« Taxicab Query | Main | Ah, Sovereignty » Obviously, I'm the Exception25 Jan 2008 08:38 am Joan Raymond for Newsweek: Are men smarter than women? No. But they sure think they are. An analysis of some 30 studies by British researcher Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London, shows that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ. But women, it seems, underestimate their own candlepower (and that of women in general), while men overestimate theirs. Of course I myself am far too smart to fall into any such patterns of misestimation. Comments (31)
His sample of women must be solely from Oshkosh. 
Then factor in the notion that IQ tests are known to favor knowledge of culture and trivia, and the likelihood that they're written by men and presumably embody some male cultural biases, and estimate the probability that if you correct for those factors, ultimately women are smarter.
But doesn't the metric used count at all? For example, suppose you measured intelligence by how good you were at fooling people into thinking you're smarter than you really are? Then, men would come out looking pretty good. And you can easily see how such a strategy would lead to reproductive success and be reinforced by natural selection.
Several years ago, I read the factoid that the chief product of testosterone is unreasonable confidence. Apparently, at a critical juncture in evolution, it was true that moving, however irrationally, was a better survival mechanism that waiting to see.
The real lesson here, for social conservatives, is that women think they aren't as smart as men. So why is anyone trying to act otherwise?
Its well-known that the same pattern holds for looks. Most men think they are above average in looks, whereas most women think they are average.
I thought that the mean IQ was the same for men and women but that the standard deviation in men's IQ was bigger than for women. If the previous statement is correct then there are significantly more men than women with an IQ over 120 or an IQ of under 80. Since most of the business and political leaders are people with IQ's over 120 then it would be reasonable to find that most of the business and political leaders are men. I really don't know if my IQ is over 80 or not so I don't know which group I belong to.
Since most of the business and political leaders are people with IQ's over 120 then it would be reasonable to find that most of the business and political leaders are men. That's assuming that people become business and political leaders as a function of intelligence. I don't see any reason to believe this is the case.
So who is smarter, you or your classmate Natalie Portman?
Insert token Larry Summers joke here!
Regarding the "spread" of IQ, it is true that while men and women have approximately the same mean IQs, men have a much "flatter" bell curve, with higher numbers at the extremes, while women's average IQ tends to cluster around 100, with fewer numbers at the extremes. This doesn't matter when considering 96% of the population, but it matters a great deal in absolute terms when looking at the top and bottom 2%. Larry Summers got into trouble for pointing this out, but nobody seems to have a problem with the fact that approximately 7 out of 8 individuals classified as mentally retarded are male... Also, the notion that IQ tests are made up primarily of knowledge of culture and trivia is simply erroneous. The WAIS-III (the most widely used test of intelligence) has 13 subtests. Seven of those asses verbal (or "crystalized") IQ, and one can make the argument that only a single subtest measures knowledge of culture and trivia directly (the "Information" subtest). Three others do require some level of vocabulary (Vocabulary, Simiarities, and Comprehension), though the latter two measure abstract thinking far more than meanings of words. The remaining nine subtests have virtually nothing to do with knowledge of culture or trivia, including the six subtests associated with nonverbal (or "Fuild") intelligence.
For example, suppose you measured intelligence by how good you were at fooling people into thinking you're smarter than you really are? Or, in other words, "standardized testing".
Jeremiah, Sorry, but you're wasting your (virtual) breath on this thread writing with a high level of knowledge and logic about IQ. A snarky putdown of Larry Summers is the type of thing we're looking for.
I don't want to make this point, because Malcolm Gladwell made it on Colbert this week and I don't want to echo, but I would think a better answer to the question of whether men are smarter than women that we don't know how well IQ tests capture some underlying trait of intelligence, and don't have any other robust way to measure it, so we don't know the answer.
Misunderestimation strikes again.
An analysis of some 30 studies by British researcher Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London, shows that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ. But women, it seems, underestimate their own candlepower (and that of women in general), while men overestimate theirs. Maybe it is the IQ test that's wrong, not the self-assessments.
That men and women were equal on average in IQ was first proposed by pioneering researcher, the much denounced Sir Cyril Burt, in 1912. It was one of the great findings in the history of the social sciences, since nobody believed it at the time.
