= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Oscar_Cunningham comments on Open thread, August 5-11, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (307)
I think it deserves more fairness. The abstract only claims to have measured a "cross-cultural sex difference in color preference", making no claims about the sex difference's origin. They do speculate a bit about ev-psych in the body of the paper, but they begin this speculation with the words "We speculate" and then in the conclusion they say "Yet while these differences may be innate, they may also be modulated by cultural context or individual experience."
This, of course, isn't how it was reported in the mainstream media.
(By the way, thanks for actually linking to the paper you mentioned, it makes it a whole lot easier when people do this.)
The problem with that kind of phrasing is that we already know that cultural context can easily change the gender codes of blue and pink, because it already happened. If one doesn't assert that something evolutionarily significant happened at around the time of the cultural shift, then linking color preference to an inherent property of gender or sex is privileging the hypothesis.