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An often overlooked aspect of statistics of human traits is that even a small difference in the variance of a normal(ish) distribution results in a large differ

• SvenMarquardt 5y ago
  > The only way to prevent the extreme outlier men from dominating everything is to prevent winner-takes-all games Which is why we should focus on infinite wealth creation games, rather than zero-sum status games. Throwing away equity while chasing equality is a recipe for ushering in the next dark age.
  • TulliusCicero 5y ago
    I don't think chasing more equality necessarily precludes more productivity. I think you can easily think of some examples where greater equality meant more total productivity. For example, at least all developed societies have 'chased equality' by providing free, decent-quality public education for people at least until adulthood. Does anyone think dropping that and just leaving poor families to their own devices would actually increase total economic output?
    • SvenMarquardt 5y ago
      Equal opportunity ≠ equal outcomes As a teenager, I tried briefly to play basketball. But I was lucky to hit the backboard, much less the basket. Yet I had just as much opportunity to play basketball as Michael Jordan had. But equal opportunity was not nearly enough to create equal outcomes. Nevertheless, many studies today conclude that different groups do not have equal opportunity or equal "access" to credit, or admission to selective colleges, or to many other things, because some groups are not successful in achieving their goal as often as other groups are. The very possibility that not all groups have the same skills or other qualifications is seldom even mentioned, much less examined. But when people with low credit scores are not approved for loans as often as people with high credit scores, is that a lack of opportunity or a failure to meet standards? When twice as many Asian students as white students pass the tough tests to get into New York's three highly selective public high schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech — does that mean that white students are denied equal opportunity?
      • kbenson 5y ago
        > Yet I had just as much opportunity to play basketball as Michael Jordan had. But equal opportunity was not nearly enough to create equal outcomes. I don't know about you, but as someone that played a lot of basketball in my youth, I did not have equal opportunity to play basketball the same way Michael Jordan did. Could I go out to a hoop at a park and play around? Sure. But at 5'-8", my opportunity to play at any real competitive level was limited by genetics long before things like drive and skill. I'm confused why you would think this is a good analogy at all, unless you were trying to link it to intelligence (which is its own can of worms), which doesn't seem to be where you were going. Using competitive sports, which are extremely cutthroat when viewed through the lens of careers and those that make a living doing it, is almost never a good way to equate equality and regular access for the masses.
        • fanciestManimal 5y ago
          There are also the the equality of opportunity issues that still exist for cultural reasons... which seem like obvious things to correct. For example, having a "black sounding" name on your resume causes you to not get called in for interviews as frequently.
  • cbozeman 5y ago
    > Throwing away equity while chasing equality is a recipe for ushering in the next dark age. I would argue trying to enforce equity to chase equality is your actual recipe for ushering in the next Dark Age. Look at your Scandinavian societies for a model of what happens when you allow men and women the choice to live their lives as see fit without interference from the state, in the form of 'quotas' - you get some very interesting distributions. Something like 90% of all engineers in those societies are male, and something like 90% of women are nurses. Would anyone have the gall - to border on sheer stupidity - to claim that Scandinavian nations are holding back their women and oppressing them? Or is that equity isn't a very good goal... and that when you maximum equality, you'll also get massive differences in occupation because different occupations appeal to different personality traits and men and women do not have the exact same traits in the exact same quantities?
    • SvenMarquardt 5y ago
      I agree with your POV. I'm arguing throwing away equal opportunities (free education and career path choice for all Scandinavians) with the aim of chasing equal outcomes (50/50 gender split of nurses and engineers) is a fool's game.
    • throwawayboise 5y ago
      I would dispute that the Scandinavian system does not have "interference from the state." The Scandinavian educational system seems more active at steering kids into career paths compared to the US model. From what I understand, kids are split into various vocational/college bound tracks after middle school based on grades and aptitude. In US high schools it seems that you're either college-bound, or a non-entity. If you're lucky your high school might have a vocational program which might have instruction in automotive repair, welding, or construction.
  • coldtea 5y ago
    >Which is why we should focus on infinite wealth creation games So, fairy tales?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • FredPret 5y ago
      Fairy tales are ironically typically set hundreds of years ago, when wealth creation was tied to land and thus finite.
