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Again, biology has predictive power in the realm of IQ distribution by gender. The bell curve for male IQs is wider but flatter than female IQs, which could exp

Again, biology has predictive power in the realm of IQ distribution by gender. The bell curve for male IQs is wider but flatter than female IQs, which could explain why there are more men than women in physics, a profession with the largest demands for exceptional intelligence. It also explains why there are more homeless men than there are homeless women.

Mz 9y ago
It also explains why there are more homeless men than there are homeless women. IQ distributions don't explain that at all. It is vastly more complicated than that.
- programmarchy 9y ago
  Many things are complicated but that doesn't mean we can't use data to understand and predict them. IQ correlates almost perfectly (~ r = .95) with income at an ecological/epidemiological level (again, not at an individual level). The average IQ among the homeless is around 80. It may not be the only factor, but it's part of the story.
  - Mz 9y ago
    I once did volunteer work for an organization aimed at supporting gifted individuals. IQ tests are highly biased and not reliable. They often correlate not to intelligence so much as to social bias. Immigrants, the poor, etc tend to do more poorly on them purely for reasons of not having in-group knowledge required to do well on them. Historically, this has been used to ill effect to justify racism, anti-immigration sentiment, etc. I am something of a subject matter expert in homelessness and I just wrote this a few minutes ago: http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/07/gender-and-homelessness.html http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/07/ge... Putting it here for the benefit of other people. I don't expect anything I say to sway you.
    - programmarchy 9y ago
      You're misinformed about IQ tests. They're specifically designed not to test for retained "in-group" knowledge, but rather markers of general intelligence like analytical thinking and spatial recognition. And no, anecdotes, cherry picking, conspiracy theories, and ad hominem attacks don't sway me.
      - Mz 9y ago
        I actually know quite a lot about IQ tests. They aren't useless, but they do have a track record of being used to harm already disadvantaged groups. The original test that some Frenchman was asked to create was not intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness of children of indeterminate age. In the era in question, city kids in France tended to have birth certificates and to also have plenty of familiarity with things involved in school readiness. Their ages could have been used to determine school readiness. The problem was the rural children of that era often lacked birth certificates and also lacked experience with things like pre-school. They had more trouble fitting in at school already due to coming from a different background than the city kids. This test then became the inspiration for IQ tests. Feynman supposedly did not have a very high IQ. Some IQ test he took placed his IQ around 129, iirc. Yet he was widely regarded as a genius. When I was actively involved in an organization that concerned itself with gifted education, I very often said that "tests are merely a tool." I have heard too many stories of young gifted kids who could not answer a question on a test because it was a multiple answer question and their rich understanding of the world meant that none of the answers fit. A good example is "Who discovered America?" An average kid may know to correctly spit back the answer "Columbus" because we memorize that in school. A bright kid may answer such a question with something like "Well, it wasn't called America until x date after Amerigo Vespucci came here and before Columbus, the Vikings had settlements here and Columbus thought he discovered India, not a new continent...(blather on some more)...um, what was the question?" Bright kids can be very hard to properly test. IQ tests are useful tools for trained professionals, but often don't stand well on their own. Furthermore, the last I was keeping up with such info, they were having trouble finding a new test with a high ceiling. The one test previously known to have a high ceiling was getting rather out of date and nothing new was being developed. It was a very serious problem and some professionals were resorting to using the out of date test as the least worst option available. Most tests ceiling out around 130 or 145. So if you score anywhere near that, you can generally assume that is a minimum IQ. It is quite hard to find accurate tests for IQs above that IQ range and that only goes out 2 or 3 standard deviations above the norm. I am homeless. I was one of the top 3 students of my graduating high school class and I have had a class on homeless and public policy from SFSU. My IQ is absolutely not 80. In 5.5 years on the street, I have run into a lot of homeless people. They often do have mental health issues, but they aren't typically mentally retarded, which is your assertion. Homelessness tends to grow out of serious personal problems, such as mental health issues, medical issues and other special needs. In my 5.5 years as a homeless person, I do very often run into people who are mentally retarded. They are typically in a group that shows up at whatever library or public park I am frequenting and they apparently come from some kind of group home. There may be mentally retarded people on the street. But I have zero reason to believe that it is the norm or that it explains homelessness.
rayiner 9y ago
Even accepting that argument on its own terms doesn't explain the observed difference. The population above 130 IQ is roughly 2:1 male. Even if programming aptitude is entirely correlated with having an IQ above 130 (and let's face it, most programmers aren't two standard deviations above the median), that doesn't explain the 5:1 to 10:1 ratios you see in the field.
- programmarchy 9y ago
  Not entirely, no. But like I mentioned in my other posts, women are freely choosing to pursue other careers which are more stereotypically female, a phenomenon which is even more pronounced in societies with high levels of gender equality. The evidence for aptitude and interest outweighs the evidence for discrimination.
  - smt88 9y ago
    > women are freely choosing to pursue other careers which are more stereotypically female Can you call it "freely choosing" when they're treated badly when pursuing male-dominated fields and treated well when pursuing female-dominated fields? People don't like swimming upstream, for the most part. What they would choose "freely" and what they choose in the real world are often very different.
    - MagnumOpus 9y ago
      A. You are begging the question that they are more badly treated in tech than in accounting or health care. B. They enter even uni or high school CS and physics courses at a fast lesser rate. Is that because of interest or because they make assumptions about being discriminated against 10 years down the line?
tptacek 9y ago
This is just special pleading. The demand for exceptional intelligence in pure math is extraordinary, and math has much better parity than CS. Meanwhile, most of commercial CS is just connecting database columns to form fields. Sorry, not persuaded.
- programmarchy 9y ago
  Undergraduate degrees are only one data point: Only 30% of PhDs are awarded to females. Math scores on SATs are higher for males than females and the top 1% scorers are 2-to-1 male to female. Males also excel in the ability to mentally rotate figures in three-dimensional space. [1] The source concludes: > The relatively small numbers of women in math-intensive careers result from many factors, one of which seems primary and should be accorded the greatest weight. Sex differences in mathematical and spatial ability, although substantial, appear unable to explain most of the shortage. Nor can the shortage be attributed to current discrimination, although historic discrepancies may be explained in such terms. The primary factor in women's underrepresentation is choices both freely made and constrained by biology and society. Women choose at a young age not to pursue math-intensive careers; few adolescent girls express desires to be engineers or physicists, preferring instead to be medical doctors, veterinarians, biologists, psychologists, and lawyers. Females make this choice despite earning higher math and science grades than males throughout schooling. Although women earn a large portion of baccalaureate degrees in all fields of science, including mathematics, disproportionately fewer enter graduate school in these fields, preferring biology, social sciences, law, medicine, and the humanities—even when they possess math ability comparable to males. Of those who enter graduate school in math-intensive fields, more women than men drop out or change fields, and of those who complete doctorates, fewer women apply for tenure-track positions. (...) [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997703/#!po=37.5000 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997703/#!po=37...

