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Essay On Summers Comments On Women In Science

V

Virgil

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim Logajan said:
Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com said:
Karl Uppiano said:
I'll take scholarship over indoctrination any day.

Summers wasn't engaging in scholarship. He was speculating, off the cuff,
at best. That is more akin to what people people do at a bar, over a
beer.

That men are superior to women was, and many cases still is, the most
accepted dogma. Summers wasn't stating some truth, he was the one who
attempted to use a handful of questionable observations which ended up
reiterating dogma that is thousands of years old.

But Summers didn't say anything like that. What he said was that men
appear to be statistically more variable than women in almost every
measurable characteristic. This means that while men may have more of
the extremely bright they also have more of the extrememly dim.

It is those extremely dim at statistics who have misrepresented what was
actually said and raised this whole foofah.
 
V

Virgil

Jan 1, 1970
0
The lack of female theoretricians in physics and mathematics (say) could
be explained in sociological or psychological terms or -maybe-, just
-maybe- there is a genetic factor (gasp!).

It could also be explained by variance for women in measures of the
relevant talents being smaller than the corresponding variance for men.
This could be the case even if it should transpire that women have on
average better measurements than men, since it is only in the extreme
upper tails of these distributions that one expects extreme talents to
exist.

Those who do not understand the difference between means and variances
should not pontificate on what they mean.
 
U

Uncle Al

Jan 1, 1970
0
Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com said:
able to
talk about this stuff, especially in universities. They're supposed to
be
looking for the truth, not spouting dogma. <<

You're in trouble already, young man. Mandatory women's studies and
sensitivity training for you, followed by expulsion.

Mandatory Wymyn's studies, then sensitivity/diversity training, then
*Anger Management,* then expulsion - with ignominy! You don't receive
the bullet to the base of your skull until you satisfactorily finish
your re-education.

"Assessment of Detention and Corrections Operations in Iraq." If
Uncle Al were in charge of Abu Ghraib prison we'd start with
testosterone antimetabolites and estrogen in the low-protein
high-starch food. When the prisoners are weepy-teepy and emasculated
we add a major tranqulizer like Thorazine or have some real proximate
fun with droperidol and the like. Strap 'em down in the dark and add
a fat dollop of DMT plus eight hours of Enya for behaviorial
reorientation. Give Uncle Al 90 days and he'll transform stiff-dicked
stinking 20-year old Arab terrorists into lavender-scented
kaffe-klatching girlies. Think of it as feminism with a PERT chart.

MK-ULTRA was bush league. You cannot take out. You must replace -
biologically as well as psychologically. Damnation and redemption,
then rebirth.
 
M

Mark Thorson

Jan 1, 1970
0
Uncle said:
If Uncle Al were in charge of Abu Ghraib prison we'd start
with testosterone antimetabolites and estrogen in the
low-protein high-starch food. When the prisoners are
weepy-teepy and emasculated we add a major tranqulizer
like Thorazine or have some real proximate fun with
droperidol and the like. Strap 'em down in the dark and
add a fat dollop of DMT plus eight hours of Enya for
behaviorial reorientation.

Don't forget the domoic acid so that they don't . . . don't . . .
whatever it is you use domoic acid for. :)
 
U

Uncle Al

Jan 1, 1970
0
Robert said:
The fact that Summers allowed even for the -possibility- of intrinsic
genetic differences in the way femaies think as compared to males is the
Harvard equivalent to yelling Nigger, Nigger out loud. The authors of
-The Bell Curve- met the same kind of reaction.

Academia properly yells "KIKE! KIKE!" Diversity admissions are inert
material. If you let in Jews they will take over within your own
rules, euchering out those who deserve to thrive given their pater
familia social connections. It was an Ivy League disaster in the
1950s and 1960s. 3% of the American population embraced everything
that was profitable and powerful.

Asians are the new 3% intellectual threat, but the immigrant F1 norm
raised on traditional low-protein high-soya diets was physically
nonthreatening (including sexually diminished males). The F2
generation raised on beef, chicken, and heavily supplimented with
nutrients is six-foot with normal genitalia. They stare back.
 
