Yuuki said:
What a fascinating video, I watched the whole thing. I haven't done much research on the topic so thanks for sharing that! The Norweigan scientists I felt gave the weaker arguments in the video but at the same time I can't help but lean on their side. Not that I think biology doesn't play a role at all or anything, but that I feel the biological side simply predisposes you to certain behaviors as your default reactions but that from then on it's all societal/cultural, and that this is why the norwegian scientists were saying that biology doesn't play a role at all.
This video got me thinking that maybe things are actually a lot like games like Skyrim. Like at the beginning when you create a new character, different races have different starting stats. But those stats change depending on your experiences as you play. So like maybe you make a character with a lot of points in combat and few points in magic and obviously they'd be much better with weapons and have a preference for them. But suppose somehow you never used weapons and always used magic instead. In that case most of the points you gain would mostly be in magic and eventually the character would probably start preferring magic abilities (even when given the option to use weapons). I'm thinking maybe that's how a lot of this biological vs social stuff actually works (seems legit to me anyways lol
)
Yuuki said:
As for my personal opinion, I think I will need to see a LOT more evidence before I believe that a 9-month-old baby can already associate with masculine/feminine toys. Repeat the test with like...2000 babies or something, 1000 boys and 1000 girls (shush parents, it's not cruel and it's in the name of science!).
I mean if it's really true, then what you're suggesting about forcing a girl to grow-up with lego/toy guns/etc may completely fail and the first time she lays eyes on a pink barbie (if you let her) she'll desperately want it.
Yes, it's an experiment...for science.
-GLaDOS
Haha lol but that's actually a very good point. I do feel the experiment wasn't perfect since it's entirely possible that even by the age of 9 months that the babies could already be ?tainted? by the parents. By that I mean the parents already letting them play with boy/girl toys or raising them in rooms of certain colors, and they've already learned to recognize them. Like, if the baby girl is raised in a room that is painted pink, I expect she'd most likely have a preference for pink toys and that sort of thing.
The thing that I was suggesting about forcing the girl to grow up with lego/toy guns/etc, I thought about it more and I'm now thinking of a slightly different version that would maybe potentially work better (as far as getting them more interested in engineering/programming type jobs later in life goes).
My new though is that, instead of boy toys in general, lego and construction type toys specifically. Like they could even have girl themes or pink colors or whatever, but the point would be that they're toys where you build stuff and have to figure out how it all fits together.
Playing with toys like that at an early age encourages the kind of thinking you have to do when you have a job as an engineer/programmer. So most likely that type of thinking would come more naturally or maybe be more enjoyable/exciting later in life, so maybe something like that would work better? Sort of like how people who play tetris a lot are generally better at packing stuff, like boxes in moving vans and stuff.
Anyways yea again, just thinking aloud and rambling a bit
(btw it's a bit late my time right now and I'm really tired so if parts of my post are weird I apologize in advance lol)