But, yes, as Larry Summers pointed out, and got fired for it, the variance in male IQs is greater, so there are more males at super high levels of IQ -- for an analysis of Summers' numbers, see: Summers stated, "… if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. [In a normal bell curve, only one out of 44 individuals is that much above average.] And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean [or one out of 741]. But it's talking about people who are three and a half [one out of 4,299], four standard deviations above the mean [one in 31,574] …" Observing that among the top five percent of twelfth-graders in math and science, it's common to see two boys for every girl, Summers estimated that the variance in ability is about 20 percent greater among males. He went on, "If you do that calculation -- and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways -- you get five to one [males per female], at the high end." Actually, Summers was being a bit politically correct with his math. At three standard deviations above average (the equivalent of a 145 IQ), there would be over seven males for every female. At four standard deviations (a stratospheric 160 IQ), there would be more than 30 men for each woman. This also implies, correctly, that there are a lot more retarded men than women, but they don't come up much for tenure at Harvard. These proportions are not contradicted by the Nobel Prize statistics. Since 1901, women have made up four percent of the Nobel laureates in Medicine, two percent in Chemistry, and only one percent in Physics. Strikingly, no woman has won a Nobel in Chemistry or Physics since 1964. Few would consider economics a hard science, but, for whatever it's worth, the entire female sex has never won a Nobel in the math-intensive Economic Sciences, while Summers' immediate family has won two: Kenneth Arrow is his mother's brother, and Paul Samuelson is his father's brother. (Summers' dad changed his name for fear of anti-Semitism.) Both of Summers' parents were economics professors, and Summers was, for a while, the youngest person ever to win tenure at Harvard. http://www.isteve.com/2005_National_Post_Summers_Harvard.htm
Steve, you know perfectly well that Summers was fired for covering for Schliefer, a criminal who cost Harvard a boatload of money.
Actually, I've always vaguely wondered whether Summers wasn't some sort of "silent partner" for a piece of Schliefer's international insider-trading action. I know that Schliefer and Summers were supposedly very good friends, but Summers' must have known what might happen to him if he used millions of Harvard's money to settle those lawsuits against Schliefer and (maybe) keep him from being bankrupted or even going to prison. Risking your Harvard presidency over your friendship to a crook seems really pushing it. On the other hand, if Schliefer had the goods on Summers, it would have been really easy to blackmail him into doing exactly that. Admittedly, this is all pretty speculative and I don't even remember all the details of the case...
Generally, women are more emotionally intelligent than men. Sure, Ted Kacysinski was technically smarter than Susie Radcliffe. And, the fact is - go to any library- there's a surfeit of "brilliance". But, brilliantly imaginative people of either sex are far rarer.
Counting Nobel Prize winners doesn't mean one thing or the other.
As I've often written, Summers's costly defense of his corrupt best friend, superstar economist Andrei Schleifer, played a role (deservedly) in alienating non-politically correct professors, such as Dr. Abernathy of mechanical engineering. But clearly the women and IQ brouhaha was the single biggest factor in Summers's downfall, as shown by the feminist leader, Drew Gilpin Faust, who put together the $50 million payoff to women that Summers appproved as reparations for his remarks, being picked to succeed him.
never shall "IQ" and "Women" be mentioned in the same sentence without the posting of a "poor Larry Summers, he was only telling the truth you PC bitches" defense.
Actually, there's indisputable evidence, albeit indirect, that solves the question permanently. Some state U. in Arizona keeps snakebite data, and when men get bitten, they get bitten the overwhelming majority of the time on the hand, arm OR FACE. Women, the overwhelming majority of the time on the foot or leg. QED
Yes, the firing of the President of Harvard after making scientifically correct but politically incorrect statements was kind of a big deal in terms of the message it sends out to anybody who cares about protecting their careers. Same with the firing of America's most prominent man of science, James Watson. I see Matt still hasn't given us his opinion on the firing of Watson, although since then he has snarked plenty about peripheral scientific topics in which he's in way over his head and just makes himself look ignorant.
Matt, you should know that posting anything even tangentially related to IQ will do nothing but produce an endless series of rants by our local "looking-to-find-a-reason-why-white-people-are-better" Mr. Sailer. If I remember correctly, Summers also make the mistake of the "maybe it's that women and men aren't equal in scientific expertise" comment after the number of women hired for scientific faculty positions at Harvard went DOWN under his tenure, while the number had been going UP under previous administrators. It looked like he was looking for justifications for his own biases. Just like Mr. Sailer.
"So who is smarter, you or your classmate Natalie Portman?" He posts the answer to that every day - it isn't pretty. But she is. Now if we could only wean her away from that asshole Dershowitz...
hey, hey, don't mischaracterize sailer's views just to make a snarky point. he is generally looking to find reasons why white men are better.
Hey all, let us praise the male ego. It's smarter than you are. And if it hasn't quite saved the world yet, just you wait.
Comments closed February 08, 2008. |
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Heads in the Sand
ahhh...lol
Never under-estimate the male ego !!
Posted by lauren | January 25, 2008 8:45 AM