discussion about IQ tests

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you were the only person to mention discrimination or cultural indoctrination on this thread, so i am not sure who you are shouting at.

Biological differences are not hard to comprehend. If you look at ducks, spiders or lions, it is clear sex has serious influence.

What bothers people is the notion that being born a certain way means your identity must develop in a certain way.

I have no problem admitting that being a man means I can be prone to aggression, have good depth perception and blah blah blah. I would take issue with someone saying that I must therefore endorse violence or always be the one to drive.

This makes David Hume barf a little bit in his grave. There is a massive is-ought gap here.

For future reference for those who don't know what that is: David Hume once observed that people have a habit of saying what things are before suddenly talking about how they should be. He claimed this was a problem, since it leaves a large logical gap. How does "ought" follow from "is"?

Unless you can objectively prove the content of the word "should", I would suggest not assuming that identity follows from anatomy. If Alan the Strong Man could lift 3 megagrams but wants to do ballet, don't force him to join the circus. If a woman could nurture a child and run a home beautifully, but wants to run a research and development firm, don't force her to stay home.

Forgot the part in which people take a xkcd comic at face value.


Your statistical sample is not suitable for taking conclusions (duh, BTW).

While this discussion is not showing any relevant information in regards of gender and intelligence it is doing great work at showing that some men are terribad at science.

Does not change the facts. More male mathematicians and theoretical physicists than female. There is a difference in the way male brains work from the way female brains work on average.

ruveyn

that does not mean that men are smarter, though.

Just counting the amount of mathematicians and theoretical physicists is a terrible method, that's probably the map you won't find a paper in nature magazine saying "more boys are teh phycisits ergo women are bad at mathz" . Your experiment would, for starters, need a control group.

The mathematicians and physicists have more influence on what the world is than other groups.

Consider that we are communicating by a computer network. Who made that?

ruveyn

A woman was the first computer programmer, so you tell me.

You are avoiding the actual point, that just counting mathematicians is incredibly terrible science. It does not matter if the field is more relevant or not. You are not considering that you are taking a biased sample.

Just saying that there are more of this or that in a given profession doesnt account for the cultural selection that led to those results.

It may well be that there are discernable racial (or population) and gender IQ gaps and that IQ measures intelligence. White males have larger brains than blacks or women. But so do whales. I don't believe we know enough to be sure yet how it all fits together. Your mileage may vary.

May be from outdated data. I remenber reading somewhere that the proportion of female/male for very high IQ has raised over time as female have more and more access to intellectually stimulating activities. A girl gifted in math is now more likelly to have access to math advanced education and competitions, for example, raising the measured IQ.


More like female never had the opportunitie, never heard of Fanny Mendelssohn? She was possibly as good or better musician that her brother, but it's his brother who got success.

Don't limit this to networking. In computing, women were involved almost every step of the way. Hell, they were even called computers during WWII! Their entire job was to handle the brutal math behind calculating the trajectory of artillery shells. Picture entire rooms filled with women being trusted to come up with extremely accurate results in spite of human errors.

Even after ENIAC and other machines came into the picture, guess who was around to learn how to work them?



Wait a minute... Why am I telling you this? You're 75! Didn't you at least hear about all this sometime in your youth?

Anyway, don't forget Grace Hopper. She made the first compiler, which allowed computers to understand certain pidgins that we now call "high level programming languages". Stack all that on with Vexcalibur's mention of Ada Lovelace and this formidable list of women in computing. (click) Oh yeah, and a girl I tutored not too long ago also got a gig with the Navy. She was sharp, and she did not need many sessions with me... She knew what she was doing.

But what do I know? "That's the exception that proves the rule", right?

Unless you can intelligently incorporate cultural and economic bias into the discussion, you cannot draw meaningful conclusions.

Yes men and women score, on average, differently on IQ tests. But until you can normalize the tests for cultural bias, you can't pretend that the IQ test is an objective measure of anything except the ability to take tests.

Yes, there are more men in mathematics and theoretical physics. But there are also more male poets and novelists. Surely if ratios of employment were determinative, then we would be forced to the conclusion that men are better verbal thinkers than women, too. But the IQ tests tell us that they are not.

So why, then, are we falling prey to the confirmation bias inherent in the statement, "there are more male mathematicians, therefore men are better at math."

This has little to nothing to do with cognitive skill, and much to everything to do with economic opportunity.

Very old frustration. Any questions?

just two: CAN YOU DIAL IT DOWN A NOTCH? AND CAN YOU STOP YOURSELF FROM RE-INTRODUCING OLD ARGUMENTS?

Please read the stuff that I have posted here.

There is scientific evidence that gonadal steroids have a measurable effect on performance in tasks involving certain aspects of spatial reasoning and verbal memory, and there is evidence that they also impact divergent versus convergent thought processes.

I have provided the concrete, authentic, falsifiable evidence that you are claiming, here, there is a deficit of. Now, I agree that most people who comment on either side of the issue are profoundly lazy, and they never contribute anything tangible or falsifiable to the discussion. I am one of those people, though, who have busted their asses to comprehend this issue, as well as many others, having read thousands of pages of authentic material on it. Try actually reading my citations. They are interesting.

Last edited by WilliamWDelaney on 02 May 2012, 3:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.