      • coldtea 5y ago
        Wealth creation is still tied to land and natural resources (and bounded by those), and is thus finite, by we conveniently ignore the issue and pile up extenalities.
        • FredPret 5y ago
          We’ve had economic growth that’s not tied to land since the Industrial Revolution. Yes there are externalities. But value is being added in continually more ethereal ways.
          • coldtea 5y ago
            >We’ve had economic growth that’s not tied to land since the Industrial Revolution. Only ignoring the externalities (including a very real possibility of wiping out billions via climate change).
            • FredPret 5y ago
              You have to price those externalities pretty damn high to cancel out two centuries of exponential improvements and growth. We simply aren’t all going to die from climate change.
  • zpeti 5y ago
    For that it would be great if we could differentiate between who in society is a wealth creator and who is a zero sum player. Grouping Jeff Bezos in with Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan CEO), as both evil because they are both rich, is an extremely simplistic view of the world, but seems common, even on HN. Bezos has his faults, but he is still responsible in an insane reduction in prices for many items for consumers. Plus he created 400,000 jobs in the pandemic. Jamie Dimon takes huge financial risks with all sorts of opaque financial tools, an when he fucks up gets bailouts from government. One creates wealth, the other basically rearranges it into his own pocket. (and don't get me started about people complaining about Elon Musk being a billionaire, that is just a sad state of jealous resentment that should not be given a voice in society)
    • fastball 5y ago
      Yes, my test is fairly simple: your business (whatever it is) should be creating value and then capturing a fraction of that value. If that is not what you are doing, the business is parasitic in nature and should not exist.
      • throwawayboise 5y ago
        Creating value for who? Every business creates value that someone is willing to pay for, otherswise it couldn't exist.
        • fastball 5y ago
          I see a difference between creating value and finding value. For example, if your business is based around an ad model, you are not creating value because that value already existed (people's attention / purchasing power). You are merely redirecting value. If you take facebook as an example, they are creating value for people by letting them communicate / etc. But they are not capturing a portion of the value they are creating, they are taking value that already existed (the value of your attention) and selling it to someone else. Or take an investment bank that purely speculates on existing assets. Any time they win, it is not because they created value and captured a fraction of it, it is because someone else lost. I of course like fb better than the ib in this example, because they are at least creating some value. But I think any business where you're capturing value in a different area from where you're creating it is one that is very likely to end up with lots of conflicts of interesting and exploitation to a certain extent, so best avoided entirely.
• serverholic 5y ago
  I really like the 3 sex groups idea. As a male I've often felt that women tend to look at the extreme outlier men and assume we're all like that.
  • Consultant32452 5y ago
    One I've been pondering lately is suffrage. For most of history, and indeed most of US history, "men" could not vote either. A small percentage of rich white men could vote. The rest of us were in the same boat as women. And within one human lifetime from when all men got the right to vote, we gave women the right to vote. That's incredibly fast on social change timeframes. But the story is not taught that way in history class. It's interesting how frequently this pattern exists where history is silent about class difference and loud about race/gender differences.
    • SvenMarquardt 5y ago
      > It's interesting how frequently this pattern exists where history is silent about class difference and loud about race/gender differences. That's not a coincidence. The 0.1% would much rather the 99.9% squabble over race and gender than class: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        This is not simply due to what the 0.1% want, but nearly every person in the 99.9% likes “knowing” they are not at the bottom, and so choose to associate themselves with various classes within the 99.9%.
      • JPKab 5y ago
        It was very weird having my last company's CEO talking to us about his focus on equity, when the mandatory company report showed his salary was 111x that of the average employee (at a tech company with no hourly workers). At some point, you wanted to ask if he truly thought his salary was worth more than half of the development team's combined salary, and whether he thought that was equitable.
• epx 5y ago
  Among birds, males are the XX ones (actually ZZ, they call it ZW system to stress this difference). Didn't even like biology at school but I admit to be curious what male birds think/feel about this.
  • pdpi 5y ago
    And this has the (obvious in hindsight) effect of separating male/female differences and homozygous/heterozygous differences
• proc0 5y ago
  Why call them "sex groups"? Why not just use another label? Also, do you realize who is doing the selection as to who reproduces, and therefore which genes eventually become prone to "extreme"? In other words, I'm sure women are rewarding these extremes otherwise they wouldn't exist, evolutionarily speaking.
