I wonder if it's generally true that people - male or female - who are
exceptionally good at systematising are deficient in empathy, and vice
versa. Prejudice would suggest that only *very* exceptional people are
exceptionally good at both.
In recent years, since I quit the academic study of poetry and started
designing software systems for a living, I do feel as if a different
aspect of my personality has come to the fore. That could quite easily
be role-play - OK, now I wannabe a "geek", I'm going to socialize
myself into geek attitudes and traits, adopt geek role-models, abjure
the sorts of things geeks disdain; I will recognize myself in geek
characters in sci-fi books, disavow former attitudes that are
incompatible with this stereotype, etc. - but I could also be quite
ungeekishly vague and woolly and talk about a rebalancing of energies
or some nonsense like that.
If you'd asked me what I wanted to be when I was eleven, I would have
said "a systems analyst".
Dominic
On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 21:58:21 -0000, Douglas Clark
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2005 9:43 PM
> Subject: Re: Sex differences
>
> >I read something about this, and there was a comment by some genetic
> > scientist (forgive the vagueness of my memory) that these differences made
> > little difference to ability and that male and female brains have much
> > more
> > in common than not: ie, that the reasons why there are so few women in
> > tenured positions in Harvard had little to do with sex differences in the
> > brain and a lot to do with social traditions at Harvard.
> >
> > No one can have children of both sexes (as I do) and deny that there are
> > innate differences from birth, inflected infinitely through individual
> > personalities and histories. However, it's what is _made_ of those
> > differences that often bother me.
> >
> > Best
> >
> > A
> >
> Baron-Cohen does say that he thinks intelligence to be equal. It's just what
> different people are good at. Regarding mathematics look at Grace Wahba.
>
--
// Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
// bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
|