Who is ‘we’? Larry Summers? Me? You?Dan74-MkII wrote: ↑Thu May 09, 2019 8:34 pm Well, we can wax lyrical about 'physicists at a top-twenty five research university', as if we are part of this exalted club or have anything to do with by virtue of being male (maybe some vicarious glory will rub off on us?), but in actuality, so many factors go into making a top physicist that we have no idea 3.5 standard deviation right of what exactly??? Richard Feynman apparently had a pedestrian IQ in low 130's.
I don't know. I fully admit the possibility that on average there are differences between men and women. What does this mean though for us? For individual men and women? Nothing really. It may be useful info for people who create policies that affect thousands where statistics come into play, but that's about it.
Pseudobabble wrote: ↑Thu May 09, 2019 12:31 pmInterestingly, Sarath, Larry Summers had the same observation:
He also perceives men to be more extreme than women. If you look further into the matter, you'll see that Larry got in trouble, because saying such things means you are a bad boy. We are all identical clones in every respect, remember.Larry Summers wrote: It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that 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. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class.
What it means for us as individuals, is that where we end up in life might well be heavily influenced by biological factors not amenable to change by government policy or cultural messaging. And ‘we’ ought to be able to talk about that publicly, without being fired or deplatformed. ‘We’ also probably shouldn’t try to legislate change on matters that cannot be changed by legislation.
A dhammic connection in this regard is related to what retro wrote above: given that identity view is conceit, and these are merely statistics about the influence of biology on human capability, talking about it publicly should really been seen in the same light as talking about the relative prevalence of eye colour - these are just statements about measurements. Attaching ‘personal’ significance to them is a mistake, Dhammically and statistically.