I'm a female computer scientist / developer, and after my experience both online, at school, and at work, I would really just rather ignore it. I went to a college with 4:1 ratio of male to female.
I've had periods in my life where I felt like I was the beautiful princess at the school, and periods where I feel like a somewhat disfigured monster with an average intellect. It really sucks when culture places so much emphasis on appearance, and I don't have that when I engage in dialogue and activity online.
The fact that I've been able to think about this since I was maybe 14 years old, on a hypothetical and applicative level, shows that there is more that varies to predicting individual differences than what these tests measure, and what causes are inferred, as the act of measuring may change the outcome. Males may take more risks because culture rewards them if they do, supposedly, and I as a female have sought stability, predictability and consistency in my education. When people are trying very hard to either sleep with you, hit on you, or even screw with you (because for some reason, your existence bothers them), it's very hard to know whether you are learning the truth, or whether the truth has been distorted, made easier to swallow, or prepackaged otherwise, because of your teachers' and classmates' perceptive biases.
I take a lot of risks in learning. I try to avoid taking those risks in real life, because while at one point, I did, I found myself on the precipice of losing almost everything.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, that the individual is different from the aggregate. But even myself, I am a hypocrite, because these are cynical inferences I made along the way, about my education, while I was receiving it. And I made those inferences mostly from having a behind the curtain peek into boys clubs, online. I was judging my classmates and peers by assholes on the internet, and that really isn't right, but neither is it right to assume that a person fits on the distributive curve of which they can be categorized into, based on a very small subselection of data.
Thinking about this has led me to the conclusion, that I really don't know a lot of things, and it seems neither does anyone else. Every point in time can be as unpredictable as infinity. People make so many assumptions about what is stuffed up in other people's heads, what guides how they think, what they do with that knowledge, how it directs them, and the resulting thoughts, the determination of envisioning, assisting, and planning the life paths of others.
My greatest comfort level is being an anonymous blob with no face, on the internet, where I learn a little bit of haskell here and there, and maybe find some elegant nuance and subtlety in code, computational theory, mathematics, philosophy. It's a bit hypocritical for me to share my gender willingly, over and over, but at this rate, I go through probably hundreds of aliases in a year.
Thank you though, for clarifying an important point concisely. The last time sex differences came up on a forum, I don't remember feeling quite so calm.
Some realms of art still entertain this definition for art, but you are correct in that the vast majority of modern art is exactly this distinct departure from the notion that one must have an audience. Modern art came about because of the rise of the bourgeoisie, meaning, people of different classes could commission works, artists had more freedom in what they chose to depict, sell, create, etc, instead of being limited to being commissioned by the church or by nobility.
But you are getting into a debate that hasn't really been resolved in modern art either, this has been a debate in the concept of kitsch and collage, dada, Greenberg, photography, etc.
If you want to dance around the question linguistically, that's all fine and good, but there are people in the world who believe that art must be sold and there are people in the world who find value in it other than the fact that it sells. You've got the past and the contemporary interpretations of art conflated with the trends of culture. Plus, these circles weave and web together, people derive influence and inspiration from all sorts of places, art comes to mean different things depending on who is listening, who is speaking/painting/etc.
I mean, there is obviously either a rigid definition for Art which has no form in language and is thus inexpressible for all eternity despite the various shapes it may manifest as, or art is something else. No, just kidding, I have no idea what I'm patring on about.
Also, there are probably many nuances and facets of socialization that have yet to be created, discovered, exaggerated, detailed, organized, etc. Just because most people limit themselves to the physical world of body language, sensory percepts, the electronic-intellectual world of thumbs up, upvotes and personalized walls of media subtypes; that doesn't mean that's the end to socialization.
I think there is a lot of potential for creativity to be expressed, to come up with new ways to communicate.
The surrealists did automatic drawing with one another, and some folks at Google combined vast quantities of depersonalized data and individuated constructions of layered learning, to create surrealistic like images.
I had ED-NOS (eating disorder not otherwise specificed) which mostly means it was a combination of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa (which just means binge-purge cycle - fasting counts as purging).
