4 ms·

Women and Minorities in Science (Warning: Basic calculus and statistics; political incorrectness)

7 points by _h4xr 19y ago

amalcon 19y ago
This entire article appears to be based on the assumption that standardized tests can be used to determine anything useful. I suspect everyone can see where that's going.
- _h4xr 19y ago
  Well, here's the approximate conversion between SATs and IQ: http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002360.html http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002360.html . And here's an interesting scatterplot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IQatWoN_GDP_IQ.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IQatWoN_GDP_IQ.png . Put those together, and... Also, assume they don't determine anything useful, but that schools have been magically fooled into thinking they do: what part of the conclusion to this essay changes?
  - amalcon 19y ago
    1) IQ tests are also standardized tests. If they are somehow beyond question, why do schools just not use IQ tests? 2) Nothing. I just doubt that schools have actually been magically fooled into thinking they do: They actually get to do the regression analysis, and see that past grades are a better predictor than standardized tests. This has been well known for a long time. If applicants have been fooled, however, it allows the school to get useful effects from the test (even if the effect isn't predicting future performance).
    - _h4xr 19y ago
      I don't think they're beyond question. Certainly, there's room for improvement (the cutoffs are too low. A physics PhD program isn't really interested in a test that has no measurement value for IQs over 120, or wherever it is -- and the analogy section was pretty g-loaded, so it's a shame that's been removed from the SAT, too). And schools don't just rely on standardized tests; they'll look at outside achievements, school grades, and maybe essays -- a competitive program might want people in the top 5% of intelligence, determination, and charisma -- which still means their students' academic test scores will need to be in the top 5%. 2) That holds true for studying results within schools, but not for test results overall. This is because schools admit people with roughly the same ability -- so they might have one person with test scores .5 stdev below the mean, but with a really brilliant essay. Fortunately, you don't have to take my word for it -- just look at the dropout rate among people who are admitted despite lower test scores and lower grades: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?id=1635 http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?id=1635
  - axiom 19y ago
    That scatterplot comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations Which by the way predicts that the average IQ of Ethiopia is 63. Note that an IQ of 70 is considered mentally retarded. Anyone see a problem with this? Edit: my point is that it's absurd, and the study is nonesense!
    - _h4xr 19y ago
      Are you saying the data are surprising, or that they're wrong?
      - rms 19y ago
        It is wrong. It is funny how much the descending list of IQs corresponds to the economic freedom of a society. It is known that IQs are culturally biased. Residents of Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea aren't functionally retarded but they aren't good at taking IQ tests and they happen to live in a society where it is impossible to generate wealth because of insane autocrats.
        _h4xr 19y ago
        I'm not sure the correlation works that way. Wouldn't you expect a smarter society to, uh, trust people to make their decisions rather than leave it up to insane autocrats? It's also known that non-biased tests, like remembering a sequence of numbers and reciting it backwards, exhibit the same differences in scores.
        jsnx 19y ago
        Why would a brilliant autocrat decide to trust the people's decisions? The political and economic freedom of Western Europe and its friends is substantially the result of historical accident -- as is the poor state of Africa. Many of the post-colonial nations experienced autocratic catastrophe, seemingly in proportion to the degree in which industrialism was a jump for them. If you want tell me what ethnic group you are descended from, I would be happy to tell you how stupid you are based on some unhappy incident in your people's history. I, for one, have a lot of German in me. Are Germans smart for their rockets or dumb for their Fuhrer?
  - npotter 19y ago
    where's that signal to noise essay from pg? I've always viewed standardized tests as a way to approximate intelligence, but they aren't very good ones at that. A search will show a lot of discussions about why. It's pretty silly to use scores that are partially determined by a given input to prove that some people have that input. It's circular causality at best and blatant deception at worst.
npk 19y ago
Bleh, so what. This guy claims to have measured something, but who knows if it's even interesting. At the end of the article, do you even understand what the point in reading it was? I think what is interesting is tagging the article as "politically incorrect." I really hate this term. It forces people to think, "If I don't agree, or find this offensive, I'm small minded." What makes this particular article reek of crackpotdom is that it offers no references to any other pertinent articles, yet it acts as if it is "scientific" you know, with all that math. Don't bother reading this thing.
- _h4xr 19y ago
  I hate the term 'politically correct', but you've got to admit that it drew more viewers (and votes) than some other adjectives I could use. And if you don't tag something like that, people whine.
- pius 19y ago
  Agreed on all points. The whole "warning . . . politically incorrect" thing is not only lame, but smacks of a good ol' boy telling a ribald or xenophobic story to his buddies with a wink and a nod. Might as well have just said "We all get it, but you know how those chicks and minorities whine about every little thing . . . they just don't have any sense of humor." Don't know what OP's intended tone was, but it certainly didn't come off well to me.
  - _h4xr 19y ago
