Posted on 09/24/2002 12:55:07 AM PDT by RogerFGay
As I said, outstanding achievement. I did not need diapers.
No wonder Kasparov had such a hard....I mean difficult time beating her. From personal experience, it's very difficult to play chess well when you're horny.
My stated assumption is that the means are not equal.
There are various ways of quantifying aspects of ability, all of which may or may not say much about success. How much ability or talent is actually translated into real life success may indeed be dependent on cultural factors.
[Later]My stated assumption is that the means are not equal.
It certainly isn't your stated assumption, unless you're stating it now. You're clearly talking about a difference in variance, and then drawing an incorrect conclusion. Perhaps you just worded in incoherently; "more women are better than the average man" doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
If you really believe that woman have a higher median than the mean for males when it comes to "cognitive, analytic or whatever" capabilities, how did you reach that conclusion? How do you average out Einstein and Ted Bundy?
Thank you for bringing it to my attention. Both the Nazis and Feminists reflect different aspects of the same compulsion. So, too, do the Communists and Social Democrats. It is basically a total intolerance for the reality of human differences; the reality of different aptitudes and different levels of achievement. While the rhetoric may be slightly different, it is part of the same war on reality that turned the Twentieth Century, which could have been a golden age of innovation, into a nightmare of conflict and acrimony. (See Compulsion For Uniformity.)
It is the same compulsion, which condemns our public schools to failure, however much money is spent on their behalf. It is not politically safe to acknowledge that innate aptitudes differ; and therefore, that reality cannot even be considered in making policy. And where it must be acknowledged, in some form; it must be trivialized and treated with all the scorn that a self-righteous neurotic can muster.
In my own small, and not always modest way, I try to give back some of that scorn to the crackpots who would intimidate the rest of us into silence.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
I still find it fascinating that some guy can write an article complaining about wacko feminist theory, pointing out obvious empirical facts such as that the best scientists in general tend to be mend, and get jumped on for being a "misogynist".
Meanwhile, in some of the responses, such as yours, we find sweeping assertions seemingly pulled out of the clear blue sky such as the idea that "more women are better than the average man". (At what? At everything?)
Dare I even ask what the statement "more women are better than the average man" is based on? Is it based on anything besides wishful thinking, a sincere desire on your part to appear non-misogynist, a bit of a patronizing attitude towards the sensibilities of women, and that sort of thing?
It makes sense if the means are different. But, I've been accused of wording things incoherently before.
If you really believe that woman have a higher median than the mean for males when it comes to "cognitive, analytic or whatever" capabilities, how did you reach that conclusion? I've read articles to that effect.
How do you average out Einstein and Ted Bundy?
Why do they need to be "averaged out"? Perhaps neither distribution is normal because of the lower limit. However, populations are large enough to support extreme outliers.
I was thinking of IQ tests.
The point that I must not have made clearly, is that no statement about men in general or women in general holds for all men or all women. Generalizing statements are made (as I did) about averages or (as the author did) about outliers. The author is a bit guilty of the same "madness" he accuses the "womenists" of.
It makes sense if the means are different.
I meant, the sentence doesn't make sense. More than what? I assumed you meant that greater than 50% of women are better than the average man, i.e., the median for women (in all things cognitive!!) is above the mean (average) for men.
Somehow, I can't believe you've read articles that sweeping. Are the majority of women better than the average man at map-reading? IQ? SAT scores? Military strategy? Animal tracking? It's a fantastic statement.
How do you average out Einstein and Ted Bundy?
Why do they need to be "averaged out"?
I was using your example, and the implication that averaging these two together brings you somewhere in the middle of some distribution ("the tails for men are longer than women. We don't see female Einsteins, and we don't see female Ted Bundy's either.") If you're figuring an average intelligence (as you are for men, anyway), and using Bundy and Einstein as examples, then you must have some way of quantifying cognitive ability. {Is Bundy (a lawyer) supposed to be the low-end of the scale?}
I don't know that numerically equating Einstein and Joe Idiot with two Joe Averages makes sense. It's not just that the distribution isn't normal, it's that cognitive ability has a great number of dimensions, and a simple average of a linear scale may have little meaning. I would point out that Joe Idiot, Joe Average, and Einstein are better than anyone else in the world at being Joe Idiot, Joe Average, and Einstein, respectively.
