Slashdot Mirror
Report Claims Men More Intelligent Than Women
Jeremy Dean writes "In controversial research reported all over the place, Richard Lynn, the emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University claims that, on average, men are more intelligent than women. Let battle commence!
As the research is not yet published there's nothing more to go on than the press reports. The co-author of the study, Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, is apologetic about the findings.
In the BBC News report he states that the paper will go on to argue that despite their disadvantage in IQ, there is evidence that women utilise their (lesser!) talents better than men. This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world."
Well, I'm going to be one of the 1st to say that I've known this for a long time
*SMACK*
Girlfriend: "Get back in line you stupid male."
Me: "Yes ma'am"
Sincerely,
Andrew Allen
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Every woman on earth believes that men should be able to read minds. Every man knows this is impossible. Ergo, we are more intelligent.
Now if we could just find a way to explain this to the ladies, there'd be much less unhappiness in this world.
In other news:
Richard Lynn, the emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, will never get laid again.
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
...I can only imagine how many women are going to protest this. On the same key, if there was a report that said women are smarter then men, most likely we would just accept it, or ignore it, and continue to put together the desk without directions.
Double Standards.
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? Y
Why exactly do we have to battle at all? What's the reason to have any sort of contest over which 'side' is 'better' than the other? It just seems like a waste of energy to try and 'prove' that one sex is in any way superior to another. We are who we are, and most of our achievements aren't due to how our brains and bodies are wired at birth, it's what we do with our brains and bodies.
hahahahahahahahahahahaha.
bullshit.
if it was, people could be predicted, models could be measured, etc.... but they can't.
this is ridiculous. intelligence. bah. ask einstein what intelligence is. he would say: "what the fuck u talking about?"
remember: in einsteins last days he said, basically, "oh fuck, i'm a moron. i've always thought so."
intelligence is not measurable because that would require the brain to completly know itself, which, as we know, due to Turing/Godel/etc, is justn ot possible.
the real numbers are not countable. god, get a clue.
here come a bunch of overrated "+5 funny" jokes to prove the study wrong
On the bottom is better than on top!
Red is better than Purple!
Being a complete dipshit is better than being an utter and complete moron!
Why can't I get paid to spout idiotic claptrap all day?
The professor has caused outrage in the past with claims that white people are more intelligent than blacks and that criminal traits are genetically inherited.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The study is about intelligence difference "on average". It says nothing about any particular individual. If you make hiring decisions or appointments based on these findings, you'd be a fool. Why would this study be anything more than a curiosity to anyone?
As the research is not yet published there's nothing more to go on than the press reports
But, by god, we aren't going to let that stop us, are we?!
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
First time I've seen a parent topic that needs to be modded "Flamebait"
duhh!
Phew, some male researches are not getting "any" from their wives or significant-others for the next week! :)
Honestly, who cares. I'm willing to bet the real difference is very little to none. Could everybody stop fighting over whose more intelligent? I'm tired of hearing that women are more intelligent and I don't put much stock in this study either.
It's comments like that, that make up 99% of the *SINGLE* guys on slashdot....go figure!
The blondes, there IQ is so low it can bring down the females' average IQ.
that a certain race is more intelligent that others.
:-)
Racist and sexist researchers....why don't they try to find a cure for cancer of something.
P.S. But we *are* smarter
"The co-author of the study, Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, is apologetic about the findings"
I wonder if Dr. Irwing would have been apologetic about the findings if the results had gone the other way?
How can anyone create an unbiased test (and know so) to be able to prove that men are smarter than women?
This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world.
I have not read the article yet, but the last study I read that dealt with IQ (the controversial study on Ashkenazi genetic diseases and intelligence) cited some sources saying that IQ testing is the best known predictor for salary, family stability, and a whole bunch of other things.
IQ is only part of the picture.
some people consider 'EQ' (emotional intelligence)
to be a greater predictor of 'success in the real world'.
regards,
j.
This one is more obvious... but many articles that are essentially flamebait make it up here all the time...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
you have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I hate how people get all pissed off and offended by "controversial" studies like this. If the study was done correctly, then there's really nothing you can do except shutup and live with it or do your own study that proves it wrong.
If the study was done correctly, then getting offended by the results is like getting offended when somebody says "The sky is blue." You just look like an idiot, no matter what gender you are.
Maybe not
it's all stereotypes people, get over it...
women are just as smart as men, just less boastful about it. men are just more aggressive and dominating..
--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/
I might agree, but my wife won't let me.
I'm a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn.
That's what kind of man I am.
You're just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us.
It's science.
(Obligatory Ron Burgundy)
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Even if true, it would still be a generality. It doesn't mean that you are smarter than whoever is in the car beside you at the stop light.
There have been so many studies showing women have better interconnection between their right and left brains and better verbal skills than men.
The popular theory (which is considered pretty darn solid) is that over thousands of years women have been more closely tied to the children, and been more closely involved in teaching them, therefore requiring better verbal and descriptive skills.
As descriptive skills involve producing a concrete definition for what often is abstract, it can be applied elsewhere, such as producing concrete solutions for abstract problems. I suspect that if social structures were less discouraging, women would most certainly be the best in fields such as urban planning and computer science.
Disclaimer: I am male
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
There is a reason we make more per hour.
Maybe the laundry.
My point, define smarter? Better at math or science? Or street smarts or farming or what?
really bored? My blog
but women are better at having babies.
PC crusaders won't let a little facts get in the way of their blindly emotional outpourings.
Even if a study proved beyond a shadow of a doubt something which is not "PC", you'd have people disagreeing with it simply out of emotion.
It's doubtful that this study proves anything, but it won't stop people from making knee-jerk reactions to it.
Male scientists!
Sounds like an old Peanuts cartoon in reverse...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Mi niece told me the other day that she would rather be beautifull than intelligent.
Society tells women to be stupid and popular and then asks itself why women, on average, seem less inteligent than men.
Of course men are more intelligent! We have TWO brains!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
...women still have men wrapped around their finger. Figure that one out.
Seriously? Is it the minds ability to process data? Then wouldn't that make an baseball player as intelligent as a rocket scientist?
Or a wood worker who does extrodonairy work, is that intelligence too?
Intelligence is a bullshit term we invented to fit a very limited set of skills ( and I suspect, to make ourselves feel better about ourselves ).
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
We barely understand how our brains work in the first place. IQ tests, while maybe OK for judging some things, it is still just based on the abstract idea of intelligence being measurable in a way we can understand
and if guys are smarter than women, why do we have so much more trouble getting laid?
There should be a "-1:Groupthink"
from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/new s/news.html?in_article_id=335026&in_page_id=1770&i n_a_source=
"They found that in intelligence tests men use 6.5 times as much grey matter as women do - but women use far more white matter.
Grey matter is a category of brain tissue crucial to processing information and plays a vital role in aiding skills such as mathematics, mapreading and intellectual thought.
White matter connects the brain's processing centres and is central to emotional thinking, use of language and the ability to do more than one thing at once. "
So Personally I think it all evens out. Besides that, then you get into the whole IQ / EQ thing.
I especially like the following part about Women and Spacial
"Professor Rex Jung, a co-author of the study at the University of New Mexico, said: "This may help explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing-like mathematics and mapreading, while women tend to excel at integrating information from various brain regions, such as is required for language skills.
"These two very different pathways and activity centres, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."
Previous studies have shown that women have weaker spatial awareness than men, making it harder for them to read maps. "
As a guy that wants to get laid again, let me just say that this study is completely inaccurate.
We all know multitask needs overhead. So it's unfair to compare DOS and Linux
Clearly this study is false. Otherwise, the comments on Slashdot would be far more intelligent.
my fragile ego.
Humans condition and educate children differently according to gender. Male conditioning results in higher scores on IQ tests. No biggie.
HOWEVER, since nobody seems to be conditioning today's young people AT ALL, I'm sure tomorrow's adults will all be equally degenerate.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
OH LORDY! There are physical and mental differences between the sexes. I could of told you that when my girlfriend dragged me to a Hanson concert! Wake me up when men can have babies.
Welcome to the Entropy Bar, may I take your order?
to see which one is smarter.
Some say man, but I say no,
De woman run de man like a puppet show.
KFG
wtf i could have told you this years ago
My UID is a palindrome, that must be good for some type of prize.
A brief setup for the debate reads:"...on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes."
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
My question is this... who wrote the tests?
I would be willing to bet that if a woman were to come up with an IQ test that women would do better at it than men.
Being smart doesn't make you better at anything other than being smart. If you can add two 8 digit numbers in your head then great. If you can lift a car over your head, good for you. If you can stomach the sight of blood enough to become a doctor, guess what... good for you.
Women, men, children, black, white, grey, whatever.... who you are is not defined by what you can do better than others. Nobody is the best at everything. Some people throw great parties or know how to make others laugh and feel better about themselves. If that is their greatest skill then so be it. Everyone should be happy with themselves or at least be given sufficient opportunity to be happy with themselves.
If your only way to be happy about yourself is to be better at something than others, find a new hobby.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
I predict 1000 comments on this story. Now taking bets... what's your pick? Closest one wins Karma.
gag one:
I, for one, welcome our new male overlords.... wait..."new"?
gag two:
If only there were some sexy chicks to say say gag one without the last bit, but I am afraid the situations a lot more grim that that. For one, no women will say that. And two, even if they did, it wouldn't be to anyone on slashdot.
gag three:
You know how there is a "womyn's room" in every uni? The idea being it's women without the "men". I want you to set up a "myn's" club in your local uni - our catchphrase will be "putting the myn back in womyn". Spread the meme.
</male crypto-fascist patriarchal bigotry>
</all that is funny and amusing>
wait... second closing tag is redundant.
try teh veal!!1
Slashdot, as we well know, is both frequented almost entirely by males, and the last remaining bastion of erudite conversation and higher discourse on the Internet.
If you need proof of the intellectual superiority of the Male, look no further than Slashdot.org.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I hate people who stereotype! They're all alike!
If we really were smart we'd be telling the ladies they are smart and we wouldn't all be sitting here at 11:30 on a thursday night messaging on nerd central! We'd have a lady friend to be on....
Oh yea.. I that's great.. my confirm script made me type "retarded" lovely!
Q: "What is intelligence?"
A: "Intelligence is what IQ Tests Measure."
(Yeah, I know it's not actually funny)
Basically, the psychologists make this construct they term intelligence quotient, and they try to make a test that will measure the construct. If they can get reliability across a number of tests, plus a few more things, then you have a number that you can attribute to "Intelligence," which is really handy if you want to make a test that determines if men or women have more of this "Intelligence".
That's pretty much it. Oh, okay, that's not all, but in effect, you see if anything else correlates with Intelligence, and if so, then you'll be relatively safe in betting that, whatever positively correlates with it, means that other correlations will similarly relate. So if people who are more intelligent are more likely to get a particular neurodegenerative disease, and men have more intelligence than women, then chances are, more men will have this disease than women.
However, presuming that Intelligence means anything other than what it correlates with in tests is foolish. It's not necessarily a predictor of success, it's not necessarily a predictor of the ability to solve problems other than the ones covered in the IQ tests, and it's not necessarily a predictor that you're a better person. It just means that you have a higher amount of the traits covered by this particular construct.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
Debating this here on slashdot is quite pointless as there are no females here to defend themselves :(
IQ tests are meaningless because they don't have any basis in any observable metric, and probably favour certain kinds of abilities which may or may not have anything to do with "intelligence", whatever that is. Furthermore, they are entirely self-referential, since the 'benchmark' of 100 is merely the median 'value' retruned by a sample population doing the self-same tests. So all you're measuring is your relative ablity to do thesekinds of tests.
Also, if we ever encounter aliens and they give us the REAL objective, universal IQ test, I bet we won't be very good at it...
and compare the womens and the mens ads.
Do I need say any more?
Ok you insisted, in two words:
'dick pics'
At least a guy has two heads to think with. Trouble is its usually the smaller of the two that prevails.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Men have a higher tendency to be at either extremes: extremely intelligent or extremely stupid. Women tend to be closer to average. The reason? Women have two X chromosomes that average each other out. So if she has a genius X chromosome and an average X chromosome then she'll be somewhere between those two. However, men have a single X chromosome that cannot be dragged down or carried up by another X.
There should be a "-1:Groupthink"
Well, Wikipedia's entry on the man says in part:Looking him up on amazon.com will find the fascinating detail that he has written two full books in favor of Eugenics, trying to "rehabilitate" eugenics.
Seems like this guy has kind of a
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
With other sort of nature versus nuture hypotheses, one can at least look at how identical twins separated at birth fare in different environments, so as to obtain some sort of lower bound on the environmental influence in (say) intelligence.
But one can't exactly do that with male versus female, can one?
It will be interesting to read the argument and results in the paper itself. Especially since to justify the position, they will have to either claim that the difference they observe is at least partly due to educational and environmental differences in the way that boys and girls are raised, or, should they claim to be dealing with some sort of meaure of 'intrinsic' intelligence, demonstrate that their results are not contaminated by these educational differences.
That the environment in which boys and girls are raised differs is unarguable: colours, toys, social roles, expectations, the works. If they are simply state that intelligence is affected by upbringing, then they are saying nothing new and certainly nothing of any surprise. Separating out environmental influences on the other hand is going to be very tricky indeed.
The only objective measure they can call on is brain size. (And even that may well have dependencies on nutrition and childhood environment.) But is there any sort of strong correlation between brain size and intelligence, in the realm of the 5% size difference mentioned?
Oh, and surely the distribution of Nobel Prizes along gender lines surely is much more dependent upon the gender distribution and politics in universities and research institutions that it is on any putative average 5 point IQ differences. It is not as though the Nobel Prize goes to the smartest researcher.
If the studies are implying that logic, mathematics, and kinesthetic intelligence is higher for men than women (on average), then I agree with the findings. However, if the study was based on linguistic and interpersonal intelligence, then I think the results would be different.
I don't understand what all the stir is about this topic. All the study says is that given the general population from which the sample was drawn, there is a measurable difference in IQ scoring. Maybe the test measures inteligence, maybe it doesn't, but everyone is treating this as though the researchers insulted them personally. Some women are downright nasty about how they portray these researchers, and some of the men are appologetic, while others are self righteous. Statistics say absolutely nothing about individuals, only the population as a whole. Why is it that everyone is so quick to forget that?
-=geoskd
www.geoskd.com
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Simply saying that men have a higher IQ doesn't really seem that controversial to me.
Since IQ's are based off of many things that are learned it is possible that living situations and social stigmas could effect this as well just as much as genetics. I'm sure if you compared the IQ's of two twins, one who went through school and got a degree and the other who was never given the chance to go to school. The college graduate would have a higher IQ simply because of a greater knowledge. This does not mean that the college student was born any smarter than the other. It just means that he was given more opportunity to learn and develop.
Likewise I would bet that before women's rights movements when most women didn't even attend school there would have been an even greater difference in IQ simply because men were given more opportunity's.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Many people might get pissed off. But that does not make the research false. Just like some christians get pissed off at Darwin. I am sure there are those who believe they are right, and everyone else is wrong. For the record, I believe in Intelligent Design. I don't believe that everything could have happened in such a random fashion to create humans. But that is a different discussion.
There was a book that came out a decade ago called the Bell Curve. I got to meet with a person who was responsible for doing research with the authors. He was dumbfounded as to why people were pissed off. In his mind, he was simply measuring something. In this case, IQ.
The guys name is Richard Bailey, he is a professor at NU. He now does sexuality research (last I heard of him, which is over 6 years ago, so he might be doing something different now). He is a typical nerd. He can crunch numbers in his head like nobody I have ever met. He even came up with mathematical forumlas to try and figure out how much of a trait is genetic. He does this by tracking the difference in behavior between monozygotic twins. Since they are genetically identical, and difference must be enviormental. This greatly oversimplifies his work. He has a whole mathematical framework for every kind of genetic relationship.
But back to the topic at hand. When the Bell Curve came out, it said the research showed the avarage IQ was slightly over 100. Most blacks were at 80-90, most whites at 110, and most asians at over 110. When this book came out it was devistating to many people. Blacks called it racist. Every black, regardless of individaul IQ, was pissed off.
About a decade later, another book came out called Emotional IQ. This book argued that to be sucessful, one must have more than IQ. The hypothesis the author had was that IQ does not predict how sucessfull a person will be in life, or how much money a person will make.
The authors conducted a long term study. The research originated with childern 7 or younger in kindergarden. The research was simple, a plate of candy or treats was put in front of a child, along with a small bell. The child was told that if they wait 10 minutes, the child would get more treats, but if the child could not wait, the child was to ring the bell and they could get the treat in front of them, often something small.
The study followed these kids into adulthood. The authors discovered those who can postpone immediate gratification were most sucessfull, and those who could not were less sucessfull.
I have been able to live a while, and I think I have discovered some of my own revelations. IQ is important to advance to the top levels. But at the middle levels, IQ is not important. At the middle levels, just showing up on time is most important. Check out the movie Office Space for further study.
I don't know if men have higher IQ's. They might. Maybe thousands of years where men had to find ways to catch animals to feed their families created some kind of genetic marker that makes men smarter. Maybe it is society, where women are not encouraged to take the advanced math and science classes. God knows the few women I have met who have taken the advanced classes were far smarter than I am. Maybe women have genes that make them better at nurturing. Women have a bond with children that they claim no man can have/
The point is that science can measure many things, but can explain very few.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
yeh and on average it makes sense for men to be smarter. men have been bred for intelligence(success) longer than women, who have been bred for boobs, hips, etc., right?
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
Why are women so quick to react and bitch about something like this? Maybe it's because it took YEARS for us to have the same "rights" as men. Maybe it's because we've been treated as the lesser of two human beings for centuries.
:)
I'm not sparking a debate here, but you guys need to think for a second. You haven't been denied the right to vote, discriminated at the workplace, took lesser wages, get constanly objectified... all because you're a chick.
I have tons of guy friends (more than girls, believe it or not!) who take a little educating to understand why we're so different. I say you all need a little time with an atypical female
We're not all crazy bitches.
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
Isn't it likely that the iq tests simply stress things that men are generally better at?
They can't drive either.
Women with cell phones have been a menace to the roads for too long now.
Get off your phone you dumb cunts!
(For the record my girlfriend is in agreement with me on this)
May my karma burn in Hell!
zosxavius photography
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
One of the authors, Richard Flynn, maintains a website. http://www.rlynn.co.uk/
Before you start reading, I will make my own assessment of his 'research' known. It's really a load of psycho-babble-pseudo-mathematic crud. He believes that we can reduce a comparative analysis of something called "intelligence" to a single metric - i.e. scores on an I.Q. test... he thinks we can compare Saharans and Americans with the same stupid I.Q. metric. He thinks that by measuring these I.Q.s, he can use it to bolster his crappy theories of race and intelligence- basically he makes ALMOST untestable theories of race and intelligence, such as this statement
"The theory I have advanced to explain these race differences in IQ is that when early humans migrated from Africa into Eurasia they encountered the difficulty of survival during cold winters. This problem was especially severe during the ice ages. Plant foods were not available for much of the year and survival required the hunting and dismembering of large animals for food and the ability to make tools, weapons and clothing, to build shelters and make fires. These problems required higher intelligence and exerted selection pressure for enhanced intelligence, particularly on the Orientals."
So harsh climates make races smarter? Why are polar bears stupider than humans? Why are thermophilic bacteria dumber?
Ok. I'm off the soap box now.
there's probably another study out there that shows that most iq test authors are men.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
The professor's study shows politically incorrect results?
We've found a witch, may we burn him?
Does it really matter how smart they are? I mean, as long as sge can make my dinner, perform in bed, and keep her damn mouth shut, I'm happy.
Replace why with that
I think the main concern might be that there are some people who would make decisions based on this study. I mostly agree, though. It's not as if my intelligence (I'm female) suddenly drops when somebody comes up with a study like this. If it's true, complaining won't change it. Besides, we don't even know how scientific this study is yet anyway, and whether there's any accuracy in it.
Compare the number of male geniouses to the number of female. Then consider you probably know a smart guy but don't know a smart girl.
We feel guilty about women having the short end of the stick on voting, land, etc so we go along with this politically correct bullshit that "men are stupid and women are smart" or "men are stupid but women are crazy". It's bullshit. One sex had to be dominant and it was males. In other species sometimes the woman is dominant, but not in humans. Sorry ladies.
Ron Burgundy: I'm a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That's what kind of man I am. You're just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It's science.
Who cares if the guy is right or if he's a quack, let's plaster it all over the front page to sell papers!
There is so much confusion about the notions of intelligence, cleverness, wisdom, creativity, etc., etc. that belief in the signficance of IQ testing only proves someone to be an elitist fool--usually because that person "does well" on certain tests.
By the way, I almost always score in the top 1% on every standardized written test, including IQ tests. The only exception I can recall was the LSAT, where I only scored in the top 10%. However, I'm not foolish enough to think those tests indicate anything of significance.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
What I find intresting is the replies from the "men of the street" shown in the BBC's article.
One women was openly offended. Almost all of then seemed to be offended. Not a single women accepted the study.
Some men belived the study and were delited about its results. Most of the men didn't belive the study.
Some replies didn't belive the study because of their "personal experience". Few women belive in
somekind of conspiracy. One male doesn't seem to belive it science. Also few men point out the fact that men tend to have higher variance in IQ tests. They seem to suspect that the results were in fact measuring this.
Not a single person considered to read the study before commenting on it. Not even Maria from Sheffield who was "suprised that a academic journal is even considering this publication".
I think that this Maria is not alone and we hear lots of similar comments. And they are listened. Welcome to an age where academic journals screen articles based on the results not the methodology.
I'd rather be rich than stupid.
It all depends on what you believe is intelligent. The definition of intelligence is a matter of perception.
Is "intelligence" that allows you to derive a technique to conquer the world with ingenious weapons while causing great pain and suffering to everyone really intelligent?
Arguing over some numbers that are supposed to measure this "intelligence" while there are so many other worthwhile things to do is really stupid. Are we still stuck in the same neanderthal mindset that thinks that it really matters that some groups are "better" than others. That is very counter productive and a waste of everyone's time.
Plus it gives the apes of our generation an excuse to be sexist and racist.
