Vladimir_M comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 01:53AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (823)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 14 March 2011 01:23:18AM *  1 point [-]

The humanities articles both use the same formal dry academic style, from which it's hard to say anything. The first one is much worse in terms of long-winded verbiage, but that doesn't say much. If I had to guess, I would toss a coin.

The Times articles are similarly written in a routine journalistic style (it reads like a telegram with some cliche phrases cut and pasted between the words), so again it's hard to say anything. (Also, from what I know, news articles are heavily edited and it's questionable how much individual style they preserve.) If I really had to guess, I would say the first is more likely to be female by an epsilon. Google confirms this is correct, but I admit I wouldn't bet any money on it. (On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if an experienced newspaper editor could guess much better.)

As for the short stories excerpts, well, that's some bad prose. The first one sounds to me a bit more feminine; I'd say it's something like a 60-40 guess. Googling these paragraphs, I see that I guessed right; admittedly, I wouldn't have bet very much money on this one either.