Mz 9y ago

It also explains why there are more homeless men than there are homeless women. IQ distributions don't explain that at all. It is vastly more complicated than that.

programmarchy 9y ago
Many things are complicated but that doesn't mean we can't use data to understand and predict them. IQ correlates almost perfectly (~ r = .95) with income at an ecological/epidemiological level (again, not at an individual level). The average IQ among the homeless is around 80. It may not be the only factor, but it's part of the story.
- Mz 9y ago
  I once did volunteer work for an organization aimed at supporting gifted individuals. IQ tests are highly biased and not reliable. They often correlate not to intelligence so much as to social bias. Immigrants, the poor, etc tend to do more poorly on them purely for reasons of not having in-group knowledge required to do well on them. Historically, this has been used to ill effect to justify racism, anti-immigration sentiment, etc. I am something of a subject matter expert in homelessness and I just wrote this a few minutes ago: http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/07/gender-and-homelessness.html http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/07/ge... Putting it here for the benefit of other people. I don't expect anything I say to sway you.
  - programmarchy 9y ago
    You're misinformed about IQ tests. They're specifically designed not to test for retained "in-group" knowledge, but rather markers of general intelligence like analytical thinking and spatial recognition. And no, anecdotes, cherry picking, conspiracy theories, and ad hominem attacks don't sway me.
    - Mz 9y ago
      I actually know quite a lot about IQ tests. They aren't useless, but they do have a track record of being used to harm already disadvantaged groups. The original test that some Frenchman was asked to create was not intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness of children of indeterminate age. In the era in question, city kids in France tended to have birth certificates and to also have plenty of familiarity with things involved in school readiness. Their ages could have been used to determine school readiness. The problem was the rural children of that era often lacked birth certificates and also lacked experience with things like pre-school. They had more trouble fitting in at school already due to coming from a different background than the city kids. This test then became the inspiration for IQ tests. Feynman supposedly did not have a very high IQ. Some IQ test he took placed his IQ around 129, iirc. Yet he was widely regarded as a genius. When I was actively involved in an organization that concerned itself with gifted education, I very often said that "tests are merely a tool." I have heard too many stories of young gifted kids who could not answer a question on a test because it was a multiple answer question and their rich understanding of the world meant that none of the answers fit. A good example is "Who discovered America?" An average kid may know to correctly spit back the answer "Columbus" because we memorize that in school. A bright kid may answer such a question with something like "Well, it wasn't called America until x date after Amerigo Vespucci came here and before Columbus, the Vikings had settlements here and Columbus thought he discovered India, not a new continent...(blather on some more)...um, what was the question?" Bright kids can be very hard to properly test. IQ tests are useful tools for trained professionals, but often don't stand well on their own. Furthermore, the last I was keeping up with such info, they were having trouble finding a new test with a high ceiling. The one test previously known to have a high ceiling was getting rather out of date and nothing new was being developed. It was a very serious problem and some professionals were resorting to using the out of date test as the least worst option available. Most tests ceiling out around 130 or 145. So if you score anywhere near that, you can generally assume that is a minimum IQ. It is quite hard to find accurate tests for IQs above that IQ range and that only goes out 2 or 3 standard deviations above the norm. I am homeless. I was one of the top 3 students of my graduating high school class and I have had a class on homeless and public policy from SFSU. My IQ is absolutely not 80. In 5.5 years on the street, I have run into a lot of homeless people. They often do have mental health issues, but they aren't typically mentally retarded, which is your assertion. Homelessness tends to grow out of serious personal problems, such as mental health issues, medical issues and other special needs. In my 5.5 years as a homeless person, I do very often run into people who are mentally retarded. They are typically in a group that shows up at whatever library or public park I am frequenting and they apparently come from some kind of group home. There may be mentally retarded people on the street. But I have zero reason to believe that it is the norm or that it explains homelessness.

