
Women and Minorities in Science (Warning: Basic calculus and statistics; political incorrectness) - byrneseyeview
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/women_and_minorities_in_science.htm
======
DaniFong
The article is bullshit. I didn't read anything after the quote "On all
standardized exams, including IQ tests, men score higher than women on
mathematical reasoning sections."

That's simply not true. Women are known to score higher (and have since the
60's) on tests of calculation, which is just one example.

To have such a sweeping fallacy stated as a general truth betrays a
disgustingly prejudiced intent.

There are volumes more wrong with the whole essay, but really it's not worth
my time. If you take any particular statement there, and dig a little deeper,
you'll be sickened by what comes out.

~~~
byrneseyeview
"Women are known to score higher (and have since the 60's) on tests of
calculation, which is just one example."

That's true. Usually, the breakdown is that women are much better at
arithmetic and the like, but men are much better at more abstract problems.
Which is going to make someone a better EE professor?

~~~
DaniFong
Well, we weren't talking about EE professors. But, if we were, we're talking
about the top 1% of quantitative ability, in which case there's barely any
statistical validity in what is written there at all.

Here's a good piece of data. The Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins
has been testing youth (~12 years old) across the country since 1972. One of
the first things that they noticed was that of the students scoring above 700
on the math SAT, boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1. Okay, wow.

They have, of course, run the tests every year since then, and now it's down
to a 3:1 ratio. This indicates a very, very strong cultural variable. The fact
that this isn't even mentioned, again, betrays bias.

~~~
byrneseyeview
I hadn't heard about that. I imagine it may be cultural, but again, note that
the SAT's ability to measure top scorers has been dampened. As far as I know,
standard deviation is more significant than absolute difference in the
men/women IQ debate. Men swamp women at the high ends because there are more
male geniuses and male morons.

~~~
DaniFong
The thing is that intelligence isn't some kind of nice, statistically normed
quantity. There's more to most variables than a mean and a standard deviation
-- so I don't know why people seem to always think that you can restrict a
discussion of intelligence to such concepts.

One thing that is actually correct is that there's more variation in gene
expression between men and women. On of the reasons for this is because,
chromosomally, women have two X chromosomes, which pair up, and then randomly
one or another turns off. These means that the gene expression is mixed
between both parents.

On the other hand, the Y chromosome is largely only effective at turning off
gene expression. You can see how there's less redundancy here.

But intelligence isn't a gene. Researchers have, since the time of Dalton,
tried to find a simple, biological basis for genius. You know, memory
capacity, reaction times, brain size, brain structure convolution, etc. They
haven't found anything -- literally everything has turned out to be a false
start, even brain size, which, has been shown, within families does not even
predict g.

In the mid ranges, there are greater standard deviations, yes. But every
single normed test is normed on a sample on the order of 1000. They're
designed for regular people. The designer of the Weschler has adamantly
opposed the use of IQ tests for anything other than clinical settings, for
this reason. It's just no good at drawing conclusions on the extremes of
ability.

A better guide might be actual performance. The IOI this year had more girls
than ever before -- 11. That's nearly 300% more than last year, where they had
4, and one medal. They are:

Emina Bukva (Bosnia and Herzegovina) Constanza Contreras (Chile) Anna Currel
(Spain) Romina Huenchunao (Chile) Vaiva Imbrasaite (Lithuania) Taksapaun
Kittiakrastien (Thailand) [Silver] Sepideh Mahabadi (Iran) [Gold!] Radwa
Metwali (Egypt) Katie O'Mahony (Ireland) Phitchaya Phothilimthana (Thailand)
[Silver] Ye Wang (USA) [Silver]

Sepideh Mahabadi had one of the best performances of anyone. If you're
familiar with IOI scoring, only the top 1/12 are to get golds, and 2/12 to get
silvers, thus 1 gold and 3 silvers out of 11 implies that they did at least as
good as the boys, and in fact somewhat better.

Were the 'standard deviation' explanation correct they should have, instead,
had 0.4 girls earning maybe 0.01 medals. It just doesn't work. Psychometrics
are a non-science.

~~~
byrneseyeview
"But intelligence isn't a gene. Researchers have, since the time of Dalton,
tried to find a simple, biological basis for genius. You know, __memory
capacity, reaction times, brain size __, brain structure convolution, etc.
They haven't found anything -- literally everything has turned out to be a
false start, even brain size, which, has been shown, within families does not
even predict g."

I hadn't heard that about brain size. The correlation I read about was 40%,
over a number of studies. It would be interesting to know if this had been
updated, since I know individual cases belie it. But that's a small sample
size (like your IOI numbers -- 11 people in one year is extraordinary, unless
it's an outlier).

But even if those numbers don't predict _g_ , you're, uh, left explaining how
_g_ varies when what it's made up of doesn't vary. You're implying a
correlation between any two intellectual activities (e.g. counting and
calculus, or reading comprehension and analogies) of zero. Unless your sample
size has five idiot savants for every Gauss, I just don't see how that's
possible.

"Psychometrics are a non-science."

How do you account for the explanatory power of IQ, then? Is it a myth we've
all bought into? Is it suggestion?

