I find it funny that so much scientific research attempts to prove the existence of a biological contrast that's blatantly obvious, but which has been completely deconstructed and obscured by modern literary theory/philosophy.
How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
71–80 of 297 posts
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some answers here: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7093/do-men-show... Intuitively it made much sense for me when I was in high school and trying to figure out the world. People perceive high, even extreme intelligence as some beneficial trait, but I don't think that's how we should look at things. Evolution does not care about men as much as it does about women. Man can be far from being best fit for rai…
> Man can be far from being best fit for raising children and still forward his genes to next generation. This would seem to predict that men show less variance than women in whether or not they forward their genes. They actually show more. Why would too high intelligence make someone a worse parent?
>> Man can be far from being best fit for raising children and still forward his genes to next generation.
> This would seem to predict that men show less variance than women in whether or not they forward their genes
Not necessarily. Ratio of variance of whether women and men forward their genes is influenced with many factors. Extreme men can have less variance then equally extreme women, but average women can have less variance because there is very few extreme women. Also what I'm referring to is about times that shaped modern day men and women. Child of extreme woman had very small chances of surviving back then. Child of extreme man would have had better chances.
> Why would too high intelligence make someone a worse parent?
I'd want to back that up with something solid but only things that come to my mind are anecdotes of absent minded geniuses, emotional volatility associated with intelligence, social misalignment that could get a person in serious trouble (Archimedes?) or simply loosing interest in own 'plain' children.
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is a partial explanation.
Only if you can show a strong causation (or even just correlation) between very high intelligence and holding a high status position
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes, it is generally accepted. But people don't like it. For example it explains why there are more men in high-status positions, which again, people don't like, and try to rail against ("We need more women in XYZ!"). It's important to remember that high IQ and high-status positions don't correlate. High IQ is no indicator for success in live. If you actually measure people with higher societal status, you'll proba…
>Psychologically, the more relevant variable for success in live is motivation. Which is still pretty small compared to who your parents are (in terms of the upbringing offered to you and the connections it offers).
> > Psychologically, the more relevant variable for success in live is motivation.
> Which is still pretty small compared to who your parents are (in terms of the upbringing offered to you and the connections it offers).
It quite looks like it, yes. That's why I prefixed that with "Psychologically". I actually had written more or less your answer after that, but then deleted it because I didn't want to derail the thread :)
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#75I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time. The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing. Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation. And, it has…
Is the percentage of women in STEM low in all STEM degrees in the US? I'm Spanish and math and chemistry usually have a 50/50 or >50% of women here. Not sure if those are considered STEM at all in the US.
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#76Is it generally accepted in the relevant scientific communities that male IQ's exhibit more variance than female IQ's? I imagine this type of thing would be easy to verify via e.g. standardized test scores.
It seems to be a meme without a lot of evidence attached. However, the one paper I did find appears to refute it: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.long I think that some ideas gain traction because they fit well into people's narrative, even when the evidence is not yet strong enough for real trust in them.
It seems that people continue to find significant differences.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7DMQCP3v6SZQUw1MnNWbXBUV3M/
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#77The next article in this series on "Which sex is playing higher stakes reproductive game?" is also worth reading: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-diff... It reminds me of an interesting hypothesis I've read about the other day that the concept marriage plays a significant role in the success of our culture as it counteracts this difference. It allows more men to reach a social status at which…
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Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#78I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time. The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing. Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation. And, it has…
> gender disparities across different occupations.
I guess it would depend on the occupation. For example, I don't see much difference between nurses and doctors in terms of something that could be quantified as a gender-specific preference. It seems to me that the idea of "nurses are women, doctors are men" came about more from the idea that women were "too stupid" to be doctors and that it was a "man's job." Even today many doctors look down on nurses (as 'below' them; people whose opinions don't matter), and men that decide to become nurses also face a uphill battle of social acceptance.
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#79I find it funny that so much scientific research attempts to prove the existence of a biological contrast that's blatantly obvious, but which has been completely deconstructed and obscured by modern literary theory/philosophy.
My thought exactly: we've gone so far afield with this ridiculous notion of "sameness" between sexes that we actually now need "serious" research to "debunk" what was so obviously never true. "This just in: women and men are not exactly the same!"
The real problem is that our society tends to equate sameness with acceptability as its preferred mode of "tolerance". This has the paradoxical effect of re-inforcing the negative ways we view our differences (e.g. discrimination). That is, the desire to claim that we are all exactly the same is an implicit statement that it would be somehow problematic if we were not.
So, the fact that we are obviously different means that we are attempting to sell oursleves a lie that we never buy, while allowing our negative feelings about our very real differences go unchecked.
Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a 60/40 male/female split in that graph for people with IQ's of 140. First, you don't need an IQ of 140 to have a high-status position. Second, the male/female ratio for high-status positions is much higher than 60/40.
If OP's explanation of this difference is correct then you would expect (at least some) other mental traits to also have a higher variance in men. It wouldn't be just IQ.
20% of Congresspeople and 5% of CEOs are women; to explain that, you would need 3 independent traits (ie, no correlation between traits) with a 40/60 split strongly tied to Congresspeople (ie, everyone who is a Congressperson shares this trait) and 7 for businesspeople.
You could go the other way and assume that it is all explained by a single trait -- give Congresspeople an IQ of 150, CEOs 160, and just assume that the trend in the chart continues and the overrepresentation of males is even higher at the further extremes.
This, however, runs into the problem that we've measured the IQs of Congresspeople and CEOs. Congresspeople are starkly average, with Representatives averaging 101 and Senators 98, so unless you believe that half of Congresspeople are below 50 and half above 150, the expectation based on this research is that more than half of Congresspeople should be women. Likewise, CEOs only average -- optimistically -- 130, where the gender split is only 46/54.