I find the case of Larry Summers and Harvard very interesting, given a conversation I had with a Harvard researcher a few years back: I mentioned that at my university, females comprised 55% of the student population but had received 65% of the major entrance scholarships, and was immediately told "that makes sense; girls are smarter than boys". The fact that she had spent her life fighting against people who made exactly the same argument to justify women receiving fewer university places and fewer scholarships didn't seem to occur to her.
(Incidentally, last year we still had a 55% female student population, but 85% of major entrance scholarships went to women. I suppose the argument would now be that girls have gotten that much smarter in the past three years...)
I was a Harvard undergraduate at the time, and talked to numerous people involved in Faculty politics.
Absolutely nobody who was even tangentially involved thought Summers was forced out primarily for his comments (though many were offended by them, as many were offended by his similarly inartful comments earlier in his career along the lines of “maybe some countries have too little pollution”).
Summers was forced out because he made a long list of enemies picking political fights with numerous people at the university, without first doing the work to understand the status quo, the stakes, or other people’s positions. He fired popular staff members, unilaterally drove big shifts in budget, issued weird ultimatums, rudely disparaged people in public, interjected himself into academic departments’ internal decisions, and so on. In short, Summers lacked the patience, discretion, empathy, humility, and good judgment to be an effective leader in a context like the Harvard Faculty where everyone is at the top of their field and big egos abound.
The comments about women in science were just a convenient public excuse to dump him.
The narrative that Harvard Faculty just couldn’t handle Summers speaking truth to feminist power, or whatever, is a caricature.
That's not a bad anecdote to point to as a counter-example of men being "unfairly favored", but it might not actually be "unfair" the other way either.
I was top ranked in elementary and middle school, and in the top in math and science in high school, but (as you can tell from the trend) didn't care much about grades when I got to college. I was also done with applications and writing essays. I had been doing that stuff for a decade. I just wanted to focus on computer and software engineering, and it worked out pretty well for me. I even made good money doing interesting work in summer internships.
I knew some other guys who treated college similarly (not a surprise we got along), and I also knew girls who were smart, and put in a lot more effort studying, in both high school and college. So, these statistics you present are rather believable. There are gender skews to what people are really motivated to work on, even when there doesn't seem to me to be really significant pressure either way.
In addition to that, the "college admissions" game is an arms race that has advanced in sophistication over the years. You need leadership positions, an instrument, a sport, a foreign aid trip, a good sob story, advanced classes, grades, art, everything to get above the thousands of competitors there are for your slot in the Ivy League. There are a lot more girls putting in the effort to hit all those notes. Guys tend to focus on just a couple of them.
More guys think "parents/colleges/society want me to do all this shit? fuck it, I'll just do my stuff". The result is a different path which can go similar distances in the end.
> One unfortunate legacy of feminism has been the idea that men and women are basically ennemies
I couldn't agree more. If we could drop the idea of helping a category of people based on their gender, and rather help a category of people based on the specific criteria, that would be great.
> Why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things?
Moreover, I keep seeing so many newspapers and articles stating the qualities of women as a gender. I'd like, from time to time, to see more articles about men being recognized as useful as a gender. I don't know whether it's a consequence of feminism, but I indeed identify to a gender that's dumb, violent, rapists than to anything positive.
The article mirrors my beliefs quite well; but on a meta level, I can't believe we are still having this conversation. Why can we describe sub-atomic particles, but not settle this cultural divide with conclusions based on data that we have abundantly gathered? Is it because results are forged? Or are metrics (e.g. IQ Tests) unstable (not reproducible)? Are we pulling conclusions out of thin air? All these gender studies should be put under review.
You may be underestimating how difficult it is to make good and correct strides in social science, compared to hard sciences.
To a large extent progress in sciences like sub-atomic physics depends on ability to (1) simplify the problem down to mathematical laws, (2) conduct repeatable, randomized controlled experiments to rule out hypotheses about them.
Social sciences deal with phenomena that are extraordinarily complex, so hypotheses usually have to be qualitative rather than mathematical, and devising good experiments is very hard. Falsification is hard. Most hypotheses can be "generally true" yet have specific counterexamples in some times and places.
As for empirical data, you can use data to tell a million plausible stories, and many of those probably have some nugget of truth. But without randomized trials, how do you falsify any of these stories? It's hard.
Imagine if the results were that men were inherently smarter than women. Could you conceive of a way that this would go over well? Nobody (men or women) want to deal with that. It's understandable that it's controversial.
