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.
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
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.
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!!
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
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.
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.
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.
Ahem.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.
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.
Seems to me the Emotional Quotient is a simple reaction to IQ. "So, men perform better in one test, let's find another evaluation that is broadly similar in name, mixes concepts and in which woman get the best results".
Nobody complains that women and asian people are smaller on average then men and african people, but when it comes to IQ, seems every group on average should get the same average (men, women, caucasian, black, rich, poor, Britney Spears fans, music lovers, and so on). Absurd.
Why should these quotient measurements give equal score to all sides? Why would nature divide intelligence equally between gender and races?
All Political Correct crap to me.
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.
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
Success in the real world is defined by one's ability to use logic to regulate emotions so that they do not become dominant. That's your EQ (what I think it should be). If emotion controls logic, you're probably entangled so far into your ideals that you'd contradict their very meaning in the process. i.e. being so anti-fascist that you become fascist.
Balancing logic and emotion means to balance the man with the beast.
"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.
Unless I was, uh, not white.
Incidentally, I get treated like SHIT compared to women, simply because I am, in a word, unattractive.
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?)
You haven't been denied the right to vote
Nope. And you have?
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
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
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.
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).
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.
While IQ is theoretically justified, EQ is just a bunch of big crap for people to believe in and to make some BIG bucks:
:)
EQ "tests" were validated with samples that are NOT available to scientific scrutiny. The samples are property of a company (forgot the name), and are not being released on basis of intellectual property. All of you people, who read that EQ tests are valid and read the validation scores - must take them as they are - you will not be able to check them personally.
Replication studies have been made, and not a few of them:- none - NONE - have been succesful. Yet people still believe this crap.
EQ is defined by the psychologists who use this concept as the ABILITY to understand other's reactions and actions, act upon them in accordance. They say this ability is LEARNED: (otherwise they wouldn't make a penny). Ok, so we now take the 10th grade psychology book and look at keywords as ability, learning and look, we find the term: SKILL not EQ! We already have a word for this! EQ is being sold as THE next best thing in seminars and coaching workshops because they 'predict' success. Not true, but this is not what i can say about IQ: though definitions may differ - the concept remains and IQ is the predictor for things such as (and these are real): School success, a big part of work performance and a bunch of other stuff. OK; rant off!!!
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
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?
I am so tired of hearing that. It didn't take YOU years to get anything. YOU haven't been treated as ANYTHING for centuries. I am willing to bet you haven't been alive for a third of a century, let alone a full century. Last I checked, you had a bunch of rights, as well as laws and government agencencies to protect those rights.
No, but I have been denied due process, discrimated against at work, been DENIED positions, been objectified as a source of income and security, been judged on my appearance... All because I am an intellegent overweight white male who generally makes good money.
To use a favorite phrase of so many women, GET OVER IT.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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.
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
Why are emotions and logical understanding mutually incompatible? Show me the emotion that doesn't have a logical cause? If I'm angry with someone, I have a reason. If I'm afraid of something, then I have a reason. It is not always wise to act on these feelings straight away but that has little to do with whether I can comprehend them or not.
Girls tend to do better at school (statistically shown many times) than boys because girls tend to study more. But I make the case that study, both through learning from others and from excercising the memory and analytical capabilities of the brain, does increase that hard to define thing called intelligence.
But the most important thing to consider when reading this report is that there are over six billion people on this planet and that's a lot of people to generalize over. I'm not going to dispense with the scientific method just because of the subject matter, but if it were the case that men were more intelligent than women on average, then that statistical difference would have to be enormous to justify taking it into consideration in daily life. And it clearly isn't, or people wouldn't be debating this.
We'll have to wait for the actual paper to be published to see what the basis is, since TFA(s) contain nothing except flamebait. But research into this has been going on for a long time so which has come first? The definition of intelligence and the realization that men fit it best? Or the ever finer analysis of the differences between men and women and the definition of intelligence based on that? Surely the latter should be considered as a factor as by this stage in the game, no scientist designing these tests is entering the field without prior knowledge of these differences.
And does it make a difference to how you evaluate this post if you knew whether I was male or female? Because it shouldn't, but this report implies it should.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
At least in the european societies, that just isn't true for at least 2000 years.