    I apologize if it didn't come off well. What I wanted to avoid was a response like "That's racist!" I should probably ask doctors how they do that -- do they say something like "The racist disease, sickle-cell anemia, tends to strike people of African descent," or what? I mean, the point of the article was that, given some data about tests, the correlation between tests and academic appointments, and some basic math, you can at least say "If a group is under-represented in the sciences, it is mostly because their test scores are low." Which means that either the test is inaccurate, and they're really underrepresented, or the test is accurate and they aren't. It's not about the research -- it's about showing where the prejudice has to be hiding if there's any prejudice to be found.
Tichy 19y ago
Hm, in one sentence he claims that the gap shows up in all tests across all cultures, but then he goes on talking only about SAT scores. Some citations would have been in order... I don't think the SAT thing is very interesting: presumably (or possibly, at least) it is still a culture thing that women are less interested in maths, which would explain the gap by the end of high school. Several years ago I took some interest in the Bell Curve and IQ tests. The IQ test people also claim their tests are culture insensitive, but that is definitely not true. Just think about the following kind of test: show 10 kanji symbols on a page of the book and on the next page ask the reader to identify them. Clearly people familiar with kanji will have big advantage. That might sound constructed, but there were times when IQ testers concluded that people from primitive societies can't think in 3d because they would build a drawing of an abstract box as a 2d structure. That's so obviously a culture thing... Anyway, not refutations of IQ testing, but enough to let one be sceptical.
- _h4xr 19y ago
  "I don't think the SAT thing is very interesting: presumably (or possibly, at least) it is still a culture thing that women are less interested in maths, which would explain the gap by the end of high school." That could be it. But I'd actually be more worried about students who were just "less interested" than students who were interested and tried really hard. "The IQ test people also claim their tests are culture insensitive, but that is definitely not true. Just think about the following kind of test: show 10 kanji symbols on a page of the book and on the next page ask the reader to identify them." Actually, what IQ testers found was that the culturally insensitive tests exacerbate group differences. Unless there's something cultural in being able to remember a sequence of numbers and recite it in reverse, or to have high reaction time, or to remember the orientation of a set of geometric shapes.
  - DaniFong 19y ago
    I used to tutor junior high and high school kids in physics. In junior high, nearly all the top students were girls. For some reason, in high school, there was this huge switch -- suddenly, most of the girls weren't interested in physics or math. It was weird, but I suspect that it's largely a matter of social pressures. Luckily, I've had no direct experience with this. I skipped high school.
DaniFong 19y ago
The article is bullshit. I didn't read anything after the quote "On all standardized exams, including IQ tests, men score higher than women on mathematical reasoning sections." That's simply not true. Women are known to score higher (and have since the 60's) on tests of calculation, which is just one example. To have such a sweeping fallacy stated as a general truth betrays a disgustingly prejudiced intent. There are volumes more wrong with the whole essay, but really it's not worth my time. If you take any particular statement there, and dig a little deeper, you'll be sickened by what comes out.
- _h4xr 19y ago
  "Women are known to score higher (and have since the 60's) on tests of calculation, which is just one example." That's true. Usually, the breakdown is that women are much better at arithmetic and the like, but men are much better at more abstract problems. Which is going to make someone a better EE professor?
  - DaniFong 19y ago
    Well, we weren't talking about EE professors. But, if we were, we're talking about the top 1% of quantitative ability, in which case there's barely any statistical validity in what is written there at all. Here's a good piece of data. The Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins has been testing youth (~12 years old) across the country since 1972. One of the first things that they noticed was that of the students scoring above 700 on the math SAT, boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1. Okay, wow. They have, of course, run the tests every year since then, and now it's down to a 3:1 ratio. This indicates a very, very strong cultural variable. The fact that this isn't even mentioned, again, betrays bias.
    - _h4xr 19y ago
      I hadn't heard about that. I imagine it may be cultural, but again, note that the SAT's ability to measure top scorers has been dampened. As far as I know, standard deviation is more significant than absolute difference in the men/women IQ debate. Men swamp women at the high ends because there are more male geniuses and male morons.
jsnx 19y ago
I know a few smart women. Even if there are important statistical differences between men and women in the way of analytical ability, we still have to take individual men and women on their own merits. It's too bad that colleges are unfairly admitting sub-par women, but then again, that's probably not as bad a thing as admitting all those god damn business majors...
pius 19y ago
I'm not particularly impressed by the research but, then again, I'm black . . . I'm probably not bright enough to understand all this "basic calculus" and other "smart" talk.
viergroupie 19y ago
Well, the distribution of asian SAT scores looks vaguely bimodal, so let's validate our preconceived notions by arbitrarily stuffing two gaussians inside. Very methodical.
- DaniFong 19y ago
  With enough Gaussians, we can say anything!

7 points by _h4xr 19y ago

This entire article appears to be based on the assumption that standardized tests can be used to determine anything useful. I suspect everyone can see where that's going.