U

Uncle Al

Jan 1, 1970
0
Mark said:
Don't forget the domoic acid so that they don't . . . don't . . .
whatever it is you use domoic acid for. :)

A little sloppy but definitely in the smorgasbord,

http://www.inchem.org/documents/pims/chemical/pim670.htm

If you want to play that kind of game, then enjoy ciguatoxin. The
idea of interrogation is to disgorge information. Physical damage
levied upon the subject is evidence of a low competency interrogator.
Physical mutilation has other goals - most of them unachieved in the
real world.

What does severing fingers get you? It gets you a permanently
motivated enemy. Vietnamese emigrated to the US and were accepted.
Hanoi Jane is still reviled, and rightfully so. There are better,
more useful, more profitable modalities to target in the opposition.

Look at imprisoned Northern Irish. They had hunger strikes to the
death and painted the walls with their feces. So? That is how they
lived on the outside, too. If the British had any brains they would
not have pounded on the armor, they would have pried at the cracks.
 
S

Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com

Jan 1, 1970
0
I give him an E for including a gender bias in the real question
which should have been about why Americans aren't choosing
science and math. The current ads by one of the teachers'
unions is bitching about how they have to teach math and
English instead of art.<<

COMMENT:

Oh, that's a good question, but I think the answer's sort of obvious.
Any political sphere will eventually be taken over by politicians. By
"political sphere" I mean one in which power is derived
verbally/socially, by means of who you can convince or coerce, or how
loud you can wail, how well you kiss ass, or how good your debating
skillls are. As opposed to other spheres in life, where power comes
from how well you can bust heads, manipulate a machine, manipulate raw
nature, etc. Neither machines or nature being particularly susceptable
to threats or verbal skills (although mankind has a long long history
of thinking otherwise-- see magic, shamanism, religion both "primitive"
and not, etc, etc. The rise of technology in just the last half
millennium is due partly to a VERY late post rennaisance recognition
that "magical" or verbal attempts to control nature are worth shit).

There are famously few engineers and physicists in congress. Do we need
some huge academic study to figure out why? Should we hear from the
president of Harvard on the question? But the question of why there's
so little love of the physical sciences in modern academia and
teacher's unions, is merely the flip side of this, and has the same
underlying mechanism. These are simply not the same kinds of people,
that's all.

People differ in how they look to control the world, in order to get
power (which is the goal of all human existance, since it leads to
reproductive success). (1) There are people whose approach to the world
is to get power by means of rhetoric (these days, "giving the
disenfranchised a 'voice'-- see pure whining). This is essentially an
infantile approach, since all humans start out in this mode. Some never
leave, though, and we call these "progressives." (2) There are other
people whose approach to the world is by means of theft, or bonking
somebody on the head (these people perpetually wear helmets--- see BD
in Doonsbury). These are conservatives and violent criminals (hard to
tell apart sometimes). (3) there are merchants and salesmen and
huckters whose first instinct is to buy or trade for it, and finally
(4) there are people whose approach is to take it apart, see how it
works, build a device to get what you want. Math and the natural
sciences are obviously here. [There's some math in business and
wheeling and dealing also; business requires both sorts of skill sets].


The nonverbal math-and-mechanics oriented people flee the verbal wars
of academia and politics as fast as they can, normally. They have been
kept in academics historically only because of academia's domination by
men (who, with the exception of a few natural dramatic actors, I think
tend toward the last three categories of power-grabbing). Now that the
era of male domination in academia is ending, with only the whiners
left, the engineers and businessmen are simply going to be found
elsewhere, Because they simply cannot stand the rules of the odious
power structure that results in any place when politicians completely
take over.

So where are the math geeks to be found? Usually running their own
companies and thanking god they're out of academia.

SBH
 
M

Mark Thorson

Jan 1, 1970
0
Uncle said:
A little sloppy but definitely in the smorgasbord,

http://www.inchem.org/documents/pims/chemical/pim670.htm

Try searching on "Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning".
If you want to play that kind of game, then enjoy ciguatoxin.
The idea of interrogation is to disgorge information.

