Gender Genie: Andrea Dworkin is a man. And Philip Roth is a woman.

[Lavie Enrose]

Andrea Dworkin is a man. And Philip Roth is a woman
By_Leah McLaren
The Globe And Mail
Saturday, November 15, 2003 - Page L3

Okay, so the fact that men and women communicate differently is pretty obvious to any woman who has tried, over time, to communicate with a man, or vise versa. Surely, this is one piece of human life we don't need confirmed by scientific experts. But no, it turns out, apparently we do.

Gender Genie is a Web site/tool that predicts, with 80-per-cent accuracy, whether a piece of writing has been written by a woman or a man. It is based on a procedure created by a group of Israeli scientists to determine differences in word selection between the genders.

 

[Martin]

And Lavie Enrose is a man. Trying to tell us something?

 

[bignickel]

I've heard that it's extemely obvious in Japanese: women tend to always put 'des ne' on the end of questions, instead of 'des ka' (or so I've been told).

Any Japanese speakers confirm?

 

[Interesting Ian]

I've posted that link to Gender Genie before. And this surely shouldn't be posted in the paranormal forum?

Anyway, I got

Female Score: 390
Male Score: 810

for this

Well you know my opinion of the matter, which I've stated many times. Objective reality, that is to say the reality that can be measured, abstracts from our experiences. Why should one suppose there is a wholly mysterious reality, which lies forevermore over and beyond everything that we ever see, hear, touch, taste and smell?? Why suppose there is anything more to a peach than its visual appearance, and the feel of it, and its taste etc?

Once we start saying that the peach doesn't really have a colour as experienced but simply reflects a certain wavelength of light; is not really solid but is really the electrons near the surface electrically repulsing the electrons in the tips of our fingers; doesn't really have a taste because that is just a process in ones brain when biting into a peach, then we are engaged in a profound scepticism in all things. Apparently everything that we ever perceptually experience is a delusion. Apparently the "real" world, a world forevermore beyond our direct acquaintance BTW, is the nightmarish world the scientists and materialists have dreamt up. A world devoid of colour, smells, tastes, in fact a world devoid of all that which we directly experience!

But it's even worse than that. The materialists would have it that we are soulless robots living out our purposeless lives in a purposeless Universe with the added promise that soon we will cease to exist forevermore. They would have it that everything we ever perceive is a comprehensive delusion. That everything that we ever see is a lie. That our loves, hopes, fears, aspirations, everything that we have ever thought, felt and experienced is nothing over and above meaningless atoms in motion or meaningless chemical processes.

They deny everything and anything that appears to be truly real, and which truly matters, and substitute their lies, and then they have the effrontery to deride anyone who calls into question their wholly unwarranted crazy interpretation of reality.

But do you know what the worse thing of all is? It's that they have no reason or evidence for their grotesque metaphysic! We have no reason to suppose that qualia are somehow unreal, indeed we have no reason at all to even suppose a material world exists!

At the end of the day everything we believe we know about the world has to be cashed out in terms of our perceptual experiences. This so called measurable reality is itself something which is only known through experience. But if everything about the external world is only known through experience, then why go over and above what experience reveals? Why do we suppose that science is anything more than discerning the patterns in our perceptual experiences? What warrants us to suppose that this measurable reality, itself only known through experience, has primacy over our experiences, and indeed is the origin of our experiences??

Absolutely crazy!

To repeat what I have said many times:

Doubt thou the stars art fire;
Doubt thou the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.

 

[Lavie Enrose]

I've posted that link to Gender Genie before. And this surely shouldn't be posted in the paranormal forum?

If I read it correctly, the Forum title is: General Skepticism and The Paranormal.

If you posted a link to the Gender Genie before, fine. I am posting a link to a skeptical article about the Gender Genie which I thought was interesting.

 

[Interesting Ian]

If I read it correctly, the Forum title is: General Skepticism and The Paranormal.

If you posted a link to the Gender Genie before, fine. I am posting a link to a skeptical article about the Gender Genie which I thought was interesting.

Well OK. I have reservations myself on how accurate it is. But that's an algorithm for you. I suspect that a human being would have somewhat more success. Well at least I would.

 

[TruthSeeker]

I've been playing a wee bit with the Gender Genie and think it may have a gender bias:

I tested 2 samples of writing from 2 authors (1 male, one female). For each author, one piece was a "basic science" article and the other was a "clinical" paper.

In both cases, the basic science paper was attributed to a man and the clinical to a woman.

Interesting...write about caregiving and you must be a woman. Write about neurophysiology and you must be a man.

 

[Yahweh]

I've posted that link to Gender Genie before. And this surely shouldn't be posted in the paranormal forum?

Anyway, I got

Female Score: 390
Male Score: 810

for this

At Gender Genie, I used all the text you had quoted. For the genre, I choose "Blog Entry" (it seemed more like a rant, not really something like that teaches... note: I put autobiographies and biographies in the same catergory as "blog"), the results came up as:

Words: 514
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 955
Male Score: 1100

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

You're really riding the fence their Ian, I suggest you masculinize up your authoring style, people might get the wrong impression.

 

[Lavie Enrose]

I've been playing a wee bit with the Gender Genie and think it may have a gender bias:

I tested 2 samples of writing from 2 authors (1 male, one female). For each author, one piece was a "basic science" article and the other was a "clinical" paper.

In both cases, the basic science paper was attributed to a man and the clinical to a woman.

Interesting...write about caregiving and you must be a woman. Write about neurophysiology and you must be a man.

That is interesting. Do you remember the details of which words it chose in each paper for each gender? I think it gives a summary, if I am not mistaken.

When asked about the inaccuracy of the Gender Genie:

(From Leah McLaren's linked column)

Koppel complained that the algorithm has not been applied correctly on the Internet, and that it is primarily intended to analyze fiction, not blog entries, e-mail, journalism or any of the other non-fiction miscellany that has dominated submissions.

However:

(From Leah McLaren's linked column)

Ponder, for a moment, the opening paragraph of what is arguably the most inherently female novel ever written in the English language, Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central I Sat Down and Wept: "I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for a bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire. Apprehension and summer afternoon keep drying my lips, prepared at ten-minute intervals all through the five-hour wait."

The Genie thinks a guy wrote it, which tells you nothing about the novel, but a great deal about the difference between human and artificial intelligence.