On average, yes I believe men probably are better at figuring out difficult problems. But I also think women have a lot more control and grace. IOW if they're faced with a difficult problem, they can probably get a man to just do it for them. Not bad. Men and women are just designed for different roles and they always have been. Consider way way back say half-a-million years ago when humans were just roaming around in hunter gatherer groups. Men and women didn't compete for the same jobs. That would be inefficient. It so happends that the jobs men were faced with took a little more thinking like hunting and fighting (e.g. because when women are pregnent they can't hunt or fight very well). I'm largely speculating of course but I doubt I'm real far off. Yeah, mean might be more "itellegent" but that doesn't make them BETTER. Women can be very effective in getting what they need to live comfortable lives and they usually get a man to give it to them. The problem is a social perception that intellegence equals superiority.
"what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world."
I suppose complete male domination since the dawn of time does not qualify as a "real world" validation.
It's a man's world, baby!
She said the fact that women marry men is proof of their stupidity.
My take is that her comment is the real proof.
When my mom asks what I did today at work, and I say that I developed some mixin classes in Java because it does not support multiple inheritance unlike other object oriented frameworks and used generics because I want my compiler to catch some casting errors at compile-time rather than run-time because the application runs in a networked environment lossy at the transport layer and where distributed debugging is hard although Apache log4j helps and it's the best I can do because my boss wouldn't allow me to use Python which is dynamically typed and shares the same garbage collection facilities as Java which I think is of the generational variety although I haven't disassembled to find out and has wonderful functional programming elemets built in like anonymous methods and the Mersenne Twister random number generator built right-in that has a 623-dimensionally equidistributed uniform distribution... She starts complaining about headaches and how she doesn't get it.
Then I ask my dad if he wants more elaboration, but he just shakes his head and turns away, because he OBVIOUSLY gets it.
QED!
- shadowmatter
If your niece is still fairly young, tell her to turn off her TV. Throw out her Hollywood-preaching magazines. Tell her to grab a physics book, the works of Plato, or some other intellectual material for her to read and contemplate. Get her involved in sports. Teach her about camping and farming. Please, help your niece before it's too late.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Apparently IQ is of no use in finding the actual meaning of "begs the question"!
God do I hate that misuse.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beg_the_question:
"Begging the question is the term for a type of fallacy occuring in deductive reasoning in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises"
Buy Text Processing in Python
And yet, it's boys that are struggling through school.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
How many pairs of shoes do you need?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Watch as our enlightened age shows that it only loves empericism if empericism is on its political sides (sic).
;).
Now, I'm not convinced he's right, but it makes sense. To sum it up: Men are smarter on average, women are more better at using it on average. Sounds like every math class I've seen: One guy sleeping through with a B with a girl working her butt off for an A next to him. They come out with roughly the same knowledge, but the girl has learned how to apply herself: More important than raw knowledge.
But of course, the fem-nazi's will surely attack this one!
I thought about why measuring intelligence is so taboo. It seems that it's one of the few things that scientists are not allowed to study, not because it violates the law, but because it's simply taboo. It seems that as soon as we are able to devise methods of measuring intelligence, such measurements also became taboo or at best are viewed as curiosities flaunted by the arrogant.
Perhaps that's because correlating these measurements with any kind of social categorization, whether it be race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, eye color, etc ignites a socially unacceptable controversy. If these correlations are taken seriously, it often leads to attempts at eugenics and strengthens discrimination against the group that is deemed "less intelligent". These correlations are not false in that they violate generally accepted statistical practices, it's just that we feel that we're better off not knowing and entertaining the illusion that all are roughly equal.
If our modern atheist society has a religion which facilitates social cohesion than this is probably part of it: That we're all of equal ability and if we just work at it anyone has the same chance of acheiving a goal as anyone else. Intelligence correlations contradict this idea directly and are therefore considered heresy and hence are taboo.
OK, guys. See how much pussy you get when say to your woman that you have proof that men are smarter than women.
Men tend to be more visual, and IQ tests tend to be visual-oriented. If such tests had more linguistical puzzles, the scores may be even.
Further, it seems possible that women are more intuative. By this I mean they can perhaps make judgements without being able to define how they arrived at the conclusion. It is sort of like neural nets versus logic programming. NN's can often deliver the right answer, but be harder to understand or "extract" how they arrived at that answer. Thus, being right and being able to explain an answer may be orthogonal.
For example, my wife is not a very good debater. She does not supply very convincing logic, or sometimes does not even bother to volunteer her reasoning. But she is damned sure right more often than me about many, perhaps most, practical matters.
Table-ized A.I.
Whites: 65%, Blacks 20%
In other news, while women can do two things at once, they do them both half-assed.
*duck!*
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
Well, if they protest, I don't think its going to be on /. :)
/. anyway?
How many women reads
No sig for now.
I submit that the submitter is an idiot, and doesn't know how to use "beg the question" properly. Therefore, the submitter has no business talking about intelligence of either sex.
Beg the question:
An argument that improperly assumes as true the very point the speaker is trying to argue for is said in formal logic to "beg the question." Here is an example of a question-begging argument: "This painting is trash because it is obviously worthless." The speaker is simply asserting the worthlessness of the work, not presenting any evidence to demonstrate that this is in fact the case. Since we never use "begs" with this odd meaning ("to improperly take for granted") in any other phrase, many people mistakenly suppose the phrase implies something quite different: that the argument demands that a question about it be asked--raises the question. If you're not comfortable with formal terms of logic, it's best to stay away from this phrase, or risk embarrassing yourself.
link
Is that nerds tend to be somewhat sexist. Not obnoxiously sexist, but sexist nonetheless. How many of us think that if everything else was equal that women would be equally recognized in IT, CS, etc? Maybe part of the problem is a certain level of sexual frustration on the part of the stereotypical nerd, but many of us are married, so what gives?
Now, paradoxically, this means something very strange. When a woman gets involved in a nerdy subject (like open source software) she often gets preferential treatment on the email lists. Why? because the nerds are all in awe that a woman is interested in this stuff. Unfortunately, I am not the only one to notice this.....
I will admit that I used to be much more sexist in this way than I am now. Now, because my free time is much more variable, I don't take as much time to care about whether the email was written by a man or a woman.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
black female with criminal parents.
When I got married, I told my wife
"OK, from now on, I'll make all the hard decisions, and you'll just make all the easy decisions."
Since then, we haven't had a single hard decision to make yet.
--
make install -not war
"Ya know, I know so much more than you do about almost everything."
I guess this will prove to her that her fancy book learnin don't mean squat.
Of course IQ tests don't predict anything in the real world. In fact, if they do, it might actually be a negative prediction.
From http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro01/web3 /DawsonAndoh.html:
Who can remember the kerfuffle about Jensen's and Eysenck's research on race-based IQ?
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by. (Robert Frost, 1916)
It doesn't "beg the question." (See, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beg_the_question) It does raise the question, though.
Let's say that this is true.
For far too long, women have been denied education, and now that they do, should we be surprised that such suppression had an evolutionary effect?
If this is true, then it would take at least three or four more generations to change things.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Then why can they make men behave like complete fools any time they want?
Ducks
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
..it *raises* the question.
m l
"Begging the question" describes an argument that is faulty because it ultimately relies on an assumption of the truth of its own conclusion.
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxbegthe.ht
It is not the same as "raising the question," as in, "every question answered in science raises more questions."
That said, 'intelligence' is extremely tricky to define, composed of dozens of different dimensions. It's possible that women do better at certain areas than men, and vice versa.
This also is an average. It doesn't mean that every woman is inferior to every man, as some people will assume this means.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It would be better if we just judge each person individually, regardless of statistics regarding gender, race, etc.
But of course Adam was just as stupid because he ate it, too.
Bingo! I wish someone would do a study on how often that happens. And rated the papers by how often they did it. *That* would be a metric worth seeing. Of course, few papers would report it...
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
We're not all crazy bitches.
That's awesome! Hahaha even my gf laughed at that one.
I think that there are inate differences between men and women. But I think that most of the differences that we notice have more to do with social conditioning than biology. Also, IQ tests are full of crap. There are many kinds of intelligence, and IQ tests don't hit them all.
There's overwhelming evidence in favor of this conclusion. There are overwhelmingly more male scientists, composers, painters, sculptors, etc. etc. than female ones. And don't try to tell me that women were somewhow denied access to these things. They simply weren't for the last 50 years.
About 5 years ago I read about a study that showed that women's performance on scholastics tests was more consistent than males. The male performance curves tended to wider than females. In other words, most of the very stupidest and the very brightest people (based on test) were male.
This may explain why there are less female "super scientists", but also less females in jail.
Historically, male roles tended to be more varied per individual, and thus natural selection has given males a wider variation of abilities to fit into different roles more easily. This is not saying that each male has wider abilities, but rather that males differ more. However, women's roles were pretty much to take care of the children and the sick (for good or bad). Thus, their brains are more geared toward a smaller range of roles. One male may specialize in hunting, another in herbs, and yet another in memorizing religious chants because of natural affinity to such.
Think of it this way. Suppose our brains had 3 lobes, A, B, and C, in it that specialized in different things. In women, the *variation* between the lobes compared with other women would be smaller. Really large or small lobes of any of the letters would be rarer in women. However, some males would have giant lobe C's and tiny lobe A's, or giant lobe B's and smaller lobes A and C. (The total volume of all three lobes would be about the same.)
Table-ized A.I.
While I'm sure the average Equatorial Guinean is poorly educated and might well have received insufficient iodine as a child, that figure is so insanely low (more than 2.7 standard deviations below the global mean of 100) as to fail the laugh test.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Richard Lynn, the emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University claims that, on average, men are more intelligent than women.
Yeah, well, my wife will still always be right.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Not too long ago there was a study that showed men's brains shrink with age, and all the media got a big kick out of that. Everyone laughed, etc., etc. because, you know, bashing men is ok.
I can't wait to see the hypocritical reaction to this study.
Well, I have no opinion about whether or not the findings are correct or not. I imagine that study will be nit-picked to death, and there may even be some horrible major flaw in it. But...
You're average female mathematician is most likely still much brighter than your average male restaraunt manager. Just because the humps on the bell curve for some statistic as measured over the entire population happen to lie in different places for men and women still doesn't say much for what an individual you happen to meet is capable of.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
IQ tests are weighted more towards men than women.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The crappiest of craps. I officially declare all IQ tests to be worthless. No test will ever measure / analyze all the various capabilities of a person.
Tests and other things have repeatedly suggested that i was lame and dumb, so i'm biased. My parents were told to not send me to school, cause i wouldn't succeed the wise people said.
Well i succeeded more than other *normal* people.
Don't believe the hype, yo.
Using my brain for a second here, i wonder how this *expert* told his wife about his findings. Or maybe he prefer men.
Stolen from the bbc article :
The only thing IQ tests prove is how good you are at doing IQ tests.
Matthew, Cheshire, UK
100% of statistics are wrong.
does anyone realize how stupid this debate is? women and men are built both physically and phsycologically different. men are more inclined towards physical prowess, mathematics and violence, but at times lack common sense and are not as prone to go with any group. women are inclined to try to be beautiful, talking skills, people skills, writing skills, and to follow the group, but they for the most part have great common sense. there are millions of exceptions to this, so trying to judge peoples intelligence or behavior by their sex is really stupid. trying to figure out which sex is superior is not only impossible to do, but it's also irrelevent.
might be true, i have a supra genus iq, but i have a difficult time catching desert fowl. wile e coyote
A: What you put on when your mother's cold
Here's how: Overinterpreting one's findings.
Suppose you were to conduct an experiment in which you had participants picked the colors that they best thought described the sky, and then concluded that, on the whole, "People show a very distinct preference for blue over red".
No, "People show a very distinct preference for blue over red when picking colors to describe the sky." Just like "Men are more clever than women" should be "Men are more clever than women at completing IQ tests".
I think a better question one might ask of this research, to be honest, is "What is wrong with the IQ test that it reveals a gender difference where there ought not to be one?"
You don't have any male friends, you have 'intellectual whores'. See here: http://intellectualwhores.com/masterladder.html Maybe you are not a crazy bitch (most women are), but you are an intellectual pimp. Background: I was a feminist before discovering ladder theory, now I'm a sexist.
I don't comment much on Slashdot.org. I mostly read and analyze the information provided. I check out comments from time to time. Being a female, I do feel inclined to comment on this post.
I simply do not regard this gentleman's research to have any bearing on me or the makeup of my mind. I am not insipid or stupid. I am sure I am ignorant of subjects that hold little interest for me just like many others, male or female.
If some men want to be brash and make a cockup of things in the world, let them dine on cheese and wine. I have more fruitful endeavors to pursue such as my own education, my contributions to society as a worker, educator, and a mother to my future children.
Though some men would like to dimiss us, women have played significant roles in the development of men. That is no small feat. Raising children is a critical process of life and a daunting one.
Women have a great capacity to contribute to the world just like men. We have in fact contributed many things in various fields.
Society plays a huge role in grooming people. Of course, there is a certain amount of free will, but conditioning is a powerful thing. As a woman, when I look at magazines, television, etc, women are not treated the same as men. Women are provided with superficial imagery and the conditioning it imposes, which is to be beautiful, be thin, be popular, date (i.e. date good looking or someone with money) guys, get married and have children.
Things are not not as rigid like they were in the past. However, the importance of looks and stereotypical female roles of the past are still blindly emphasized and are jejune.
Stereotypes are one of the biggest issues facing everyone and women. However, there is also the ingracious facet of human behavior of survival of by any means necessary, and if this means, subverting a group within the human race to make sure another is on top, it will happen. It seems one of the faults of our design.
It could have always worked the other way around with women on top and men on bottom. Unfortunately, women, as a collective majority, not speaking individually, have begrudgely faced this assimiliation into a stereotypical, conditioned servitude for some time now.
When we do speak up, we are often dismissed, belittled, or made fun of. I really wish that the men out there who feel inclined to inflict pain upon us, put us down, etc could really understand how much they are undermining society due to a selfish, egotistic, ingrating need to be top dog.
NOTE: I say some men not all.
Truth like surgery, may hurt, but it cures. - Han Suyin, Chinese Physician and Writer
It's like the game of hunt. Prey outwit the predator, but predator gets "his" meal at the end.
Isn't the battle of sexes all about this exact thing? Men's constant luring and women beating the bait in search of better suited lurer? If the roles were reversed (as most in nature), female would mark high on IQ test and brag about how big their breasts are. Hey, but what the hell do I know. As far as I'm concern, I'm still hunting. Therefore I really must be stupider than them, women!
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Don't get me wrong, I understand the reaction, but it's not what you should be doing. You should evaluate the study and see if anything was done wrong, and attack it on those problems.
Who knows? Maybe it's right? Remember it tested a very limited definition of intelligence. IQ is hardly the be-all, end-all. It's mainly a measure of quantitative computation. Of the seven intelligences identified by Gardner it tests two, maybe three of them.
I think part of the problem is, in the fight for equality many women take it too far. They don't want equal rights and treatment, but seem to cling to the notion that men and women actually are equal, in all ways. This is clearly false. Other than the obvious biological differences there are things such as the fact that on average women are smaller than men. Does not mean there are not some very small men and very large women, but if you graph heights, you get two bell curves, the women's peaking lower than the men's.
Well, it's possible that this flows in to the mental realm as well. I personally believe it does. My highly unscientific observational hypothesis is that men tend to have higher visual/spatial intelligence, women tend to have higher inter and intra personal intelligence. Put less BSified: Men are more logical, women are more emotional.
I notice that women are more likely to reach decisions based on a feeling, and men are more likely to come to a decision based on facts. The flip side is that women tend to be better able to deal with emotional situation whereas men often try to rationalize it away when there isn't a rational solution. I certainly know I'm prone to that.
Now neither of these is a better or worse skill to have, nor is this an absolute, I know some exceedingly logical women and exceedingly emotional men. However these are general trends I notice. As I said, unscientific, just my theory.
Well, things like this SHOULD be studied scientifically. We should research if men and women think differently usually. If it is established that's the case, then we can study why. If it turns out it's purely societal/education related, we can work to correct it, to teach men to be good at what women are and women at what men are. IF it's a fundamental difference in the way our brains work, we can learn about it, and use it to better teach both sexes.
So I'm not opposed to women lashing out at things that try to set them back, but I am disturbed that there is a trend to want to shut down any study that suggests men and women are different. It's clearly the case that we ARE different, and just how much and in what ways needs to be understood.
We aren't going to achieve true equality by sticking our head in the sand about the difference between the sexes.
The author of the study did not try to indict all women or say all women were idiots. Did you try to read the material at all or did you just want to create a false argument for show?
Please, stop trying to pull something political out of this study that doesn't exist. Its just data collected with him telling you what the data means.
Firstly, a score on an IQ test indicates nothing more than performance on a selection of mental tasks that a researcher has deemed to be fairly representative of some quality (general intelligence) that is assumed -but not yet proven- to actually exist.
Secondly, Those who know the history of IQ tests will give this study much less credibility. Allow me to inform. The first IQ tests showed that women were smarter than men, and whites were smarter than blacks. The former was taken to be an error in the testing, so the questions were adjusted (by adding and removing test elements that tested different abilities) until men and women scored equally. The latter was taken as evidence of racial superiority.
I hate having to draw obvious conclusions but I will do so anyways in case you are tired while reading this -the results of an IQ test do not actually correspond to an actual characteristic or trait of an individual, and should not be taken as seriously as they are.
Other IQ tests could just as easily produce the opposite result as this study (as they indeed did originally) simply by switching around the scoring of a few questions. I think it is terribly irresponsible of the researchers to make statements such as they are without providing a thorough explanation of what it is the tests are actually measuring, because it promotes a sexist attitude (ie its okay that men are smarter, its just genetics!)
This study demonstrates nothing more than how sexism still thrives among the intellectuals of today, in their willingness to draw and promote such conclusions in the face of valid alternatives.
While our awesome male brains are a lot better than their underdeveloped female brains, our thinking usually gets done with an entirely different organ.
Thats the smartest thing I've heard in a long time.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
She knows how to get sex whenever she wants it.
I want to see the study that compares a mans intelligence to the size of his schlong.
Boy that really is a journalist's question, isn't it, thats like asking which one of your ex-wives is your favorite. --T
I'm smarter than you, deal with it
You get many people who want to tell you what you can and can't say, can and can't think. When you say something they don't want to hear, they try and shut you down. The government did that with marajuna research. They found out things they didn't want to hear, namely that pot isn't very harmful and does have medical benefits, so they simply deny the studies, etc. It's mandidated by law that marajuna has no medically accepted use, though the medical community disagrees.
Well, you get the same shit from the PC crowd. You say something they don't want to hear, they work to shut you up. If you want to see some interesting examples punch brainwashing 101 in to Google. It's a short film about the suppression of free speech/thought on some university campuses (warning for the politically touchy crowd, it's presented from a distinctly right-wing viewpoint).
You'll see that here as well. Many people won't want to examine the study to see if it's good or bad, because if you do one might come to the conclusion it's good. They disagree with the studies conclusion and so will just decry it as evil from the start, to attempt to discredit it.
Happens all the time, from all different groups, unfortunately.
lucky people unavailable for galatic space mission involving grave peril.
Taking your statements for granted, all you have shown is that there is a correlation between IQ score and some success metric. It doesn't demonstrate causality (esp. for a given individual) and doesn't justify a physical link between IQ and potential.
All it says is people with high IQs do better by some chosen metric(s), in general, than people with low IQs - by design. The test itself may have value in that somehow it is measuring existing thought process. I cannot see how it measures potential (unless it is proven that ones thought processes are locked and unchanging, a theory I would resist without brutal proof).
How is that really useful then? It can't predict the future of an individual. It may or may not even be permanent. It just somehow has a correlation with success. I can see it has value to people trying to understand the brain, I can't see that it has social value, nor that it should be thrown about with such recklessness.
No shit!
It wasn't obvious by the way that we have better paying jobs, drive better, interact better, and make more money?
I must be some sort of scientist to have figured all that out before the report! Obviously I'm a man...
I am a hermaphrodite.
Regarding the argument of some that it is reasonable for women to be hostile to this, due to past injustices...Past injustices don't justify a paranoid, unintellectual reaction to studies. Either this is true, or it isn't.
I'd also note that many of the things you describe as "rights", aren't or shouldn't be. "The right to vote" is newspeak for "the 'right' to aggress against others" (namely, to openly express and act upon one's desire to take that which they haven't earned). Regarding discrimination in the workplace, no-one has the "right" to work at a specific company. I'd argue, however, that there are alot of managers who would like nothing more than to have all female employees. Furthermore, to the extent that women are discriminated against* in the workplace, this creates a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs willing to hire them at lower wages.
On a related argument, a professor of mine gave a very interesting lecture, for which I have notes, discussing the wage-gap between men and women and the glass ceiling. He argues that the "wage gap" (women receiving 70% the pay of men) is really nothing more than the result of the fact that women (not men) get pregnant, and tend to thus take time off and stay at home to be parents. When you look at never-married men vs. never-married women, and teenaged boys vs. teenaged girls, there is no statistically significant wage-gap.
As regards the glass-ceiling, he argues this is due to a difference in the dispersions of IQ among men and women. He argues that although the average IQ of men and women may be the same, the distribution for women is more concentrated on the mean, while the distribution for men is less concentrated on the mean (fatter tails). That is, there are fewer very dumb or very smart women, and more very dumb or very smart men. Likewise with regards to other social characteristics, such as aggression. If you look at the highest peaks of many areas -- chess, business, science, etc -- they are dominated by men; however, you also see prisons and insane-asylums overwhelmingly occupied by men.
The reason for this is that men are expendable, and women are not. If 99% of the female population dies out, the human race is in severe trouble; if 99% of the male population dies out, the remaining 1% (provided adequate fecundity and stamina) can relatively quickly repopulate.
Interestingly, someone else brought up the issue of "emotional quotient" or "EQ". From their description of it, it seems to measure maturity, the ability to sacrafice immediate gratification for more long-term gratification. As emotional intelligence is "an awareness of and ability to manage emotions and create motivation", this would seem to be an appropriate characterization of part of the issue. Economists -- particularly those of the Austrian school -- call this "time-preference". Lower time-preferences are civilizing forces, and lead to success. Criminals and children, for example, are characterized by high time-preference (a rapist is someone who simply can't wait; children will give up $1000 tomorrow for $1 today; etc). I don't see why this doesn't fall under the rubric of general "intelligence".
* The term "discriminate" here is used in the very narrow sense, in that being female is considered as a negative aspect, all else equal. In reality, all private property, and every choice of free people, is based on discrimination.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
... that I am smarter than her. Maybe she is right, maybe she is not.