Assume the result yields that one gender is effectively superior in all relevant areas.
This could easily lead to a basis for genocide, people tossing their children with an unwanted gender out right after birth/aborting them. That seems like a pretty awful prospect to me.
Furthermore, discrimination would then just be waiting to happen at an even greater extent, with the stakes not just being yet another minority, but almost half of an entire population. Those are huge stakes, and few want to tread that path.
I think the discussion will occur for ever, if we continue searching for arguments for "why are these men so {dumb,angry,bad}?/ Why are these womans so {plastic, Feminine,dumb}".
I think we should stop thinking in that categories and Start thinking:"this One (Wo)men is so dumb!".
Categories for humans(behavior) where never a good idea.
EDIT: It may be easy, but easy isn't good anytime.
Just take a look at programming. Writing the good old "jump" was easy. Was it a nice idea?
The experiments social sciences would need to conduct in order to achieve the same level of data quality and volume as physicists are completely unethical. It's not surprising that they are unable to progress at the same pace.
This problem amplifies itself, as the inability to acquire good data leads to a politicization of the science. Without the ability to perform, replicate or refute experiments, the scientists focus on convincing their peers through prose and essays.
But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as __"an abstract system that competes against rival systems"__ (emphasis mine).
Why! Why is everything a bloody competition. This Baumeister character can't even escape this construct.
The problem is that we are told that live evolved by natural selection and survival of the fittest by out competing other rivals in it's niche. Or at least that's how the popular story goes.
And we've internalised this as a structure and caused it to permeate every bloody thing we do.
Why is everything a competition? Until we develop and internalise a world-view that sees that life thrives where it cooperates we will continue to decimate everything on this planet in an effort to out-compete our rivals. We will turn everything into a competition between everyone, the Left & Right sides of politics, male against female, all competing for limited resources.
It's because feminism is a self-serving ideology. They are not trying to clarify or resolve anything, they are trying to turn more people into believers of the ideology.
And it won't change, because feminism itself is an expression of female privilege. Stories about rape of women will always have more pull than stories about men being killed. Feminism has found these psychological loopholes (like more empathy for/willingness to help women) and is exploiting them as much as they can.
A man who is being killed was simply too weak and has rightfully been weeded out of the gene pool. Women do always have to be protected and are always victims. That is how society secretly feels. The rest is just confirmation bias.
This is a very interesting theory, and dovetails nicely with the fact that women tend to trade stocks less than men (and therefore earn better returns) when they invest, a random fact I recently learned.
It comports extremely well with my experience of the world. Women are risk averse, and their intelligence distribution is compressed. Most of the brilliant people I know are men, and so are most of the idiots.
It'd be interesting to see this studied in more detail, because it really seems to explain quite a bit in a nice way.
Clickbait to the max. Here's the summary at the end:
To summarize my main points: A few lucky men are at the top of society and enjoy the culture’s best rewards. Others, less fortunate, have their lives chewed up by it. Culture uses both men and women, but most cultures use them in somewhat different ways. Most cultures see individual men as more expendable than individual women, and this difference is probably based on nature, in whose reproductive competition some men are the big losers and other men are the biggest winners. Hence it uses men for the many risky jobs it has.
The title is intended to be provocative, but it's not clickbait to my thinking.
Posting the summary of the main points as you've done there is to do a massive disservice to the carefully considered, and thoughtfully presented arguments and evidence within the article.
It's not a short article, to be sure, but if you want complex concepts reduced to a single sentence then you're in the wrong universe.
I feel time for such discussion has long time passed. The question today is not "are men good?" but "why should men bother?"
Traditional carrots used in history can not compete with modern forms of entertainment. In past it took major war to shake things down, but thats not possible today.
Feminism was great for liberating men. No more self-sacrifice, disposability, gallantry and marriage.
I think he lays out his arguments well, though more sources for the data he cited would have been nice.
One thing is missing though, imho: in the past, men have actively hindered women to pursue "male" activities, like getting an education or joining the armed forces, against the women's will.
The reason behind that could be that the competing large groups of men required soldiers, and lots of 'em. Less soldiers meant your neighboring tribes could defeat you, or you couldn't conquer the world. So instead of allowing women to become independent, study and possibly bear less children, they enacted policies to ensure "maximum womb utilization".
This is and was oppressive, and should not be forgotten.