If a ship sunk, who got to the lifeboats? "women and children first"
During the centuries, women were treated differently as men - that's true - however they weren't ever treated as "a lesser human", quite to the contrary, a women's life was regarded to be worthy a lot more than the life of a man.
Actually if you look at suicide rates, it seems that women were never as unhappy as today.
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
In fact, I seem to recall reading that lack of emotion impairs decision-making, especially when making decisions that involve oneself. Here for example is a brief from some guys currently studying just that, or one could take a look at the work of Antonio Damasio.
With this in mind, one would sincerely hope that both genders are equipped with a full set of emotions.
Ours is called the "Physics lab".
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
This issue, like abortion, religion and others like that (...emacs vs. vi - oops, perhaps that doesn't go here) is so loaded that there is nobody there who is capable of serously and objectivly conducting an investigation of this.
The bigger problem with this, the way I see it, is that before we even get to comparing men vs. women, we need to define what "intelligence" is and how to measure it.
Interestingly there is an accepted and known test for machine intelligence --the Turing test, but for humans it is not as clear. Is a tribesman from Africa less intelligent than me? He knows how to kill a lion, while I might know what a Hilbert space is, so who is more intelligent?
Until there is a concrete and accepted definition of human intelligence there can be no study about who is more intelligent than whom.
One might as well say that "men have been shown to be better at 'blah' then women, while women consistently outperform men at 'foo', and both are equally good at 'x'." Untill those 'blah', 'foo' and 'x' are defined the statement will make no sense.
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
Actually IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient. It takes our current perception of intelligence, that is, figuring out solutions different problems, that don't really require that you know specific facts, at least outside the basic math/language skills,
Except most IQ tests I've ever seen don't properly test that. First of all, the "figuring out solutions to problems" is restricted to a very small set of problems, usually of the form "spot the pattern". Secondly, they still require some knowledge, as you admit yourself. They are certainly biased towards people who are good at maths for example, and it is possible to improve your "IQ" with practice.
IQ tests are not useless, but it is important to remember they test a very specific sort of "intelligence" - namely, logic, or ability to spot patterns. I had to do some for an interview with a software company - here it is relevant, because those skills are needed in computer programming, but can you really say that computer programming is a better measure of intelligence than say, being a historian?
Whilst an IQ test may require less knowledge than a maths or history exam, it is possible to construct academic tests which are less dependent upon knowledge - eg, a maths test geared towards your natural mathematical ability, a history test geared towards your ability to judge evidence rather than remember dates and other facts, or a science test that involves you working out what's happening by experimentation and forming a hypothesis rather than recalling facts.
However, it would be ludicrous to suggest that because these tests are less dependent upon knowledge, that they therefore test "Intelligence" in general. IQ tests are tests of logic/pattern spotting, which is no more a factor in intelligence than that required for maths, history or science.
IQ tests are the best tool we have to measure, what we understand to be intelligence. It's like saying physics tests don't test physics knowledge, just because we don't fully understand all the laws of physics.
We have many ways to measure intelligence, and we shouldn't discard the rest for one arbitrary type. It's like saying we can measure someone's physics knowledge by setting them a quick quiz on Astronomy.
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
Not everything that gets flamed is flamebait.
This issue, like abortion, religion and others like that (...emacs vs. vi - oops, perhaps that doesn't go here) is so loaded that there is nobody there who is capable of serously and objectivly conducting an investigation of this.
There are FEW people capable of seriously and objectively investigating it, but far fewer who are willing to listen to them.
The bigger problem with this, the way I see it, is that before we even get to comparing men vs. women, we need to define what "intelligence" is and how to measure it.
FTFA:
I.Q. tests aren't perfect, far, far from it, I tend to say that they measure your ability to take an I.Q. test more than your intelligence, but it's something that can be measured, logged, and compared.
This study is interresting. It's not comforting, it's not in line with the current vogue of "everyone is the same" discourse, but that's no reason to NOT do the study, nor to refrain from publishing it.
If you want to debate the interpretation of the results, or the methodology, please, be my guest.
But if you object to the study itself because it's subject is sensitive, by god, STFU&GBTW!
You can't take the sky from me...
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?
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.