I dropped from 140 lbs to 110 lbs in a month. I'm 5'4 female, and a 'skinny' weight for me is about 130 lbs as I am fairly muscular.
I used to want to look like a skeleton, I had no medical supervision and this was probably one of my worst eating disorder periods, the other being at college where I ate a microwaved apple or orange and 2 cups of broccoli / carrots only every day, for most of my freshman/sophmore year.
When I was ill, I knew I what I was doing with a disorder in mind, but I didn't admit it to anyone outside of me. I think most people who have an eating disorder know they have it inside, it's just something kept carefully secret.
I've been in recovery for about 2 years now, with healthy thoughts and no food restriction, excess exercising, starvation or purging. When I was sick I really didn't care if I died, as I have major depressive disorder comorbid, which I continue to have more difficulty beating than I did the eating disorder. I've fainted from fasting and I've been hospitalized from starvation. It's hell, pretty much.
I think it's important to take a step back from whatever the goal of these diets are, and look at the bigger picture. My weight only varied between 30 lbs over 15 or so years, and it controlled me entirely. It made me have to put a lot of my life on hold, when I had to focus what little energy I had towards getting better. I would really recommend anyone take a more careful, therapeutic look at their life if the above sounds tempting, and they find themselves going into cycles of fasting and 'losing' control over how they manage their diet.
Day 1 was always the easiest for me, but I had an eating disorder, I was not going about this in a healthy way.
After 3 days, I could easily do a week, and I managed to do a 30 day fast one year.
I don't recall feeling high, I just remember a lot of laying down, dreaming and thinking about food, baking, and not doing much of anything else.
I really rather prefer being able to eat everything I want, and spend 2-3 hours a week at the gym. But my weight has gone up by 10-15 lbs (and I have also aged from 17 years old to 29).
I can't say I'm the same size as when I was fasting, but I have a defined shape, whereas before I was bone and skinny fat.
I've had periods in my life where I felt like I was the beautiful princess at the school, and periods where I feel like a somewhat disfigured monster with an average intellect. It really sucks when culture places so much emphasis on appearance, and I don't have that when I engage in dialogue and activity online.
The fact that I've been able to think about this since I was maybe 14 years old, on a hypothetical and applicative level, shows that there is more that varies to predicting individual differences than what these tests measure, and what causes are inferred, as the act of measuring may change the outcome. Males may take more risks because culture rewards them if they do, supposedly, and I as a female have sought stability, predictability and consistency in my education. When people are trying very hard to either sleep with you, hit on you, or even screw with you (because for some reason, your existence bothers them), it's very hard to know whether you are learning the truth, or whether the truth has been distorted, made easier to swallow, or prepackaged otherwise, because of your teachers' and classmates' perceptive biases.
I take a lot of risks in learning. I try to avoid taking those risks in real life, because while at one point, I did, I found myself on the precipice of losing almost everything.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, that the individual is different from the aggregate. But even myself, I am a hypocrite, because these are cynical inferences I made along the way, about my education, while I was receiving it. And I made those inferences mostly from having a behind the curtain peek into boys clubs, online. I was judging my classmates and peers by assholes on the internet, and that really isn't right, but neither is it right to assume that a person fits on the distributive curve of which they can be categorized into, based on a very small subselection of data.
Thinking about this has led me to the conclusion, that I really don't know a lot of things, and it seems neither does anyone else. Every point in time can be as unpredictable as infinity. People make so many assumptions about what is stuffed up in other people's heads, what guides how they think, what they do with that knowledge, how it directs them, and the resulting thoughts, the determination of envisioning, assisting, and planning the life paths of others.
My greatest comfort level is being an anonymous blob with no face, on the internet, where I learn a little bit of haskell here and there, and maybe find some elegant nuance and subtlety in code, computational theory, mathematics, philosophy. It's a bit hypocritical for me to share my gender willingly, over and over, but at this rate, I go through probably hundreds of aliases in a year.
Thank you though, for clarifying an important point concisely. The last time sex differences came up on a forum, I don't remember feeling quite so calm.