You should probably expand on this. In particular, tribe men prevented tribe women from getting education in what universities? Some stories of women trying and being prevented from joining military forces of the tribe? Please name some of those tribes what were using writing and warring with neighbors while dreaming about world domination. Maybe examples of those policies? Places, dating, document texts?
I am not sure why the debate on whether or not men and women have the same level of intelligence is still ongoing. It is obvious that men are more intelligent than women and the few studies that dared experiment on this proved this right. Women have an advantage up until a certain age (I think 12 or 14 y/o). Afterwards men crush them.
Men also have a higher deviation. There are a lot of geniuses and a lot of idiots among men. But in either case, as long as we live in today's society filled with "feel-good" and "political correctness" ideas, you won't see any definitive study being conducted because people in reality don't want to know the results. Because the moment it's recognized that blacks are dumber than whites or that women are dumber than men, this will change the society profoundly and people are just not ready to accept "the ugly truth".
This is really keeping back all of us. Science should be above all this PC bullshit... and yet, here we are...
> It is obvious that men are more intelligent than women and the few studies that dared experiment on this proved this right
That goes against my/common knowledge. Off to Wikipedia [0]. The higher variability of intelligence for males is undisputed. If there is a difference between the averages is an open discussion. A revealing quote:
> Most standard tests of intelligence have been constructed so that there are no overall score differences between females and males
So genders have equal intelligence by definition. It seems consensus that men have better visual–spatial abilities. Since tests can balance this out, women must be better in other areas (which?).
Ultimately, the problem is the definition of "intelligence". Just like with AI.
This is not only about PC, it will shake the whole society, so to publish such results is simple dangerous and unacceptable – I feel the situation is close to artificial keeping of some jobs, just to decrease unemployment.
Also, I think it doubles by the fact that mens are really encouraged (one can even say "forced") to do extraordinary stuff, to get money, wife, respect and other social approval. For women, they will literally never be ashamed for the life outcome.
You may be right but the problem is, were those 'smartness' tests decided by men? What type of smartness are we talking about? There are different types of intelligence and on average men and women seem to be good at different things. It's hard to compare things that have pros and cons in different areas. Where one is green and crunchy the other is orange and juicy.
> Women have an advantage up until a certain age (I think 12 or 14 y/o). Afterwards men crush them.
That matches my experience with math contests from 6th grade up through high school. Lots of girls were there in "24 Game" contests, but they disappeared. Another thing I noticed was that the relative ranking of boys moved around quite a bit. I had a couple of classmates that were quite competitive with each other in middle school -- but then starting in high school, one moved way up in the rankings, the other didn't. All I can say to explain it is, puberty activated something.
Fundamentally, though, the problem with articles like this is that even if he's right, there are very few situations where knowledge of a difference in distribution are that useful, and very very many where it is misused to justify existing (and unjustifiable) bias.
If you knew that men were on average 5 IQ points lower than women (which is not what he says, and probably not true, but whatever), it wouldn't be very useful information for actually making choices. Male student underperforming in class? That's 'cuz men are dumber. Emerging gender-skew in medical school students towards women? That's 'cuz men are dumber. Etc etc.
If someone told me that a certain truth is not useful, I would be inclined to disbelieve them. The basis of your argument seems to be "I can't think of any uses" but that can hardly be considered "the problem with articles like this". I can think of quite a few applications, but in many cases I have experienced, whenever relevant truths have been ignored, delusions have thrived.
Distribution alone doesn't help, but if you knew the distribution of IQ and its effect on academic success (a fairly big if), you could statistically use it to determine whether groups underperform relative to their potential and hence, decide whether corrective action is needed.
Gender-skew of over 10%? That's more than expected given the IQ distributions of men and women. Let's look for what causes that.
I would argue that understanding the underlying distribution is useless when looking at a single datum (a man or a woman) but critical for understanding things en masse. The author's point is that we can't be so quick to judge seemingly unfair trends or groupings which might actually be the product of statistics. He admits readily that there are exceptions to be found on all fronts.
The actual problem with this article is that experimental evidence for the variability hypothesis is not consistent across cultures. There's no particular reason to believe it is intrinsic... other than to support articles like this, anyway.
I disagree that it wouldn't be useful. In the example you gave, knowing that there's an underlying difference would prevent ultimately futile attempts to affirmative action the numbers into being equal.
I don't think this article is that bad. The article was actually quite moderate in its perspective and would lead to a (hopefully) insightful discussion here.
