There ARE fundamental differences between men and women. It's in our genetics. Saying all men and women are the same is just not true.

Nobody said they were all exactly the same. Nice straw man. The simple point that you two can't seem to understand is that when moderators come and say women have been harassed out of webdiplomacy, and others have had to change their usernames, this is a problem. But you two continue to cling to biology as an alibi while "rational" Oscar continues to call those women weak.

Millions of years of evolution have led us to today. Look at any species, the males and females always have some differences, whether physical or otherwise. Humans are no different.

Sexism is not saying that men and women are different. Sexism is not pointing out natural predispositions or sociological factors.

Sexism is hating men or women because they are men or women.

President Eden:
"Under what understanding of sexism or racism does pattern recognition fall? If it's statistically significantly more likely than random chance that a person of a particular demographic has a particular trait, am I to be expected to ignore this because it might not be correct all of the time? This assertion strikes me as plainly incorrect and contrary to our decision-making in most other aspects of life. Presuming that you're careful to avoid confounding factors, I see no issue with making such assumptions, as long as you readily admit your error when incorrect and apologize should the error offend someone."
Of course you're expected to ignore overarching generalizations when speaking to individuals! Don't be blind. Should we call every Israeli we meet a war criminal because a plurality voted for the recent governments? Is it helpful for a female rape victim to hold contempt for and despise every man they come across on the assumption that they too are rapists?

"But the error here isn't that pattern recognition is wrong, it's that humans are often incomplete in attempting to use it. This implies a very different conclusion than yours."
Huh? What on Earth are you talking about here?

Chaqa, you keep repeating yourself. And you haven't established that the gender ratio has anything to do with 'natural' sex differences. This is just pure speculation.

Sexism is insisting that inequalities in how people are treated as human beings are 'natural'.

"The simple point that you two can't seem to understand is that when moderators come and say women have been harassed out of webdiplomacy, and others have had to change their usernames, this is a problem. But you two continue to cling to biology as an alibi while "rational" Oscar continues to call those women weak."

If someone is harassing women on the site for being women (and not harassing them for some other reason like a bad game decision or being a douche) than that is a moderator issue. Not an issue that needs to be shoved down every member's throat.

Chaqa:
"Are people really arguing that women AREN'T less competitive than men? There's been dozens if not hundreds of studies that show they are, in general( IN GENERAL) less competitive. Sure, you can have competitive women, but it's going to be at a lower percentage than competitive men."
There are many, many women who are extremely competitive. But I don't think you're understanding why so many people are getting annoyed with oscarjd74 et al in this thread. They're not just claiming that there tend to be characteristics more often expressed in females versus males, but claiming that there are fundamental differences between males and females.

And there are fundamental differences between males and females. Our entire genetic makeup is based off of it. Men have a Y chromosome, women have a second X chromosome. Women can have babies, men can't.

If there are physical differences, why not psychological? It's not sexist to say these things.

Chaqa: Never mind; you seem to hold the same beliefs as the others. Take a look at my first posts to oscarjd74 and Your Humble Narrator in this thread (both are on page 2) and let me know what you take issue with.

@Putin

"Just the other day you were claiming people who listen to certain types of music are "teenage girls"."

That's not at all what I claimed. I'm sure Taylor Swift has fans from all walks of life, but yeah, I also think teenage girls are probably widely overrepresented in that group. If you take offense at the fact that teenage girls as a group have a particular taste in music though, then yeah, I can't help you with that.

"Just today you created a thread attacking fat women."

I did no such thing. Stating that overweight women eat more is a fact, not a judgment. And the thread title was obviously a pun on another thread title, not an attack against overweight women. Also, I suspect that overweight female human beings do not much appreciate you calling them fat. Maybe you should take an example from my choice of words in this matter.

"You can claim women who don't put up with your shit are "weak" all you want."

Nope. I claimed that most women can deal with harassment (which I do not consider "my shit" to be), not that those who can't are weak. I also claimed that your a priori assumption that they can't deal with it equates to you considering them weak (not to them being weak).

More importantly though, I claim that if a woman is offended by "my shit" that she is capable of telling me so personally. Instead I have only received such complaints from a bunch of sexist men like yourself who suffer from white knight syndrome and think women can't speak for themselves.

I read those posts but it doesn't seem to go against what I said. I'm saying that fundamental differences between men and women, in genetics and upbringing, result in them on average pursuing different hobbies, careers, choices, etc. It leads to few women playing Diplomacy, or entering computer science programs, etc.

@JECE

"Youv'e already admitted that you think there are fundamental differences between males and females. You are blindly applying generalizations to individuals."

I've said there are fundamental differences between males and females, as groups. That's not applying anything to any individual. I fully acknowledge that there are outliers in both groups.