Yes, but covering your tracks is also important.
I rather like the idea of performing the interrogation,
implanting an RFID chip, then sending the guy back
home. Maybe get him really drunk first, so there's
a logical explanation for his memory lapse. Nobody
needs to know he was captured and interrogated.

Domoic acid is a little less sloppy when combined
with kynurenic acid.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=2101746

Some finesse (and a watchful eye on the EEG)
may be required to achieve optimal results
without leaving footprints observable on MRI
or at autopsy.
 
S

Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com

Jan 1, 1970
0
I give him an E for including a gender bias in the real question
which should have been about why Americans aren't choosing
science and math.<<


The subset of this question was also addressed by him and I give him an
E for missing what I think is one part of the big picture. For those
people who do chose the sciences, why are the women to be found almost
exclusively in the life sciences, and those that deal with human
beings?

Here's my take on it. This has nothing to do with math skills at all,
except in a derivative way. There is less math in the life sciences
BECAUSE of the sorts of people who go into the life sciences, not the
other way around. In other words, women don't avoid physics because
it's so math-intensive. Rather physics is so math-intensive as a
science because the people it interests tend to be the sort of people
who are very very good at math. And these people in turn are often
uninterested in doing statistics and the kinds of math things that
biologists and economists do. Until they reach their 40's, if ever. So
such people tend to study subatomic particles instead of insects or
viruses. Quarks instead of jaguars, if you will.

Because of this, we get this stuff about how it somehow intrinsically
*takes* more math to study particles than dolphins. As though there
were some parts of nature intrinsically more mathematical than others,
LOL. Sorry, I'm not buying.. If you have the math skills, you can find
a way to apply them to any science you happen to be interested in. If
anything, biology is messier and more difficult to pare down to
something you can analyze with a mathematical model. But there's no *a
priori* reason at all why the mathematical models themselves should be
any less complex in the life sciences than they are in the "hard"
sciences. The fact that they *are* is a historical result of who was
interested in what. Yes, the math in "acceptable research topics" in
physics, is harder. But that is NOT because physics is INHERENTLY more
mathematical than (say) physiology. Rather, mathematical applications
have been furthest advanced in physics because those very few highly
skilled young mathematicians tended to be male. And not interested in
the life sciences at that stage in their career. Women if they are
interested in science, are often interested in life sciences from the
get-go.

Interest can change for individual scientists, of course. One thinks of
the careers of Schroedinger, Delbruck, Szilard, Feynman, Pauling, etc,
etc. At some point all of them looked up from their commutator brackets
and heard the songbirds. At that point, they merely felt the way the
average woman feels all the time. Before that, they were in a kind of
high-testosterone shoot em up fugue-state that it really takes a Galois
to understand. I don't think the academic politically-correct
squat-to-piss types at Harvard will EVER get it. Fortunately, the
progress of science (mostly) doesn't depend on it.

The real battle is over money and power, of course. The big Harvard
debates wouldn't care of fewer women went into the "hard" sciences, if
there wasn't some kind of odd public perception that the "soft"
sciences are somehow less important to progress, or that even the less
mathematical parts of physics (ie, experimental physics and applied
technology) were somehow less important than pure theory. They aren't.
All are equally necessary for progress. The fact is that women have
been working in the sciences since as long as the sciences have been
around. But they've been doing the parts of the labor which haven't
gotten the recognition.

Just about anybody of average intelligence can eventually be trained to
do algebra, simple calculus, or statistics. Most progress in science
comes from hard work, curiosity, self-questioning, and relentless
honesty. Much of it can be done by people who can't divide 60 by 5, if
they have access to somebody (or something) that can. The ability to do
the very highest sort of math is a rather Martian trait, like the
ability to play a peice of music by ear on some instrument, after
hearing it just once. Those people who have this kind of talent are
rare, always young, usually male, and often somewhat odd. Left to
themselves, they often do not drift into all areas of the sciences
equally. So what? But they can usually be persuaded to work in them, as
part of a team. As for the rest of science, men and women generally
compete on a more or less equal footing so far as basic skills, and if
they happen to have different interests in the kinds of science they
happen to want to work in, so what? It's only our job as a society to
make sure that we don't tend to undervalue the various scientific
fields that women prefer, BECAUSE women tend to prefer them. Other than
that, let the chips fall where they may.

