Should Pillars add in beauty or renown stats for dialogue options or events?

[Katarack21]

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3110817/

 

Ooh, you linked some literature! Let's take a a look at it.

 

This is from the abstract (incidentally, right after your quotation, which is missing actual quotes or any other indicator of citation, cuts off):

 

 

While we revealed significant main effects of sex, there were no significant effects of brain size (and no significant interactions between sex and brain size).

 

Huh. That doesn't seem to mesh with what you're saying. But it gets better.

 

 

When conducting post hoc tests, we revealed a number of regions where women had larger GM volumes compared to men. Importantly, these sex effects remained evident when comparing men and women with the same brain size. Altogether, our findings suggest that the observed increased regional GM volumes in female brains constitute sex-dependent redistributions of tissue volume, rather than individual adjustments attributable to brain size.

 

Golly. That's specifically important because it establishes that you cannot characterize gray matter as masculine or white matter as feminine - the two have different configurations and connotations in ways that both are and are not sex-dependent.

 

Now of course, that on its own speaks to the statistical differences between men's brains and women's brains, so I'll link this again: while the grey-to-white matter ratios differ observably between the sexes, the actual significance of those differences is not well established, as women with less grey matter perform equivalently to men with more grey matter on identical tests. But of course, even if you didn't take a look at the article in question, you should already know about its contents, because this ...

 

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050121100142.htm

 

... is actually about the article I just linked. It's a pretty good summary! Here's the handy tidbits you didn't include in your post.

 

 

The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance.

 

“These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and longtime human intelligence researcher, who led the study with colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico. “In addition, by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain.”

 

 

The study also identified regional differences with intelligence. For example, 84 percent of gray-matter regions and 86 percent of white-matter regions involved with intellectual performance in women were found in the brain’s frontal lobes, compared to 45 percent and zero percent for males, respectively. The gray matter driving male intellectual performance is distributed throughout more of the brain.

 

According to the researchers, this more centralized intelligence processing in women is consistent with clinical findings that frontal brain injuries can be more detrimental to cognitive performance in women than men. Studies such as these, Haier and Jung add, someday may help lead to earlier diagnoses of brain disorders in males and females, as well as more effective and precise treatment protocols to address damage to particular regions in the brain.

 

Interesting stuff! The article's full text can be found here. But, as we'll see, this is greatly recontextualized by later research.

 

See, the studies we've looked at so far are methodologically sound but also older and limited in scope - the Ludders study (from 2011) looked at a sample size of 96 brains, while the Haier article looked at 48 volunteers. These are actually pretty large samples as far as neuroscience goes, and I wouldn't want to imply that these small samples indicate unreliability. But what they definitively establish is that the brain does diverge, statistically, along rough male and female lines.

 

This seems like a good place for me to relink this study, from 2015, which looks at a sample size of 1,400 brains (you can't see me, but I'm fanning myself and feeling faint now), and builds on the Haier and Ludders work towards the conclusion that - rather than earlier notions of male brains vs female brains, or of brains appearing on a linear male-to-female continuum - the average person's brain is a "mosaic" of features, some of which are more common in men, some of which are more common in women, and some of which have no statistical correlation with sex. They also did a psychological study of 5,500 individuals (holy logistics, Batman!), with convergent results. But it gets even weirder, as reality tends to do!

 

 

... more recent evidence that masculinization and feminization are independent processes and that sexual differentiation progresses independently in different brain tissues (10), predicts poor internal consistency [of masculinization or feminization in the brain] (4, 5). Poor internal consistency is further predicted by evidence that the effects of sex may be different and even opposite under different environmental conditions and that these sex-by-environment interactions may be different for different brain features (4, 5).

 

Emphasis mine.

 

(I'm really enthusiastic about that bit in particular because it's totally new to me - I learned it while researching my post yesterday, and I wish I could have fit it in. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to!)

 

So, let me see if I can sum this all up. A handy-dandy list may be useful.