His hypothesis: Dispersion is greater for women. That's testable. There should be data sets for this.
This list of data sets [1] seemed promising. But a general-population data set with standardized test results is needed. College student data sets have too much pre-selection bias. The National Longitudinal Surveys data ought to be useful, but is restricted.[2]
I’m not going to address much of the article directly, but I would like to address some of the undertones I’m perceiving in both the article and the comments here. Additionally, I don’t hear this kind of thing said around here much…
Firstly: Equality is not a zero-sum game, nor does it mean treating everyone equally (yeah).
To address the first component of this – the effects of feminism for women do not need result in a net-reduction of freedoms and happiness for men. Patriarchy[1] screws both men and women, each in different ways.
Patriarchy is why for a long time I felt compelled to be the strong supportive male and hide my weaknesses, despite the unhappiness these roles caused me. In other men it can manifest differently, perhaps undirected anger at the world, but not really knowing why. Or perhaps a numb feeling that you’re just doing what you’re ‘supposed to do’.
I strongly feel that feminism and masculism (?) stand side-by-side. They are different entities fighting mostly the same enemies. Sometimes they will need to have talks and make compromises with each other, but it can still be a cooperation.
I get the impression that much of the male disquiet with feminism is coming for a place of, ‘yes, but what about me’. And this is totally reasonable. However, the answer is not to criticise feminism. If you’re envious of your neighbour’s new car, the rational response is not to attack it with a baseball bat. Rather it is either a) deal with your feelings and be happy for your neighbour, or b) work hard, earn some money, and get your own awesome car.
AFAIK we have nothing like option ‘b’ presented above[2], whereas women have been on this for c. 150 years now.
If you want this, then get on it.
To address the second component of my opening statement: Equality does not mean treating everyone equally.
This may sound pretty ridiculous at first glance, and it also somewhat goes against the meritocratic principles often found in the tech world.
Rather than treating everyone equally, I feel that equality should mean we strive to raise everyone to the same base level. To offer everyone the same basic opportunities should they choose the pursue them. Yes there are limits to our realistic capabilities in this regard [3], but most situations lie within these limits. Should we offer jobs to those who are unqualified? No. Should we allow people the opportunity to earn those qualifications? Probably.
Maybe it is true women have a bias towards doing X and men have a bias to towards doing Y, maybe it is not. I don’t think I really care. If I – being suitably qualified – want to be a primary school teacher I should be able to do so without feeling I’m being given sideways glances for being male. Likewise, a suitably qualified woman should be able to be a construction worker without having to fight against harassment.
Moreover, my housemate[4] should also be able to go to our local corner shop without a 90% chance of being harassed and a 25% chance of being followed home (we have the data).
In my eyes, the original article has quite a lot of shaky logic and rather dodgy assumptions. I strongly encourage people to read it critically (for example, “But it has worked”? Maybe for the author, less so for my housemate and billions like her).
However, I like that the article concludes that different motivations drive different behaviours between the genders, and that this situation is not necessarily moral or desirable. But I think this is only the start of the story. Why do these different motivations still exist today? To what extent are these motivations inherent, and to what extent are they socially received? I strongly suspect they are mostly socially received, and we therefore have it within our ability to offer change should it be desired.
[1] I do believe patriarchy is both a thing and a useful concept, but I do not believe it is a conspiracy. Rather I believe it is systemic – an emergent property of the social system we arrived at.
[2] The MRA is the baseball-bat-to-the-car approach, so not them.
This is a surprisingly well-thought-out and interesting article. Was expecting dull male whining about being victimized, actually has something far more interesting.
[+] [-] cperciva|9 years ago|reply
(Incidentally, last year we still had a 55% female student population, but 85% of major entrance scholarships went to women. I suppose the argument would now be that girls have gotten that much smarter in the past three years...)
[+] [-] jacobolus|9 years ago|reply
Absolutely nobody who was even tangentially involved thought Summers was forced out primarily for his comments (though many were offended by them, as many were offended by his similarly inartful comments earlier in his career along the lines of “maybe some countries have too little pollution”).
Summers was forced out because he made a long list of enemies picking political fights with numerous people at the university, without first doing the work to understand the status quo, the stakes, or other people’s positions. He fired popular staff members, unilaterally drove big shifts in budget, issued weird ultimatums, rudely disparaged people in public, interjected himself into academic departments’ internal decisions, and so on. In short, Summers lacked the patience, discretion, empathy, humility, and good judgment to be an effective leader in a context like the Harvard Faculty where everyone is at the top of their field and big egos abound.