But few would debate the fact that she is the superior human being.
It sounds like the guy just pulled a bunch of "intelligences" out of his ass so that everyone can be intelligent.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
So, if they can charge men more for car insurance because statistically they are worse drivers then can employers pay women less because statistically they are less intellegent?
NOTE: I'm ripping on the car insurance, not advocating paying women less. It's all foolishness.
I don't recall this guy sitting here belitting females in his report.
There is a tendency in society to assume all people are equal at all things (despite the obvious incorrectness of this statement) and bash people who dare to point out differences between groups of people.
People used to say that the world was flat - does that mean we distrust all scientists beyond that point who now claim otherwise?
Of course not. We should objectively look at what is being conjectured and work to a more accurate and better level of understanding instead of trying to shut off debate with silly labels like "sexist" or "racist". Unless this guy wants to throw all women into a concentration camp, I hardly think the labels being used are fair.
I really can't debunk or answer your claims about IQ tests - its not my field of research, however, in terms of statistical use of said tests (something that is easier to understand - anyone that has taken a high school or college level stats course can analyze how the data is used), it is sound. The real question is - how should IQ be defined differently than what it is now, and what is the best way to measure it?
I don't see a rather clear answer to the last one. Everyone wants to say that "oh but your test is male-centric or white-centric" instead of coming up with real answers.
"Of course a man made it. It's scientific research, Lois, not a delicious Thanksgiving dinner."
Without having read the article, this does sound quite a bit like earlier findings that men have more grey matter and women more 'white' matter. That is, men are better at pure processing and women are better at making connections between things. This is consistent with conventional wisdom (like "Men navigate by names and numbers, women navigate by landmarks"), and is hardly what I would call controversial. In addition, saying that women 'use' their grey matter more effectively by making connections better doesn't imply that increases in grey matter are useless; your implied assertion that IQ is 'useless' it unfounded. There are many areas (mathematics, science) where focussed processing power (if you'll allow the analogy) is exceedingly useful.
Depending on my mood, I find it annoying or amusing that people would be up in arms for saying that men are more intelligent, but nobody thinks twice when someone says that women are more intuitive. If these recent studies and conventional wisdom are to be believed, then both statements are equally correct.
No one takes IQ tests seriously anymore, so it's not surprising that a racist crackpot would use them to publish such BS.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Men
- men orgasm before sex is complete (woman need to do it before the man... or no chance).
- men make women cook... woman just do it
- men encourage woman to shave sensitive areas... we refuse.
Woman
- hold men hostage by their penis
- can be a bitch a few days a month, and blame it on biologicial processes (and blame men somehow)
- scream for equal rights... except when the draft comes around... then "gender roles are essential in society".
- can orgasm in the shower without getting a cramp from stroking (damn waterpik's).
That's kind of like the whole point.
It's analytic, not causal, and it's a test of potential for measured success in the current (or predicted future) environment.
It doesn't measure potential for unmeasured successes, it doesn't account for the possibility that the future may be drastically different than predicted, etc., etc.
It is interesting to note that many legendary leaders in Ireland were women, and the most popular of modern politicians in Ireland was Mo Mowlam. (For that matter, England is no different - from the legend of Boudicca to the very real history of Margret Thatcher. Hey, I despised Thatcher's politics, but there's no questioning the fact that she was intelligent.)
One of the youngest students ever admitted to Oxford University for a degree program (mathematics) was Sufiah Yusof at the age of 13. Ruth Lawrence had actually achieved a starred First Class honors degree in maths by the time she reached age 13, had a degree in physics a year later and a PhD in mathematics by the time she was 16.
"These are the exceptions", you might say. That might well be the case, but exceptions are falsifications. If you have to add a whole bunch of exceptions to a theory, in order for it to work, then the theory is wrong.
But even the "exceptions" claim is suspicious. Girls generally out-perform boys in maths and science, up to the early teens. After that, western culture often requires them to be stupid. As such, any observations above that age need to be treated with caution. (You notice how the two prodigies I mentioned fit inside the age bracket I outlined.)
Actually, boys are often expected to be more interested in sports and social stuff (such as the Cub Scouts) than education, so it's actually very hard to know if earlier comparisons are any fairer - again because of cultural expectations. You'll notice how boys who are "geeky" are invariably described as "loners" and "anti-social".
My suspicion is that if we stop telling kids what they can't do, they'd start discovering what they CAN do. Actually, it's less of a suspicion and more of an observed fact (although the rock school mentioned in the article didn't seem to have many women). As such, I simply cannot see any merit to the study.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Lived with quite a few, too. They averaged 1.5 hours a day on bathroom tasks (don't ask me WHAT they're doing in there - if they're bringing in a book I'm wrong) while I spend that time on logic, number theory and combinatorics. Is it any surprise that I'm a tad smarter than they are, when they spend all of that time dousing themselves in antibiotics while I'm enriching my brain?
Richard Lynn is a major proponent of Eugenics (i.e., "perfect-race" stuff). You know, the same Eugenics that Hitler and the Nazis used to justify murdering millions of people.
I think if anyone is actually pro-thought-police, Richard Lynn would be one of the first on the list.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
So, is this an indictment of an IQ test's ability to measure intelligence or how society treats smart people?
This kind of finding has actually been around for awhile. Evolutionarily speaking, men have been the leaders. Women have had to keep up to test to make sure the men arent bullshit. Basically our minds(intellegence, wit, humor etc) have developed to make us more sexually attractive and women have been forced to develop to ween out the fake(weak) men who dont actually have the traits. So in truth men are more intellegent than women.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
Did these guys not read the newspapers 4-5 months ago when the Harvard Pres really put his foot in it?
The real point is what if they reported that women were found to be more intellegent? Would there be the same hesitation to report the findings? I've heard other reports that claimed women were superior with some subjects and those were thought to be reporting accurately but when the opposite is found to be true it's a vicious lie. Have we hit the point that the facts must fit into political correct position? I guess the answer is obvious but the real victim in the end may be science and the truth. What if you take it to the next level and said it's wrong to report that some races and sexes were more prone to some deseases? We're close to that and I've heard complaints about those findings as being potentially racist. Burying those facts could cost lives all in the name of sparing some one's feelings.
The point is, when you have a scholarly paper (presumably there is a real scholarly paper behind this) you evaluate the paper on it's own merits. You read the research, the methods, the results and the conclusions. You then deicde what merit, if any it has. Maybe the methods are wrong, maybe the results don't substantiate the conclusions, maybe it's just plagarized Harry Potter text.
Whatever, the point is you judge the paper based on it's own merits. You do not read the brief conclusion in the abstract and start decrying it just because you don't like what it says. The truth is not always what you want ot hear and what you agree with, so just because you disagree doesn't make it wrong.
You yourself are guilty of this, you immediatly launched an ad homenim attack. You claim this guy is a proponent of Eugenics, and infer that therefore his paper is worthless. Further you use a straw man in saying that he favours shutting down ideas he disagrees with. Both of these presented with no proof.
Now frankly, I don't know if these are true, and I'm not going to take the time to research it, because I just don't care. The point is simple: IS the paper good research? I won't know until I've read it, so I'm certianly not going to start villifying it. Who cares who the author is? Science is not a popularity contest, it's not a democracy. It's a way of knowing about the universe. Thus you judge scientific research based on it's own merits, is the research sound or not.
I wonder if there was a test to measure the other half - would men come anywhere near as close to women ?
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
People make hiring decisions on broad generalisations al the time. First impressions make a huge difference in how you respond to people.
From personal experience, I know that while at university I had blonde hair briefly, during that period I noticed that men in particular (but often women) were far more likely to treat me in a patronising manner. I did however got more offers of free drinks in the pub.
Similarly, when I wear my glasses, people speak to me in a more serious manner than when I don't.
Both experiences are the result of commonly accepted stereotypes - blonde=dumb, glasses=smart
As someone who is also under-tall and overweight, I also get assumptions that I am lazy and eat too much, and yet the poeple I work with comment on how little I eat when we have lunch together.
Different is just different, IQ tests are notorious for being biased in their outcomes. If we value differences it doesn't matter, some skill sets work better in some roles.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Everyone knows all this stuff (or rather anyone with a half a brain). You're not educating people; you're showing them something they already know and they're realizing it's easier to look shocked and pat you on the back than to do anything else like say... ask about your current inability to vote.
You will always be objectified. There's nothing you can do about it, and your fellow women (since we're all teams now) tend to make that battle an uphill one for you. Hell, I've been objectified and that never ceases to amaze me. People think we're sex craved uncommuncative pigs who want no connection that doesn't involve the genitals. All because we're guys. Boo hoo.
As to work discrimination, I'd be right along side you fighting with you on that one. For anyone. It's definitely swung in the men's favor, but it would just easy be the opposite had things turned out differently earlier in our history. One of my teachers in college (the head of the department) was a female chauvanist pig. It was obvious and admitted by other female teachers. It's nice for people to think you're substandard just for your gender... oh... wait...
We got over it and fought it when it affected out schoolwork. (Well there was her yang that told her women should be in the kitchen getting his dinner ready... that was quite an interesting altercation :)
It's a study. One study. I'm sure it will have a ton of little issues than can be interrpreted in many different ways. There's no reason to make a huge deal about it other than express rational skepticism
I do agree with whoever pointed out that, had this been reversed, I wouldn't be shocked at all to find that men didn't argue yet the everyday man would never hear the end of it. I'd be even more shocked if there was an apologetic tone to the article.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
rabble rabble rabble rabble
rabble rabble rabble
rabble
Obligatory South Park reference.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
Can't beat em off with a stick. He's sure to reproduce.
Not so useful study, after all. I mean, it just remarks what is already known.
"People" want smart men to be hired an stupid womens to be laid.
That's all.
You forgot #9:
No Intelligence - duhh
is obviously bigger/better than their synthetic benchmark. (any salesman anywhere)
"Scientists who report men more intelligent than women greatly deprived of sex" ... now who woulda guessed _that_!
Oh well, what the hell
Our society places a high value on Basketball Intelligence, so give it its due.
Most of the smarty-pants students at Harvard are girls and about 90% of the dumb-butts in the hoosegow are boys?
I knew it! Woo! Wooooooo!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Why don't we just call this site Cowboyneal.org with the slogan of "Good articles which obviously no one has read. Posted by someone without any brain."
Fuck Karma
Too bad he doesn't know the meaning of what he is saying is the opposite of what he thinks it means.
Booyakasha. E-man indahouse aiii. Big shout out ta mi Slashdottas massiv wit a capital S, coz slashdot iz a place izznit - u see I aint no ignoramus. Things like 'apple' and 'orange' do not start wit a capital letter, unless dey iz at de start of a sentence - but some of you brainboxes probably already know dat already innit. Me name be Albert E and me represent de USA. For those of u who didn't study geography de USA is a place over a 100 MILES wide, de capital of it iz? Anyone? Not u geography square! ....yes, it is New York. U iz clever and quite fly if u don't mind me sayin.
First of all, I iz got to say I iz a bit nervous speakin to so many of you - at least me would be if I weren't totally mashed. In da past, de only public-speaking I does is to a couple peoplez, and it's well easy all me has to say iz me name and de words 'nicht ein Jude'.
Anyways I digest. . To fink dat so many great people has been called smart like Lyndon Banes Johnson, or as he is better known - JFK, Newton was also smart I fink, and also...William Tell - is he one of those smart guyz, probably, and dat bloke wiv de hat, but most importantly dat really fit honey from who did da work on Radium - if u iz out dere, me'd love to - me iz stayin at de Best Western Hotel - me's got a really nice room, altho since dis morning dem has put a parental lock on de tv.
Anyways, me be thinking dat de smart people are really dumb, like, f'in those guys wit da bag on theys heads whos always botherin me an my honeys as we walk down by da park, about Jesus and angry beez and tings like dat. For those of u who studying people and categories in college, you probably already learned that they be called homeless, because de dont have any home or so de media would like u ta believe, an top scientists like me homies work night and day to figur out where de brainz went. De got dis wikid box dat makes pictures from shootin invisible laser-rays in they eyes and out da back like from Star Wars and sht.
But really, ya know, sometimes me tink that i like dem too. I mean, I smart in some ways - I brilliant at counting - ye know, 1, 2, 3...4... I could continue, easy. I memorized da whole alphabet 'a to x' and can even spell words like "hippopotamus". But I cant even figure out dis whole quantum uncertainty thing, and I cant find me car keys, and where we at rite now?
As it iz, I look out and I see 1000s of people who iz smarter den me in de brains and all - but it is important never to forget where u all came from - becoz black, white, brown or pakistani we all come from de same place - de punani. Jah bless - bigupyaself Slashdot...and keep it real... wesside."
Rock Us, Dukakis.
Men have larger egos and penises than women.
Women are not as smart because smarts don't go as far as a thin waist and big tits.
Yes, this is exactly what the study shows - the items the IQ test measures were exactly the things men were better at than women, as a group.
Man, you're one smart mofo. How did you come up with that one?
I wouldn't have to work so hard for shit. Of course, since I'm already a beautiful man, I don't have to worry about that. I just flash a little quadricep, and I'm on easy street! ;-)
More of the usual geek hubris crap -- defining intelligence as "what I'm good at." Try playing a sport like basketball at a professional level. Better yet, try taking ballet classes for a month or two. You'll find these things require a high degree of intelligence, of a kind you probably don't and never will have.
Intelligence has nothing to do with how much knowledge you have. You can have a high IQ but be devoid of useful knowledge.
deleted that "She's Soooooooo Blonde" joke piece I downloaded this morning! Oh, wait! Here it is!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
No, EARLY IQ tests were notorious for being biased. This embarresed phsychometricians very much and they have worked very hard to design as cultural neutral a test as possible. Look up "Raven progressive matrices" for a good example of a modern non-verbal IQ test.
What about crack-slangin' intelligence?
t he%20public
Or 360-behind-the-back-chocolate-thunderdunkin' intelligence.
Pimptelligence?
Here's something attacking EI (Emotional intelligence): http://eqi.org/gole.htm#How%20Goleman%20misled%20
It really does look like a load of b.s. sold to otherwise smart people by a bunch of smart, radical egalitarians.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
I realize this is /. humor, but some might be interested in a 50-year longitudinal study called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), hosted currently by Vanderbilt U. It is the longest-term study of its kind, designed to track boys and girs through a 50-year period, and is now in its third decade. The study has spawned over 300 research articles, and is considered by many to be the best collection of data in existence concerning intelligence differences betweens males and females.
Of course, I might be biased since I was a participant in one of the first cohorts, but it's certainly worth a look if you're interested in this kind of thing.
I've done 3 IQ tests, 2 scored about the same, one was quite a bit less, I was having a bad day.
Now, can you think of any reason why a proportion of post-pubescent females might be having a 'bad day' ?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Intelligence isn't a well defined concept...
;-) ) talking about any particular of these intelligences for example?
Is he ( what a funny coincidence it's a "he" btw
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Everyone should look through "The Mismeasure of Man", by Stephen Jay Gould. He digs up the raw data and procedures behind many "proofs" that one group is inferior to another. Often the researchers knew what was wrong with the results but someone above them rushed into print anyway.
This study should be controversial, and the controversy *should* center on whether the study proves its conclusions.
Ever entertain the thought that there was an unspoken feminist plot or conspiracy against men? Cartoon dullard villains are too often men. Male bashing is supposed to be taken with a stiff upper lip. Preferential treatment to women in custody cases/child support.
"Oh, be a man."
Maybe it's because we don't beat our SOs as much as we did back in the good old days. Like if she flies off the handle when you kindly suggest the proper road directions she should be taking, well, maybe a slap to calm her down isn't out of the question.
Those newspapers are not the proper place to publish peer-reviewed emperical studies. I will withhold judgment until after the research is published and criticized as is customary for all new scientific studies.
signature pending slashdot approval
Oh yeah, Slashdot's a fair place to have this argument. Men outnumber women about 100:1 around here.
As if the argument wasn't already skewed enough, it's completely unfair since we're smarter than them.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
"In my relationship, I always have the last word: Yes, honey"
-P@
signal_connect(0, "test_top.dut.my_sig", "clk");
...is always released to the press before being published in a peer reviewed journal. :P
"Intelligence tests are hocus-pocus used by psychologists to prove that they are smart and that their clients are stupid. The general acceptance of these tests suggests that this claim may not be without foundation." --Thomas Szasz
--Mizerai
Tis said that a person is capable of harnessing roughly 5% of his or her mental capacity. My theory is that this test was done on men. What happens with the rest of the of their mental capacity? They think of SEX!! When working in a group of men and women, it seems as if the difference in mental capacity is almost negligible. The only thing is, it is known that women don't think of sex as much as men. This means they use a larger percentage of their mental capacity. So relatively there isn't much in it, but absolutely, men are far cleverer!
!
Seriously...this stuff always shows up in the paper, gets thwacked in a journal, and the thwacking never gets printed. Why? Because difference/controversy sells plenty of papers/ads. Read the Mismeasure of Man or the Mismeasure of Woman for the long history of this.
Recently the Science writer for the nytimes got busted by the community because he was planning to print articles that questioned the existence of bisexuality and 'different' orientations just to stir up controversy. He emailed one woman in a newsgroup, before he published a 'scientific' article wanting to gather information for a later article about when "science" says your "identity" isn't real. He was building a series of stories that would sell papers.
Binary oppositions and straw man arguments are tools of the trade, even at places like the BBC and the nytimes. No data? No peer review? No problem. We'll print it, and when another story supporting controversy shows up, we'll print it again.
Then why does my girlfriend have two black eyes ?
StupidChildren...the reason jesus is crying
Crud? Cuz you don't understand the topics, so you immediately dismiss something that threatens your idea of ordered society? Do you have a *legitimate* counterargument that is based on the same areas of study, or do you just have an "i'm offended" argument?
How are the theories crappy? How are they untestable when they have been tested so much, for so many decades with all sorts of batteries of tests, including tests that were "culturally" tuned to the target subjects in question. Is intelligence only something that can be tested with whites and asians? You're silly.
Its a simple fact - those who can't survive don't and those who can, do. Why do people survive? Multiple reasons - being able to adapt to the climate (lighter skin complextions as a result) and having complex survival skills - something that requires higher orders of intelligence.
As to your silly comparisons using polar bears and bacteria, here is the answer. Polar bears and bacteria are simiper creatures. Survival is a much simpler methodology for them than it is for humans. Humans have complex social structures, different physiologies, and other differences that, in order to maintain the survival of humans, these types of variations manifested themslves, and through the process of natural selection, became the dominat traits and explain the geographical differnces that correlate with race. I could counter argue your point by asking why humans simply didn't devolve to become like polar bears.
I know people don't want to even entertain the idea that differnet groups of people are truly different in varying ways. We accept that black athletes are generally better than white or asian ones. That doesn't seem so politically charged. But if we just want to FIND OUT if there are differences between races or genders, it all of the sudden becomes a political issue where most of society doesn't want to entertain any sort of idea that would flow disrupt the status quo of the "everyone is equal" dogma.
Anyone heard of the theory of multiple intlligences? I know it's just a theory, but it seems to be reasonably correct. I'd like to meet the test subjects as well see how the experiments were performed. If being able to drink three beers then burp loud enough to shake the foundations means your intelligent, then men are more intelligent than women. I admit there are ditzes among us (females), but there are just as many idiots among the male population (Bush and Blair, to name a couple). Okay, so no one is quite sure what gender Blair is, but I don't of know anyone who is brave enough to check that's never been on Jerry Springer.
The Simpsons, Everyone loathes Raymond, Home improvement and a vast array of modern televisions shows have clearly conveyed to me that it's ok to be a "stupid dumb husband type" who is more like a child to a mother with his wife than a husband.
With the media enforcing this kind of behaviour through entertainment I'm very surprised at the results to be honest.
It's pseudo-science, not real science. Pseudo scientists say anything they think will get attention.
Psychologists and sociologists adopt the language of science, what little they know of it, to try to seem more important. But they don't actually do the work. Almost all social science is social pseudo-science.
There are many possible reasons for the small differences they say they discovered.
The best way to deal with these guys may be, every time you see them, act like you are calling a pig, and say sooooodoooooe, sooooodoooooe, sooooodoooooe. How better to communicate disgust? Sometimes when you show disrespect for stupid things, you are indicating respect for more important things.
Adolf Hitler extolled the virtues of the Japanese race, so Hitler couldn't possibly have been a racist.
i should mention that the nytimes writer was presumably well aware that study was by someone of questionable ethics background (mentioned in the press) and had been viewed as flawed by other scientists and anyone with half-a-brain.
a full account is here.
yeah yeah shameless parent plug.
The United States existed for two lifetimes before finally allowing women to vote, an event which is still (barely) within living memory. It didn't happen until 1950 in Canada (1960 to be allowed to run for office), 1971 in Switzerland, and 1976 in Portugal.
_ timeline.htm
Liechtenstein waited until 1984.
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/suffrage/a/intl
until the same experiments are confirmed from other researchers before jumping to conclusions.
Ooops, too late.
You can't handle the truth.
I mean, "salary, family stability" and IQ??? Give me a brake! The only thing these IQ tests are good for is to reveal really stupid people (whose IQ is less than George Bush's)
Basketball and breakdancing fall under "Body-Kinesthetic," which was fourth in the list. (Breakdancing also has a component of "Musical-Rhythmic," which was fifth.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Welcome to the dark ages where:
- Creationism is more important than Darwin
- More money is spent globally on the sex industry than on development and environment
- Dubbya is POTUS
- Pat Robertson thinks he's god
- Fidel Castro is STILL AROUND!!
- Gays and Lesbians are treated as second class citizens
- Abortion is a crime
- Feminism is seen as a root of all evil
What's next folks? Slashdot headlines about scientific breakthrough in craniology? Blacks is dummer than whites?
The real headline reads...
"Science is dead"
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
In other pseudo-science news, squirrels are obviously smarter than people. People have to go to work every day. Squirrels take afternoon naps on their favorite tree branches.
People travel on dangerous streets; squirrels travel on low-traffic overhead wires that they had the people install for them. All hail our squirrel overlords!
It doesn't demonstrate causality
Of course not. Go read the post again. IQ is predictive, not causitive. As a predictor it's very good. I would be quite willing to bet $100 that a person with a 120 IQ is more successful than a person with an 80 IQ. I'll even let you choose the success metric. This doesn't mean that everyone with an 80 IQ is a failure, or that everyone with a 120 IQ is a success. It only means its predictive enough that I'm willing to bet $100 on it.