~~~
rms
>>"Psychometrics are a non-science."

>How do you account for the explanatory power of IQ, then? Is it a myth we've
all bought into? Is it suggestion?

The IQ test means a lot in the midrange in western cultures, but becomes
completely worthless at the extremes. It's not so much that there is no
scientific basis behind psychometrics as it is just the beginnings of a
science. It's really hard to understand the brain, I'm hopeful that we or our
AI overlords will get there eventually.

And Dani: I have no doubt there is a genetic basis for intelligence, we just
haven't figured it out yet. Clearly it is a whole lot more complicated than a
single genetic mutation. This one gene has an influence on signaling pathways
in the brain which has an indirect influence on intelligence.
<http://www.physorg.com/news91799494.html>

Also see the disproportionate number of Chess Grandmasters and Science Nobel
Prize winners among Eastern European Jews.

Summary:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html?_r=1&#...</a><p>Paper:
<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf"
rel="nofollow">http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocs...</a>

~~~
DaniFong
rms,

Yes, I agree with you there. It's just there are constantly pronouncements
that something or another has been found, and the true story always seems to
be that it makes no real difference. Certainly there must be a genetic basis,
I just have real doubts that the standard explanations of genetic variation
can actually account for it. I mean, say, hypothetically, that it took 15
genes to produce genius. Then the lack of redundancy and higher variability on
the male genotype would be a hindrance, not an advantage.

"...see the disproportionate number of Chess Grandmasters and Science Nobel
Prize winners among Eastern European Jews."

If you plot said statistic over time, even taking the Jewish population versus
the rest of the world into account, you'll notice massive fluctuations. Anand
just took #1, for example. I bet you'll see a lot more young Indian chess
players. In different times you could say that the world's intellectual
leaders were Sumerian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Arab,
Milanese, Viking, Khmer, Maori, Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, Jewish,
Russian, or American. Don't forget that the Nobel prize committee are
themselves Nobel prize winners, and they have not shown themselves to be free
of bias (They didn't award Rosalind Franklin, nor Emmy Noether, nor Freeman
Dyson, and I'm sure, many, many others). I also think that the selection of
Chess and Scientific Nobel prizes is clearly occidental. Why not Go
(Japanese/Korean) and Tang (Chinese) era scientific achievements? Why not
programming competition performance (Poland and Russia seem to be leading) or
memorization of oral history (The Tibetans seem to be quite remarkable in this
respect).

Or for that matter, the first masters of Astronomy (Babylon, Mayan) or masters
of the Mesoamerican ballgame (Mayan, Aztec)?

~~~
byrneseyeview
"I mean, say, hypothetically, that it took 15 genes to produce genius. Then
the lack of redundancy and higher variability on the male genotype would be a
hindrance, not an advantage."

Not exactly. It would be more random, but depending on how mating worked out,
you might just expect the genius to have more kids. In a monogamous society
with a strong welfare system, that's not how things would work -- but if your
genius 1) doesn't have to pay taxes, and 2) can have as many wives as he
wants, he's probably going to be very rich and have an absurd number of kids,
some of whom will have the magic 15 genes.

"I bet you'll see a lot more young Indian chess players."

Out of a much, much bigger sample? As a percentage of population, Ashkenazim
dominate.

"memorization of oral history (The Tibetans seem to be quite remarkable in
this respect)."

Are they as good as people in the Balkans? Or Aborigines? Or North Indian
bards? Oral history is a different game -- as long as you don't teach someone
how to read, they can remember phenomenal amounts (Robert Fagles wrote a bit
about this in his intro to _The Oddyssey_. I don't know that anyone has done
research on which groups are best at it).

"Or for that matter, the first masters of Astronomy (Babylon, Mayan) "

It's known, among people who study this, that Ashkenazim are average in
astronomy. It's also known that astronomy requires disproportionately high
visiospatial IQ, and that Ashkenazim are average.

"It's just there are constantly pronouncements that something or another has
been found, and the true story always seems to be that it makes no real
difference."

