Hacker News Books

Dr. Brizendine's books are hyperbolic pseudoscience.

I stopped taking "The Female Brain" seriously when I read the stuff about how young men think about sex once a minute and young women think about it once every couple of days. Both those numbers are pretty ridiculous :^)

And indeed, none of the papers she cited contain any evidence to support that statement. Source: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003668.h...

Check out The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine. Covers a lot of things you mention.

- It will be fine. It turns out that evolution prepared your mind for this. You'll step into the role comfortably once you've gotten through the first time experiences with newborns.

- You'll feel things you never felt before. One of the ways evolution prepared you is that you'll feel a new kind of pride when your child accomplishes anything new. I still remember vividly both of my daughter's first steps after 20 years. People who are never fathers will never feel this exact emotion. It can be surprising.

- Another feeling you will likely encounter is the 'rescue response'. It's a kind of flow state your mind will go into if your child is in imminent physical danger. It's happened to me twice in 20 years. No thinking, time freezes, only acting to remove them from the danger.

- An important one is that the mother's personality is going to change. It will be fine, but be prepared to see a new side of her that she likely won't know herself. Evolution has prepared her, too, and in even more impactful ways. I'd suggest reading 'The Female Brain' by Louanne Brizendine. It's research and science based and will help explain a lot of what's coming.

- Fatherhood is the 'meaning of life' for men. Preparing your children to be successful human adults is what you're all about. If you accept that and run with it, you'll have a fulfilling life.

- It will be fine.

I have a question about:

"Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds"

I read "The Female Brain" by Louann Brizendine and all it makes sense to me but I am beginning to think that I (and this book) are wrong.

¿How is it possible that two opposing theses could be maintained in something like neuroscience?

I can imagine that it is possible in Economics, Philosophy, Psycology and other similar sciences but in neuroscience it does not make sense to me.

For those that haven't read it, "The Female Brain" is a fantastic book about human nature and discusses how male and female hormonal levels fluctuate throughout life and how that influences behavior.

A man's and woman's oxytocin levels are elevated after child birth but it's much higher in women. So the PP reference that a man is more clueless when it come to playing and touching their baby is not without scientific basis.

> I think it might be simple as that. Its not about ability. Its about environment.

Which is how I interpreted what Damore was trying to do with his memo: saying that women are capable, but that the environment was not appealing to them. Either/both of (a) what they got to work on, and/or (b) how they were treated.

IMHO, men and women perceive and react to the world differently, and treating them the same is foolish and counter-productive. Damore was simply pointing out those differences.

I found The Female Brain a good book on this topic:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Brain_(book)

The grandparent is really similar to a post someone just left on my review. In response, I wrote:

It's not obvious at all that this is more true than men than of women, or if so, how. That's why people making these kinds of claims need evidence—otherwise you're merely telling stories and repeating stereotypes. For another example of this general principle, see Mark Liberman's http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/24/s... Women use 20,000 words a day, men only 7,000 - or so says a new bestseller. Fact-checking ``The Female Brain."</a>.

The grandparent is really similar to a post someone just left on my review. In response, I wrote:

It's not obvious at all that this is more true than men than of women, or if so, how. That's why people making these kinds of claims need evidence—otherwise you're merely telling stories and repeating stereotypes. For another example of this general principle, see Mark Liberman's <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/24/s... use 20,000 words a day, men only 7,000 - or so says a new bestseller. Fact-checking ``The Female Brain."</a>.

About 4 years ago (when this article was written), a book called The Female Brain, by Louaan Brizendine, was published that caused a couple of media outlets to blindly parrot he book's numerous claims of female stereotypes having a scientific basis. The links title is a reference to the stereotype "Women talk more than men", which was 'scientificized' by Brizendine as 'Women talk 20k words to men's 7K'. Mark Lieberman showed that the claim had no basis in the literature, including the paper which Brizendine cited in her book.

More recently, the author has published a sequel The Male Brain, which does the same for males.

Mark Liebermann, the author of the linked article, has recently been featured in a different thread today on Hacker News refuting the claim "There is a scientific basis for why men don't listen (which is also a scientific fact)". http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240307