I see. Too bad you didn't specify that this is what you were thinking of as you wrote the words "cognitive, analytic, or whatever".
Now as things stand your claim is as follows: "more women are better than the average man"... on IQ tests. Put another way, the median women's score on IQ tests is higher than the mean man's score.
Question: do you have support for this assertion? I don't doubt that it could be true (or not), but it still sounds suspiciously like something pulled out of the clear blue sky.
The point that I must not have made clearly, is that no statement about men in general or women in general holds for all men or all women.
Sure, I think this was your point about tails of distributions. The point was a fine one. I'm just saying I think you overplayed your hand a bit when you went on to make your "more women are better than the average man" assertion, which I don't think you can seriously defend.
Generalizing statements are made (as I did) about averages or (as the author did) about outliers.
True. The author's generalizations were clearly labeled as such and are rooted in readily-observable empirical observations.
Your generalization was based on... well, nothing whatsoever, as far as I can tell. You simply asserted that "more women are better than the average man", sans proof or even without any claim that this assertion was rooted in observation. I still honestly don't know where you came by this belief of yours.
The author is a bit guilty of the same "madness" he accuses the "womenists" of.
Not really. Saying this doesn't make it so. The "womenists" the author is talking about (and one can debate how many of these there really are, but that's a different issue) are doing insane things like rejecting logic and science "because it is male".
The only thing the author is guilty of are generalizations. In general, due to sex differences, the top scientists tend to be men (the reason he makes this point is to say that such a pattern doesn't make science or logic "male"). One can quibble with this generalization, but the author gives at least some anecdotal support of it (listing top male scientists).
You also made a generalization: "more women are better than the average man", at "cognitive, analytic, or whatever" (which apparently means IQ tests). The difference between you and the author is that you offer no evidence whatsoever, nor do you even attempt to explain how you drew this conclusion (i.e. by at least saying something like, "I work as a teacher/tutor/professor and it's been my observation that...."). Seriously, that's why I respond, because I honestly would like to know where or how you got this idea that "more women are better than the average man". Even if it's just something personal and anecdotal like your subjective opinion based on the nonrandom sample of men and women you've known and observed.
I just want to know where you got your generalization, that's all.
That is not the case for IQ tests (Binet), where the sexes have the same average score. The result is well-known, and many times replicated. Men do have a larger variance.
But the result is meaningless. Men and women score differently on different kinds of questions. The tests are designed so that they will have the same average score. Add a few questions in column A, or a few in Colum B, and you can show that men have better cognitive ability or vice-versa.
Yes. The tests like S-B had to be devised particularly to bring male average scores up to female averages. The IQ tests, and aptitude tests like SAT, are constantly tweaked to eliminate racial differences as well.
I agree that cognitive ability includes multiple parameters, not all of which are resolved by simple tests. Further, I agree that for the individual it doesn't matter how he compares to everyone else.
Differences between the sexes can be profound, even if not exactly measurable, but the overlap covers the majority of individuals, including the majority of scientists, mathematicians, and so forth. The exceptions are rare, and it's difficult to determine, as the author so readily does, that cognitive function related to sex rather than cultivation by society is the sole contributing factor to these exceptions historically being male.
Sensitivity training and minority studies ...
"Desire for approval and recognition is a healthy motive, but the desire to be acknowledged as better, stronger or more intelligent than a fellow being or fellow scholar easily leads to an excessively egoistic psychological adjustment, which may become injurious for the individual and for the community. " ___ A. Einstein
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods." ___ A. Einstein
"We should take care not to make the intellect our god."___ A. Einstein
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." ___ A. Einstein
"I believe in standardizing automobiles, not human beings." ___ A. Einstein
Of course, Einstein as a German Jewish immigrant was supremely aware of the frailty of human nature in assigning arbitrary value to people based on attributes of their birth. Judging from his writings, he was also, apparently aware of the vastness of human capacities of endeavor and spirit, and in fact he was in awe of such vastness. He was also much aware of how "knowledge" is often subsumed by evil intentions. Somehow I doubt such an intelligent person as Einstein would crow about the supposed superiorty of the "male mind" (or any other mind). He was wiser than that.
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