I wish there was more research, too! It's a little unfortunate that the most
open-minded people in this field are the bigots. In economics, or math, or
physics, people say "That's wrong! Check your data! Your reasoning is flawed!"
In psychometrics, people say "You can't say _that_!"

~~~
DaniFong
"Not exactly..."

Depending on the amount of gene expression you actually need, you might get an
absolutely higher percentage of females at the highest level of ability, or
vice versa. It is model dependent. That was my point.

"...Indian chess players"

The population size doesn't matter nearly so much. What might matter is the
population size of interested players. The point is that this is highly
culture specific. On TopCoder, per capita, Norway, Croatia, Slovakia, and
Poland seem to lead the way in terms of top competitors, and, as we know,
tragically, the Jewish population there had been reduced to near non-
existence. I don't know why programming competitions are a big deal there, but
they are.

In most of the united states, African Americans perform worse than average in
most tests of academic achievement. Yet, in New Jersey, Joyce Kilmer middle
school in Trenton, has continually fielded one of the top teams. I saw them
when they won in 2006, and they were incredible. Say what you want about
sample size, but what I've taken from this is that with a good teacher, and
inspiration, a team can rise to the occasion and even beat the kids of
Princeton professors, despite otherwise being handed a second class public
education.

"...oral history."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_King_Gesar>

That's pretty darned incredible, to me.

"...it's known..."

Are average? Huh? What a crazy pronouncement. It's not 'known' that astronomy
requires any kind of extreme visual ability -- for most of it's history it's
involved more bookkeeping than looking at pretty pictures. I don't know what
the historical precident was to make Mayans and Babylonians look up in the
sky, and eventually develop mathematics to predict solar phenomena, but they
did. I think it's a heck of a lot more random than you seem to be implying.

If you were born 300 years ago would you still be a hacker?

"...I wish..."

I wish there was less wasted effort going into measuring something we don't
understand, and more energy put into an actual understanding of intelligence.
We are further back here than we are in AI. We don't merely have a theory
that's incorrect. We don't even have a theory. We're stuck in the local
maximum, and I really don't think there's any way to move forward if people
keep approaching it in the same way, over and over.

People make these unqualified, absurd statements and they really have no idea
what kind of damage they do. I've been studying these things for years, and so
I'm in a much stronger place than most. But I know for a fact that if I was
told that I couldn't do something because of my genetic makeup, it would have
taken a lot of work to get over that. You know what the worst thing is? Most
of, if not all of it, is complete baloney.

People see to think that as long as they can measure something in the social
sciences, they can publish it, and draw conclusions. Well, the bar is way, way
higher in physics, and as far as we're aware, particles don't base life
decisions on whether or not our model represents them as different from what
they are. Scientists should, and do, take extreme caution when they start to
say anything about race, and the few that do not should be called out on it.

(That said, having actually read them, I'd be totally okay with Lawrence
Summer's comments were he not the president of Harvard. He should have known
people would blow things out of proportion. But "The Bell Curve" is totally
fraudulent).

------
npk
Bleh, so what. This guy claims to have measured something, but who knows if
it's even interesting. At the end of the article, do you even understand what
the point in reading it was?

I think what is interesting is tagging the article as "politically incorrect."
I really hate this term. It forces people to think, "If I don't agree, or find
this offensive, I'm small minded."

What makes this particular article reek of crackpotdom is that it offers no
references to any other pertinent articles, yet it acts as if it is
"scientific" you know, with all that math.

Don't bother reading this thing.

~~~
pius
Agreed on all points. The whole "warning . . . politically incorrect" thing is
not only lame, but smacks of a good ol' boy telling a ribald or xenophobic
story to his buddies with a wink and a nod. Might as well have just said "
_We_ all get it, but you know how those chicks and minorities whine about
every little thing . . . they just don't have any sense of humor."

Don't know what OP's intended tone was, but it certainly didn't come off well
to me.

~~~
byrneseyeview
I apologize if it didn't come off well. What I wanted to avoid was a response
like "That's racist!" I should probably ask doctors how they do that -- do
they say something like "The racist disease, sickle-cell anemia, tends to
strike people of African descent," or what?

I mean, the point of the article was that, given some data about tests, the
correlation between tests and academic appointments, and some basic math, you
can at least say "If a group is under-represented in the sciences, it is
mostly because their test scores are low." Which means that either the test is
inaccurate, and they're really underrepresented, or the test is accurate and
they aren't. It's not about the research -- it's about showing where the
prejudice has to be hiding if there's any prejudice to be found.

------
amalcon
This entire article appears to be based on the assumption that standardized
tests can be used to determine anything useful.

I suspect everyone can see where that's going.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Well, here's the approximate conversion between SATs and IQ:
<http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002360.html> . And here's an interesting
scatterplot: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IQatWoN_GDP_IQ.png> . Put
those together, and...

Also, assume they don't determine anything useful, but that schools have been
magically fooled into thinking they do: what part of the conclusion to this
essay changes?