• gricardo99 5y ago
  Many of your points are completely new to me. Some references for these points would be very helpful. I'd like to learn more. men tend to have more variance in everything due to having only one X chromosome As every function of the society scales more and more, more things become winner-takes-all games more things become winner-takes-all games and end up being male dominated The only way to prevent the extreme outlier men from dominating everything is to prevent winner-takes-all games
  • etrabroline 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis The other statements I think are false. Men dominate in high IQ areas because more men are high IQ because of the Variability Hypothesis. It has nothing to do with being "winner take all". I'm not really sure what that means.
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
      The wiki article seems pretty inconclusive.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • patmcc 5y ago
      I think "winner take all" refers to certain areas, where being 20% better than a competitor can bring you 80% of the market share. (I'm not sure if this is an accurate way to view the world, but I think that's what OP was getting at)
    • eindiran 5y ago
      I think the claim about "winner take all" games is about things which follow power law distributions. If a large fraction of all possible rewards go to a small fraction of participants, its not too out there to imagine a small number of extreme outliers dominating. Lots of things appear to work this way; eg income or number of streams to songs or book sales. Relating this back to OP's point, almost everything where network interactions come into play appears to be power law distributed, due to the Chinese restaurant process[0]. So as the world scales, we see the effects of power law distributions for larger and larger networks. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_restaurant_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_restaurant_process
• deleted 5y ago
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• seneca 5y ago
  > It's more like we have three "sex groups": all women, normal men and extreme outlier men. For the sake of conversation, I think it's worth pointing out that we could actually break out yet another group: the extreme outlier men at the low end of the curve. High male variance means men dominate at both ends of the distribution. This is why "incels" and such are almost exclusively a male group. These people not only lose the genetic lottery, they're then lumped in with the high end outliers demographically and systematically punished for "imbalances" when they're already less likely to win these winner-takes-all games than anyone else.
  • gnarlysasquatch 5y ago
    What sources suggest the incel condition is genetic? Edit: or even predominately male?
• awb 5y ago
  > It's more like we have three "sex groups": all women, normal men and extreme outlier men. There are extreme outlier women as well.
  • meowkit 5y ago
    True, but they exist in fewer numbers if you follow the male variability hypothesis. The argument is that there are not enough of them to model as their own group.
    • awb 5y ago
      I don’t know why these groupings are important anyway, but the gap between the top 1% or women and bottom 50% is likely pretty noticeable. But maybe I’m confused as to the point of all this?
  • FredPret 5y ago
    Yes, but fewer. That’s the point
• tachyonbeam 5y ago
  One aspect that maybe deserves to be more explicitly outlined because people tend to assume that talking about gender differences means that we're pointing to one as being better than the other, is that "more extreme" doesn't just mean "closer to the top" or "better". There's more variance between men, success wise. There are more men at the top, but there are also 7X more homeless men than homeless women IIRC. There's also a higher rate of drug addiction amongst men, there are way more men in prison, way more men getting killed because of reckless driving, etc. It's a bit like investing. Nature takes a more high risk approach with men. High risk can yield high reward, but it also means a higher rate of failure. This is why, when investing, the advice people generally give you is to make conservative/safe investment decisions.
  • 77pt77 5y ago
    The real problem is that the ones that lose the game are effectively invisible because their outcome is not desired by the people complaining that men are overrepresented at the top.
    • trashtester 5y ago
      Exactly. The root of the problem seems to be about optics. In some areas (business, science, etc), 90% of people that reach high enough to become famous, are men. A large percentage of "normal" people, ie close to the median will see those famous people as potential role models. When their internal pattern matching engine detects that 90% of those belong to a class they do not identify with, that can cause a crisis of faith in their own dreams, self-esteem, etc. At that point, there is no comfort to be found that 90% of the people at the very bottom belong to the same class as those at the top. Not only do they not see those at the bottom, they do not WANT to see them. So if someone tells a story that explains the difference as a result of oppression, it becomes really tempting to chose that explanation, whether or not it is true. Oppression may indeed be the main reason for differences in many cases, but even when it is not, it will be attractive to believe it is.