• Per a 2005 article by RJ Haier, based on a sample size of 48, different distributions and ratios of white-to-grey matter are recognizable between male and female volunteers, but appear to produce equivalent general intelligence results.
• Per a 20011 article by E Ludder, based on a sample size of 96, sex differences between brains are structural, not linear, and cannot be explained away with "men sometimes have larger brains," or "men have more grey matter."
• Per a 2015 article by D Joel, based on a sample size of 1,400 MRIs, the appearance of masculine and feminine features of the brain is not linear and only predictable in the broadest statistical terms: any given person's brain is a totally unpredictable sampling of features that are typically masculine, typically feminine, or typically unassociated with sex. It also appears that environmental factors can sometimes reverse what is statistically masculine or feminine.

 

I wish I could click like on this post twenty times. It's *beautiful*. I'd also like to point out that I linked to the study about the "mosaic" nature of brains earlier in this thread. :-D

[illathid]

 

 

They never do this. Never meaning the majority not the less than 1% that do.

 

 

[Boeroer]

It is not universally bad to be naive.

Of course not.

[smokeBomb]

 

1) That first study is from 2009, and has been superseded and disproved by more recent research, like that I linked.

 

 

 

Here’s another from the NCBI from 2017 confirming everything once again. Where is your source that specifically disproved something from the NCBI?

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5516591/

 

we conducted a voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis along with global volume analysis for white matter across sex. We analyzed 384 T1-weighted MRI brain images (192 male, 192 female) to investigate any differences in white matter (WM) between males and females. In the VBM analysis, we found males to have larger WM, compared to females, in occipital, temporal, insular, parietal, and frontal brain regions. In contrast, females showed only one WM region to be significantly larger than males: the right postcentral gyrus in the parietal lobe region.

 

We could keep doing this all year.

 

 

2) The second study is *very* careful to use phrases like "in general" and "on average".

 

 

Thesaurus again, bud. When I write ‘majority’, you know what that means? In general. On average.

 

I know, I know – wild stuff, the human language.

 

 

3) The third is an article, not a study of any sort.

 

 

An article that discusses scientific research related to differences in male and female brains, and one that articulately argues for everything I’ve argued. I provide it as evidence I’m not the only one in the world who believes – amazingly – that women and men are different.

 

4) I can just as easily tell you about all the various times I've personally seen women walk up to men they've never met before and go "Hey, let's ****."

 

 

You're inventing things again.

 

 

5) You've made hard statements about how women "NEVER, EVER, IN ANY CULTURE, IN ANY TIME" do certain things

 

 

More interventions.

 

Man, you’re delusional. That’s not a personal attack – that’s a definition of what happens when someone invents something that doesn’t exist. I never ever wrote anything like that. Quote?

 

 

 

6) I apologize for the meme, I honestly didn't realize it had a curse word in it.

 

 

There’s something wrong here, people. Seriously, seriously wrong. That image had only one sentence in it and he didn't see it?????

 

Moderator, please – I implore you to lock this down. There’s no way of actually having a debate with this guy. He’s making stuff up about what I said, and he’s all out lying about his own posts as well.

[Katarack21]

Man, you’re delusional. That’s not a personal attack – that’s a definition of what happens when someone invents something that doesn’t exist. I never ever wrote anything like that. Quote?

 

 

 

 

 

I never used the expression ‘men won’t’, for starters. And I only used ‘women won’t’ to describe one circumstance: flirting. I’ll say it again, simply – women won’t flirt like men do. In any country. In any culture. From now, all the way back through time. Because of how their brains are different.

[Amentep]

@smokeBomb calling someone "delusional" is a personal attack as this is not a psychiatric office in which to make clinical diagnosis. You can disagree with someone without bringing "them" or their mental state into it at all.  You can also choose not to engage anyone you feel is not debating with intellectual honestly, as is your prerogative.