My high school had a "gifted" program for students with high IQs, and a "special" program for students with low IQs. I'll let you take a wild guess as to which group has more successes today, twenty years later. Or if you prefer, you can guess as to which had the fewest failures.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
the point of this story is to incite rage and get women pissed off at their men.. (a plot for the author to get rebound ass)
shamefull...
This is especially the case among the borderline-Asperger's-Syndrome types that like to frequent Slashdot
Wow, I looked it up on wikipedia and found a description of myself - thanks for the info.
Working for necessity's mother.
Does it matter? Men are faster runners than women in general, but any female runner of note will run faster than 99% of all the people on this forum. Intelligence can be looked at the same way.
s m r t! s m r t! I'm so smrt!
Lack of intelligence can be indicated by begging the question.
Ignorance can be indicated by not knowing what the hell begging the question means.
He also claims that White people are more intelligent than black...
Which is entirely possible. Clearly the claim is not that every white person is more intelligent than every black person—we know that isn't true. But it may be that on average, whites are more intelligent. Or it may be that blacks are, on average, more intelligent. There's no conclusive evidence either way, and it wouldn't be a particularly meaningful discovery if there were—there's no reason the average intelligence levels of somewhat arbitrary groupings of people should affect individuals' legal rights, or school admissions, or anything else. But I don't see why we should rule out the possibility that there are such statistical differences, just because it is unpleasant to think so.
Am I allowed to say that Dutch people are taller than, say, Peruvians? Again, there are certainly people in the Netherlands who are shorter than most anyone in Peru, but the Dutch are, on average, taller. There are lots of statistically significant differences between racial, ethnic, and national groups—it might be more surprising if every ethnic group on the planet did have precisely the same mean intelligence. If there are race-correlated differences in facial features and body type, why shouldn't there be differences in the brain?
If you would like to argue instead that "intelligence", unlike height, is not a unified quantity or one that can be objectively measured, then you may have a point. But for any more objective subcategory of intelligence you might choose to measure (some specific skill, like memorization, or mental rotation of objects) there is still the possibility that there will be racial differences in average ability. Again, such a finding wouldn't mean much—clearly the differences between racial groups are pretty well swamped by the variance within groups—but I'm not aware of any a priori reason to believe that all racial groups are statistically identical in all mental characteristics, when they obviously tend to differ in physical characteristics.
And, incidentally, "you really just wanna piss on the head of this guy"? This is what passes for discourse here?
A college professor (in Quantitive Business Analysis) once told me that statistics are only as meaningful as you make them. Because a study like this simply can't cover the entire world as a whole, it will always be skewed in one direction or another. It may not be intentional but it will happen, and should always be kept in mind.
I know of a test that says chickens are smarter then men.
I usually like to annoy my family full of women's libbers by telling them that, on the whole, men are seemingly more intelligent than women (and yes, I am female... a young one at that). They're sure as hell a lot more practical. I say that all the ditzes out there should shut up and do what they want - not what they think will impress men. I can always hope, can't I?
Men's evolutionary role has, for millions of years, been different from women. This led, quite naturally, to biological specialization of tasks. Women's biological burden is their uterus. During pregnancy, the uterine tissue is processing a HUGE caloric burden in the developing child. During this time, women may experience what my wife calls "pregnancy retardation" where the burden is so great their brains shrink and they become rather, um, stupider. Men don't have to deal with this, but there are other hazards of maleness. Early death comes to mind... This is especially apparent in hunter gatherer societies where the hunter is generally male and the gatherer is generally female. Predatory behavior requires intelligence. Most predatory animals have higher intellect than their same-sized equivalent herbavore. It's not fair, it's not equality. Nature doesn't care. Nature does what makes the best offspring. Science is the study of what IS, not how we wish it were. Modern society could learn a little from science.
People with 150+ IQ's often are easily distracted or socially incompatible with normal people. Although standardized testing placed me above the 150 threshold by a reasonable margin, I can safely say that I am regularly jealous of "Normal", "intelligence" only gets you so far.
I can't have nightmares. For that fact, I can't have realistic dreams. I'm always evaluating my situation no matter whether I'm awake or asleep and in my dreams I understand that I'm dreaming and control them since I understand their limitations. This means that although in my dreams I'm able to work in an entirely mouldable 3D space, I'm incapable of having a good scare or anything happen to me to trigger a euphoric emotion since I know it's not real.
Average people can find people to spend time with even if common interest isn't available. I instead have to trick myself into being interested in topics that are otherwise mundane. Average people recognize others that don't stumble over the problems of life easily. We stand out in a crowd. All problems in life are solvable for intelligent people. An intelligent person is someone that is creative enough to analyze and formulate a solution to any problem they are faced with or able to recognize a problem is insolveble so instead they can mediate a middle ground in order to make the problem less of an issue. Normal people have the opportunity to experience challenges on a lower level and therefore and can therefore take away a great deal more satisfaction from solving simpler problems. Normal people act many different ways around these "problem solvers" and even when they're not mean towards them, they regularly make remarks degrading themselves to ensure that you know that "Sure we can be friends, but we don't really fit do we".
Also I tend to find that people immediately put you into the position of Guru. People regularly ask your advice on many different topics. People that are highly educated and very intelligent are able to ask the right questions in most circumstances or can at least formulate a method in which to extract any beneficial data from a fellow nerd. The normal person on the other hand assumes that a "Nerd" is a nerd in all topics, not just one. So they look at their personal nerd as a guru instead of as a person specializing in specific fields. I am regularly asked questions that I can research and respond to, but I've come to the conclusion that now when asked for advice, whatever solution I give must be able to work with a high certainty and it has to be something the other person isn't going to be offended by. Otherwise, I switch between two answers being "Well, I think you've stumped me. I'm pretty sure that I can't find any acceptable solution to this problem", which although is not true, at least is nicer than my alternative answer "I can assure you that the two solutions that I can provide you will be less than satisfactory to your liking and will negatively impact our relationship. I believe the best solution I can offer in this circumstance is that you pose the question to yourself and decide what advice you would give me if I asked the same thing". This stresses relationships since there's never a true comfort level available between two people of different levels of intelligence. For normal people to understand this feeling, just think of what it is like to spend time with a down syndrome person. Although the difference isn't as drastic as that, it's an exaggerated example that should provide a certain degree of proof of this.
Intelligent people are able to adapt their speech and communicative skills to suite their company. Meaning that they are able to identify that certain people believe that no matter how obvious the rest of their statement is, it must be presented. Intelligent people are annoyed by this, but an intelligent person will bite their tounge and await the end of the soliloquy to ensure the comfort of their companion. When two intelligent people speak on a topic, when they have reached a level plain where one party can complete the
You broke my brain. Y < Y makes all kinds of fundamental concepts I've grown to count on crumble to the ground. Euclidian geometry, calculus, the comedic value of Carrot Top . . ..
Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
Its called intuition.
Thats a new discussion topic besides computers in future dates for slashdotters.
Yes. Getting a blind date is not impossible even for slashdotters, since in that case the date don't know nearly anything of you before date.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
oh no! we might all be intelligent...
my mom always knew when I was lying...
IQ Test Question No 42:
Which one of these four things is least like the other three?
1. Idli
2. Dosa
3. Vada
4. Chappathi
Correct Answer: Chappathi
Because Chappathi is made from Wheat but Idli, Dosa and Vada are made from Rice.
What does an IQ Test measure? Intelligence or is it Knowledge? I would like to ask the same thing about SAT I Tests....
Is there a way to measure Intelligence without measuring Knowledge?
"Men have larger brains than women by about 10 per cent and larger brains confer greater brain power, so men must necessarily be on average more intelligent than women."
So, yeah, men are smarter than women. But men with big heads are smarter than ordinary men. It's head size. (No, not that head, get your mind out of the gutter!) Finally, a payoff for the fact that I can't wear baseball caps because they won't adjust large enough, that off-the-shelf hats sit on top of my head like the fez on a monkey. (Ok, so that depends on the monkey's tailor.)
Read and weep, pinheads!
Putting my Caucasian (are Finns caucasian?) intellect to work, I'd like to say who cares. Point of these studies is to boost the researchers ego. Variation of IQ within the population is so large that generalization is just inflammatory and serves no purpose.
Aren't they interrelated?
Some knowledge is going to be easier to gain if you're intelligent. At least, that's the thought.
If you ask a lot of intelligent people a lot of different questions you can figure out which kinds of questions map to intelligence and which don't.
How many intelligence tests have you taken? I know that the ones I've taken were nothing like scholastic aptitude tests. The knowledge required to solve the puzzles was rudimentary. Most of it was about solving the puzzles.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
With so many people noticing that this is the same guy who claimed whites are more intelligent than blacks, I'm surprised I haven't seen this explanation:
THE TEST WAS BIASED.
Pretty much any society is dominated by males, and the societies that are currently at the top are dominated by white people. This holds true for politics, economics, culture and science. Given that this test was designed in such a framework, wouldn't you think it's at least plausible that it is biased and favors the classes at the top?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
People who are expected to provide most of the income, to stay in the workforce the longest, to do the marriage proposing, to provide the last name, to take whatever the economy throws at them like a man, are men.
Heroines on the other hand can do those things but aren't expected to. If a man fails to do those things, he's failed. That's all there is to it. If you're under such an imbalanced expectation for success you're going to get imbalanced levels of education.
Indeed, laugh. That's the best you can do with such a result. The only thing it really tells you is that men did better on this test than women. That doesn't mean much in real life. In real life, we see that top positions are often taken by men. Why is that? Maybe it's because men are more intelligent. Maybe it's because they're more arrogant. More likely, it's because of a complex mixture of factors, and predicting the suitability of a person based on any single one of those factors is going to be very meaningless.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The attitude of societies throughout the world have changed significantly in recent years. Today more women are college educated, business leaders, and more yet are high school graduates. At home, daughters, as well as sons, are encouraged to explore their creativity and ideas to their utmost.
However, the full engagement and integration of women will take time. There are still some societies/communities with unrealistic, unfair treatment of women. Despite this, human ideals and reality is progressing. Eventually, women and men will be statistically on par with each other. Then claims such as that made in the article, will be categorically false.
Just a matter of time.
The main and very common missconception is confusing that knowledge and intelligence. IQ test INTELLIGENCE. Tests grades are KNOWLEDGE. What their study shows is not that men are dumber than women, it shows that they are on average more lazy. Which I believe most of us can agree with. I believe women are less intelligent because, although both sexes are bound by emotions, most women choose not to fight them at all. Thus women become less logical in their daily thought processes. However, for reasons I am still not sure about, women tend to care about their grades more then men. So they STUDY and MEMORIZE more. Knowledge is not helpfull at all in "the real world" though, since that is another missuse of the word. The REAL WORLD is in the woods, in nature. Human society has greated their own, artificial world, and knowledge is usefull there and only there, where it cannot accomplish anything of worth to THE REAL WORLD. Intelligence is helpfull to philosophize and understand the funciton of the universe and life. However, since men are lazier on average, they don't bother to untilize their generaly higher IQ. Yes, the IQ tests are flawed and are not perfect, however they test your Intelligence much better than a U.S. history test.
What's the smartest thing to have ever come out of a woman's mouth?
Einstein's cock.
Sorry ladies... but it's just too good to be kept from the
Making the assumption that both genders and all races are equally smart is not science. If this study turns out to be true does it make you personally any smarter or stupider? No, it would just mean that the average man is slightly smarter than the average woman (argue about the worth of IQ scores all you want). That wouldn't mean there aren't a ton of women more intelligent than me. Now calm down everyone and for the love of Bob keep and open mind.
Don't mess with the bunny, outsideworld.org
Heh... and you can also be a smug arrogant bastard without really trying. I commend you! :D
Shoes:
The average man has 4 pairs of footwear: running shoes, dress shoes, boots, and slippers. The average woman has shoes 4 layers thick on the floor of her closet. Most of them hurt her feet.
Laundry:
Women do laundry every couple of days. A man will wear every article of clothing he owns, including his surgical pants that were hip about eight years ago, before he will do the laundry. When he is finally out of clothes, he will wear a dirty sweatshirt inside out, rent a U-Haul and take his mountain of clothes to the laundromat. Men always expect to meet beautiful women at the laundromat. This is a myth.
If we could all just get over the fact that men and women and different races of mankind all vary in attributes natural we would all be better off and could stop this midless bickering.
So the average man (if he really exists) has an extra 5 IQ points women have a much higher EQ (Emotional Quota), my theory is along time ago (possibly pre 70's) when dinosaurs roamed the earth Women stayed at home and took care of the young (multitasking) and developed complex social interactions to levie there position within the group (women work on a cold war basis, little violence but lots of back stabbing and politics).
Men on the other hand had the job of hunting and gathering the best were the one who used there head a bit (trap construction, ambush and biger and better pointy sticks/22 guage).
As with everything else the best and strongest did better and became dominant so women became masters of reading between the lines whilest cooking/cleaning and caring for the young and men became problem solvers, physicaly biger and created over 400 names for there penises (penii?).
IMHO thats what happened between genders.
With different races of man environment had a big role to play and as such some are on average stronger or larger (travel back to when the Romans first invaded Briton and they were amazed how much taller the Brits were). It also bares out that potentialy some races will be better at certain mental tasks.
Political correctness insists that we are a equal when we are not, we all have equal worth but NOT equal ability and I think that is something that we just have to accept and move on, of course that said it is important to remember that there is no average man and an individuals ability should be baised on their own performance not a gender/racial model.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
I think reports like this just prove how unintelligent people generally are. Earth shattering news: tests written by white males and and normed on middle class white folk consistently show these people scoring higher! OMG!!
The fact that "IQ" is an entirely arguable topic in and of itself is a whole different can of worms. I'm not at all shocked men score slightly higher on IQ tests which tend to have strong visuo-spatial components. Men, on average, are slightly better at visuo-spatial tasks, whereas women (as people have mentioned here) are, on average, better at socially related tasks. So I would not be shocked if women scored higher on a social IQ test. Men and women are different, we just have an artificial fascination with IQ Tests over other measures of intelligence so it somehow seems more important.
Yes, I'm a white male.
For anyone that questions how society "molds" one gender into something, just check out your local Toys R Us.... Everything for girls is PINK, and many of the toys seem to center around the Kitchen or babies.
Toys for boys, on the other hand, involve construction, Remote control speed machines, police, army and fireman roles.
Girls are fed Princess fantasies. Boys are fed Star Wars/Action.
Believe me that, from birth onward, gender roles are forced onto you, and if you resist, you're an outsider with no friends.
"Subdivisions -- in the shopping malls, in the backs of cars, be cool or be cast out." -- Rush
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Why do you resort to ad hominem attacks ("elitist fool"), and use as support for your argument the particular section of The Mismeasure of Man that is also ad hominem in that Gould's basic point was that early IQ testing was performed by bigots, and therefore their data is invalid? In any case, the argument "you are making the same argument that a bigot once made" hardly refutes the argument - it is ad hominem once removed!
.9 and up. Of course, you can get slightly different answers by weighting different subtests in different ways - for example, who says "intelligence" as per the SAT is 50% verbal and 50% mathematics? However, playing with these numbers only changes the results a little. So Gould is right in the sense that IQ isn't perfectly well-defined or accurate. However, it doesn't imply that it has no meaning, either. Saying your IQ is 130+-5 is little different from saying it is 130.
Actually, people with high IQ's do not do well on just "certain" tests, but on just about any test that tests anything remotely akin to what a normal person means by the term "intelligence". The correlations between a wide variety of tests are extremely high, typically
Claiming that there is no such thing as intelligence, or that it cannot be measured well enough to provide useful information, is downright silly.
This doesn't actually mean anything except that there are more bimbos than jocks - and that's probably because the jocks have a higher death rate (car crashes, military service etc). A dumb but pretty girl can get further in the world than a dumb but pretty boy which also reduces the incentive.
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Spoken like a true geek, giving long scientific lecture after supposed female said something, anything to your general direction. :p Haha
"In my house I am the boss, and I have my wife's permission to say so."
Now if he was just saying this to please my mom, not only was it bloody clever, it also did well as a way to affirm that he was indeed the boss.
Who was pulling a fast one on who ? hmmm...
So has the clever shizzle NOW ?
"Graphed separately, the male curve is a little to the right and wider than the female, meaning males have more dunces and idiots."
I'm not sure how much you actually know about the IQ concept, but you seem to me to be contradicting yourself.
The IQ scale is set such that the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 15.
Be very careful how you interpret things.
Just to the right of the ] and #. It's a double sized key with a kind of crooked arrow.
I just hit it twice!
This is a huge problem showing up in western society - most people are totally incapable of having a reasoned debate on emotion-laden topics. By the time we've finished reading the story, most of us have already formed an opinion based on whether or not we want the research to be true, not the facts supporting or detracting from its conclusion.
The parent is largely factual, whether the researcher's claims are true or not.
A caucasian male would have never made such a mistake.
That only reinforces the point that women are not as intelligent as men. Society (through magazines such as "Sports Illustrated", "GQ", etc) tries to tell men to be physically fit and attractive.
A lot of men don't listen. Most men would rather sit on their couches, guzzle a drink, down a pizza, and watch somebody else do the hard work. A lot of men don't say, "That guy is muscular and trim, therefore I should try to emulate that guy." A lot of geeks and otaku would rather be sitting at the computer than excercising.
The sheer number of titles of magazines for women ("Cosmopolitan", "Glamour", "Seventeen", etc) far outweigh the number of titles of similar magazines for men. Nobody is forcing the women to buy the magazines, and nobody is forcing the women to think "That gal is trim and voluptuous, therefore I should try to emulate that gal". Somebody is making money, though; women continue to buy those magazines.
The cosmetics industry is several billion dollars, with creams and oils that claim to take away years of aging. Whereas science has conclusively proven and warned time and again that sun tanning is dangerous to the skin, accelearates its aging, and leads to malignant forms of skin cancer, women still go to the tanning salons in droves and voluntarily bake their skin in ovens of UV light, or lay out for hours at the swimming pool or sun trying to get a tan. That's very stupid, and yet the women do it. Then they buy these oils and creams -- which are essentially high priced lotions -- which don't do a thing for their wrinkles; dummies! Only women could believe that putting cucumber slices on your eyes helps reduce skin wrinkling; a man would eat the cucumber.
In fact, what is the intelligence level of women who commit bulemia and anorexia? I can't imagine it must be very high. Nobody in society tells them to do this, since it's not attractive to look like a walking skeleton, and even when people tell them to stop (with warnings about the obvious malnutrition and the stomach acids that come up during the vomitting to rot away the teeth), they continue to do it. Why?
Because these women are basically stupid.
Women want to dye their hair blond because a Barbie doll's hair is blond? It's not like men would dye their hair to look like some toy.
Placing the "blame" on society is ridiculous.
The only type of people who are so easily suggestible are dumb people. Women are suggestible, as can be proven by billion dollar industries, and their complaint that "society forces them to do thi"...and this is symptomatic of their idiocy.
Hi all. 1st post I see that a lot of people turn the subject to the validity of the IQ test or to the notion that IQ tests dont measure anything really. For me the way to test the TEST is to ask: are there any high level (by high level I mean accomplished in their field of expertise) scientists, engineers, doctors , economists, chess players etc that DO NOT rank well with the IQ test? If not (or the % is lower than 2-3%) then the test does measure something. If women were smart they would not go out on dates with us. Case closed! Food for though: do people getting gender change operations need to have brain surgery too?
Until the one blaming off-shoring for giving Microsoft the measles turned up.
...not so much whether the tests were valid, or whether then conclusions were valid, or why the results came out the way they did, or any of that crap.
In my opinion, the biggest question studies like this leave me with is, "Who gets to define intelligence, and what is that definition?"
Seems to me that if a bunch of white males decide what "intelligence" is, and then test everybody for it, they will likely find that white males are the smartest (or, of course, it could backfire and show that Asians are smarter because they out white-maled the white males). Get a bunch of women together and let them define intelligence, and then have them test for it, and you'd probably find that women come out on top. So who is right?
This is where you get into things like the theory of multiple intelligences. Like it or not, there is some merit to that theory...people really are gifted in different categories (and some people are still gifted in none of them). The problem is who gets to decide which of those categories are important...mathematical? linguistic? musical? spatial? interpersonal?
IQ tests are an absolutely fabulous measure of intelligence...as long as your definition of "intelligence" is pretty narrow. All this is coming for somebody with a pretty damn high IQ.
you've hit the nail on the head
-ashot
right here
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Because a charlatan like Richard Lynn told you so? Have you ever even been to Africa? Some eugenicist quack without any knowledge of a single African language invents numbers out of whole cloth through "geographical averaging" [sic], chooses to ignore or downplay the Flynn Effect as it suits him, compares incomparable datasets separated by decades, uses tiny samples to stand in for entire countries, and just because the results match the racial prejudices of morons like you, it's simply eaten up uncritically. Unlike you, I've actually spent lots of time in Africa, and I know for a fact that the average person I've met in my time there was no less intelligent than the average European or white American, especially when spoken to in his or her own language. Your crap about "pure" blacks and "interbreeding" (as if people of different colors were different species) only says just how far gone you are in Nazi thinking.
Anyway, he's popped up in the mainstream media once or twice since then and always in association with highly controversial but media-friendly topics... often with a rather suspect right-wing (or far-right) 'conclusions'. Strangely enough, ISTR many of these stories broke in August...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Leave aside for a moment the question of whether or not IQ tests are fair measures of "intelligence" (whatever that is), and consider the following question:
Hypothetically, in our enlightened modern climate of equality and fairness, even if were proven beyond doubt that (for example) men are more intelligent than women, would we accept it or (as most of the comments above, and on the BBC News feedback page) merely reject it out of hand?
Nobody would be up in arms if asian students were proven better at maths, or if gay people made better artists, or if women were proven more intelligent than men.
However, the first suggestion that the perceived majority group (straight white males) might be better than any minority, at anything, threatens us - just listen to the knee-jerk reaction of almost-unanimous disapproval.
The experimental procedure and results haven't been published yet - nobody even knows what the numbers are, how the trial was conducted or even what IQ test(s) were used, and yet here we have people who know nothing but a soundbite about the final conclusion of the study, already feeling justified in ripping it to shreds.
