Trying to quit [LWN.net]

Trying to quit

Posted Oct 1, 2007 18:36 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: My attempt by alankila
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

I don't want to engage in full-scale warfare again, just a small skirmish: you still don't get it. The shape of the curve is there by design too, including the dispersion, just as much as the average.

IQ tries to measure the unknown quantity g, which represents "intelligence" and is hard to even define. It does so by creating an absolutely artificial measure, which includes gender equality in the definition. (Which some people here don't seem to like.) If the dispersion is different for men and for women, that is an artifact of the measure, not a fundamental truth about the unknown g. It is as insightful as saying that it is twice as hot when the temperature in Celsius degrees doubles, from 20°C to 40°C (or 50°F to 100°F, if you prefer).

In short, IQ is utterly useless for, among other things, finding differences between men and women, apart from the obvious: spatial vs verbal aptitudes. forthy makes an interesting comparison below to CPU profiles. (Note the irony: if it was the opposite and women were better at spatial reasoning, a few posters would probably have jumped at the fact to suggest that women are worse at programming since they lack the verbal skills to use our very masculine programming languages. As it is, they are left wondering what on Earth does better spatial reasoning have to do with IT skills.)

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Trying to quit

Posted Oct 1, 2007 20:27 UTC (Mon) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (5 responses)

Perhaps we refer to different definitions of IQ. What I mean is: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence>. E.g., see the second figure and the explanation for it.

Wikipedia at its worst

Posted Oct 1, 2007 20:44 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (4 responses)

You mean Normal_distribution_pdf.png, about which the article says: "The diagram shows only general concepts of how curves might compare. It does not represent specific experimental data". Come on, you are bordering the obtuse.

Please read this very informative article by the American Psychological Association, linked from there. It may clarify the situation for you. Then again, it may not.

Wikipedia at its worst

Posted Oct 1, 2007 21:46 UTC (Mon) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (3 responses)

> You mean Normal_distribution_pdf.png

I mean there are scientists who are perfectly happy NOT to use gender-averaged definition of IQ as your previous post explicitly said. This figure TOGETHER with the text RIGHT to it confirms it.

> It does not represent specific experimental data". Come on, you are bordering the obtuse.

If you're interested in the specific experimental data, follow the links to refs below. E.g., let me quote the abstract of Ref. [15]:

"Sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability: more facts"
CP Benbow and JC Stanley, Science 222 (1983): 1029-1031.

Almost 40,000 selected seventh-grade students from the Middle Atlantic region of the United States took the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test as part of the Johns Hopkins regional talent search in 1980, 1981, and 1982. A separate nationwide talent search was conducted in which any student under age 13 who was willing to take the test was eligible. The results obtained by both procedures establish that by age 13 a large sex difference in mathematical reasoning ability exists and that it is especially pronounced at the high end of the distribution: among students who scored greater than or equal to 700, boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1. Some hypothesized explanations of such differences were not supported by the data.

-----

Now you can go to the library and read the full article. Alternatively, call this sexism and be PC-happy.

Careful with your terminology

Posted Oct 2, 2007 6:20 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

You will notice that the referenced article is not about "IQ", but about mathematical reasoning. When using these culturally loaded terms in a scientific frame so that we can distinguish between prejudices and legitimate differences, rigor is crucial.

Careful with your terminology

Posted Oct 2, 2007 11:56 UTC (Tue) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (1 responses)

> When using these culturally loaded terms in a scientific frame so that we can distinguish between prejudices and legitimate differences, rigor is crucial.

I did suggest we might use different definitions - to which you extremely politely replied "you are bordering the obtuse."

With linguistic issues aside, do you accept that (i) certain intellectual abilities (in this specific case, abstract math) might differ significantly between the representatives of the two genders and (ii) these abilities might be crucial for a success in certain FLOSS projects? You know, at least as _hypotheses_ that may merit civilized discussion instead of shouting "liars" and all kinds of "*ists".

These 13-year boys and girls are now around 37 - more or less the average age of e.g. LKML, if multiple photos from all kinds of kernel summits are indicative.

Now, one can go to great length discussing whether these differences are at the genetic level or somehow socialized (those dolls... I wonder why no parent sued the manufacturers of these toys resulting in dumbing down their daughters - and that in the US, known for successful multi-million absurd cases!). There are _scientific_ works on these subjects as well. But these are extremely off-topic. Not to mention that an absolute majority, if not 100% of us are not specialists in the field.

Whatever the actual causes of the disproportions are, any attempt to "actively" bring in an abstract "equality" are doomed. The best we can do (and I believe most of us are doing it anyway) is to fight against any sign of _direct_ discrimination and try hard to avoid prejudicing.

Let us operate with _facts_, clearly label _assumptions_ and _personal_ experiences as such, and be tolerant to opinions which break taboos (even when you honestly believe this is an axiom and not a taboo).

Careful with your terminology

Posted Oct 2, 2007 17:21 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I did suggest we might use different definitions - to which you extremely politely replied "you are bordering the obtuse."

You did suggest your own alternate definition for the same term, "IQ", which has a perfectly defined meaning already. I only replied the quoted sentence when you tried to use as explanation of your alternate definitions a wikipedia graph about normals which you can find in the corresponding article. Sorry if I'm being pedantic, but as I explained it is especially important to use the right terms in this area.

I accept your suggestions (males are more profficient at some abilities than females, and those may be crucial for certain FOSS projects), but I don't think they are very likely -- or relevant. As to the rest, all you say is perfectly reasonable and I think we mostly agree.

Trying to quit

Posted Oct 2, 2007 17:50 UTC (Tue) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

> ... an absolutely artificial measure, which includes gender equality in
> the definition. If the dispersion is different for men and for women,
> that is an artifact of the measure, not a fundamental truth about the
> unknown g.

This looks like a contradiction to me. If measurements are corrected to produce identical result ("gender equality in the definition"), then how could the dispersion end up being different? And why wouldn't some approximation of the "fundamental truth" about g not be found in the gender bias function used to correct the results for equality?

No contradiction

Posted Oct 2, 2007 21:18 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

IQ tests must be corrected from time to time, or the results tend to drift. For starters, among civilized populations IQ grows about 3 IQ points per decade. Since the average for a large population must be 100, by definition, the test results must be adjusted.

I'm no expert, but I can imagine that variations in dispersion between genders are possible too. Giving more weight to tests with bigger variance on one side and smaller in the other, and recalibrating to keep the same average, would eliminate the gender bias. Or maybe it is a statistical artifact from an imperfect fit to a normal. Remember, the normal distribution in IQ scores is there by design; nobody really knows if intelligence itself (whatever it is) follows a normal distribution or not.

And why wouldn't some approximation of the "fundamental truth" about g not be found in the gender bias function used to correct the results for equality?

Because g is not an intelligence profile; it is a scalar factor. Again from APA:

Some theorists (e.g., Spearman, 1927) have emphasized the importance of a general factor, g, which represents what all the tests have in common

This factor, in other words, represents "intelligence" itself, not ability at specific tasks. It is the thing that makes people solve problems better than chimpanzees or gorillas. It is what makes disabled children unable to learn beyond a certain point (as opposed to those with behavioral issues). Even its existence and utility is also a contended issue; read the article for a good introduction.