However, your notion that both groups are completely the same is just clearly incorrect as it flies in the face of logic and evidence. And so again, I can only explain you holding on to that position so desperately from an inability to transcend with rational thought your ideological beliefs about gender.

@Putin

"Oscar continues to call those women weak."

I'm not calling them women weak. I'm pointing out that you consider them weak, as this follows from your attitude towards them. I on the other hand have mentioned multiple times that I believe in strong females. So this criticism of me is rather insincere, and I belief deliberately so, as it is an obvious part of your debating strategy of ad hominem attacks against anyone who opposes your views.

"But I don't think you're understanding why so many people are getting annoyed with oscarjd74 et al in this thread. They're not just claiming that there tend to be characteristics more often expressed in females versus males, but claiming that there are fundamental differences between males and females."

So yeah, they are annoyed by facts. Well, facts don't care.

Incidentally though, I haven't even spoken about "fundamental" differences. Just about biological and psychological differences, but yeah if you label those as fundamental then sure.

The reason this is not insulting is because stating that two things are different does not equate to stating that one is better than the other. An apple is different from a banana. I like them both. See how easy that was? I'm sure someone will tell me that I've just insulted all apples though.

There are no psychological differences of the kind you are talking about. There are biological differences, which are almost completely irrelevant in a modern society, hormonal differences, which don't do nearly as much as you people think, and there are reflexes women have that men don't, and vice versa. There are no basic psychological differences.

The issue is, you are claiming women are psychologically inferior to men. You'll dispute this, but I'll be asleep by then, sorry. But you are claiming men are tough, better able to deal with competition. Meanwhile, you characterize women as thin-skinned and weak. That is why you are insulting women, among other things.

@phil

Sigh. No, I'm not claiming that women are psychologically inferior to men, just that they are psychologically different. The inference that this means that they are inferior is entirely yours.

And sigh. No, I do not characterize women as thin-skinned and weak. I characterize them as strong and self-reliant. It's the social justice warriors that characterize them as weak.

There are probably more comments I ought to address, but I'm busy and this particular subthread was one that most interested me so I'm slacking off and replying to just this for now. Sorry in advance.

"Of course you're expected to ignore overarching generalizations when speaking to individuals! Don't be blind. Should we call every Israeli we meet a war criminal because a plurality voted for the recent governments? Is it helpful for a female rape victim to hold contempt for and despise every man they come across on the assumption that they too are rapists?

Huh? What on Earth are you talking about here?"

In both of your examples, the generalizations are flawed because there exist confounding factors which mitigate the strength of the generalization. Among the subset of Israelis who voted the most recent government into power, there may well be a group of war criminals; but voting for the most recent government does not prima facie make you a war criminal. There are other factors that make you substantially more likely to be a war criminal, like committing war crimes. The assumption fails not because humans cannot be generalized (they most certainly can be), but because the specific generalization made does not make a pertinent logical tie to the characteristics of the individual(s) in question.

The rape example is perhaps clearer. Let's assume we know the rapist is male. Among the subset of men there exists a subset of male rapists; but being male does not prima facie make you a rapist. There are confounding factors that make someone more likely to be a rapist, like committing rape against other people.

Both examples fail because the tie between the group in question and the characteristics in question is too weak to be useful. If you go around assuming that all Israelis are war criminals or all men are rapists, you'll be wrong well over 99% of the time.

In contrast, let's take a rather straightforward example. According to the INCREDIBLY scientific Ask.com (ha), in 2050 we can expect roughly 5% of the world population to speak English. (http://www.ask.com/world-view/percentage-world-speaks-english-859e211be5634567?qo=questionPageSimilarContent) However, I live in my sleepy podunk hometown, Baton Rouge, LA, and in 2050 I can expect roughly 85% (probably undershooting it, tbh) of the people I encounter in BR to speak English. If I were to run into a human randomly selected across the entire world, it would be a terrible assumption that they speak English. If I were to run into a human randomly selected from Baton Rouge, LA, it would be a very strong one.

That's all that pattern recognition is. It's recognizing that certain people with certain characteristics are statistically significantly more likely than random chance to have other characteristics. It allows me to make useful heuristics that save time in my decision-making and allow me to make more informed decisions.

It goes without saying that race and sex are characteristics which imply similar statistically significant correlations with other characteristics. Yet your post would seem to assert that creating similar heuristics is morally wrong:

"To make an assumption about an individual based on their sex is just as sexist as assuming that a given black person likes rap is racist."

Why is this? The only error here is in making incomplete heuristics that don't account for other factors. This is, again, why you should readily admit your errors when you make them and apologize if your errors offend. But I see no moral error with creating the heuristics in the first place. This is why I asked where pattern recognition fits in your understanding of racism and sexism, because both of those words are typically used in the context of condemning a particular practice, and I think it would be incredibly foolhardy to condemn pattern recognition as a practice, considering that it's not only a useful process when done right, but is additionally something we attempt to do automatically, even subconsciously, all the time.