SBH
 
J

Jim Logajan

Jan 1, 1970
0
There is little questionable about the observations that the standard
deviations for the distributions of various cognitive abilieties
(probably not only cognitive) are a tad larger for men than for women.

Then how do you account for the results of the Stanford study, which was
referenced in one of the URLs I included but that you elected to elide?
Straight from a PC manual, this one.

Which part are you contesting? The statement that the dogma is thousands of
years old, that it was a reiteration of that dogma, or both?

I know of at least two major world religions that are centuries old which
promote the subordination of women to men - and they are still quite active
in the U.S. So I presume I irritated you only with the "reiteration" part?
It is pointless, devisive, and is irrelevant to the argument so, if
possible, please consider that part retracted.
Too far? He pointed that such difference amounts to a lot when you
get to, say, 4 standard deviations away from center. Takes an idiot
to say that a statement to this effect is "too far".

First, I haven't used any personal insults, so if you can refrain from them
I'd appreciate it. Feel free to humiliate me with facts - I can deal with
that. Secondly, Summers himself says "Now, it's pointed out by one of the
papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and
are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And
that's absolutely right." And in spite of saying that it is _absolutely
right_ that the tests aren't highly predictive, he continues on that track
anyway! Hence my "running too far" assessment.
But he didn't say anything like this. He did say, in fact, that
social and cultural factors may have influence and even open bias may
exist. Only, he added that there may be intrinsic factors, as well.

The order of importance and the emphasis of his points are pretty explicit,
and "intrinsic factors" weren't "added" - they were what he considered most
important. He explicitly listed the factors in order of importance, and
intrinsic motivation and intrinsic ability both top social factors in his
analysis:

"One is what I would call the - I'll explain each of these in a few moments
and comment on how important I think they are - the first is what I call
the high-powered job hypothesis.

The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the
high end,

and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of
discrimination in a search.

And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order
that I just described."

The paragraph beginning "The most controversial in a way, question,"
addresses the third factor, and the bulk of it looks to me to be an attack
on it as a factor. I think his argument might have had validity if the pool
of applicants to colleges was already uniform and unaffected by social
factors encountered during grade school and college, but such is not the
case (https://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/rest_86_2_447_0.pdf).

Sadly, by the time students reach college it appears that the damage is
probably done and there is nothing he can do as an administrator to improve
the situation. Social and cultural factors don't suddenly kick in at
college freshman year after all.
So now you crossed the boundary from spewing PC gibberish to plain
lying. Which is about what could've been expected.

I've never posted on this subject before, nor have I personally attacked
you, so I don't understand what this "which is about what could've been
expected" personal attack is referencing. And I have tried my best to
explain why I believed his remarks were essentially dismissive of the
social and cultural factors.
 
J

Jim Logajan

Jan 1, 1970
0
Virgil said:
But Summers didn't say anything like that. What he said was that men
appear to be statistically more variable than women in almost every
measurable characteristic. This means that while men may have more of
the extremely bright they also have more of the extrememly dim.

It is those extremely dim at statistics who have misrepresented what
was actually said and raised this whole foofah.

Ahem. Summers listed three factors, in order of alleged importance (my
paraphrasing, obviously):

1) Motivation - intrinsic or socially impressed.
2) Intrinsic ability.
3) Social influences.

The first two have been used for centuries to rationalize limiting the
rights of women - hence the bitter attacks against him. The fact that his
argument was modestly novel doesn't erase the priority he assigned to the
factor, nor its checkered history. Because of its use in the abuse of human
rights, use of "intrinsic ability" and its variants seem, IMHO, to deserve
careful scrutiny.

If you remove entirely the "IQ standard deviation width" argument from his
remarks (which even he acknowledged was probably ill-founded, yet he plows
ahead anyway) you still have him invoking point 1 - and signalling that he
sides with an intrinsic difference in motivations, rather than socially
impressed. And is therefore _still_ reiterating dogma.