The comments about women in science were just a convenient public excuse to dump him.
The narrative that Harvard Faculty just couldn’t handle Summers speaking truth to feminist power, or whatever, is a caricature.
[+] [-] ploxiln|9 years ago|reply
I was top ranked in elementary and middle school, and in the top in math and science in high school, but (as you can tell from the trend) didn't care much about grades when I got to college. I was also done with applications and writing essays. I had been doing that stuff for a decade. I just wanted to focus on computer and software engineering, and it worked out pretty well for me. I even made good money doing interesting work in summer internships.
I knew some other guys who treated college similarly (not a surprise we got along), and I also knew girls who were smart, and put in a lot more effort studying, in both high school and college. So, these statistics you present are rather believable. There are gender skews to what people are really motivated to work on, even when there doesn't seem to me to be really significant pressure either way.
In addition to that, the "college admissions" game is an arms race that has advanced in sophistication over the years. You need leadership positions, an instrument, a sport, a foreign aid trip, a good sob story, advanced classes, grades, art, everything to get above the thousands of competitors there are for your slot in the Ivy League. There are a lot more girls putting in the effort to hit all those notes. Guys tend to focus on just a couple of them.
More guys think "parents/colleges/society want me to do all this shit? fuck it, I'll just do my stuff". The result is a different path which can go similar distances in the end.
[+] [-] tajen|9 years ago|reply
I couldn't agree more. If we could drop the idea of helping a category of people based on their gender, and rather help a category of people based on the specific criteria, that would be great.
> Why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things?
Moreover, I keep seeing so many newspapers and articles stating the qualities of women as a gender. I'd like, from time to time, to see more articles about men being recognized as useful as a gender. I don't know whether it's a consequence of feminism, but I indeed identify to a gender that's dumb, violent, rapists than to anything positive.
To wit: https://github.com/confcodeofconduct/confcodeofconduct.com should be reevaluated as depicting a prejudice about programmers more than solving problems (which are already forbidden by law).
[+] [-] manmal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiritofenter|9 years ago|reply
To a large extent progress in sciences like sub-atomic physics depends on ability to (1) simplify the problem down to mathematical laws, (2) conduct repeatable, randomized controlled experiments to rule out hypotheses about them.
Social sciences deal with phenomena that are extraordinarily complex, so hypotheses usually have to be qualitative rather than mathematical, and devising good experiments is very hard. Falsification is hard. Most hypotheses can be "generally true" yet have specific counterexamples in some times and places.
As for empirical data, you can use data to tell a million plausible stories, and many of those probably have some nugget of truth. But without randomized trials, how do you falsify any of these stories? It's hard.
[+] [-] semicolon_storm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orblivion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beefhash|9 years ago|reply
This could easily lead to a basis for genocide, people tossing their children with an unwanted gender out right after birth/aborting them. That seems like a pretty awful prospect to me.
Furthermore, discrimination would then just be waiting to happen at an even greater extent, with the stakes not just being yet another minority, but almost half of an entire population. Those are huge stakes, and few want to tread that path.
[+] [-] darfs|9 years ago|reply
I think we should stop thinking in that categories and Start thinking:"this One (Wo)men is so dumb!". Categories for humans(behavior) where never a good idea.
EDIT: It may be easy, but easy isn't good anytime. Just take a look at programming. Writing the good old "jump" was easy. Was it a nice idea?
[+] [-] Sacho|9 years ago|reply
This problem amplifies itself, as the inability to acquire good data leads to a politicization of the science. Without the ability to perform, replicate or refute experiments, the scientists focus on convincing their peers through prose and essays.
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|9 years ago|reply
Here's the freaking problem, from tfa:
But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as __"an abstract system that competes against rival systems"__ (emphasis mine).
Why! Why is everything a bloody competition. This Baumeister character can't even escape this construct.
The problem is that we are told that live evolved by natural selection and survival of the fittest by out competing other rivals in it's niche. Or at least that's how the popular story goes.
And we've internalised this as a structure and caused it to permeate every bloody thing we do.
Why is everything a competition? Until we develop and internalise a world-view that sees that life thrives where it cooperates we will continue to decimate everything on this planet in an effort to out-compete our rivals. We will turn everything into a competition between everyone, the Left & Right sides of politics, male against female, all competing for limited resources.