I also think there's something of another distinction between what PE is doing and your examples, JECE.

In both your examples, you're talking about somebody labeling a specific member of a group because of their membership in that group. PE wasn't doing that. He was using (putative) traits of a group to explain why the *numbers* of people from that group who participate in online diplomacy might be small.

Nothing he said would, for example, support assuming that a particular woman (any particular woman!) would not enjoy diplomacy, or condoning hateful behavior toward her when she did.

To go back to your examples: the results of the Israeli election would by no means justify labeling any individual person anything. But surely they might be an important data point in explaining under-representation of Israelis, as a group, on a website forum called "Free Palestine!"

In brief: one of the things confusing me about a lot of the you're-all-hateful-sexists side of this debate is that several of you keep complaining about using statistics to justify behavior toward an individual, when in fact it's the statistical behavior of a group (and not any individual's behavior!) that we are trying to explain (and so the statistical behavior of that group is extremely relevant).

I'm not, incidentally, jumping into the women-are-statistically-less-competetive debate on either side. I think that's a very thorny question that is extremely complicated by various factors, many of which have already been discussed. I'm just addressing some of the objections that have still been brought even by people who accept that arguendo.

This one seems relevant here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZqHxw-E2Y4

Enjoy!

@semck

I think the competitiveness issue is a lot less black and white than some people seem to think. How do you even define competitiveness? If you look at it in a nuanced way you might very well find that rather than being less competitive, women just compete in different ways than men. I wouldn't at all be surprised to find that men tend to compete by keeping score of stuff while women tend to compete by evaluating social picking orders. The former being more objective and explicit and thus more easily recognized as competition. The latter being more subjective and subtle and easily "hidden" under the guise of a cooperative effort.

Ya, I regret bringing up the competitiveness example because it's not black-and-white. It was just the most immediate idea that came to mind when I thought of effects of testosterone (which, being male, is the hormone that most readily comes to mind when I think of sexual dimorphism in humans), but I should have been more careful in using it. Mea culpa.

The gender ratio here? Well, genetically I'm 100% male....but having lived with three females for the last 15 years, I probably choose to sit on the toilet sometimes when standing would do. I occasionally tear up in a movie that I wouldn't tear up in if I had boys. etc...etc...

So...my gender ratio is....eh....92% dude, 8% sensitive toilet-squatting chick.

Only real men go for solo victories. If you play a cooperative game for a draw, you must be a woman.

Women are very competitive. They just compete in *different ways* than men. Surprise, surprise.

Part of the reason that women *appear* to be less competitive than men is that they often avoid confrontations with men. This is not just learned behavior. It is simple survival. Men are typically larger and more prone to use violence as a means to an end. Ergo, women will tend to disarm or defuse confrontations with men while men will often switch to attack mode, in person and online. This means that women are more likely to say, "This place gets hostile a lot. It's not worth my time." and then go and do something more enjoyable or productive with their time. Men get more satisfaction from arguing and from winning. Women are more pragmatic and don't see the point in arguing with a bunch of idiots who they will never meet in real life.

However, social justice warriors do love to argue, and they especially love to rescue virtual damsels in distress.

Jeff, I don't understand why you decided to throw that last sentence on.

@mendax: "
However, social justice warriors do love to argue, and they especially love to rescue virtual damsels in distress."

He threw that sentence in because there are a bunch of left-wing super-sexist assholes floating around this site that love to tell us how they treat women as equals...and then tell us that pathetic women are so weak they need to be saved by strong men.

All you people that think it is AOK to call any guy around here an asshole, or <pick your insult>, and know that the men will shrug it off and stick around....are the same people that say women run away because they can't handle the insults.

Truth is, chicks are just not into wasting huge chunks of their life playing a board game on line with strangers....not because they can't handle the insults.

It is ALSO super-sexist for all you idiots (yes, I said it...) to pretend that men and women are equal, should be treated equal, are equal in all ways (instead of acknowledging that they are equal but DIFFERENT)....and then say that we **must** have more women here.

WHY???? Why do we need more women here? What is this bullshit, farcicle cry for women all about? As if having women here will grant some sort of extra-special "we have arrived" status to this website. Ridiculous.

Perhaps I am wrong, but like many others here, I always assume I am talking to a male on these forums.

I think that oscarjd74 has made some valid points in this thread, and that they are not misogynist as others claim. I also think that many people here, likely many of those who are calling oscar a misogynist, are male teenagers or college kids who don't have a lot of real life experience with women yet.

Seems to me those trying to defend the honor of women who don't actually appear to be on this site are in reality SJWs fighting an imaginary battle for an ideal that only exists in their heads.