rayiner 9y ago

Even accepting that argument on its own terms doesn't explain the observed difference. The population above 130 IQ is roughly 2:1 male. Even if programming aptitude is entirely correlated with having an IQ above 130 (and let's face it, most programmers aren't two standard deviations above the median), that doesn't explain the 5:1 to 10:1 ratios you see in the field.

programmarchy 9y ago
Not entirely, no. But like I mentioned in my other posts, women are freely choosing to pursue other careers which are more stereotypically female, a phenomenon which is even more pronounced in societies with high levels of gender equality. The evidence for aptitude and interest outweighs the evidence for discrimination.
- smt88 9y ago
  > women are freely choosing to pursue other careers which are more stereotypically female Can you call it "freely choosing" when they're treated badly when pursuing male-dominated fields and treated well when pursuing female-dominated fields? People don't like swimming upstream, for the most part. What they would choose "freely" and what they choose in the real world are often very different.
  - MagnumOpus 9y ago
    A. You are begging the question that they are more badly treated in tech than in accounting or health care. B. They enter even uni or high school CS and physics courses at a fast lesser rate. Is that because of interest or because they make assumptions about being discriminated against 10 years down the line?

tptacek 9y ago

This is just special pleading. The demand for exceptional intelligence in pure math is extraordinary, and math has much better parity than CS. Meanwhile, most of commercial CS is just connecting database columns to form fields. Sorry, not persuaded.

programmarchy 9y ago
Undergraduate degrees are only one data point: Only 30% of PhDs are awarded to females. Math scores on SATs are higher for males than females and the top 1% scorers are 2-to-1 male to female. Males also excel in the ability to mentally rotate figures in three-dimensional space. [1] The source concludes: > The relatively small numbers of women in math-intensive careers result from many factors, one of which seems primary and should be accorded the greatest weight. Sex differences in mathematical and spatial ability, although substantial, appear unable to explain most of the shortage. Nor can the shortage be attributed to current discrimination, although historic discrepancies may be explained in such terms. The primary factor in women's underrepresentation is choices both freely made and constrained by biology and society. Women choose at a young age not to pursue math-intensive careers; few adolescent girls express desires to be engineers or physicists, preferring instead to be medical doctors, veterinarians, biologists, psychologists, and lawyers. Females make this choice despite earning higher math and science grades than males throughout schooling. Although women earn a large portion of baccalaureate degrees in all fields of science, including mathematics, disproportionately fewer enter graduate school in these fields, preferring biology, social sciences, law, medicine, and the humanities—even when they possess math ability comparable to males. Of those who enter graduate school in math-intensive fields, more women than men drop out or change fields, and of those who complete doctorates, fewer women apply for tenure-track positions. (...) [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997703/#!po=37.5000 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997703/#!po=37...