Now look at the two dominant world religions - both of which have for
centuries had as their canon the subordination of wives to their husbands
and women to men. Did Summers address that "elephant in the living room"?
God no! Talk about a literally sacrosanct subject! I'd have been supporting
him to my death, if he had attacked those canons with a few cannons of his
own!
 
J

Joshua Halpern

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim said:
Ahem. Summers listed three factors, in order of alleged importance (my
paraphrasing, obviously):

1) Motivation - intrinsic or socially impressed.
2) Intrinsic ability.
3) Social influences.

The first two have been used for centuries to rationalize limiting the
rights of women - hence the bitter attacks against him. The fact that his
argument was modestly novel doesn't erase the priority he assigned to the
factor, nor its checkered history. Because of its use in the abuse of human
rights, use of "intrinsic ability" and its variants seem, IMHO, to deserve
careful scrutiny.

If you remove entirely the "IQ standard deviation width" argument from his
remarks (which even he acknowledged was probably ill-founded, yet he plows
ahead anyway) you still have him invoking point 1 - and signalling that he
sides with an intrinsic difference in motivations, rather than socially
impressed. And is therefore _still_ reiterating dogma.

Well now, rather than looking at how well someone does on one of these
"tests" let us look at what people's motivations are.

There is a class of people who look at these tests, figure that it means
nothing to them and fill in all the answers at random, leave the room
and take a break.

Another figures out that they might get something out of a good mark,
but it is nothing to get all hyper about. They do pretty well, but
don't break their heads on it.

Then there are the gerbils.

Which group is the most intelligent?

Which is why IQ tests are worthless.

josh halpern
 
V

Virgil

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim Logajan said:
Ahem. Summers listed three factors, in order of alleged importance (my
paraphrasing, obviously):

1) Motivation - intrinsic or socially impressed.
2) Intrinsic ability.
3) Social influences.

The first two have been used for centuries to rationalize limiting the
rights of women - hence the bitter attacks against him. The fact that his
argument was modestly novel doesn't erase the priority he assigned to the
factor, nor its checkered history. Because of its use in the abuse of human
rights, use of "intrinsic ability" and its variants seem, IMHO, to deserve
careful scrutiny.

Have you actually read, to the point of understanding, what he said
about intrinsic ability? Do you understand what it means to say that
one population has a larger standard deviation or larger variance than
another? It specifically does NOT mean that either of the populations in
question is inherently better or worse than the other, only that one is
more variable than the other. If he had said anything about the mean
(average) levels of ability, you might have had a case, but he
specifically denied any such implication.
 
V

Virgil

Jan 1, 1970
0
Which is why IQ tests are worthless

..
Tools are best used when used for the purposes for which they were
designed.

IQ tests were originally designed as a diagnostic tool to assess the
needs of young students thought to be below avarage enough to be in need
of special education. For that purpose, at least, they seem to have been
reasonably effective. But as they are misused now, they are of at best
questionable value.
 
Summers did not seem to want to bother familiarizing himself with the
scholarship on his topic, as any academic should before talking to
the experts in the field.

Rubbish. He was asked to deliver a general address, not a review of
the field.
He has a history of arrogance,

Not relevant.
and that has something to do with the reaction of the Harvard faculty.

The only way in which I can describe the reaction of the Harvard
faculty is "shameful".
Summers was not engaging in scholarship. He is not an academic. He
is an administrator. He was making ill-informed comments to justify
Harvard's failings.



Which has nothing to with nature versus nurture debates, or what is
intrinsic and what is socialization.
Kindly keep your red herrings to yourself. It has a hell of a lot to
do with the common argument that "the lack of equality at the top of
the profession is a proof of discrimination". Very much on topic.
The above is not rational argument. No rational reason has been
given to reject the statement that Summers was "reiterating dogma
that is thousands of years old."

Iddiotic statements do not deserve rational arguments, only derision.
Summers presented a *rational* argument, anchored in existing data.
This doesn't mean that the argument was unassailable. One can argue
the accuracy of said data, the meanigfullness of the measure being
used, the sampling procedures, etc. That could also have been a
rational argument. But using as dismissal the statement that Summers'
argument is "reiterating dogma that is thousands of years old", this
is ***not*** a rational argument, just PC garbage. And same goes for
most crap that came from Harvard faculty on the topic.
Which has nothing to with nature versus nurture debates.