      • tachyonbeam 5y ago
• dmos62 5y ago
  > men tend to have more variance in everything due to having only one X chromosome The variability hypthesis is interesting (and old), but I don't follow what you said about X chromosomes and males, or how it pertains to the variability hypothesis. I'm pretty much ignorant in genetics. Does your assertion follow from this observation: "if X chromosome has a genetic disease gene, it always causes illness in male patients, since men have only one X chromosome and therefore only one copy of each gene"? As in, men exhibit more variability because their genetics are less stable, because they don't have a Barr body? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_chromosome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_chromosome > As every function of the society scales more and more, more things become winner-takes-all games and end up being male dominated. That kind of needs some explaining too.
• wpietri 5y ago
  I think it's a mistake to lay a lot of that variance purely on chromosomes. Society treats people very differently based on gender presentation, and that starts basically at birth. It would be truly amazing if decades of gender-based socialization had no influence on personality and outcome. Especially given that the point of socialization is to influence personality and outcome.
• Quasimarion 5y ago
  Then shouldn't there be three classes of man to make things symmetric: the underperforming ones, the normal ones, and the overperforming ones?
  • fastball 5y ago
    Yes, but our society doesn't elevate underperformers so they disappear when you're talking about "who dominates what industry?"
  • Applejinx 5y ago
    I think the underperformers and overperformers are very much the same pool of people. The difference between a king and a hanged man is whether the guy got away with it: there's no special category of the virtuous succeeders. The categories would be 'normal', and 'those that pushed their luck'. The harder you push, the farther you get, unless you blow it. Sometimes it shocks people when their paragons turn out to be reprobates, but it doesn't shock me because to me it's the same category.
• rectang 5y ago
  This is on the surface a "reasonable" argument. It also perfectly illustrates why HN will forever have negligible female participation.
  • zwkrt 5y ago
    Men are so special we can’t even be confined to a single sex! Women are mostly all kind of like normal housewives, right?
  • burnished 5y ago
    Could you elaborate? I'm not convinced of your claim.
    • rectang 5y ago
      I can see why you might be skeptical about my my claim that the argument that biological variance leads to male dominance is "on the surface, 'reasonable'". After all, if you were to voice that argument in a room full of women instead of a room full of men, it would likely be considered risible. It would also probably make many in the group uncomfortable and resentful. If you have a mixed gender group, you're still going to instill discomfort and resentment in many of the women present — but voicing opposition will be risky and painful. So many will just quietly disappear — leading over time to a disproportionately male discussion group.
• eloff 5y ago
  I don't know if it's because of having only one X chromosome, but there are very small differences between men and women on the average and very large differences at the extremes. Men are a little more aggressive than women. But the top 1% of the most aggressive people are all men (and not something to be proud of either.) Women are a little more agreeable than men. But the top 1% most agreeable people are almost exclusively women. So small differences on average can still mean there are large differences at the extremes.
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > it is naturally the most extreme individuals, who are mostly male, who end up at the top Worth noting that it's also mostly males who end up at the bottom: homeless, imprisoned, or just plain dead from non-natural causes. The only plausible explanation for that imbalance is uneven distribution of ability.
• stanfordkid 5y ago
  The assertion of this idea is what got Larry Summers fired from Harvard.
• justinboogaard 5y ago
  I’m not really buying this, so I thought of a way to disprove it. This statistical outcome only holds for recessive genes on the X chromosome, but it doesn’t make men with the recessive gene “more extreme” than woman with the recessive gene. Just the number of people would be different. So if there is such a gene that makes people excel in their specific field, theoretically we could sequence the x-chromosome of the top women in that field and look for the common recessive gene. They would be more likely to share it if it mattered in that field. This is interesting, but when you consider the scale by which men across the board receive different societal advantages over women, it feels trivial. The discrepancy should only appear at the top of every game, not with the middle management too. Because of this I fear it is more likely other societal effects are at play. I try to be mindful of the ones I can directly control.
• ackfoobar 5y ago
  https://darrendahly.github.io/post/2017-09-12-sex-differences/ https://darrendahly.github.io/post/2017-09-12-sex-difference... Looking at it quantitatively, the greater male variability hypothesis mattered less than I expected.