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> That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and im

by foxyv 2y ago

> That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in. This is almost a statistical certainty no matter how many women are admitted. Not because of any preferential treatment of women or men, but because the admissions process is not perfect. If you reverse this statement, that the least qualified man accepted to the college is less qualified than the most qualified woman who was denied, you are also probably right. Another way to look at it is that only the most qualified women even bother applying. The number of filters on women in technical fields is absurd. When I was studying Physics there were only five women in the entire program of 200 students. My graduating class for Physics was 5% women. We were all there because we loved physics. Otherwise we would have dropped out 10 times over after being stuck in a male dominated program for 4+ years.

mchannon 2y ago
Disagree. In my argument I used “talented and impressive” to mean as the admissions group saw them. It’s subjective, it’s likely inaccurate, but it’s consistent with itself. Essentially the admissions group stack-ranked a male pile and a separate female pile and pulled the top 100 off each. Having to stack rank #100 from the thin pile and #101 from the thick pile would reverse their order using the organization’s stack ranking rubric. Filters for women aren’t high-pass or low-pass, they’re bandpass. Many of the top tier women with the background for Caltech simply have no interest in the school or the doors it can open, versus Stanford or Harvard or MIT, so that self-imposed filter is not a barrier to their qualifying. You thrived in Physics as a minority not because you were lucky but because you worked hard. If luck got you here you’d see more women dropping out than men over the course of the program, and I’m sure you’ll let me know if you have numbers to show that happened.
- ghaff 2y ago
  As a guy, I just never had an interest in Caltech not because I probably saw it as more of a stretch than other schools I applied to and some of which I was admitted to. For one thing, it was in California which was probably more of a practical barrier from the East than it would be today. But it's probably fair to say that the other schools you list (including MIT) are probably seen as more "normal" than Caltech is.
- foxyv 2y ago
  > This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus You make a lot of assertions, however I think you would be better off finding evidence. For instance, 93% of women graduate, while only 91% of men do. This would seem to indicate that women are more qualified to be there by at least one metric. https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/incoming-class-50-percent-female#:~:text=The%20six%2Dyear%20graduation%20rate,and%20enrollment%20of%20women%20undergraduates https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/incoming-class-50-percent....
  - mchannon 2y ago
    If you're going to claim numbers make your position superior, I'd suggest using more meaningful numbers. 93% vs. 91% is a rounding error. What's the p-value for that? Makes me wonder. Was Steve Jobs qualified to attend Reed College? How about Bill Gates or Zuck for Harvard? Larry and Sergei? Would society (or their alma maters) be better off if someone took their place who ended up graduating? Or maybe the world is a better place precisely because these people got in to these colleges. Maybe the lower number for men indicates more risk-takers that Caltech will eventually get huge checks from. Likewise, someone using similar logic might argue that a young woman who decides her junior year she wants to get married, pregnant, and be a stay-at-home mom is overeducated and her slot should have been taken by someone else. Is that career path just as meritorious as others? For numbers, we could consider the number of Nobel laureates who had gained Caltech BS degrees since 1970: 1 total. Eric Betzig, Chemistry, class of 1983. No doubt there are more to come, but there were 10 prior to 1970. Whatever Caltech was juicing the tank with I would posit has run out, and the institution's best days are behind it. The reason may have nothing to do with this whole gender issue. I'd like to close this tangent's discussion with the following: Women and men should be judged by their academic prowess alone. If you're going to prefer women, own it, and don't pretend you don't. I bet at least one male future Nobel laureate scratched Caltech off his list because they're biased in this way. Also at least one future male check writer.
    - foxyv 2y ago
      Graduation rates have an error of zero. Unless you think the registrar didn't count properly.

by foxyv 2y ago

mchannon 2y ago

Disagree. In my argument I used “talented and impressive” to mean as the admissions group saw them. It’s subjective, it’s likely inaccurate, but it’s consistent with itself. Essentially the admissions group stack-ranked a male pile and a separate female pile and pulled the top 100 off each. Having to stack rank #100 from the thin pile and #101 from the thick pile would reverse their order using the organization’s stack ranking rubric. Filters for women aren’t high-pass or low-pass, they’re bandpass. Many of the top tier women with the background for Caltech simply have no interest in the school or the doors it can open, versus Stanford or Harvard or MIT, so that self-imposed filter is not a barrier to their qualifying. You thrived in Physics as a minority not because you were lucky but because you worked hard. If luck got you here you’d see more women dropping out than men over the course of the program, and I’m sure you’ll let me know if you have numbers to show that happened.

ghaff 2y ago
As a guy, I just never had an interest in Caltech not because I probably saw it as more of a stretch than other schools I applied to and some of which I was admitted to. For one thing, it was in California which was probably more of a practical barrier from the East than it would be today. But it's probably fair to say that the other schools you list (including MIT) are probably seen as more "normal" than Caltech is.
foxyv 2y ago
> This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus You make a lot of assertions, however I think you would be better off finding evidence. For instance, 93% of women graduate, while only 91% of men do. This would seem to indicate that women are more qualified to be there by at least one metric. https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/incoming-class-50-percent-female#:~:text=The%20six%2Dyear%20graduation%20rate,and%20enrollment%20of%20women%20undergraduates https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/incoming-class-50-percent....
- mchannon 2y ago
  If you're going to claim numbers make your position superior, I'd suggest using more meaningful numbers. 93% vs. 91% is a rounding error. What's the p-value for that? Makes me wonder. Was Steve Jobs qualified to attend Reed College? How about Bill Gates or Zuck for Harvard? Larry and Sergei? Would society (or their alma maters) be better off if someone took their place who ended up graduating? Or maybe the world is a better place precisely because these people got in to these colleges. Maybe the lower number for men indicates more risk-takers that Caltech will eventually get huge checks from. Likewise, someone using similar logic might argue that a young woman who decides her junior year she wants to get married, pregnant, and be a stay-at-home mom is overeducated and her slot should have been taken by someone else. Is that career path just as meritorious as others? For numbers, we could consider the number of Nobel laureates who had gained Caltech BS degrees since 1970: 1 total. Eric Betzig, Chemistry, class of 1983. No doubt there are more to come, but there were 10 prior to 1970. Whatever Caltech was juicing the tank with I would posit has run out, and the institution's best days are behind it. The reason may have nothing to do with this whole gender issue. I'd like to close this tangent's discussion with the following: Women and men should be judged by their academic prowess alone. If you're going to prefer women, own it, and don't pretend you don't. I bet at least one male future Nobel laureate scratched Caltech off his list because they're biased in this way. Also at least one future male check writer.
  - foxyv 2y ago
    Graduation rates have an error of zero. Unless you think the registrar didn't count properly.