This has none of the justifications of considered intellectual doubt, and all of the hallmarks of instinctive emotional rejection.
Regarding the researcher's other work, does this necessarily prove he's a bigot? Could he (in fact) be merely discovering unexpected and therefore interesting statistical trends?
Racists claim that one race is unilaterally better than another, and this is (rightly) universally recognised as bad. However, wishful-thinking political correctness stipulates there's no difference between any groups of people, and this is clearly bullshit. Adults are stronger than kids. Men are generally stronger than women. Women are generally more empathic than men. And yes, black men on average have bigger (longer but thinner) penises than white men - look up the statistics.
These facts have been statistically proven time and time again, yet because they don't fit with our prevailing ideology we pretend they don't exist. This is no less intellectually dishonest than creationists who selectively ignore evidence that contradicts their position.
If we truly believing in science, mathematics and rationality means sometimes having to confront facts or possibilities that make us uncomfortable. Putting our hands over our ears and singing "Lalalalalala" is just as bad when we do it as when the ID or creationist crew do the same.
Assuming the study's accurate and valid, does this mean that women are stupid? No, it means that the average woman is (almost unmeasurably) less "intelligent" (whatever that means) than the average man. It means that men are more likely to be geniuses, not that women can't be.
Get down off your high-horses, reign in the emotion and behave in the same way we demand of the creationists - rational, sensible, and valuing Correct thoughts over Comfortable ones.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Do you know how science works at all? Since when did the burden lie on skeptics to "disprove" far-fetched claims? I can pull "numbers" out of my ass too, but I bet you wouldn't swallow them wholesale if they didn't fit with your prejudices, would you?
The poster you pounded out your inane response to is right: an IQ of 59 is so low that in clinical practice such a person should be barely able to function in society, let alone live an independent life as Equatorial Guineans actually do.
Sure I can pick up cues. I can pick up all cues. When I say "What's wrong?" and she says "Nothing" I know something's wrong. The difference is that I'm not 12, and if there was something bothering me I'd tell her instead of having her play 20 questions.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Didn't a Noble prize winner, Mr Shockley, Find that Nigros and brown people in general were mentally deficent? and hasn't it been shown that the yellow cross-eyed bucktooth menace from ching-chong-china are better at math? So? What's the problem? It must be the color, or the sun, or stupidity.
Women also excel at spreading their attention.
:P. All the women I know can't watch TV and talk at the same time. Another example, say you and a friend of yours are walking down the street. You look in front of you and there are people coming your way and you turn to talk to your friend. You know people are coming, and will look forward after a while to avoid running into them. Women don't do that. I've bumped into women many times because I assumed they'd look early enough to avoid me. I'm not trolling or anything, that's my experience with women (and some of my male friends as well).
Stop spreading lies
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Ours is called the "Physics lab".
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible. -- Margaret Mead
Slashdot = Sarcasm
... from man to woman or woman to man allmost all state that living as a woman is noteably more difficult than living as a man.
If anyone can truely compare, then it's this type of people.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So let me get this straight... According to the research, on the one hand the highest ranking intelligent people are males; and on the other hand, the lowest ranking bottom-of-the-pile-dumb-as-nails people are also males?
So we are both smarter *and* stupider than women. Did they even bother to include women in this research?
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Since when is that news??
*ducks*
|| Geshem ||
IAAPS, i am a psychologist soon, and i dont think that this study infers in any way that there are biological differences between the sexes. there are many obvious differences in the way man and woman get treated in society that will most likely contribute to differences in intelligence tests. since you have many, many observable facts like rolemodels, sexism, pregancy that can and will on average hinder woman in their intellectual development there is no reason to infer a biological one. i dont say that there isn't, there just isn't any reason to imply. think about the way our brain/mind works, how adaptable it is to different stimuli/situations. lets make an inadequate comparison that will spark some +funny posts :)
you got 2 computers. one is running linux, the other windows. you see differences in some task specific performance. would you attribute that to differences in the underlying hardware without knowing a thing about it?
...that men are better at taking IQ tests than women.
IQ tests simply look at a set of mental skills that are deemed to be representative of intelligence. In practice, any intellectual activity requires more than these. In particular, all problems set in such tests are brief: there is no test for integration and planning over multiple small problems.
In short, this 'study' amounts to nothing.
Keep in mind that an emeritus professor can be dumber than SCO and they still can't fire him. There might be a loophole for insanity, but only for the more violent kinds.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
during the course of my studies for a degree - a degree that the girls succeeded in better than the guys, btw - we studied the correlation between IQ test results and levels of extrovertness.
it turns out, the people who score highest on IQ tests are generally shy, less likely to ask for help for even trivial things during the course of their lives.
ergo, they think more for themselves when it comes to problem solving (often reinventing the wheel in the process), but it's great practice when something real important comes along, like phychologists waving around meaningless pieces of paper.
girls in general are a lot less socially inept, so it makes sense that the IQ results are lower, because they're more used to solving problems in a group effort.
as an aside, i personally believe that the only real psychological (not physical) differences between men and women are induced by society, and upbringing. men and women's brains possess the same functionality, we're just taught to use them differently, is all.
---- I was woken up this morning by a face full of fur. Damn cat thought my head made a good pillow.
Meg, start at Psalm 41 and don't stop reading until I tell you! The power of Christ compels you!
help her to achieve her dreams. add a little plastic here and there, just not TOO much, then send her my way. i'll be happy to find things for her to do.
FLAME ON
---- I was woken up this morning by a face full of fur. Damn cat thought my head made a good pillow.
Hmm once again I find myself in possible disagreement with you and in the same thread nonetheless! Hope you don't mind too much, it's not personal :)
Anyway, would not most soap operas fit the bill as a "realistic drama" type show where the female characters are generally at least slightly smarter? I haven't seen many but remember seeing episodes with my mother of Dynasty (correct name?), and Falcon Crest which had plenty of strong female characters that outwitted the men in all sorts of fashions (my mom loved Alexis (lol scary) and whatever the female top boss was named in Falcon Crest). Maybe it is a function of those shows having a lot of female viewers and as such catering to them or the other way around (although these examples are above the ordinary ilk of soap operas and were shown during evening "prime time" when they were fresh - at least here in Norway - i.e. lots of men watched them as well).
I don't watch all that much tv but even though every CSI version has a male top dog there are plenty of smart intelligent female characters in those, a fairly egalitarian distrubition both on the good side and the bad. Same can be said (or even more so) about The 4400 series imo. Yes I know CSI isn't strictly speaking realistic and that The 4400 is far far away from it but the characters themselves and their personalities are realistic enough.
What about Martha Stewarts version of The Apprentice? (I haven't seen any of it myself but I've heard about it). Sex in the city? Not exactly realistic perhaps but isn't the whole concept there a group of "get-go" women? (I've just seen it briefly while channelsurfing). Whatever that female judge series is called? (or isn't there more than one?). Cold Case has an extremely intelligent female cop as the top dop (and is a nice series to boot). Ally McBeal (sp?) - yes drifting off into the unrealistic here... Alias? The psychic female investigator show, whatever it is called? Buffy? (decidedly unrealistic now, but still).
I think the list could go on, my point is that there should be plenty of shows where females characters in some way play roles that are smarter than "the men", and across the whole width of shows from highly realistic to complete fantasy. And I would say that these shows have plenty of stupid men in them.
I can't think of any show where absolutely all the men are slobbering dimwits but then again I can't think of any show where the same applies to women. However I can think of plenty where either (or even both sexes) are portrayed as, or actually are, nothing but dimwitted "sexual objects" (or at least intended to be "sexy") cue "reality tv".
I guess my point of contention is the not too uncommon focus on men having to be portrayed as dumber in order to refute the argument being made about "whatever" (uaually some claptrap ramblings about every woman being a slave unless so-and-so, which, interestingly enough, is usually the proponents of whatever argument shooting themselves in the foot by dismissing all the examples to the contrary up through history - especially the last centuries). It's not really an honest way to portray things, nor particularily efficient as it easily becomes anti-male rather than pro-female or pro-egalitarian.
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
maybe he should go back to teaching? Kansas would be the place to start; it intends to give time to the teaching of different theories - like (un)intelligent design ...
-
may you be touched by his noodly appendage
that when she starts work in the supermarket checkout she will have to work harder.
The most beautifully checkout girls always have the longest queues.
is that you can make them do wonderful things. and there's always the possibility that you fell outside of the curve. just because it's unlikely, doesn't mean it won't happen every time.
like yesterday. i misplaced an electron 500,000 times. DAMN.
---- I was woken up this morning by a face full of fur. Damn cat thought my head made a good pillow.
"computers suck at social interactions. Women also excel at spreading their attention"
Computers also suck at thinking, they simply can't at the moment, and if you're spreading your attention you're not focusing.
"you never know which next female will be the one to outdo Newton"
With women having more difficulty focusing, visualising the abstract it's statistically more likely that the scientific geniuses following Newton will be an Einstein, Schroedinger, Bohr or Hawking.
"Men in prison, on the other hand, they just gang up. Women in prison don't gang. When it comes to adapting to prison life, I'd say women are more intelligent."
Males are competitive, agressive, violent. A gang makes perfect sense in that environment, it's the prison equivalent of mutually assured destruction. It works, has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with survival in a particular environment.
Other than that, I'm not saying men are smarter than women, it's a stupid concept. We simply have different and more importantly, complementary strengths. Evolution designed males and females to survive by working in concert, that simple, anything else is hyperbole. There's no point having a team where everyone has the same skills, a team full of goalkeepers or quarterbacks is a losing proposition.
Deleted
"This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world."
Steven Jay Gould wrote a great deal on the history of various methods of "mental testing" including IQ. These tests have been used to justify slavery, anti-immigration policies, and, yes, treating women as inferiors. Read more in The Mismeasurement of Man. In it, he shows the fallacy of assigning any real world meaning to these tests.
"there is evidence that women utilise their (lesser!) talents better than men."
That is a common cop out to the fact that these results are likely meaningless. It is easy to dismiss any evidence to the contrary to the women-are-inferior hypothesis with such assertions. I would wager this guy "knew" in his mind what he wanted the outcome to be before he starting his study.
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
From my experience...not even using slashdot or the responses to this thread as an example...I would say the reverse is probably true.
A psychologist's compilation book on the topic of achievement (Before the Gates of Excellence) that I read around 1990 reported that the male population has greater variability -- more geniuses but equally more idiots.
As I under it, there are more males at both ends of the IQ curve.
I think that is all old news.
Speaking as a male.... bullshit.
Apparently, it is also true that men have larger penises than women.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
IMHO a little common sense is worth *far* more than anything I've ever seen measured in any tests...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I've lived with women a few times (I'm a gay dude, so only as friends), and I have to say... where does all the toilet paper go?! What can they do with that much of it? I typically go through maybe a roll every couple weeks on my own. When I had a female roommate, we'd use at least a couple rolls a week. Some days, I'd replace the roll, and in the evening I'd come home and my mind would fart at how small it had gotten during the day while I was at school.
Someone enlighten me?
Great comment. I find it remarkable that we live in a "tolerant" society, but in fact the vast majority only tolerate a politically-correct outlook, and dismiss logical analysis.
In other news, researchers have discovered that black men tend to be better at basketball than white men. "There is a significant statistical difference..." said one researcher.
Frankly, when it comes to dealing with women, none of that matters. It doesn't matter who's smarter, THEY are always right, regardless of how illogical it is and how little sense it makes.
On another note, there might be some light on why certain races may be less "intelligent" on average. I heard that back when slavery was common in the US, the smarter slaves were killed off with the fear of them eventually outsmarting their masters.
"Ha-Ha!"
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The number of women I've spoken to who said they wouldn't ever work for a supervisor that was a woman.
When I ask why they can't give a straight answer but I know what it is.
You use 100% of your brain, 10% as an average at a time. If you would use 100% of your brain at any given moment you'd do all it can do at the same time... and that's not good.
So what this actually means is that women are intelligent in different ways, and we men happen to do better on tests that we probably designed. Shock and dismay!
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I'm not even pretending I spell-checked this.
While informative generalisations are often handy (e.g. Making your Jewish girlfriend a Full English is probably not ideal - don't try it unless know better) it is far more usual to deal with people on a personal, individual rather than group level. When you do that statistical averages are meaningless.
So rather than getting offended about studies that may or may not be twaddle, recognise that for all intents and purposes other than those meant to insult these statistics are not relevant to any kind of human interaction whatsoever.
they'd know when to keep their mouths shut about such things.
I was given this article by a collegue just a couple days. It dates back to 2002, but is still incredibly relevant. Read it and enjoy. It talks quite a bit about how IQ and success have not been shown to be correlated. http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.h tm
At least where I live (Norway), short messages and mobile communication (ie without any of those non-verbal cues) seems to be generate a lot more income to the telcos from females than from males.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
From the summary:
This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world.
No, it doesn't. That's not what begging the question means. Perhaps it raises that question. Begging the question is assuming the wanted conclusion.
So, for instance, if the professor said, "IQ tests measure immutable intelligence. Women do less well on IQ tests. Therefore, women are less intelligent," when it's not precisely known if there is a single thing measurable as intelligence (as opposed to a number of factors which tend to correlate, but don't lend themselves to organizing humans on a Great Chain of Being, white boys up near the top and black folks down near the bottom.)
Remember, Steven Jay Gould said that there are four factors that are necessary for this interpretation of intelligence: it must be reliably measurable. It must be a single linearly-rankable quality. It must be heritable (well, for the race-based portion of this trope). And it must be immutable. Drop any of those four (three for the sex-based portion) and the whole argument collapses.
All that his data shows is a correlation between sex (or, elsewhere, race) and what is measured by IQ tests. (Did You Know that the Alfred Binet, inventor of IQ tests, was strongly opposed to any interpretation of IQ as a real thing instead of just an average, or of its being considered immutable? Yeah, he's been doing a slow rotisserie in his grave since Yerkes and Goddard brought his work to America.)
Remember, folks, correlation ain't causation. Very basic stuff, here. And yet so persistent.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Answers are simple:
Q.E.D.
"Let battle commence" Me can not type "the" Men are smart Slashdot articles made by woman ugh. indian smart too.
I always thought an IQ test only predicted how white and male you were.
meh
You know, we really just have to crack down and accept that men and women are different. Men are physically stronger, on average, than women, it even holds true for those who don't even do anything to improve their strength. There's a lot of things that women are better than men at. It all has to do with millions of years of evolution. A species with both males and females, evolving with different strengths, and then using those strengths together, will be much better off than a species that can only develop one set of strengths.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
CowboyNeal said:
"This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world."
A good answer to that is the late Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" Poor old Binet--of Stanford-Binet, the grandaddy of all IQ tests--really had a great idea that was totally screwed up when ideologues grabbed the concept and ran with it.
Highly recommended book.
It is very hard to spot the women in the Physics lab, but they're there. They leave behind neatly bubble-written math assignments and keep impeccable notes.
Oh and these women would never be caught dead in a "womyn's" center, they'd be far too likely to encounter arts students.
Righty tighty. Lefty loosey.
As long as we don't tell any of them then they're still dependent on us to change their tires.
Seriously, the smartest people I've met in my life was female. One of my old lab partners, a pre-med. She'd spend less than a 1/3 the time the rest of did studying and consistently score higher. A brilliant and insightful person.
I know, I know. If she was that smart why was she hanging around with me? Hahahahaha
ha.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
- Who Started apartheid
- Who leaded the nazis into killing millions
- Who decided to launch the atomic bomb on hiroshima and nagasaki?
Answer: All were done by men.Do you still think men are smarter than women?
Then again, some people think that having a low /. id number makes them smarter than those with higher numbers.
I knew that she was moving that day, and was able to figure out that the piano was going to be trouble, and that the movers would probably use a dolly, not thinking about how all the weight would be put on each rickety step leading up to our apartment.
So, guys, you can fake mind reading by using some deduction. :)
Get it checked out - while you still CAN!
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Sure, this study will cause an uproar and people will tear it apart. But what if... it's true?
How can I say that? How can I imply that any group could be tested to be superior to another in any way? All men (and women!) are created equal! There is nothing different about anyone! The world is fair and just!
The above paragraph is the consensus, it seems, but it is also just a religion, and has no basis in reality. There are notable differences between different groups. Women have a better sense of smell and color than men. Men are physically stronger than women. Women are more emotionally engaged then men. Men might be (as this study suggests) more intelligent than women.
I think one of the problems here is that people aren't good at distinguishing between individuals and groups (I think that weakness is to blame for most of the world's troubles, but I digress). Though I believe in my heart that an individual of any sex or race or creed can rise to be whatever they want, I am not afraid to admit that as a group they may be greater or lesser than another.
To be clear with an example: "men" are physically stronger than "women". This is well established. But not all men are stronger than all women. I am an average strength man but there are many women who are stronger than me. Maybe even the strongest man is stronger than the strongest woman, but if we're talking about individuals we could say something as meaningless as the strongest person with type O blood is stronger than the strongest person with type B blood. Oh horror!
It's the same thing with intelligence, I think. I am going to go out on a sexist limb and say that men are smarter than women. I am surely a sexist bastard now. But let me just say that the smartest person I happen to know is a woman. And I know many smart women who are smarter than most men. Still, if I was to average out the groups (an arguably useless excercise) I would say in my personal experience that it seems men are smarter than women.
Though I haven't discussed this with my intelligent female friends, I think that they might agree -- as several of them have a hard time making female friends themselves because there is a lacking of intelligent females. At least, that is what they have implied.
I think the same thing applies to race and creed and any other group division. You may find a tendancy in the group, but you will find plenty of individual exceptions. So I don't think these group tendancies are limiting or all that important. Everyone has a shot to be what they want to be, nature or nurture aside.
Cheers.
in most cases, but its also a motivating factor. Without emotion yes you'd be more lazy.
Emotion has its value when dealing with people, logic has its value when dealing with things. Guys are better with things in most cases.
A good porition of the IQ test are asking problem solving questions for various type of problems. As a professional software engineer I am usually solving similar type problems in designing and writing the applications that I work on.
So in considering the fact there is a low female to male ratio throughout the profession the results of this experiment don't really come as any surprise to myself.
Needless to say I have found that women make better project managers than men. This is because they are better organisers and better at dealing with and managing people than say myself.
I always found it amusing that people cannot comprehend and accept there are differences between the sexes. I know one person who REFUSES to believe that on average men are stronger then women, and men are faster then women. Also, the strongest man is stronger then the strongest woman, and the fastest man is faster then the fastest woman.
Physically men are, hands down more dominate. That is an easy conclusion everyone can do on their own. Men were, historically and even today, considered the hunters. They have greater upper body strength.
br Now to go on and say men are smarter. While I am not doubting these findings (I haven't done any such research) there will be a lot of pissed off people in denial - no matter how much evidence. The only reason for this is people refuse to fathom that not all sexes/races are created equal.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
wtf is a "uni"?
There isn't some magical 'talking about logical fallacy' mode of conversation. There are occasionally opportunities to use it in normal speech in which confusion could ensue. One example recently when talking to a developer about a feature in their project:
Him:It doesn't matter that the feature doesn't perfectly work right, it's being removed in the next version.
Me:The problem is that people use that feature a lot and will be unhappy it'll be gone.
Him:They shouldn't be using it and therefore they shouldn't miss it.
Me:Why is that?
Him:Because it is going to be gone in the next release
Me:You're begging the question.
Him:What question is that?
Here, I used correctly the phrase begging the question, but he entirely missed the point assuming the 'common usage'.
It is not unheard of to have words with multiple distinct meanings (bat being a prime example), but usually the meanings are used in fairly distinct contexts. For example, bat as in something to hit things with versus a flying rodent, the contexts tend to be different, however if you used the word ball to describe something to hit things with, then baseball would be uselessly confusing.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This should not be moderated highly. The parent post is obviously flamebait, as anybody from either the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland will agree.
The post has nothing to do with the article but only tries to incite hatred.
Mod parent down please.
Nice man. Nice, nice man. *Scans for a good rock*
You will accept that Black people are (for example) more likely to develop anaemia than White people, or more likely to have curly hair than White people, and so on, but nobody treats Black people differently because of this. These are just irrelevant statistics.
The reason why the debate over intelligence is so turbulent is because while saying "black folks get sickle-cell anemia more often" isn't an effort to place everyone on a partial order, to rank them and decide that one group is better than another. The effort to consider intelligence as a single number, as something unitary and immutable (and heritable, if we're talking about race) is irrevocably tied to the idea that we're all on a scale from nothingness to divine perfection---the same idea that leads to people thinking of "evolution" as inevitably proceeding "upward", of spiders and giant redwoods as "less evolved" than humans.
This is a holdover from the idea of the Great Chain of Being, which was a method by which scientists used to arrange everything on a scale, with snot and rocks at the bottom, then monkeys and black people, then finally white people, angels and God. Except the angels and God weren't around, so white people were in charge. 'Cause that's the way it was meant to be.
Do you see why talking about intelligence is different from talking about sickle-cell anemia?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You know, unpopular research is still research. I am somewhat reluctant to think that a professor has fudged his data just to satisfy racial prejudices.
Just what shocks me is that - in general, mind you, not in specific - my stupid cousin from South Carolina is right, in part, about his prejudices.
Now, before you go lynching me in protest, I said in general. I know idiots from China and PhDs from Africa. When you select a group for averages - especially something as general as a racial or gender population - you're going to get some wild deviations from the average.
What does it mean, for all practicality? Nothing. Maybe a refined genetic selection process for future guided breeding processes (substitute a gene here, splice in some DNA there...).
What I'd really like to see is this guy (or someone else obsessed with IQ points) do this kind of testing versus actual DNA. You know, figure out which genes are smart and which are not. This racial/gender shit is kinda useless and impractical, but the research methods could be applied to DNA and fine-toothed with a few computers until we know which sequences mean "smart as hell".
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Sample questions and answers
1) Beer is _______
a. a fermented beverage
b. a leading cause of motor vehicle accidents
c. nature's most perfect food
2) Brad Pitt is _______
a. to die for
b. a blend of small nails and fruit seeds
c. not all that
3) When lost in an unfamiliar city, you should:
a. ask a local for directions
b. consult a map
c. insist that this is a short cut
4) Perfect breasts are ____
a. abundant with milk for feeding babies
b. bilaterally symmetrical
c. really friggin' HUGE
5) A visit to the doctor is necessary when:
a. you feel ill
b. he's really cute
c. to be resisted at all costs
6) Lesbians are:
a. women who are attracted primarily to other women
b. at low risk for STDs
c. all shapely blonds who want me to watch them get it on
7) PMS stands for:
a. Pre Menstrual Syndrome
b. Post Menstrual Syndrome
c. three or four days that you have to be at the office by 8am and stay until 11pm
EXTRA CREDIT: Write your name in the snow using only your body fluids.