See above and work on your reading comprehension.
The above is stupid. We have no reason to know that any
misrepresentation is deliberate.

Summers ranked the factors. He did not merely "add... that there may
be intrinsic factors, as well." Is Mati lying by omission?
In his words, "And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in
exactly the order that I just described". He presents his view.
Perfectly legitimate, that's how discussion among reasonable people
are being conducted. What PC garbage considers appropriate, that's
another story.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
[email protected] | chances are he is doing just the same"
 
The fact that Summers allowed even for the -possibility- of intrinsic
genetic differences in the way femaies think as compared to males is the
Harvard equivalent to yelling Nigger, Nigger out loud. The authors of
-The Bell Curve- met the same kind of reaction.
Yes, and this pretty much tells you that the so called "Western
academic intelligentsia" pretty much descended to the level of Galileo
detractors (who refused to look through his telescope since
"obviously, what it shows cannot be true"). Sad, very sad.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
[email protected] | chances are he is doing just the same"
 
Jim Logajan said:
Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com said:
:
I'll take scholarship over indoctrination any day.

Summers wasn't engaging in scholarship. He was speculating, off the cuff,
at best. That is more akin to what people people do at a bar, over a
beer.
People should be able to talk about this stuff, especially in
universities. They're supposed to be looking for the truth, not
spouting dogma.

That men are superior to women was, and many cases still is, the most
accepted dogma. Summers wasn't stating some truth, he was the one who
attempted to use a handful of questionable observations which ended up
reiterating dogma that is thousands of years old.

But Summers didn't say anything like that. What he said was that men
appear to be statistically more variable than women in almost every
measurable characteristic. This means that while men may have more of
the extremely bright they also have more of the extrememly dim.

It is those extremely dim at statistics who have misrepresented what was
actually said and raised this whole foofah.

Yes, exactly.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
[email protected] | chances are he is doing just the same"
 
R

Repeating Rifle

Jan 1, 1970
0
My personal belief, filtered through my plethora of biases, has been
that average men do not take up their their hobbies or work as
passionately as average women do. Let me give an example so I don't
seem like a dickhead. Very few men have an obsession for poetry or
other literary artforms even though many men do work with words. (This
is a clear observation, free from any slant by me of course.) If they
do, it is more likely to be with a use of words, such as filling out
forms or loudly asserting macho statements, rather than any art. This
unwillingness to be obsessive about such things (and general lack of
imagination) is probably a good thing, (after all, someone has to fill
out all those damn forms), but it is obviously different from being
truly creative and intelligent.

Although I have run into women that like to flyfish, they are relatively
few. They, with exceptions, just are not as single-minded about flyfishing.
There are many men who would rather use dynamite to fish rather than flies.
Women probably keep a better perspective. The same can be said about
computing, cars, and even chemistry.

Just look at the posts on this group. Most are from people with masculine
sounding names. And chemistry appears to be of more interest to women than
physics, mathematics, or engineering.

I am not saying that greater devotion to a hobby or profession by men
compared to women is better. But it is different.

Bill

Bill
 
Then how do you account for the results of the Stanford study, which was
referenced in one of the URLs I included but that you elected to elide?
I didn't "elected to elide", I'm just not going to follow any URL just
because you happened to list, unless you'll *first* provide a good
reason why should I follow it. Hope this is clear.
Which part are you contesting? The statement that the dogma is thousands of
years old, that it was a reiteration of that dogma, or both?
That it was a reiteratoin of this or any dogma. And I'm not
"contesting" it, I'm rejecting it as garbage. There is nothing in
Summers words to the effect that "men are better than women". A
statement to the effect that if the width of the distributions is
different then there will be different proportions on both extremas of
the cognitive spectrum does not translate into "men are better than
women". Anybody with just adequate cognitive skills (well, just a
notch or two above those of an average Harvard faculty) should be able
to comprehend this.
I know of at least two major world religions that are centuries old which
promote the subordination of women to men - and they are still quite active
in the U.S. So I presume I irritated you only with the "reiteration" part?
It is pointless, devisive, and is irrelevant to the argument so, if
possible, please consider that part retracted.