[+] [-] facepalm|9 years ago|reply
And it won't change, because feminism itself is an expression of female privilege. Stories about rape of women will always have more pull than stories about men being killed. Feminism has found these psychological loopholes (like more empathy for/willingness to help women) and is exploiting them as much as they can.
A man who is being killed was simply too weak and has rightfully been weeded out of the gene pool. Women do always have to be protected and are always victims. That is how society secretly feels. The rest is just confirmation bias.
[+] [-] darawk|9 years ago|reply
It comports extremely well with my experience of the world. Women are risk averse, and their intelligence distribution is compressed. Most of the brilliant people I know are men, and so are most of the idiots.
It'd be interesting to see this studied in more detail, because it really seems to explain quite a bit in a nice way.
[+] [-] Godel_unicode|9 years ago|reply
On average :)
[+] [-] Gammarays|9 years ago|reply
To summarize my main points: A few lucky men are at the top of society and enjoy the culture’s best rewards. Others, less fortunate, have their lives chewed up by it. Culture uses both men and women, but most cultures use them in somewhat different ways. Most cultures see individual men as more expendable than individual women, and this difference is probably based on nature, in whose reproductive competition some men are the big losers and other men are the biggest winners. Hence it uses men for the many risky jobs it has.
[+] [-] darfs|9 years ago|reply
Most of the day, Males saying femals arenz better or worse than men, are called Old angry White men in my filterbubble.
Edit: wanted to say, there could be a good discussion about it.
[+] [-] Jedd|9 years ago|reply
Posting the summary of the main points as you've done there is to do a massive disservice to the carefully considered, and thoughtfully presented arguments and evidence within the article.
It's not a short article, to be sure, but if you want complex concepts reduced to a single sentence then you're in the wrong universe.
[+] [-] facepalm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thro32|9 years ago|reply
Traditional carrots used in history can not compete with modern forms of entertainment. In past it took major war to shake things down, but thats not possible today.
Feminism was great for liberating men. No more self-sacrifice, disposability, gallantry and marriage.
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|9 years ago|reply
One thing is missing though, imho: in the past, men have actively hindered women to pursue "male" activities, like getting an education or joining the armed forces, against the women's will.
The reason behind that could be that the competing large groups of men required soldiers, and lots of 'em. Less soldiers meant your neighboring tribes could defeat you, or you couldn't conquer the world. So instead of allowing women to become independent, study and possibly bear less children, they enacted policies to ensure "maximum womb utilization".
This is and was oppressive, and should not be forgotten.
[+] [-] exo762|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UniversalBlue|9 years ago|reply
Men also have a higher deviation. There are a lot of geniuses and a lot of idiots among men. But in either case, as long as we live in today's society filled with "feel-good" and "political correctness" ideas, you won't see any definitive study being conducted because people in reality don't want to know the results. Because the moment it's recognized that blacks are dumber than whites or that women are dumber than men, this will change the society profoundly and people are just not ready to accept "the ugly truth".
This is really keeping back all of us. Science should be above all this PC bullshit... and yet, here we are...
[+] [-] qznc|9 years ago|reply
That goes against my/common knowledge. Off to Wikipedia [0]. The higher variability of intelligence for males is undisputed. If there is a difference between the averages is an open discussion. A revealing quote:
> Most standard tests of intelligence have been constructed so that there are no overall score differences between females and males
So genders have equal intelligence by definition. It seems consensus that men have better visual–spatial abilities. Since tests can balance this out, women must be better in other areas (which?).
Ultimately, the problem is the definition of "intelligence". Just like with AI.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...
[+] [-] bloomca|9 years ago|reply
Also, I think it doubles by the fact that mens are really encouraged (one can even say "forced") to do extraordinary stuff, to get money, wife, respect and other social approval. For women, they will literally never be ashamed for the life outcome.
[+] [-] jazoom|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamReidHughes|9 years ago|reply
That matches my experience with math contests from 6th grade up through high school. Lots of girls were there in "24 Game" contests, but they disappeared. Another thing I noticed was that the relative ranking of boys moved around quite a bit. I had a couple of classmates that were quite competitive with each other in middle school -- but then starting in high school, one moved way up in the rankings, the other didn't. All I can say to explain it is, puberty activated something.