("c" is the correct answer to all numbered questions.)
"Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top. " - Edward Abbey
There are several things going-on here. . .
1. Intellect-Quotient doesn't measure intelligence, only intellect as defined by male cognizers.
1a. that means that it is ( and has long been ) a means of negating/denying women's kind of intelligence, and therefore is a means of abuse-of-(category's)-worth
( in this case, category being "women" )
1b. Therefore, since we have enough intelligence to feel/perceive that hitting bruise is different from hitting robust non-bruise, we perceive that adding yet another abuse on beaten-on woman-worth isn't "good" ( read Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind to discover how women are put-down in/by the assumptions in, and enforced-by, male-engineered education & definition-of-knowledge .. no it isn't primarily about how women are put-down, but reading it is eye-opening for anyone who wants to know Woman, who didn't grow-up-in woman-mind/culture/experience. The male-ignorance-enforcement-establishment's backlash against that book was such that they did an answer to the backlash & followup book, Knowledge, Difference and Power: Essays Inspired by Women's Ways of Knowing )
2. There are a number of quite different kinds of intelligence, Intellect-Quotient being only one. Daniel Goleman, in one of his papers, said that at-least 7 major ones had been identified, including relational-intelligence, which no male-engineered-quotient is even going to acknowledge ( unless forced! ), let-alone value.
Seven Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Multiple Intelligences by Thomas Armstrong lists these: "word smart" "music smart" "logic smart" "people smart" "naturalist" "existential" on the reviews. . .
in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess Leonard Shlain notices that any population that saturates its substance-of-knowing on atomic-sequential-alphabetic-literacy, then does misogynistic-pogrom mode ( listing holocausts from time-nearly-immemorial ), and pointing-out the rather-precise mesh between saturating a population with when it butchers everything ( especially woman-nature ) that it can.
HAVING EXPERIENCED R-MIND, which I couldn't even-have-believed-to-exist for the first 30 years of my life, I understand that the spasdic "left-brain-dominant" mode that our "education" manufactures, in order to protect its mode, or to protect itself/habit, is incapable of knowing entire dimensions of Reality.
Also a consequence of having experience R-Mind as well-as L-Mind, I know that "woman" is more R-Mind than guy-mind is, and that that is probably why L-Mind butchers woman-worth so aggressively: to protect itself from the existence-of differentness's being.
Merely-read The New Drawing On The Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards PhD to know-about it ( bogo-intelligence ) or . .
honestly-work-through it to KNOW what it's talking-about ( knowing ). .
which is precisely the kind of thing that started me on this: years ago a friend told me that it was insane to even permit someone who could not ever experience being a woman to be a gynecologist, and that struck me. .
then a few years later I mentioned this to another woman, and she told me a woman could not be a gynecologist, because a woman couldn't be a doctor ( she wasn't young, and our cultural-programming had been effective, hadn't it? ).
What's insipid about the whole thing, is that it's been known for years that women are MUCH better at steady/fi
IPTables enhancement Fail2Ban bans cracker-login's
Dr. Lynn makes a number of points, arguable and agreeable depending on your slant. I'm not going to argue with his research - that's stupid. I will argue with this conclusions. I think this is one of the better (or worst, if you prefer) examples of how academics use scholarly intelligence to make up for what they lack in common sense. Read his web page, and tell me if you agree on that point.
It is known that men and women think somewhat diffrently. This is just the old idea that men have a "visual & spacial coprocessor". It is not about intelligence in general. For real information on the issue, check out:
_ index.html
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05
Furthermore, there is an enormous amount of evidence that women suffer from being educated with men. Indeed, most of the best female academics went to all girls schools. Knowing this guys work, he probably didn't bother to control for education. You should really compare women & men educated in mixed & segregated classes. You will find that male preformance is not much effected by segregation, but female proformance is greatly increased by segregation.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
My dad's told me this for years.
You do not know what the hell you are talking about. In fact, I daresay you have never taken an IQ test or you would know that such questions do not appear.
IQ test questions and problems test *cognitive abilities* and reasoning, among other things, *not* knowledge.
The only "biased" IQ test is a written one administered to an illiterate person--who may have very high intelligence, but simply cannot read or write; he lacks knowledge, not intellect.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Given that there are studies showing that women are much better at multi-tasking than men, and that men are much better at tasks requiring focus and concentration, we have concluded that women are perceived to be less intelligent because the multi-tasking tests are by nature limited to less demanding tasks and the tasks requiring concentration are more like the questions on an IQ test.
Historically, a mother must keep track of several small children and provide for the diverse needs of her family. Mothers who are able to multi-task well are more successful and their families have a higher survival rate. Men, who are physically larger/stronger than the women, have typically assumed the roles of hunter and warrior. These roles require focus and concentration. (If your opponent is focusing on crushing your skull while you're trying to multi-task several battles at once, you probably won't survive very long.)How does this relate to IQ? IQ tests measure traits that are more often associated with being able to concentrate on solving complex problems, so they favor men. It can be said that if women spend most of their time multi-tasking on tasks that are less demanding, they tend to get "out of practice" for the more demanding tasks. It can also be argued that the ability to "shift gears" rapidly and often is a component of intelligence, but the standard IQ tests do not measure it.
Both of these factors come into play, and women get a "double whammy" in IQ comparisons with men.You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
If the measure is IQ, then this is just another idiocy from academia. (Not surprising in this age of "intelligent design".)
IQ measures the level of cultural assimilation and social conditioning, that's all.
The same crap has been used to show that whites (actually 'beiges') are smarter than... (fill-in your preferred prejudice).
Jive ass honkys.
If the measure of "intelligence" used is an IQ test,I don't find it surprising that white men are found to be, on average, more intelligent than either women or blacks. In fact, if the study is of IQ test results, that's exactly the result I'd expect.
But not because white men are, at birth, smarter than black men or women. It's because you can be trained to do better at IQ tests, and also because IQ tests show a bias towards certain skills.
If you have done a lot of problems that are similar to the problems on IQ tests, you'll do better at IQ tests. People who have access to good education will do better on IQ tests than people who do not, a trend that follows wealth, which in the United States at least, tends to follow race.
I'd also expect men to do better on IQ tests than women because a lot of IQ test questions relate to spacial reasoning (figures that need to be manipulated in space), something men's brains may be better at doing that women's brains. This may make men naturally ore "intelligent" in regards to this particular subset of problems, but put some emotional reasoning questions on that IQ test and you may find that bias goes away.
If you were to do this same study with POOR white people and POOR black people, at a young age, in the same set of school districts, I would guess you would find that the IQ scores were pretty much the same.
Anyway, the moral ofthe story is that if this test is based on IQ test scores, it doesn't say 'Men are smarter than women". It says that "Men get better IQ test scores than women", which could very well just show a gender bias in the test.
paintball
While the good doctor may indeed be begging the question with regard to the relative intelligence of women, his article raises the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
From the statistical evidence I've seen so far (and my mother is a gifted education teacher, so I've seen a lot), men and women have the same average IQ. The problem is that men have a higher variation in their IQ levels. What this means is that there are a lot more really stupid guys that really stupid girls, and there are a lot more really smart guys than really smart girls. (I'm not counting mentally disabled people here). On average, it evens out... but it means that the smartest person you know is more likely to be male than female, and the bumbest person you know is more likely to be male than female. On a place like a college campus (or in industry), when you only have the brighter people to begin with, the average IQ of males will be higher than that of females, because all the really stupid people aren't there... and as mentioned before, most of the really stupid people are guys. Of course, females still get higher average GPAs than males, and more of them will attend college than males (in the USA), but no one thinks this means girls are smarter...
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I agree with everything you said, but the question is: why do people react this way? There are very intelligent, very rational people that will do exactly what you described: dismiss anything like this out of hand. Why?
The issue is people's worldview. The universe as a whole is too complex for the human mind. So we take bits and pieces of it and make a model in our head of how the world works -- our gut feel on how things are. Call it a philosophy, a perspective, a metacontext, whatever; it's all the same.
The thing is, once we form a world view, we protect it. It's so fundamental to how we think, that we would question fact before questioning it. Because of this, it tends to act as a filter to data coming into our brains. Those facts that support our worldview get special attention. Those that do not -- or actually contridict it -- get explained away or ignored.
This isn't really intellictual dishonesty because this usually happens before our intellectual mind gets ahold of the data. And it's not always bad. When our worldview -- our mental model -- is fairly accurate, it helps us simplify and speed up the process of reason. It's bad, though, when the world view contridicts important facts.
So, some people have as a fundamental part of their worldview that white males have always been dominant because they have always been racist and sexist and violent and basically bad, but certainly not superior. In fact -- to them -- most prejudice has always been motivated by realization of inferiority to these other groups. If data comes out that, no, white males might actually have some superior qualities in certain areas then, to them, it cannot be correct. It contridicts their worldview. So, instead of questioning their fundamental beliefs about how the world works, they question the data.
We all do the exact same thing all the time, in whatever area our own worldview comes into conflict with reality. Which is why true scientific objectivity is so difficult, if not impossible. You have to continually check your own biases before absorbing just about anything. It's very tough. Few people ever achieve it with any real consistency.
Specialization is for Insects
You're SUPPOSED to apologize, send flowers or something...
Then do the same thing you apologized for again.
THAT'S what keeps 'em keen. If you don't apologize, they can't show their friends how nice you are, and if you don't do it again they'll have fixed you and move on.
paintball
Any man publishing a report that men are more intelligent then women proves men are not. I would never tell my girlfriend that I am more intelligent then her. A smart man would claim women are more intelligent then men.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Caucasian males is the way to go.
Apparently mod points don't correlate with better grammar, though. So in conclusion, maybe people with fewer mod points use their grasp of the language better.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
omg everyone that is SOOOO not true! I*m a girl and i*m realllly smart!! i*m not a airhead even tho everyone calls me that!!
~ Angelic Carrie ~
In particular, I'm one who got a 1420 on his SAT. Intelligence really isn't all that great.
There are Lies....
There are Damm Lies...
There are Bloody Damm Lies...
Then There are Statistics..
This is a perfect example of this theory.
zeta male
Why do the scientists who run these studies overlook THE big problem? Historically, women were not allowed to go to school. Then when they were, they were not encouraged to make it a priority, or to persue intellectual hobbies in their spare time. TODAY, this is less of an issue, but there is still a smaller percent of women who make book-school-learning a priority or passion. Women tend to get more fulfillment from social pursuits. This is already a known fact.
Knowing that, does anyone remember their IQ test(s)? Questions that test your skill by asking you the meaning of obscure words. Or your math skills, reading, pattern recognition, etc. People who have not given their brains lots of excercise in this type of work as they grew up, will not be as good at it. Not because they can't, but because they never excercised their ability.
If Tiger Woods had never picked up a golf club, he still would have had the potential to be great, but never would have developed it.
Wait a few generations when the % of women with a lifetime intellectual focus/interest is equal to men, then run the study!
I read somewhere that for each language you know (full ability to read, write, speak, understand, etc), your IQ increases by three points.
How is this taken into account during IQ tests? or is it?
Professional football is probably the best example of this; most people think Pro Football players are a bunch of cave men left over from the paleolethic era [if cave men didn't exist in that era, that's all fine and dandy but I'm making a slashpoint; I don't have to back up what I say with actual scientific evidence because I say so!] but reality is quite a bit different. In order to be a successful linebacker or quaterback in the NFL you need to have some grey matter uptop otherwise you're going to get beaten silly. There aren't many of us here who could synthesize every play that your opposing team had run for the past ten weeks; Peyton Manning does this. He knows opponents defenses so well that he calls out their blitzing and coverage schemes at the line of scrimmage. This is not rote learning, this requires sophisticated synthesization of oppoenents playbooks because defensive schemes are designed to mask blitz/coverage info.
Personally, I'd be so fucking afraid of being hit by the 6'6 275lb defensive end who runs a 40 in 4.4 seconds that I wouldn't even know how to get the center to snap the ball. Point being, don't think these guys are stupid because they play a violent sport; they may be lacking common sense but some of these guys could go toe-to-toe with the smartest people here.
I think that *all* intelligent human beings, of both sexes, should be outraged and disgusted that the society in which is so hostile to the pursuit of actual truth, that research scientists find themselves in a position where they need to be "apologetic about the findings" of their research.
There's a pretty good essay written by Charles Murray entitled "The Inequality Taboo" here: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files /murray0905.html. Long reading, though. You have been warned.
Hypothetically, in our enlightened modern climate of equality and fairness, even if were proven beyond doubt that men are more intelligent than women, would we accept it or merely reject it out of hand?
We would reject it, and quite sensibly, because this fact (like his conclusion that whites are more intelligent than blacks) tends to lead people to the illogical conclusion that intelligence is genetically determined.
Intelligence is a funny thing; no one can prove exactly how much of it is tied to genes and how much of it is tied to upbringing. Assuming this data is true, would women be more intelligent than men if they were raised as completely equal to men? Anecdotal evidence suggests yes. After all, the "smartest human in the world" judging solely by IQ is a woman, not a man.
So if men are more intelligent, this might only demonstrate that women aren't yet being treated as full equals by our parents and teachers. Same for non-whites. Yet when most people hear "men are smarter than women" or "whites are smarter than blacks", they hear a sexist or racist slur.
And how could you expect them not to? No matter how often you add the phrase "statistically speaking", it SOUNDS like a stereotype. Even when you say "MOST men are smarter than MOST women," what people hear is "ALL men are smarter than ALL women."
If I were to point out the simple and obvious fact that "Most of your schoolteachers were smarter than you", what it inevitably sounds like I'm saying is "You were a stupid student."
Some things don't sound nice no matter how you say them. This is one of them. Saying that men are smarter than women, STATISTICALLY SPEAKING, is only a helpful fact if you IMMEDIATELY couple it to the statement "This shows that women aren't yet treated as equals in our schools."
Because the statistical data does nothing to prove that women MUST REMAIN less intelligent than men. It can't. But since this is what must be inferred, it is better for the statement to remain unspoken.
Posted about this on my blog:
n telligence-differences.html
http://libertariancivility.blogspot.com/2005/08/i
And yet, year after year, they don't pick up on the subtle cues that their subtle clues aren't picked up.
You can't take the sky from me...
Fun word here: "reification". The idea that just because you name something, it exists. The assumption is that intelligence is a single, rankable, immutable thing. ('Cause if it isn't, you can't say that one person is better than another, and suddenly it matters a whole lot less.)
See, various tests tend to correlate with one another. The idea of IQ is to have a subject take scads of these tests in the hope of measuring the quality that they all have in common.
But this "general factor" is nothing more than a convenient mathematical abstraction. We don't know if it represents a single quality of intelligence that white people tend to have more of than black people.
It's a very seductive idea, this plan of ranking everyone in the whole world on a big scale from Smartest to Dumbest. But here, let's take another example:
People's height and weight tend to correlate. Taller people tend to be heavier. But let's take the product of height and weight to get a Size Product, or SP. Now we can rank everyone in the world by size from Biggest to Tiniest. The problem is that our ranking doesn't really say anything---we've squished two factors into one, and have lost a great deal of information. We've manufactured a number that seems to reflect size, but it's just an abstraction.
So, is intelligence a real single entity, or is it just an abstraction of multiple quantities? I don't think the answer has been conclusively established, and until it has, attempts to locate people on the Great Chain of Being are highly, highly suspect.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
When you can conclusively and quantitatively define "race" and "intelligence", you might have something. Until then any extrapolation of statistical data to generalities is to a large extent a reflection of the biases and opinions of the person doing the extrapolating. Whether or not there is connection will depend in large part on how the terms are defined in the process.
In addition any measurement using a standardized test needs to acknowledge that what it is primarily measuring is correlation to the test designer--not intelligence in the abstract.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
From the same guy: What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the 'phasing out' of such peoples.... Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality. ...
Who can doubt that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contributions to civilization?
Slashdot posting stories from leading racists? Awsome.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yeah, drives me nuts too. People now think it means "compels one to ask". Women in particular seem to make this mistake, who, let's face it, aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Although a study like this does nothing productive, I would assume that on average women are not as intelligent (ie, score higher on IQ tests) than men.
If we were all as intelligent as we think, we *could* make productive use of the results (assuming the test itself was unbiased and accurate).
For instance, we could ask, "Why are women, on average, slightly less able to solve logic puzzles than men?" (Assuming logic puzzles were a core part of the test-- used here as an example only.)
The answer might very well be, "Because we encourage women to become hair dressers and nurses, and we encourage men to become mechanics and doctors. Of course, we also encourage men to become CEOs and President of the US, so that evens things out substantially."
Once we've discovered the root cause (societal influence, Barbie, genetics, whatever), we might be able to do something about it. Then we can work together to eradicate the societal influences, raise our collective IQ a couple of points, invent FTL travel, cure all diseases, fix the inequities in the world, get rid of Celine Dion, and make our lives generally better.
That is, if we weren't too fucked up to take advantage of honest self-evaluations (assuming this is an honest self-evaluation).
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Funny? Insightful! I wish your message would catch on universally - and for boys, too.
I just sent my little girl to kindergarten for the first time last week. I sat her down and had a heart-to-heart talk about what school would be like. I told her about how fun it's going to be to get better at reading, and learning math, and seeing the world of science, and I could see her eyes light up at the idea of the wonders in front of her.
I also told her that some people would tell her that girls can't learn or do as much as boys. I told her that those people are stupid and scared, and most importantly, wrong. She's lucky in that she has an automatic counterproof: my wife's a doctor, and graduated from Army Airborne school while in ROTC. My daughters and son know what women can do because their mommy showed them.
I also want the other little girls (and boys) to know that while there are differences between all of us, each individual can rise to the level they want. People who would tell them otherwise are murderers, as far as I'm concerned.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Political correctness does not exist only to perpetuate a false sense of absolute equality. It exists to provide an impetus toward achieving that equality.
We all know that, in our personal lives, we deal with people on an individual level, judging them by their merit (as much as possible) rather than by labels. But, on the societal level, we delegate that judgment to larger bodies, such as law.
Unfortunately, the law holds great power, and is cold to the individual's struggle for understanding. Therefore, we must have a law and a culture that is truly equal--in and out of the court--even if none of us personally agree.
In an environment where it is okay to freely believe in racial differences (probably with factual backing), we will quickly divide. In a politically-correct environment, we will feel second thoughts about judging everyone.
I say, never assume that just because society has learned a lesson that we will remember...shortly after we suddenly stop being politically correct, we will forget why we ever were, resuming the tribalism of our dark nature which leads to war, genocide, and hatred.
The price of political correctness is the resentment and foolishness of it all...but I'll pay that price, if it means I'll be warded from my darker nature.
"It has to be something about instability of that Y chromosome. The X seems to be much more stable."
And it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that men are taught to go off, independently, and do what they want, while women are taught to work together in groups, and stay within the social framework? I bet you've spent decades of research on this topic to disprove all the research showing that people, socialized into a certain task in society, act that way.... and that it's really about the genes, not the nurture and years of conditioning.
Men are socialized to be independent, women are socialized to conform. There is no instability about the Y chromosome! Get over it.
Firstly, this doesn't jibe with experience. My experience is that we men are stupid, and women are evil.
The second is, they say on average. I don't care about the mean, what is the median? The average woman could be dumber than the average man, while the median female intelligence could be more than the median male intelligence.
I have a median income, but it is far less than average.
"All I do is eat and poop!" -- Bean
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I would label this 'Flamebait', but then again that would require the fairer sex to actually read it...
What this means is that there are more male eggheads, but only because there are also more male knuckleheads. This shouldn't really be surprising.
Women bitch about this because it actually is unfair. Unfair because, while women may indeed have lower average whatever (while of course higher average verbal whatother, so dearly valued) it's got a totally lousy prediction value. For most (all) sex-differentiated abililities the variance for each sex is waaay bigger than the average difference.
Results like this have been shown repeatedly, but it has never meant that randomly picked woman A is better/worse than randomly picked man B at any task. Unfortunately it's always interpreted like that, probably because average difference seems intuitive but is really a hard concept to grasp for a lot of people.
The limited usefulness of average differences between groups stems from the fact that humans only come in individual servings. Groups do not suffer from discrimination, individuals do. Once more: you can't use test averages like this to say anything about individuals. The above-male-IQ-average women out there are just as smart as the men as far as IQ goes, and they aren't exactly few. You never know when you are running into one on the street and thus this does not say anything "about women".
You may however use the average to argue for any skew proportions like male/female programmers or afro/caucasian college students. But since nearly every kind of historical oppression has employed this kind defense of the status quo and later turned out to be wrong, it's a weak argument.
There's no 'on' position on the Slacker switch!
Is that what you meant? Or did you just toss out a reference to a "model of [women's] intelligence" without thinking about what you were saying?
The effect you mentioned is the Flynn effect, and it affects those with lower IQ scores more than those with higher scores.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think part of the problem with the public's general reaction to all this is that the public at large has a problem with understanding what 'average' means.
When most people read about a study that concludes that men are smarter than women, they read it as 'All men are smarter than all women' or even 'Given any man and any woman, the man will be smarter', and get up in arms. What the study really means is that the average of the varying intelligences of men is greater than the average of the varying intelligences of women. Yet it would be fairly easy to locate one individual man and one individual woman where the man was much less intelligent than the woman. Furthermore, it's distinctly possible that the most intelligent person on the planet is female, even given the data presented, because the data is simply an average!
That having been said, I do agree with the posts that the IQ test method is flawed and also that society puts pressure on females (and to a lesser but signifigant degree on everyone) NOT to be smart, especially in school. Also, I can't vouch for things on the male side, but I've heard some pretty darn stupid or shallow conversations coming from female classmates over the years.
-- One of that 1% of Slashdot that is actually female
I think its just the fact that women are usually more one with their intuitive emotions like love and are usually less egotistical. Thats where they think can compare in intelligence! Maybe its some sort of genetic evolution and they've just got a slow start, but hey I still love 'em.
go ahead and think your smarter...my immune system is stronger and i will live longer then you, so when you die from a disease all proud to be smarter then me i will laugh.