~~~
axiom
That scatterplot comes from
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations>

Which by the way predicts that the average IQ of Ethiopia is 63. Note that an
IQ of 70 is considered mentally retarded. Anyone see a problem with this?

Edit: my point is that it's absurd, and the study is nonesense!

~~~
byrneseyeview
Are you saying the data are surprising, or that they're wrong?

~~~
axiom
I'm saying it's completely bonkers. Are you kidding me? an average IQ of 63?
you're talking about a kind of person who needs constant supervision and can
barely dress himself. A far FAR more reasonable explanation is that Ethiopia
is poor because of political instability, not low IQ.

Note, I'm not saying IQ is a bad measure. In fact from what I've seen, IQ is
probably the best measure of ability we have (it's not a coincidence that the
average nobel nobel laureate has an IQ of 140.) It correlates nicely with a
lot of things you would expect. Although it's still far from a perfect
measure.

Anyway, I'm saying the study in that wikipedia article is nonesense on the
face of it.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Well, yeah. I mean, if you were to ask me before I'd heard about the IQ thing,
I would have said the same. But new data caused me to reexamine my old
assumptions -- why doesn't that work with everyone?

An IQ that low doesn't imply what you think it does. It makes it hard for
someone to handle life in a highly regimented society, where not knowing the
difference between "Walk" and "Don't Walk" will get you killed in a week. But
a person with an IQ of 50 will end up with the intelligence of a nine-year-
old, and under some circumstances, you could expect a nine-year-old to, say,
dress himself and forage for food.

------
Tichy
Hm, in one sentence he claims that the gap shows up in all tests across all
cultures, but then he goes on talking only about SAT scores. Some citations
would have been in order... I don't think the SAT thing is very interesting:
presumably (or possibly, at least) it is still a culture thing that women are
less interested in maths, which would explain the gap by the end of high
school.

Several years ago I took some interest in the Bell Curve and IQ tests. The IQ
test people also claim their tests are culture insensitive, but that is
definitely not true. Just think about the following kind of test: show 10
kanji symbols on a page of the book and on the next page ask the reader to
identify them. Clearly people familiar with kanji will have big advantage.
That might sound constructed, but there were times when IQ testers concluded
that people from primitive societies can't think in 3d because they would
build a drawing of an abstract box as a 2d structure. That's so obviously a
culture thing... Anyway, not refutations of IQ testing, but enough to let one
be sceptical.

~~~
byrneseyeview
"I don't think the SAT thing is very interesting: presumably (or possibly, at
least) it is still a culture thing that women are less interested in maths,
which would explain the gap by the end of high school."

That could be it. But I'd actually be more worried about students who were
just "less interested" than students who were interested and tried really
hard.

"The IQ test people also claim their tests are culture insensitive, but that
is definitely not true. Just think about the following kind of test: show 10
kanji symbols on a page of the book and on the next page ask the reader to
identify them."

Actually, what IQ testers found was that the culturally insensitive tests
exacerbate group differences. Unless there's something cultural in being able
to remember a sequence of numbers and recite it in reverse, or to have high
reaction time, or to remember the orientation of a set of geometric shapes.

~~~
DaniFong
I used to tutor junior high and high school kids in physics. In junior high,
nearly all the top students were girls. For some reason, in high school, there
was this huge switch -- suddenly, most of the girls weren't interested in
physics or math. It was weird, but I suspect that it's largely a matter of
social pressures.

Luckily, I've had no direct experience with this. I skipped high school.

~~~
byrneseyeview
You skipped high school? How did that work out?

~~~
DaniFong
Pretty well. I graduated in Computer Science and Physics with a first class
honors degree, and the university medal (I was the top student), at 17.

I then went into Princeton to start a PhD in plasma physics -- I did that for
two years but that's on hold now -- I'm starting a startup, as I guess is the
ambition of many of us here.

Socially, I've always been fairly mature for my age. I got along better with
college students than my age peers. It was a very good move. I hated school.

~~~
Jd
Wow, Dani. Impressive. Need a co-founder? Any workers?

------
viergroupie
Well, the distribution of asian SAT scores looks vaguely bimodal, so let's
validate our preconceived notions by arbitrarily stuffing two gaussians
inside. Very methodical.

~~~
DaniFong
With enough Gaussians, we can say anything!

------
pius
I'm not particularly impressed by the research but, then again, I'm black . .
. I'm probably not bright enough to understand all this "basic calculus" and
other "smart" talk.

------
jsnx
I know a few smart women. Even if there are important statistical differences
between men and women in the way of analytical ability, we still have to take
individual men and women on their own merits.

It's too bad that colleges are unfairly admitting sub-par women, but then
again, that's probably not as bad a thing as admitting all those god damn
business majors...