[+] [-] peteretep|9 years ago|reply
If you knew that men were on average 5 IQ points lower than women (which is not what he says, and probably not true, but whatever), it wouldn't be very useful information for actually making choices. Male student underperforming in class? That's 'cuz men are dumber. Emerging gender-skew in medical school students towards women? That's 'cuz men are dumber. Etc etc.
[+] [-] alexandros|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|9 years ago|reply
If knowledge of distributions isn't useful, then why did you rely on knowledge of distributions to make a blanket judgment about articles like this?
[+] [-] Someone|9 years ago|reply
Gender-skew of over 10%? That's more than expected given the IQ distributions of men and women. Let's look for what causes that.
[+] [-] banachtarski|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jweb_Guru|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Godel_unicode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mfukar|9 years ago|reply
Or isn't that the sort of point you were going for?
[+] [-] facepalm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olalonde|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darfs|9 years ago|reply
Or am i wrong?
[+] [-] jdavis703|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
This list of data sets [1] seemed promising. But a general-population data set with standardized test results is needed. College student data sets have too much pre-selection bias. The National Longitudinal Surveys data ought to be useful, but is restricted.[2]
[1] http://www.isironline.org/resources/collaboration-and-data-s... [2] http://www.bls.gov/nls/home.htm
[+] [-] stared|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamcharnock|9 years ago|reply
Firstly: Equality is not a zero-sum game, nor does it mean treating everyone equally (yeah).
To address the first component of this – the effects of feminism for women do not need result in a net-reduction of freedoms and happiness for men. Patriarchy[1] screws both men and women, each in different ways.
Patriarchy is why for a long time I felt compelled to be the strong supportive male and hide my weaknesses, despite the unhappiness these roles caused me. In other men it can manifest differently, perhaps undirected anger at the world, but not really knowing why. Or perhaps a numb feeling that you’re just doing what you’re ‘supposed to do’.
I strongly feel that feminism and masculism (?) stand side-by-side. They are different entities fighting mostly the same enemies. Sometimes they will need to have talks and make compromises with each other, but it can still be a cooperation.
I get the impression that much of the male disquiet with feminism is coming for a place of, ‘yes, but what about me’. And this is totally reasonable. However, the answer is not to criticise feminism. If you’re envious of your neighbour’s new car, the rational response is not to attack it with a baseball bat. Rather it is either a) deal with your feelings and be happy for your neighbour, or b) work hard, earn some money, and get your own awesome car.
AFAIK we have nothing like option ‘b’ presented above[2], whereas women have been on this for c. 150 years now.
If you want this, then get on it.
To address the second component of my opening statement: Equality does not mean treating everyone equally.
This may sound pretty ridiculous at first glance, and it also somewhat goes against the meritocratic principles often found in the tech world.
Rather than treating everyone equally, I feel that equality should mean we strive to raise everyone to the same base level. To offer everyone the same basic opportunities should they choose the pursue them. Yes there are limits to our realistic capabilities in this regard [3], but most situations lie within these limits. Should we offer jobs to those who are unqualified? No. Should we allow people the opportunity to earn those qualifications? Probably.
Maybe it is true women have a bias towards doing X and men have a bias to towards doing Y, maybe it is not. I don’t think I really care. If I – being suitably qualified – want to be a primary school teacher I should be able to do so without feeling I’m being given sideways glances for being male. Likewise, a suitably qualified woman should be able to be a construction worker without having to fight against harassment.
Moreover, my housemate[4] should also be able to go to our local corner shop without a 90% chance of being harassed and a 25% chance of being followed home (we have the data).
In my eyes, the original article has quite a lot of shaky logic and rather dodgy assumptions. I strongly encourage people to read it critically (for example, “But it has worked”? Maybe for the author, less so for my housemate and billions like her).
However, I like that the article concludes that different motivations drive different behaviours between the genders, and that this situation is not necessarily moral or desirable. But I think this is only the start of the story. Why do these different motivations still exist today? To what extent are these motivations inherent, and to what extent are they socially received? I strongly suspect they are mostly socially received, and we therefore have it within our ability to offer change should it be desired.
[1] I do believe patriarchy is both a thing and a useful concept, but I do not believe it is a conspiracy. Rather I believe it is systemic – an emergent property of the social system we arrived at.
[2] The MRA is the baseball-bat-to-the-car approach, so not them.
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c
[4] With her consent: She’s on here: hjfantaskis
EDIT: God damn, I spend an hour writing this and then the post gets flagged!
[+] [-] abpavel|9 years ago|reply
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