Too late for this.
First, I haven't used any personal insults, so if you can refrain from them
I'd appreciate it.

Well, I used it and I mean it. Feel free to be offended.
Feel free to humiliate me with facts - I can deal with
that. Secondly, Summers himself says "Now, it's pointed out by one of the
papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and
are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And
that's absolutely right." And in spite of saying that it is _absolutely
right_ that the tests aren't highly predictive, he continues on that track
anyway! Hence my "running too far" assessment.
While they're not a "very good measure" in terms of having a close to
1 correlation with abilities as evidenced by an actual achievement,
nobody came with a better measure so far. And as for "not being
highly predctive", I would say that you won't find many 3-sigma below
mean people among research scientist and not many 3 sigma above
average people among janitors. The scatter in the measure is
sufficiently large that one cannot use a difference of 5-10 points as
a reliable predictor. A difference of 20-30 points is pretty
reliable.

Besides, the very idea that one should not say anything in a
scientific forum unless all the i-s have been dotted and all the t-s
crossed is ridiculous to the extreme and, in fact, downright idiotic
(yse, here it is again and I do mean it again). Progress is being
made through hypothesising based on incomplete data, then using the
hypotheses as guidance in the completion of the data.
The order of importance and the emphasis of his points are pretty explicit,
and "intrinsic factors" weren't "added" - they were what he considered most
important. He explicitly listed the factors in order of importance, and
intrinsic motivation and intrinsic ability both top social factors in his
analysis:

"One is what I would call the - I'll explain each of these in a few moments
and comment on how important I think they are - the first is what I call
the high-powered job hypothesis.

The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the
high end,

and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of
discrimination in a search.

And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order
that I just described."

Yes. he presented the order of importance, in his view (stating
explicitly that this is a view, not a "research result". He did not
say that his number three is "no longer a factor worth considering in
his analysis", in fact he explicitly did list it. So either, as I said
before, you lied, or you've reading comprehension problems.
I've never posted on this subject before, nor have I personally attacked
you, so I don't understand what this "which is about what could've been
expected" personal attack is referencing.

It is referencing PC crap and all those who propagate it.
And I have tried my best to explain why I believed his remarks were
essentially dismissive of the social and cultural factors.

In which you failed, miserably. Go away.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
[email protected] | chances are he is doing just the same"
 
Although I have run into women that like to flyfish, they are relatively
few.

Then you're not looking in the correct places. All of my family fish.
OTOH, we don't do it as a hobby. We fish for our supper so we don't
waste money at the grocery store.

.. They, with exceptions, just are not as single-minded about flyfishing.
There are many men who would rather use dynamite to fish rather than flies.
Women probably keep a better perspective. The same can be said about
computing, cars, and even chemistry.

This single-mindedness has nothing to do with gender differences. It
has everything to do with economic differences. Frugal people do
not obsess on spending all their money on one thing; if they did
they wouldn't be frugal.
Just look at the posts on this group. Most are from people with masculine
sounding names.

Now think about why that is true. Is it possible that the females
are off working and not taking time to post?
..And chemistry appears to be of more interest to women than
physics, mathematics, or engineering.

How do you know?!!! Throughout my life there have been both males
and females in all of the above. I simply do not understand how
this myth got started. Well..I do understand, I just can't fathom
people accepting the myth when actually looking around them would do.

I am not saying that greater devotion to a hobby or profession by men
compared to women is better. But it is different.

Of course it's different. It's even different among indiduals
of the same gender. Who the **** cares as long as these
people work at producing rather than work prevention.

IME, the simple act of bringing up gender bias always has the
side effect of work prevention, period. I have seen people do
this on purpose so that no useful work gets done.
Now, IMO, the Harvard president was foolish to bring this up
because it is known to only create work prevention. Bringing
up the subject of religion, politics, and salary comparisons would
have a similar smoke and mirror effect.

It would nice to be able to yak about it but these people haven't
matured enough to be able to talk about it objectively.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.
 
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