Yup. It's pretty simple...

Posted Sep 26, 2007 13:58 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)
In reply to: Yup. It's pretty simple... by khim
Parent article: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

I'm not going to get into an evolutionary pyschology debate here on LWN, but given that human
behavior is so mouldable by what they learn as young children, and given that we know that
different cultures can and do create wildly different levels of "noisiness", as you described it,
Occam's Razor suggests that reaching for biological explanations of the disparity is unnecessary,
when purely cultural explanations are both simpler and more easily tested.

Different cultures ?

Posted Sep 26, 2007 14:11 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

1. You asked about "natural tendency". To me "natural tendency" == "tendency determined by biology". What is your definition ?

2. Name one survived culture where women are more aggressive then man. There are myths related to amazons and may be some small tribes, but all major players of such type are either extinct or never existed at all. This can hardly be explained by "what they learn as young children".

Actually it's even worse.

Posted Sep 26, 2007 14:21 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Small children are usually taught by women and so taught politeness first. Only later in life guys are starting to become "arrogant jerks". Take the situation in Japan: while Japanese look (from viewpoint of westerner) always uber-polite yet actually they are using different speech patterns and women are not supposed to talk in public at all!

Actually it's even worse.

Posted Sep 26, 2007 15:16 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Y'know, it IS even worse; I realized that I forgot to question how you got the idea that women are less assertive or aggressive, in the first place.

Actually it's even worse.

Posted Sep 26, 2007 18:30 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

"Only later in life" do guys suddenly get tons of testosterone coursing through their system. Given how much it affects them physically, one would imagine it would have an effect on their psyche as well.