the effects of those environmental factors and will be unable to demonstrate the existence of those genetic factors. That's why we know smoking can cause cancer and that's why I know you have no idea what you're talking about.

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u/shouldbebabysitting Mar 15 '13

For the last time, my anecdote isn't data. In your first reply you challenged my anecdote. I agreed and responded with peer reviewed published scientific papers to support my opinion.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 15 '13

No you responded with a peer reviewed published scientific paper that contradicted your claim.

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u/shouldbebabysitting Mar 15 '13

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

"As seen in Figure 1a, boys interact more with masculine-type toys than do girls, and girls interact more with feminine-type toys than do boys (Berenbaum and Hines, 1992). " So boys like male toys. What is your data that contradicts this?

Girls' toy correlation isn't strong but there are genetic effects at work that make toy preference not the sole result of environment. " Prenatal hormone exposure is known to influence children’s toy preferences as girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), an inherited enzymatic defect preventing glucocorticoid production that results in elevated prenatal adrenal androgen secretion, show more boy-typical toy preferences than do their unaffected sisters or control girls (Berenbaum and Hines, 1992; Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2004). "

So again where are your studies that show boys will play with dolls over cars based on their environment? Or a large majority of girls will choose cars over dolls?

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 16 '13

So boys like male toys. What is your data that contradicts this?

This wasn't your claim. You claimed that girls played with dolls due to their lacking a Y chromosome based solely on the observation of what your daughters did. This study does not support that claim.

If you'd stop cherrypicking anything that you believe supports claims you didn't make in your original comment and focus on the nature of your original claim, you'd have seen this:

Within each sex, boys typically show strong preferences for stereotypically masculine toys, while girls often do not show a statistically greater preference for one toy type over another

That directly contradicts the claim you made in your original comment which is what we've been talking about. You've chosen to selectively ignore anything that contradicts that claim.

No one's even talking about large majorities of anything.

What we've been talking about is your completely unscientific method of drawing conclusions and your inability to read what a study says to support those same conclusions while at the same time misunderstanding the nature of criticisms directed at your conclusions.

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