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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."
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.
here come a bunch of overrated "+5 funny" jokes to prove the study wrong
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!
Phew, some male researches are not getting "any" from their wives or significant-others for the next week! :)
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.
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
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!!
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.
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.
Why can't I get paid to spout idiotic claptrap all day?
You haven't made management yet?
KFG
Of course men are more intelligent! We have TWO brains!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Why can't I get paid to spout idiotic claptrap all day?
Because apparently you don't know the difference between opinions and measurable data. Whether or not the conclusion in TFA is correct, at least it's possible to measure intelligence.
It is not possible to scientifically measure whether one color or flavor is "better" than another; the closest you could get is polling ice cream lovers to see which flavor is more popular.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
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...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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.
their*
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
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
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 :(
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.
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
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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.
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.
If that's what the study shows, what is your issue with the methodology? Or is it that you couldn't bear that finding? Stereotypes don't just pop up out of thin air, they have at least a basis in truth.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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.
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.
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.
Your post is an example of how ideology and dogma can confuse the issue.
I base this on a couple of things you wrote.
What a clear example of the harm of using non-scholarly sourcing (for the record, I love Wikipedia for getting a general idea of a topic, but I would never use it as an authoritative source on a complicated topic such as this one).
Even worse than these flaws, though, is your conclusion that "there may be some truth to it."
The only reason you might consider this harmful is if you already believe what the source suggests is false. It's unlikely that you would claim that that there was much harm in believing a non-scholarly source if what that source was claiming what you believed already to be true.
I also said that there may be something to it. And there might. There is no evidence that you've given that rules it out. If anything, you're the one implying the much stronger claim that there is no relationship.
How can you make such a strong claim? The only thing that might engender that level of confidence in you without strong evidence is ideological, not scientific, thinking.
If you think you've got evidence that rules out a connection between race and intelligence then let's have it. Until then you can keep your sense of moral superiority to yourself. I'm not interested in what you think should be true or comforting.
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");
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
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ours is called the "Physics lab".
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
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?
"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 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
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.
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
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.
What I feel strongly about is that there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that the genetic component of race (to the extent that it exists) affects IQ. I did give you several examples of evidence that supports this skepticism (nutrition accounts for brain size difference, a popular IQ test is biased in at least one question, etc.).
Yes, you are right that there might be something to it. No amount of evidence would ever change that. But even in this post you seem to be leaning toward believing that evidence (correct me if I'm wrong here), and I do feel that that is irresponsible.
And FWIW, I don't think I'm being ideological as much as I'm being a pompous ass. But Slashdot gets under my skin sometimes because people talk about very important topics and rarely go into any depth about them.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
Every girlfriend I've had has been less intelligent than me.
I mean, come on, they dated me .
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.
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