[Katarack21]

Also, the whole "Your making that up!" statement about my having seen women walk up to men and go "Wanna ****?" is the *EXACT* reason that anecdotes are worthless. Like, literally worthless. I'm not making that up--not even a little--but there's no way to *prove* that to you. It's just an anecdote.

Edited May 29, 2018 by Katarack21

[smokeBomb]

@smokeBomb calling someone "delusional" is a personal attack as this is not a psychiatric office in which to make clinical diagnosis. You can disagree with someone without bringing "them" or their mental state into it at all.  You can also choose not to engage anyone you feel is not debating with intellectual honestly, as is your prerogative.

 

Perhaps ‘delusional’ is strongly worded. This is not an attempt to ‘diagnose’ anyway, regardless. I’m implying he thwarts the facts and in doing so fabricates evidence and twists words. How could he possibly have not seen that one word in an image with only one sentence? There's no way that's possible to miss. A lie is a lie.

 

Another example:

 

 

You've made hard statements about how women "NEVER, EVER, IN ANY CULTURE, IN ANY TIME" do certain things

 

!=

 

 

I never used the expression ‘men won’t’, for starters. And I only used ‘women won’t’ to describe one circumstance: flirting

 

Because...wait for it...see the word ‘things’ that you use? The ‘s’ means plural. That’s multiple versions of the item to which it refers.

 

The quote you used from me emphasises the singular: ‘I only used ‘women won’t’ to describe one circumstance: flirting.’ It’s a correction of your false assumption that I’m talking about more than one ‘thing’ with regards to women.

 

I'm out of here. Anyone that replies to my comments will be talking to the wall.

 

Final word: men and women are utterly different. Women in general will not actively approach men for sex in the way men approach women or other men. On the most simplistic level, women have a much larger role in mankind's survival than men do - if they went around wanting to shag everything in sight as men do, the whole concept of survival would thrown out the window.

 

As for talking from experience, I do just that: we have the records of the harassment case where that clown couldn't back down and he was officially reported. Do I have to point out that the record can't be posted on a forum? That I have to defend such a experience says everything I need to know. A room in an office with roughly 20 men, at least 10 of which are homosexual. 1 aggressively harasses me for weeks and has to be reported by the other homosexual men for it to stop. 2 others who non-threateningly make direct moves on me that are declined and they leave me alone. 1 last small, overweight and harmless guy that becomes a stalker, appears everywhere I go in the building, and later starts to appear at the train station I got off at, even though his own colleagues (multiple agencies in the one corporation) confirmed he doesn't get the train. He finally makes his intentions clear and he's politely declined (he quit his job a week later).

 

If that's not evidence that men are more direct than women, I don't know what is. Because when I moved floors, I can tell you the women that were being 'friendlier' always did so indirectly. I'd advise googling blog posts women write about this topic, because they'll back up everything I say.

 

I'm finished in la-la land. See ye. It's been...weird.

Edited May 29, 2018 by smokeBomb

[DaKatarn]

Post-marxism ideological point of view and studies impose an ideological vision denying any determinism, it is the base of the problem of analysis.

 

Any difference is considered as carrier of a superiority or an inferiority so it's the locked door of any discussion.

 

The templates as well as the hormonal cycles play obviously a key role in the behavior differentiated of the men and the women. And many women themselves is aware about that. 

 

Neuroscience tells us the differences of settings between emotion and rationality.

 

There are attitudes and typically male and feminine character traits. Virility is synonymic of enterprising, intrusive, audacious spirit. It doesn't mean that no woman can have virile attitudes. It means that it is a character more quantifiabllye in men. We don't make rules with flying fish.

 

Any sex therapist can confirm that, it's not a good or a bad thing, it's just the reality. It's just human.

Edited May 29, 2018 by DaKatarn

[rjshae]

I don't think Beauty should be a primary attribute, but perhaps it could be included as a Background? You're renowned for your physical beauty, and life has been easier for you as a result. Because of your well-balanced physique and attractive overall appearance, you get a bonus to Athletics, Diplomacy, and Bluff (plus the occasional special conversation option).