Oh, sure, you're welcome to talk about intelligence, if you can do it rationally. But people seem to be really, really bad at that. There's a very common, deep-seated and misleading assumption that intelligence is conducive to the GCoB worldview---which it's really not.
Hell, the article doesn't even raise the possibility that IQ is anything other than absolutely inherent and immutable. "Women are permanently and forever less intelligent than men. Discuss." It did not, as you put it, say "hey look, I.Q. test show a sexual bias. I wonder what that's about...". The validity of the test was not questioned. And while there's surely a lot of good work to be done asking why women score lower than men, this study is hardly doing it. I mean, did you actually read the article at all?
Just because someone else in the past was dishonest about this research is no reason to assume that everyone who looks at the issue is also dishonest.
When he's being dishonest about his research in the exact same way that Goddard and Yerkes were, I'd say there's every reason to consider him in the same bucket.
It's not the 50's anymore, people, try to keep up!
1950s?! The great chain of being is a medieval concept.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
hooters! hooters! yum, yum, yum! hooters! hooters! on a girl that's dumb!
Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man includes some laughably biased samples from near the turn of the century. Oh, it was marketed as measuring unchanging and unchangeable cognitive capacity, but it was really a test of how long someone had been in the United States.
Modern exams are much better about this, but if you're wondering where the idea of IQ tests being terribly culturally biased comes from, that's where.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I can't even tell what you're trying to say. Are you saying that middle-school girls don't want to be smart because it's not cool, or that men like pretty chicks more than smart chicks? And what's up with the false dichotomy between pretty and smart?
Oh, and I assure you that my dorky qualities did not make me the most popular kid in middle school.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...he's sleeping on the couch tonight :)
Don't ya hate it when the correct spelling of your favorite screen name is taken?
So... is the black stereotype of white people the same as the white stereotype of dorks? It would go along with white people having a stereotype of black people being cool. Unless socks-with-sandals has suddenly become a non-dorky thing to do. If it has, I missed the memo.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...I mean, come on - most women insist on marrying men. Most men insist on marrying women. What better proof of men's superior intellect do we need?
There are more male than female Nobel Prize winners.
There are also more male than female Darwin Award winners.
There are more males than females who are considered "geniuses" based on IQ scores.
There are also more males than females who are considered "profoundly retarded" based on IQ scores.
There are more males than females who are CEO's.
There are also males than females who are in Federal Prison. (Insert your own Enron joke here.)
There are more men at both ends of the spectrum, while there are more women are closer to the middle.
First, how well will men score on an IQ test designed by women to test women's intelligence?
Are you seriously proposing lowering the standards for women? What would this test consist of? Can you even define "women's intelligence"?
You're assuming women are inherently and immutably inferior to men, and the only solution is to move the goalposts. What you've missed is that the massive array of numbers amassed by the Ulster boys say nothing about cause. They've put together a convincing case for correlation between sex and the results of an IQ test---but that doesn't say a goddamned thing about why.
Oh, I see---you've bought into the idea that IQ tests measure something singular, innate and unchangeable. That's far from a proven fact. Shame on the researcher if he thinks that his data shows that women are innately inferior. And shame on you for thinking the same.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Second I would like to comment that "intelligence" must be considered in its cultural context. Since we live in a male dominated society, there is no doubt that scoiety casts intelligence towards males more than females. Furthermore, due to childbearing, discrimination, and other factors, women often do not have oportunities for advanced education which could help them improve their IQ scores (yes, I know that IQ is not the same thing as knowledge, but you do learn more than just facts and figures in school; you learn how to think).
So let's not get so excited over this issue, because it is so complex and dynamic that we may never be able to fully understand intelligence (what ever that is) as it differs between men and women.
Assuming the study's accurate and valid, does this mean that women are stupid? No, it means that the average woman is (almost unmeasurably) less "intelligent" (whatever that means) than the average man. It means that men are more likely to be geniuses, not that women can't be.
What really galls me is that this says nothing about women's innate worth, even though the researcher will probably claim that it does.
Did you know that Binet's invention of the IQ test was designed to identify kids who could be helped by particular forms of special education? IQ wasn't defined as innate and immutable until it came to this country, and half the people on this thread seem to have bought that line---half crying out that women are inferior, deal with it, and the other half claiming that "women's intelligence" is different than "men's intelligence", which is at least as insulting as the first argument.
I'd be really curious as to why women score lower on these tests. Ah, but we've already decided that it's either because women are dumb, or because they have mysterious, probably "spiritually nutritive" "ways of knowing".
How disappointing.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
IQ tests: BogoMIPS for wetware.
Every girlfriend I've had has been less intelligent than me.
I mean, come on, they dated me .
The thing is, women are hard-wired to care more about social stimulation than men. Unless brain chemistry/development processes change, the percentages aren't ever going to be equal.. After all, the fields labeled as "intellectual" have their labels as legacies from more male-dominated times.
It's too bad the humanities aren't respected like they used to be. If modern physics hadn't stolen the limelight so dramatically in the 20th century, I think we'd have a more balanced view of what a true "intellectual" is.* It's well-known that there's a very rich history of women making great achievements in humanities and arts, considering that many of them were working in times that were very discriminatory. It's too bad that the only vestige of the liberal arts tradition of higher education is a list of silly cluster courses. The point is lost on most university students these days. The importance of learning within the context of academic history isn't communicated effectively anymore.
Mathematics and mathematically oriented fields will never have equal representation without artificial manipulation of the numbers (i.e. subsidies). All I'm concerned about is that opportunities not be closed. I'm all for women taking up physics, etc. but I don't ever see the numbers being equal. And I'm okay with that.
* I'm a male doing a PhD in mathematics, so I'm not saying this because from any resentment I may have.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
MAN there needs to be a new meme about a discussion inevitably producing a Neil Peart quote ...
...
Seriously, though, awesome. Probably his best lyrics -- and on topic to boot!
Although I bet Ayn Rand would agree with the study
What happens when, without a doubt they prove that men are more intelligent than women, then what? What possible good can come from such a finding? This brings the study's author's ethics in to question. Much the same way someone proving that black's are inferior to whites.. etc.
Binet originally intended IQ tests to help in identifying students who needed extra assistance. IQ tests only place people on the Great Chain of Being (snot and rocks on the bottom, monkeys and black people in the middle, and white folks up top next to the angels and God) if you think that intelligence is singular, innate, immutable and (for race) entirely heritable.
On the other hand, you could take it as an indicator that our culture shortchanges women and black people. IQ tests only say that people are "inferior" if you buy into that particular model of intelligence, which has more basis in medieval theology than in actual fact.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
As other people have pointed out. There is nothing posted as to the methodology used. The truth is that there will always be some women who are smarter than some men, and there will always be some men who are smarter than some women.
Down with our version of English. Up with E-Prime!
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
We always love the funny ones.
also tend to be more inclined to win a Darwin award. Stupid women don't tend to blow themselves up as often as stupid men do.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
No, it doesn't. That's not what begging the question means. Perhaps it raises that question. Begging the question is assuming the wanted conclusion.
:-(
Thank you for increasing the level of basic literacy and English comprehension skills here on Slashdot. It's tragic that with all the time and money that we spend on public education, grown adults manage to enter our society unable to read or understand basic English words and phrases.
Understanding the basic principles of the scientific method, and how they are NOT being properly applied in our current practice of psychology seems, unfortunately, beyond the grasp of most people.
If it had shown women more intelligent than men no one would be having a fit over it. Just goes to show you that extreme left have parts of their faith that are unquestionable. The sad thing is they are often completely convinced that they are totally logical, rational, and "open minded".
Here is a big dose of truth.
Not everyone has equal abilities.
An example women do not as a group have the same physical strength that men do.
Equality is the equality of opportunity. Just because most women are not as strong the average man does not mean that no women can be as strong or stronger than the average man.
Even if women average a few points less of IQ does not mean that all women are dumber than all men. No person should have their opportunities limited by race, gender, or religion only by their ability.
Racism and bigotry is when you ignore the individual and judge the group.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You obviously ain't a playa. It's "Treat 'em mean to keep 'em lean" Of course, on /. however, yours makes more sense.
The IQ test has been proved to determine who will most likely achieve in Western-style schools, businesses, etc. It's therefore most useful to call the IQ test actually an "achievement aptitude test" rather than and "intelligence quotient" test. Then, I am quite comfortable accepting the truth that white males are most likely to achieve in Western-style schools and businesses.
...PLEASE stop abusing the phrase "Begs the question."
Wrong: This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world."
Question begging when you have an argument that uses circular reasoning. For example:
God exists because the Bible says He does.
The Bible is right because God wrote it.
Therefore, God exists.
http://begthequestion.info/ Please please please, say something like "prompts the question."
What would be interesting, although a different study altogether, would be to assemble a group of women similar to the group of (presumably) men that write IQ tests now. Find yourself a couple of groups of men and women to take each test, and SUPRISE! the women will do better on the test written by women.
There have been numerous studies just like this that show that other kinds of standardized testing (of the "No Child Left Behind" variety) is biased against women and minorities, and that the scores women and minorities earn on these tests are not representative of their actual abilities.
What I've learned from all of this is that intelligence, or even knowledge in a particular area, is impossible to quantify. The problem is that individuals use different mental models to understand their world. If they don't use the same mental model as the test-writer, then they won't do as well.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
Guess what: IQ has NEVER been an indicator of work performance!!!
In fact, it doesn't mean anything after you are done with schooling. IOW, Mensa is total B.S.
When a man marries a women, he winds up with a bright, helpful, beautiful helpmate to lighten lifes burdens. When a women marries a man, she winds up with juvenile, insecure slob who adds to her burden. Obviously, the more intelligent one is ...
P.S. I did not mean to offend or confuse slashdotters with talk about women, and marriage, and stuff. A celebate life of video games and technological wonkery can be just as fulfilling as one involving interpersonl relationships. Or so I've been told.
You know, after reading many of the comments about this story, I realized something. It seems to me that every person on slashdot is a male. Is that more proof that males just have a higher intelligence? I think it is.
We knew this a long time ago.
Sometimes you are angry at someone else when you should be upset with yourself. You fucked up, someone else caught you and who is the object of your anger? Logic and reason anywhere?
Sometimes you can be afraid of something and have no reason. Why are some people afraid of dark rooms? Fear of the unknown is often valid, but some fear even though they *know* that their bedroom is free of danger.
Emotions are instinct, first order evaluations of the universe around you and how you should deal with it. They are survival traits. In the wild, it is often better to be fast in reaction even if wrong sometimes rather than be right all the time and slow. Should I fear that lion? Hmm, I heard the roar nearby I wonder what caused her to be so excited? Was it a succesful hunt? Did a rival appear out of the brush? There she is, running towards me. Is there something behind me that...
OTOH, in much of today's world, logical, reasonable, slow, thought processes will often be advantageous. Should I invest in this product? It is a really cool idea, but the fundamentals are just not there. When I went to visit, the CEO's secretary gave me a really good time and I know that they want my money, but the numbers show that the risk is too great for the reward...
When she walks away from me and I watch her hair sway back and forth just above her ass it makes my groin twitch, but should I try to get wet or not? Reason and logic or emotion, which will be the better decision making process? What parameters will be used to evaluate the choice? What are your lifetime goals? Are they reasonable or emotional?
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
"and often these studies are inquiries so heavy-burdened with emotionally charged issues that even if they're handled properly, the findings will probably do more harm than good"
The only reason that something like this would do more harm than good is lack of humility and inability to see where your own faults are and think critically about them without slaying the messenger.
I think of it as the "my team" connundrum. If there is a controversial call in sports people will see and believe what supports their team in many circumstances. They have so much emotional investment in the subject matter, and lack the ability to compartmentalize, that they cannot accept the truth of what they are seeing. Their reality filters are processing data through the emotion port.
What I am saying is that in most circumstances data is just data. One person will see it as a condemnation of a certain group, while another group will see it as a ploy to subjugate and demean them by another group, when the truth is almost invariably something entirely different.
The problem is that everyone is so ready to point fingers, shuffle blame, and fight about it that no one wants to confront the facts impartially and dig for the answers, especially a party that feels slighted by the implications of the study.
Of course you can imagine that if some people don't like the data to begin with they sure as hell aren't going to like the answers.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Unless she is over 100 years old or so, she's full of shit. She hasn't been denied a damn thing...
How about equal pay, smart guy?
p.s. You're a fucking idiot.
OK, let's forget all of the quibbling about what IQ actually measures, and what intelligence actually is.
Let's suppose it's true. So what? Does it mean that "men are smarter than women?" Well, no, because all men are not the same and all women are not the same. IQ scores are described by a more or less normal statistical distribution. 5 points is not much; it's considerably less than one standard deviation. So if you are male and happen to meet a random woman, this gives you virtually no basis to guess whether she is likely to be smarter than you are not. Most of us are fairly close to the middle of the distribution. So for a typical male--or even an unusually bright male--there is still going to be a huge number of women who have a higher IQ than he does. Perhaps the person with the highest IQ in the world is more likely to be a man than a woman, but I'm not that guy. I don't think I even know that guy (and I know some pretty smart people).
There are clear differences in the brains of men and women. It is well established that some intellectual skills are differently distributed between men and women. So it is clearly possible to find measures in which one or the other will come out ahead, and which sex scores higher on a one-dimensional test such as IQ depends upon how those skills are weighted. But for all of those measures, there is a huge overlap of the distributions. As human beings, we are ethically obligated to deal with one another as individuals, not as stereotypes. So who is brightest (whatever the hell that means) on the average shouldn't make a damned bit of difference.
So let's quit obsessing over which population--male, female, black, white, asian--has the highest IQ. Arguing about it only gives the misleading impression that it matters.
Too many girls/women know my Slashdot handle, so I wont get into this. However I will make a few comments. First what is the researchers' definetion of intelligence.The word has several meanings. Second, what population sample was used for the research? Was it people in Ulster? If so, I dont know how they could determine anyone there was intelligent, male or female. But seriously, there have been very good scientific studies on brain sex differences. It isn't a question of intelligence in these studies, just that men and women have more or less of one skill or emotion than the other gender, usually. Heck, if the someone has brains, they have brains, regardless of who they are. The rest is just raciest/sexist bullshit on both sides of the dispute.
> This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world."
This prompts the question, was the writer simply unfamiliar with the phrase "begs the question" ?
When the summary sounds this stupid, I generally don't bother with the article -- I wonder if that is unfair.
Somewhat offtopic but, unfortunately, your gravitiy example is flawed. In the situation described by you it is perfectly correct to deduce the presence of gravitiy. Accelleration forces *are* gravity. There is no experiment able to distiguish the two in your proposed reference frame.
You could argue that this Equivalence Principle does not necessarily hold. However, it is the very basis of the most successful theory of gravitation as of today, namely Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.
(Sorry, could not hold back.)
617B3B7F7E7C7D7F00EOF
We men let them run the show to avoid the nagging, bitching, complaining, whining ...
... and for some chance of sex of course.
so that we can at least have a chance for peace and quiet.
the people with the worst driving records are almost always men
Yeah, but that doesn't include mailboxes.
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
Its not users who are broken, it's systems not taking account their likely behaviour and fixing it technically.
Here's some choice bits:
This guy would be a cartoonish sci-fi villain if he wasn't real.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Science has shown that most women, at some time, contain intelligent DNA. Unfortunately 95% of them spit it out.
(shamelessly stolen from somewhere on the web)
Peter: Chris, don't say retard. we preffer to be called 'little people' because there is nothing wrong with being mentally challenged. In fact, i've learned we are superior, above all you dumb brainy smarties , and one day you will beg us for mercy...and we will consider it.
We already knew that we were smarter... just look at a women driving a car. Well. ok, that doesn't prove we're smarter, it just proves that practice makes perfect, and as there is no road between the kitchen and the bedroom, they are naturally worse drivers. Well at least the good ones, who keep their mouth shut while making dinner, are worse at driving.
SOOO totally kidding about that BTW.
I.Q. tests designed by middle-class white males show that white middle-class males are smarter than everyone else!
Averages are BS, IQ tests are BS.... Beh. Yet another notch in the belt for those fuckheads who shove GI Joe at boys and Barbie at girls.
'Math is hard!'
vs
'... and knowing is half the battle'
Who was encouraged to do what again? We are somehow surprised at differences in the sexes BASED ON CURRENT OUR SOCIAL SITUATION?
Bah.
I'm not really surprised by the findings, politically incorrect as they may be. I bet if they compared persons diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome with the rest of the population, they would find that Aspies have higher IQs in average. (Incidentally, Autism has been said to be a "extreme form of maleness.") IQ tests generally measure analytical/mathematical intelligence, so that's not surprising. But intelligence is not one-dimensional as most people suppose -- i.e. you're either smart or dumb. A relatively more sophisticated yet still parroquial view of things includes the concepts of "street smarts" vs. "book smarts." It's far more complicated than that, though. Have they compared the emotional intelligence of women vs. men by any chance? I didn't think so.
XML UI Browser/Platform
Guys, you got to realise that any study showing that men excel over women in any field is going to be attacked. Not even looking at the study, women are going to (and are, according to the BBC comments) condemning it for being biased towards men. This isn't because the test necessarily is biased towards men -- it may very well be, but that's not why these women are reacting so strongly. Even if it had been a double-blind test replicated a hundred times, devised by women, and men scored a fraction of a percent better than women, the test would be accused of being biased.
So yes, just publishing the results of such a test is trolling, as there's no question it's going to be attacked and flamed, no matter whether it's valid or not.
Regards,
--
*Art
So what does it all mean anyway? Does IQ = Value or Quality of a person? Obviously intelligence can dictate how well people perform at some things, but as mentioned by others in this discussion, it doesn't mean that they are the most succesfull or "best". There are more traits to a person besides his ability to decern patterns and shapes, etc. Isn't it more important to interact with others by valuing what they are and their abilities, regardless of what "score" they have? I think the problem is that typically we don't neccessarily operate that way. We like simple numbers. She's a 10! He's a 0, etc. But isn't that's the way it goes: they way we want things to be and the way things are. The question is can we actually change our perceptions?
The first IQ tests, although flawed by todays standards, when implemented showed women of generally having higher IQ's. Ofcourse this test was summarily nerfed by the male implementors and creators.
Since a proper scientific experiment requires that the output or interpretation be free from any bias, I assume the researcheres were neither male nor female.
I don't care what's my intelligence/IQ/(you name it) - only how I use it.
--
live strong
just publishing the results of such a test is trolling, as there's no question it's going to be attacked and flamed, no matter whether it's valid or not.
Well, as I see it, in trolling there's a question of intent.
Just because you know that what you're about to say will cause an adverse reaction in 51% of the population is no reason to self-censor! Nor is it trolling per se.
e.g. Any time biology news is reported, the creationists start flaming.
That's no reason to give in to them and abandon life sciences, or to censor them. Nor does their flaming make the article flamebait.
It's not baiting if you say it DESPITE of the flames: the difference is who, in the relationship, wants the flames.
You can't take the sky from me...
Why does it cost you half of everything you own to get a divorce? 'Cause that's what it's worth.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
You at least came up with the magic word: spatial. No one has commented on the fact that the test revolved around spatial relations as the 'principle' measure of intelligence. And come on, doesn't that make it a rigged test. Everyone knows guys can track an injured giraffe better than women can. And at one point, that was real important and real appreciated, but today... you know what that means? It means that a guy can find the exact location in which he dropped his dirty underwear two days ago (so he can put it on again so he won't be late for work.) Raising children has taught me that 'intelligence' is a term used by people who haven't a clue what goes into the makeup of growing, developing, highly individualized people who would be alot more successful if they weren't labelled by dults
Ours is called the "Physics lab".
Geesh, you people and your crazy 'Y' spellings!
If you're so smart, howcome you're fat? No one wants to look at a big tub of lard at work, it lowers the 'quality of life' at work, and reduces productivity for everyone else.
Lose some weight or STFU.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Do any of the people raving about the inability of IQ tests to measure "real" intelligence know anything of the subject beyond what they've read in a mediocre Sj Gould book that was panned by people actually working in the field? Or more likely the blurb from the back cover of said book? Do they know that an entire field exists for the study of measuring intelligence, and that it has a pretty solid statistical foundation?
So, Caucasian males tend to score better on IQ tests designed by Caucasian males?
I'd be really interested in seeing how well they scored on an IQ test designed by, say, Japanese women.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
My wife is a psychologist and gives/grades IQ tests all the time. Something I've learned about them is that although they come up with one final number (the IQ), they start by coming up with many sub-scores (performance IQ, visual-spatial IQ, etc.), and these sub-scores are sometimes much more important information about a person than the overall IQ.
For instance, she tested me (I'm an engineer), and although my IQ was high, I had a comparatively low "performance IQ", which is how fast I process information through my brain. Believe it or not, this is quite normal for engineers, apparently. It is related to how we focus so much on the details, that we slow down our mental processing to accomodate and focus.
So IQ as a single number is misleading, but then again, if your IQ is 70, then it does mean something different than if your IQ is 130. However, if you're comparing 2 people and one person has 115 and another has 125, it's hard to say that one is particularly "smarter", as the 115 person could be quite more competent in many subjects and endeavors compared to the higher IQ person, or vice-versa.
Thankfully, most organizations that use this information, such as the military and medical institutions, look very closely at the subscores, not necesarily the overall score.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Causation is infered from a preponderance of correlations.
No, it's not. Correlation can only point the way. It can prove nothing. I can correlate my age almost perfectly with certain rates of continental drift, but that doesn't mean a damned thing.
A more relevant example: the results of the Stanford-Binet IQ tests given to American army recruits in the First World War correlated very, very well with national origin. Recruits with German and British origins scored the highest; recruits from Slavic nations scored the lowest. You could derive all the "preponderance of correlations" you could ever want.
Of course, the test results also correlated with the number of years since the test takers had come to America. Slavs were more recent immigrants, so they did worse---the test was very, very biased in favor of familiarity with American culture.
Correlation can point the way. Nothing more.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
... fail to notice that the alleged IQ difference could be due to a margin of error )which conveneintly is not mentioned).
IQ is useful if one takes into account one given context, it is completely useless to generalize about full populations in any given context (if a Masai person had invented IQ tests most non Masais probably would score lower due to the cultural differences and pro Masai biases)
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And then you have multiple types of vadas. Not all of which are made of rice.
