HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Whatever modern non-normativity pressures might possibly exist, the status quo is that male and female role models in society embody different characteristics. Looking out at the world & seeing what people who look like you do, what roles they embody matter.

Different angle, but former & new CEO of TSMC Morris Chang, in a 2014 interview, talks about how he came to semiconductors: he looked around at what other asian businessmen were doing, switched from Harvard to MIT because no opportunities, examples open to him, & saw "no chinese American politicans, no chinese-american even businessman" (1949)[1]. Obviously this is no longer 1949, equal rights is literally the rule of the land in a fair part of the world. But it's a strong story of role models mattering, of doing what you see. And there are definitely still gender-roles prevalent within society, roles taken by masculine figures, roles taken by feminine figures, and people looking in the mirror are like to understand, to see themselves forward on paths where they can already see people who resemble themselves succeeding. Disrupt this, please, but to me, the pressures towards non-normativity are greatly outranked by the evidences & pressures of what we already see in the world.

Last, I'll throw in a shout out to Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota[2] series. It's a wonderful story from a Renaissance history professor, of a post-geo-governmental sci-fi world, of politics & great events. One of the interesting flourishes of the book is that the world has largely decided to make gender taboo. To adopt a willful genderblindness, to try to treat everyone equally, to regard to everyone with non-gendered pro-nouns. The world has worked to undo the pre-dispositions set up, actively, rather than merely requiring a legal treatment. It's an interesting detail of the world, & causes no end of tension & complications for the characters of course, which is just one part of this wonderful interesting highly interwoven saga. It speaks to the difficulty of the social science happening in this article, to the impossibility to build a control group that could ever test out how sex shapes us, because so much of society is suffused with it. Even in the Terra Ignota world, where a agendered Puritanism has taken over, the old roles still have root, even though they are illegal, & must hide. When people talk about their anecdotes of boys & girls having different behaviors, I think they must just be so blind to how much influence, how many opportunities for messaging, how much of a status quo the world has, how much they are up against to provide that equal chance.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEh3ZgbvBrE#t=29m https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611648

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Ignota

⬐ etrabroline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estrogen

Do you think these maybe have more to do with causing those differences in the first place?

⬐ rektide

if you are under 11 this basically doesn't apply in even the slightest sooo yeah I think it's full of shit.

after that, I think the expression of these hormones is again confined to societal patterns, that keep us from understanding the real impact of these chemicals in any objective sense. it's convenient cheap & easy to convince yourself you know the impact of these chemicals, that it leads to this behavior or that, and while yes there are differences for sure, I place far more emphasis on the straightjacket of society & the limited roles it's even willing to consider than I do the impact of the hormones. I think there's many potentials for how these could be expressed that are simply denied, excluded.

that parents are so confident their kids have such strong gender biases well before the significant bio-chemical differences start to emerge, that's a huge red flag on this all. we have nearly no ability to grapple with the real impacts.

⬐ bewaretheirs

Puberty is the third surge of sex hormones. The first is prenatal, and the second - called "minipuberty" - typically occurs before six months in boys and before two years in girls.

Some discussion in this paper: https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/508329

(and, yes, it's skeptical that hormones significantly influence behavioral differences between boys and girls - but it's clear that boys and girls have gone through different hormonal trajectories even early in life).

⬐ rektide

Before posting I spent about ten minutes looking at graphs of testosterone & estrogen across age, & found they're basically zero until 11 or so, at which it starts to shoot up then see saws up & down.

Fair enough if there are other chemicals/hormones involved. What are they? Do they vary between the sexes?

⬐ Bluestein

"In this lecture, Stanford University President John L. Hennessy leads a discussion with Stanford Engineering Hero Morris Chang, an innovator and entrepreneur who revolutionized the semiconductor industry by creating the world's first dedicated silicon foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or TSMC."

⬐ rbinv

Jen-Hsun Huang (NVIDIA), too.

⬐ leetrout

Why did they “censor” the video (flash up the title page) when the wives were introduced?

⬐ noahmbarr

Guessing it was in response to their request to do so.

⬐ klelatti

If you enjoy this then you might also enjoy the TSMC 30th Anniversary Forum featuring:

- Morris Chang - TSMC

- Jeff Williams - Apple

- Jen-Hsun Huang - Nvidia

- Simon Segars - Arm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGT3zSGDN3k