tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26188478.post123906081280010410..comments2024-03-28T12:16:12.797-07:00Comments on Inductivist: Are men smarter than women?Ron Guhnamehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06421460508647618774noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26188478.post-24018760353380748272010-05-22T14:42:38.065-07:002010-05-22T14:42:38.065-07:00Men get promoted into management because of person...Men get promoted into management because of personality traits, not intelligence. There is little reliable mean difference in intelligence between the sexes, the difference is in the variance, which produces the male advantage at the right tail to which you refer. <br /><br />This advantage does not get very strong until about 130+ IQ, probably too high to affect the typical Wal-mart manager selection process. It is likely that there are only 10-20% more males above the Wal-Mart "cut score", which would result in a gender imbalance of no more than 55% males, 45% females. The 65%/35% ratio would require a male advantage of 1.86 to 1, which is huge.Atanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14834663754768855057noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26188478.post-21103003172894632922010-05-22T14:42:38.066-07:002010-05-22T14:42:38.066-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Atanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14834663754768855057noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26188478.post-62566907225203968822010-04-28T15:15:41.744-07:002010-04-28T15:15:41.744-07:00I don't think that this argument holds water. ...I don't think that this argument holds water. Consider:<br />"the mix of subtests, some which favor males and some which favor females." Quite, which is why the early IQ researchers weighted their tests so that the two sexes got the same average score for IQ. Having thus fixed the mean, they discovered the much larger standard deviation for men. So far so sensible. Then your quotation continues:<br />"The way around the problem is to maximize the number of subtests, which makes sense since general mental ability is supposed to penetrate a broad array of cognitive tasks." That seems to make no sense: how can you "maximize"? There is no upper bound. Set 100. Set 1000. Set 10000.<br />The essential problem is that men and women have, on average, intrinsically different mental strenghts, so reducing them to a single "IQ" score is necessarily arbitrary. If you want to fuss about, say, the paucity of women in jobs involving maths, cite the scores on the maths-related tests, don't try to stretch the concept of IQ to do a task for which it is a bit too crude.deariemenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26188478.post-31989715440335856722010-04-27T18:52:05.183-07:002010-04-27T18:52:05.183-07:00I skimmed the Wal-Mart article in the Wall Street ...I skimmed the Wal-Mart article in the Wall Street Journal and I think it said Wal-Mart does not plan to settle. This would seem to me to imply they believe they can still win the case, but I don't know enough about the legal system to be sure.Jokah Macphersonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04185675633464395897noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26188478.post-32641083671408090322010-04-27T11:52:10.998-07:002010-04-27T11:52:10.998-07:00I have always felt that it is not reasonable to as...I have always felt that it is not reasonable to assume that men and women would have identical intelligence unless proven otherwise; because Men's and women's brains are of different size, have different compositions, and developed in a very different hormonal 'culture medium'. <br /><br />They were also subjected to significantly different evolutionary selection pressures. <br /><br />If, after all these differences, male and female brains converged on an identical degree of general intelligence, it would be something of a miracle. <br /><br />'No difference' is therefore not a plausible null hypothesis.Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.com