Hell, if you ask me, idli is the odd one out, because oil/ghee is used in the preparation of the other three items, while idlis are merely steamed rice cakes.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Men have faster scalar processors, and can do linear tasks better. Women have symmetric multiprocessing, and can juggle more concurrent tasks. That's why men can disassemble and reassemble a car engine from memory, but women can keep track of where four children are while balancing a checkbook and talking to the doctor on the phone. Men *might* do better on IQ tests, but I wonder whose score would drop less if they had to take three tests simultaneously?
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Irrelevant.
A Bell Curve---better known as a normal distribution or Gaussian---is an extremely common pattern for large numbers of data points to fall into when measuring something natural. It's a curve that is key to any kind of statistical psychology.
That some stupid book happened to have the name of the curve in its title says nothing about whether a normal distribution is a sensible result to expect. It's like saying you won't eat dinner off china because you don't like China - it's complete nonsense.
There is a movement in American (at least) to claim that Intelligence does not exist.
No, there isn't. Well, not in the way that you think there is.
The original construction of the IQ exam was designed to test a whole variety of seemingly unrelated tasks which all correlated with each other. "Factor analysis" (popularized and I think invented by Charles Spearman) is a way of dragging out a common factor, or rather, a measure of how interrelated these tasks are.
An aside: while IQ tests are relatively new, the impulse to find some quantity that is reliably measurable, linearly rankable, heritable and immutable is an old one. The idea is to place every person in a partial order by using a single number. A long line of people, ranging from the smartest to the least smart. It's a seductive idea.
Now, back to IQ testing. The idea of a "general intelligence factor", Spearman's g, which has insinuated itself into the national consciousness, is nothing more than a mathematical abstraction. Do (for instance) verbal and math skills correlate because they're manifestations of a single underlying general factor? IQ testing says nothing about that. In fact, one can extract "group factors", as L. L. Thurstone did, which show multiple, orthogonal factors responsible for performance on various tests, with no single overarching general factor. It's an abstraction. By itself, it doesn't mean anything.
So, yeah. Intelligence as you mean it---inborn, measurable, rankable, immutable---may or may not exist. See here for an analogy I'm rather proud of.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
People with too much free time on their hands (hey, kinda like us...) have devoted much thought to that very problem. There are "culture-free" or "culture-fair" tests recognized by Mensa, but even those are not truly independent of culture.
At this point, though, most reputable IQ tests strive pretty hard to avoid straight-up knowledge-based questions, since those are pretty non-general.
Thanks; I'm flattered! I spent a few minutes trying to come up with something good. Glad to know it was appreciated.
By the way, does your sig mean "help yourself, and God will help you"? My French is rusty, and my Middle French is nonexistent.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And that's why you scored so low on the IQ test: utter lack of any grammatical skills or a general ability to communicate effectively. ::sigh::
Very biased by sex and race (the vast majority in use were written by white men, go figure).
Could you point me to an example of an unbiased test? Or at least one biased in the other direction?
I think this is the worst subtext I've seen so far in this debate---the idea that because nonwhites and women do worse on these tests, the tests must be biased. It can't be that we culturally shortchange women and nonwhites, because we're all equal, right now, according to you.
So you posit "women's intelligence" or something like it. You're half an inch from "well, so what if black folks can't do math; they can dance real good!"---can you see it?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"The Bell Curve" claimed that men and women have the same average intelligence, but men have a wider standard deviation. So you get more geniuses and more idiots in men.
This study looked at students, and also specifically at people with IQs of 125 and 155. The differences at IQ 125 and 155 could be explained as easily by a different deviation as a different average. And a study aimed at students, unless schooling is mandatory, is also selecting people with average IQ above the mean. Was there any part of this study that took a nonbiased sampling (with respect to IQ) of people over age 14?
Could you help me out here, and explain how, exactly, one would go about writing an unbiased test? Could you show me one? Or at least one biased in the other direction?
Or are you saying that women have special, "spiritually nutritive" "ways of knowing"? I hope not, because that'd be really, really reductive, and at least as sexist as claiming that women are inherently and immutably less intelligent than men.
And it's not nearly as useful as saying, "hmm, I wonder why our women aren't doing as well---perhaps there's something we can fix about this." IQ tests were originally intended to diagnose children who needed extra help, not to pigeonhole the disadvantaged (as has been done in the past), and certainly not to feed them the soft bigotry of low expectations, as you seem to be doing. Will you next claim that women just aren't good at physics, because physics was invented by dead white guys, and Principia Mathematica is just a rape manual? You're almost there, you know.
And out of curiosity, why do Asians do marginally better than whites? Are the folks at Stanford-Binet, Inc. (or whatever) secretly slightly Asian?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Why must everything be called "intelligence"?
Why not "ability" or "aptitude" or any of the other, broadly-applicable words that correctly describe such wide-ranging capabilities? Why try to redefine the meaning of the word "intelligence" to be something other than how it's generally been used?
It's like someone thought it was good to be "intelligent", and decided that everyone should be "intelligent", so he just redefined it broadly enough that it applied to everyone. As if that's any more useful than handing out degrees or black belts on the street---redefinition is pointless.
There are indeed people with stellar intrapersonal, naturalistic, or body-kinesthetic aptitudes, and those are often spectacularly important and useful abilities that let them easily pick up and use related skills. That does not mean such aptitudes are "intelligence", though---intelligence is an aptitude, but not all aptitudes are intelligence.
You can probably tell from the tacks I'm taking in my arguments, but I've recently finished reading "The Mismeasure of Man", and found it tremendously, tremendously enlightening.
Also, I remember claiming loudly that copyright infringement was Not a Crime, until someone pointed out that, well, it frequently can be, yes, even if you don't make any money from it. (I think geoffspear still has me listed as a foe from that argument.) I've tried to be more rigorous with my fact-checking and less mushy with my language here since then. I'm glad to know it's paying off.
(Pedantic hint for today: i.e. means "that is"; e.g. means "for example". "When celebrating a winter holiday, i.e. Christmas, decorate the house, e.g. with a wreath.")
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And if you combine this with an older report that intelligence is heritable from the mother to the offspring, you get that at an average the human race is getting stupider
Now everything has become clear to me!!!!
X~
Men = Pentium (higher IQ, not so great use of it) Women = AMD (lower IQ, better use of it) Men once dominated, but the women have taken hold recently, and now people are simply viewing the men as power-sucking hotheads.
Yup, women pretty much have that, too. The vast majority of the much-misunderstood "wage gap" is due to choices women make---whether to have children and take time off work (losing seniority), whether child-rearing requires job flexibility, which jobs to take on, etc.---rather than any actual sexism.
The "wage gap" is not a difference between wages at the same job. The "wage gap" is not a difference between workers with the same level of seniority. The "wage gap" is not a difference between workers that are at all comparable in any meaningful way.
The "wage gap" is simply a reflection of the choices women and men make in Western society. You may think they make the wrong choices, but you still have to admit that they're their choices to make.
If smart people aren't fat, you must be a whale...
The parent poster suffers from the mistaken belief that just because people are equal under the law that they must be equal in all rights and abilities too.
Although the specifics may be wrong, the examples of eugenics and phrenology show the importance of biology.
Eugenics has been given a bad rap, mainly because of its association with Nazi Germany's endless promotion of the ideal blond-haired and blue-eyed supermen and -women of tomorrow.
However, look at what our knowledge of DNA has given us today. If we can map the human genome, identify the sequences that cause inherited disease, and can do away with them, is not eugenics a good thing?
Phrenology is considered meaningless pseudoscience because modern science has repudiated that "bumps on the head" do not cause idleness, shiftlessness, and the host of other maladies that affect people.
However, until modern day, people bred and interbred in limited, small, geographical areas. If a population developed certain personal traits, these traits would be carried by the same genome that carries the "bumps on the head". So although the bumps are not proof positive of a certain disease or trait, they could indicate a strong correlation between the two.
We take for granted that we are of different heights, weights, and intellects. Why do we deny that there is a genetic contribution? Surely environment plays a part in how genotypes develop into phenotypes, but just as surely our genes also play a part in who we become.
In summary: We are different. Our genes play a part in these differences. Biology is not our complete destiny, but its contribution to these differences is definitely non-zero.
I sent my little girl to kindergarten 10 years ago with much the same speech - plus regular talks on "having her own mind," "thinking independently," and "being a leader, not a follower."
Now in high school, she is a straight-A student, socially aware (especially with regard to causes like copyright reform as it turns out), self-confident, articulate, gregarious and outgoing with a massive circle of friends. In fact, earlier this week she has been invited to give testimony to our Parliament's Standing Committee on reforms to the Copyright Act (colour me proud papa!)
It's encouragement like this that develops young women into the architects of tomorrow's society, and the types of leaders that will replace the buffoons that currently sit in places of power in politics, business and education.
Start young, and convince your daughters, granddaughters and nieces that there's nothing stopping them from accomplishment and success.
Since it seems we're talking cross-purposes, I'd like to clarify my position.
I'm talking about natural law, not fiat (or legislated) law. For thousands of years, there was no such thing as fiat-law, but only common law (which is much better). Hence, I'm not talking about what is or is not currently prohibited by coercive force. I'm talking about what should or should not be prohibited by force. I use the maid example because it is obvious, but the same thing applies to doctors, corporations, etc, because all of that is private property.
If MS wants to discriminate based on race, gender, religion, political affiliation, etc, in their hiring process, that is their right to do so. If the State tries to prohibit this by coercive force, those within the State doing such are acting criminally by natural law. (of course, that they have the right to do so, doesn't make doing so morally correct, anymore than that I have the right to be a jerk makes such morally correct).
The idea of hundreds of corporations colluding on the free market -- for any purpose -- is a stretch, and it has never ever been done, and never will be either. The only time cartels are possible is with enforcement of them by States.
Regarding a medical board setting standards, in a free market, if a medical board set standards that discriminated who could enter med school based on things irrelevant to medicine (gender, race, religion, etc), it would quickly become irrelevant, as no-one would pay attention to it or subscribe to its services.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Intelligence ... many things to many people. Do athletes demonstrate a high level of intelligence in their athletic ability? Modern psychology says so ...
... and remained friends after university].
... because the definition of Intelligence is limited to an IQ test.
... have you ever stopped to consider that you're the opposite side of the same coin? I disrespect you both equally.
So is Intelligence "school smarts", "physical technique", and/or other things?
I have a friend who topped over 160 in IQ tests - but IMHO, he's one of the slowest, non-practical people i've ever met in my life.. He literally can not boil an egg, nor change a light bulb. He is able to tie his shoe-laces [I went to university with him
So, is he "more intelligent" than me? The article would say so
No test will ever prove that men are more intelligent, or women are more intelligent. They are both different (as about 5000 other posts have said).
AC
PS To the feminists and chauvenists
Like it or hate it, IQ tests are reasonably good predictors of one's potential precisely because they are normalized to function in precisely that way.
And psychometrists spend enormous amounts of time, money and energy making sure that IQ tests actually measure something.
IMO opinion there is no question that there are differences between racial groups or between the sexes in various things. Saying that all people must be the same in various ways because political doctrine says this is so makes as much sense as maintaining that the sun revolves around the earth because church authorities say that it is so.
If you look at relatively un-controversial things like gene frequences or HLA types or blood types you will find racial differences.
Why does the US military use IQ tests? Because they work. And believe it or not at heart US armed forces are not prejudiced as an institution. What matters is the mission and getting the job done. The military is one of the largest and strictest meritocracies around.
Oh my god! Men score 5 points higher on IQ tests?
Stop the press!
The free world is coming to an end!
As if all the empirical evidence hasn't already pointed to the fact that men's brains are more tuned to logic than women's (and that's all a real IQ test can measure).
It's a far cry from that to the stupid headline "Men smarter than women!"
That is all. Return to your caves.
Star Trek Voyager, Captain Janway.
Perhaps these can be reduced somewhat to a smaller set. One way to do this is to calculate the correlation dimension from plenty of data points.
You make a good point. They charge men higher rates on car insurance because you all suffer from little dick sindrome. You think if you drive aster and crazier it will get you a girl, when in fact it get's you more tickets, crashes, and more trips to the mechanics. Screw your IQ test women are smarter. We're just smart enough to fool men into thinking your smarter. You're easier to control that way!
this report:
...male fetuses appear to involute fewer overproduced cortical neurons than females, this gender difference could explain in part the boys' greater functional impairments from early brain damage.
...any disease that causes neuronal loss could be expected to lead to more severe functional deficits in women due to their loss of more dendritic connections per neuron lost.
Due to the influx of testosterone early in development male fetuses often suffer damage to their brains. Specifically in the corpus callosum because the development of that region of the brain (which is the communications link between right and left hemispheres) coincides with the assertion of gender. This is manifested later during childhood by boys having poorer fine-motor control than girls of the same age. This early brain-damage may account for the statistically higher incidents of mental impairment in boys.
For all the insults their brains suffer early in life due to testosterone, the boys reap a larger brain with more brain-cells. Just as a person who repeatedly breaks their bones gets a heavier and stronger bone for their trouble... only the "strong" brain-cells survive and the brain is adapted to survive brain-damage better. While female's brains have not had to suffer as many insults. From the same article:
It would appear then, that it is much harder to grow up to be an intelligent man. But, if you survive to do so... your brain will probably be very resilient. A woman, however, is much more likely to grow up to be intelligent but her brain has not suffered and recovered from the brain-damage that a boy's would have so she is therefore less-well equiped to recover from brain diseases late in life.
It could be that men with more neurons but fewer processes (the neurological kind not the CPU kind) have deeper cognitive ability over a narrower set of subjects and women who have fewer neurons over more processes have broader cognitive ability spread more shallowly across their faculties.
This feminine congruity can be seen as a benefit reaped from not having areas of their brains fried by testosterone. The masculine depth of focus can be seen as compensation for having lost breadth of cognitive ability. Both sexes suffer physical and mental ailments for the virtue of posessing their morphological differences. Brain morphology is just one area of difference. Field research has shown that women and men may have major anatomical differences of unknown functional nature.
In a sentence: Men and Women are Different.
[signature]
No, I'd say the cutoff is about 50-55 there. After that, it's all about quality of your Apple Pies and Cookies...
--ducks for cover--
Professor Lynn argued in a letter to The Psychologist this month that the differences between the sexes were explained by a link between IQ and brain size. He said: "Men have larger brains than women by about 10 per cent and larger brains confer greater brain power, so men must necessarily be on average more intelligent than women."
I have to say, Richard Lynn deserves to be written off, especially when studies have shown that bigger brain size doesn't necessarily MEAN better intelligence.
What it MAY mean is that if men have bigger brains, they're probably better at throwing things...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4277359. stm
In the paper they state: The paper will argue that there is evidence that at the same level of IQ, women are able to achieve more than men "possibly because they are more conscientious and better adapted to sustained periods of hard work".
:)
It would seem to me that if someone could achieve more than another at the same level of IQ that person would be more intelligent. The sustained periods of work would seem to indicate that as well since the more intelligent/developed brain would be better adapted to long term use where the less intelligent/developed brain gets tired sooner.
It would be interesting to see a comparison of what portions of the brain were being used and how much of it was being used under different scenarios.
The problem with most of these tests is that they test what you know, not how you think. It is not always a measure of intelligence but of knowledge. Another sign of intelligence is the ability to learn or to deal with new or trying situations. Did they test the subjects by teaching an area not known and then see which subjects learned faster?
Seems like someone either trying to grab some grant money or incite a huge flamewar
You're a female! Just like a girl to try and lump soppy emotions with cold hard logic. ^_~ (I'm a girl too ^_^)
Cor! Ours too!
My physics courses typically hold 10 girls and about 5 boys... and we kick them out when the prof isn't looking.
Funnier perhaps. Smarter, ha ha, good one, just about fell over over with that one.
if i actually HAD a girlfriend, i'm sure she'd disagree.
usually spout this nonsense the moment they are confronted with a statistic they don't like.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that there is a problem with these statistics?
And please get the quote right next time...
There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Mark Twain
It is official; Manchester University confirms: Men are smarter than women.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered female community when the regents of the University of Manchester confirmed that the average female IQ has dropped yet again, now down to at least 5 points less than the average male.
Coming on the heels of a recent study conducted by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn which plainly states that women consistently score lower on IQ tests, this news serves to reinforce what mankind has known for millenia. Prior conceptions of female intelligence are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by the overwhelming ratio of male to female Nobel prize winners.
You don't need to be a chauvinist to predict womankind's future benefit to society. The hand-writing is on the wall: Females face a bleak future in fields requiring higher cognizant abilities such as science and engineering. In fact there won't be any future at all for women in science and engineering because women simply won't be able to be able to compete with their male colleagues. Things are looking very bad for women. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Based on IQ test scores from 80,000 people and 20,000 students, the average score for women was 5 points less than the average score for men. Twice as many men as women scored 125, only serving to raise the intellectual glass ceiling. At scores of 155, associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman.
All major studies show that women are consistently less intelligent than men. Women are simply not suited for higher level thinking and long term survival prospects in science/engineeringare very dim. Showingly, women chose not to enter such fields even when they were considered intellectually equal. 20th century notions of female equality continue to decay as old maxims are vindicated.
Nothing short of a miracle could save a woman's self respect at this point in time. Women are becoming increasingly irrelevent as our society focuses more on science/engineering. For all practical purposes, women serve no purpose other than bearing male children.
FACT: Men are smarter than women
That means that any study that finds equality between men and women is automatically suspect, as clearly that supports the ideology of most researchers.
I am sure this paper has been and will continue to be hyper-evaluated, often by people with no ability to actually judge it.
This isn't new information, however. That basic conclusions are as old as the hills.
You argue about someone else's small data sets and then argue from anecdote?
Good IQ tests require almost no prior knowledge whatsoever (a child's grasp of their native spoken language will do, in order to impart instructions). In any case, these tests correlate very highly with tests that do require more prior knowledge (ie, an SAT), so you basically get the same answer either way.
IQ has strong correlations with income, college and high school graduation rates, teen birth rates, crime, drug abuse, welfare, and just about any other major factor one can come up with. It generally has a larger effect that socio-economics or any other input variable.
It is absolutely false to say that is doesn't predict anything in the real world - on the contrary, it is the best predictor that we have.
IQ has a stronger correlation with income, graduation rates, teenage birth rates, welfare, crime, drug abuse and just about any other major life factor than does socio-economics or any other single predictive measure.
Give me 100 six year olds with an IQ of 80 and another 100 with an IQ of 120, and I can tell you a whole lot about where those kids will be in 30 years. The answers will be very different for the two groups.
How can you say this? Political correctness isn't questioning what is, but what ought to be. There is no question that statistically, white people are better off than black people in our society. There is no question that men make more money than women. Yet this doesn't make it "right" in a moral sense. It's the point of affirmative action to correct this.
It's well demonstrated that intellegence as measured as measured by IQ tests (ignoring alternative definitions) can be split into two factors: visual-spatial intellignce and verbal intelligence. In general, men perform better on the visual-spatial component and women better on verbal component. The researchers were analysing the results of Raven's Progressive Matrices which emphaisises the use of visual-spatial reasoning, therefore they get a result that suggests men are more "intelligent" than women.
What these results really demonstrate is that Raven's Progressive Matrices are a bad test of IQ. Part of the theoretical framework surrounding IQ tests is that men and women have equal intelligence (albeit that their typical strengths lie in different areas). This test is bad becuase it is constructed in such a way that men perform better than women; it would be straightforward to produce an IQ test that showed women were more intellegent than men, this would be just as flawed as Raven's Progressive Matrices.
i've alwayw believed that it's wisdom, not knowledge that determines intelligence. in other words, it's how effectively you use the information you have, instead of how much mass information or calculating ability you possess. an autistic person may be able to calculate pi to the umpteenth degree, but may not be able to determine whether a person is crying because the are hurt, or out of joy. intelligence should, imho, be judged by how diverse the person's ability to utilize what is available to come up with solutions. often you will find people who are very intelligent, but have little or no secondary schooling. this means that their repository of knowledge is less than say, a college professor...but that doesn't mean they're any less able to utilize the information they have already gathered already. human psychology is a very complex and varied thing to analyze. yes, there may be some basic underlying consistencies, but the variations in how much those consistent events affect the person make for a tough knot to unravel. : )
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
Uhh... dude. A small change in genetics can make for a HUGE change in intelligence, regardless of environment. Just changing less than five percent of your DNA, you would have already died of old age... as a female rat. Yeah, that's right. Less than 5% of our DNA differs from that of rats. Now, don't you think it's possible, just possible, that genetic differences between individuals or the same race can cause variance in intelligence that no amount "nuture" could ever compensate for?
I'm a gnu world man.
That is sure an indication of high IQ!
You said the article raises a particular question if IQ does not predict things. Yet IQ does predict things quite well. Therefore, you have presented no evidence that this question has been raised.
The most common modern IQ test does not have any words at all! They are only pictures.
Either way, the scores correlate strong with tests that do use words such an SAT, which you seem to be confusing with an IQ test.
Actually, testing peoples' IQ is amazing simple. Here is a test which yields quite accurate results.
Read someone a four digit number. Have them repeat it. Then a five digit, then a six digit, etc. Eventually, they will fail. Repeat this a couple time and get an average value for failure.
Now run the same test, but have them repeat the numbers backwards. This is much more difficult. Find the average value for failure.
Just knowing these two numbers, you can predict IQ very accurately. Amazing, huh?
This clearly has little to do with studying, or playing with golf clubs.
And it would almost make sense, too, if the gene set for "average" intelligence was dominant (or at least some parts were), and X-linked. Men would have a much higher chance of being geniuses, but also a much higher chance of (non-disorder linked) being at the other end of the spectrum. Just a little hypothesis which will probably get me plenty of "flamebait". :)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
At some point, science fails us. The (quality) world religions tell us that women and men have different but complementary roles. Intelligence, strength, beauty and moral character are all part of the picture; someone who is only intelligent can be a dangerous, corrupt, insane person. So let's look at the big picture. Women and wonderful and we need them as allies in the coming race, class and religious wars.
exponentiation ezine
Of course we know that men are more intelligent than women, and we know the reason!
Men have little brain appendages hidden in their pants. Under the right circumstances these appendages grow bigger allowing men to act far more intelligently than women in similar circumstances...
I would have gotten this correct knowing nothing about the words used. The first 3 are 2 syllable, 4 letter words. The question is, what was the reasoning used when this question was designed?
I could make an argument that 1 is the odd one out, since it starts with a vowel, but it seemed a much weaker correlation.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari