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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."
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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah, especially after RFTA'ing.. you really just wanna piss on the head of this guy. He also claims that White people are more intellegent than black...
Take a look at Wikipedia's entry on race and intelligence.
There might be some truth to it.
But none of that means people should discriminate, of course. Everyone needs to be given a chance. Just don't expect equal outcomes.
"some people" are mostly psychologists out to sell books.
IQ is a load of bunk. So is EQ. The whole notion of what we call human intelligence can be described in one, two or even 10 simple, easily quantified parameters is stupid and unscientific.
The idea that emotion and intelligence (or: Sense and Sensibility) are two distinct things is antique philosophical claptrap, with little justification in reality.
Results in neurology (a real science, as opposed to most psychology) indicate that not only are these things nondistinct, but rather that human emotions provide the foundation for what we call 'intelligence', even of the abstract kind.
Read, for instance Descartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio.
In general male bell curves are wider than women's. Its true of height, weight, IQ, most diseases. It also appears to be true of others things such as the ability drive (most race car drivers are men and the people with the worst driving records are almost always men). Women tend to have much better language skills on average than men but the most of the best writers are male and in modern countries most of the few illiterate tend to be male as well.
It has to be something about instability of that Y chromosome. The X seems to be much more stable.
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?)
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
You guys with mod points need to read the thread or article before using them... Half the comments here talk about how the author of this research is the same guy who concluded that white people were smarter than black people, and that lighter-colored black people were smarter than darker-colored black people.
So in conclusion -- according to him -- blacks and women are dumb. Caucasian males is the way to go.
Sorry, this is relevant in the context of this person claiming to have been denied the vote, how?
Unless she is over 100 years old or so, she's full of shit. She hasn't been denied a damn thing; in fact, if she's under 30 or so, chances are she's gotten more opportunity than most males due to female-specific scholarships and affirmative action.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
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
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.
Attempting to find this answer for you I instead found a research paper (with references) that stated the opposite conclusion.
From the article Gender Differences in Cognitive Functioning by Heidi Weiman
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.