_h4xr 19y ago
Well, here's the approximate conversion between SATs and IQ: http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002360.html http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002360.html . And here's an interesting scatterplot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IQatWoN_GDP_IQ.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IQatWoN_GDP_IQ.png . Put those together, and... Also, assume they don't determine anything useful, but that schools have been magically fooled into thinking they do: what part of the conclusion to this essay changes?
- amalcon 19y ago
  1) IQ tests are also standardized tests. If they are somehow beyond question, why do schools just not use IQ tests? 2) Nothing. I just doubt that schools have actually been magically fooled into thinking they do: They actually get to do the regression analysis, and see that past grades are a better predictor than standardized tests. This has been well known for a long time. If applicants have been fooled, however, it allows the school to get useful effects from the test (even if the effect isn't predicting future performance).
  - _h4xr 19y ago
    I don't think they're beyond question. Certainly, there's room for improvement (the cutoffs are too low. A physics PhD program isn't really interested in a test that has no measurement value for IQs over 120, or wherever it is -- and the analogy section was pretty g-loaded, so it's a shame that's been removed from the SAT, too). And schools don't just rely on standardized tests; they'll look at outside achievements, school grades, and maybe essays -- a competitive program might want people in the top 5% of intelligence, determination, and charisma -- which still means their students' academic test scores will need to be in the top 5%. 2) That holds true for studying results within schools, but not for test results overall. This is because schools admit people with roughly the same ability -- so they might have one person with test scores .5 stdev below the mean, but with a really brilliant essay. Fortunately, you don't have to take my word for it -- just look at the dropout rate among people who are admitted despite lower test scores and lower grades: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?id=1635 http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?id=1635
- axiom 19y ago
  That scatterplot comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations Which by the way predicts that the average IQ of Ethiopia is 63. Note that an IQ of 70 is considered mentally retarded. Anyone see a problem with this? Edit: my point is that it's absurd, and the study is nonesense!
  - _h4xr 19y ago
    Are you saying the data are surprising, or that they're wrong?
    - rms 19y ago
      It is wrong. It is funny how much the descending list of IQs corresponds to the economic freedom of a society. It is known that IQs are culturally biased. Residents of Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea aren't functionally retarded but they aren't good at taking IQ tests and they happen to live in a society where it is impossible to generate wealth because of insane autocrats.
      - _h4xr 19y ago
        I'm not sure the correlation works that way. Wouldn't you expect a smarter society to, uh, trust people to make their decisions rather than leave it up to insane autocrats? It's also known that non-biased tests, like remembering a sequence of numbers and reciting it backwards, exhibit the same differences in scores.
        jsnx 19y ago
        Why would a brilliant autocrat decide to trust the people's decisions? The political and economic freedom of Western Europe and its friends is substantially the result of historical accident -- as is the poor state of Africa. Many of the post-colonial nations experienced autocratic catastrophe, seemingly in proportion to the degree in which industrialism was a jump for them. If you want tell me what ethnic group you are descended from, I would be happy to tell you how stupid you are based on some unhappy incident in your people's history. I, for one, have a lot of German in me. Are Germans smart for their rockets or dumb for their Fuhrer?
- npotter 19y ago
  where's that signal to noise essay from pg? I've always viewed standardized tests as a way to approximate intelligence, but they aren't very good ones at that. A search will show a lot of discussions about why. It's pretty silly to use scores that are partially determined by a given input to prove that some people have that input. It's circular causality at best and blatant deception at worst.

npk 19y ago

Bleh, so what. This guy claims to have measured something, but who knows if it's even interesting. At the end of the article, do you even understand what the point in reading it was? I think what is interesting is tagging the article as "politically incorrect." I really hate this term. It forces people to think, "If I don't agree, or find this offensive, I'm small minded." What makes this particular article reek of crackpotdom is that it offers no references to any other pertinent articles, yet it acts as if it is "scientific" you know, with all that math. Don't bother reading this thing.

_h4xr 19y ago
I hate the term 'politically correct', but you've got to admit that it drew more viewers (and votes) than some other adjectives I could use. And if you don't tag something like that, people whine.
pius 19y ago
Agreed on all points. The whole "warning . . . politically incorrect" thing is not only lame, but smacks of a good ol' boy telling a ribald or xenophobic story to his buddies with a wink and a nod. Might as well have just said "We all get it, but you know how those chicks and minorities whine about every little thing . . . they just don't have any sense of humor." Don't know what OP's intended tone was, but it certainly didn't come off well to me.
- _h4xr 19y ago
  I apologize if it didn't come off well. What I wanted to avoid was a response like "That's racist!" I should probably ask doctors how they do that -- do they say something like "The racist disease, sickle-cell anemia, tends to strike people of African descent," or what? I mean, the point of the article was that, given some data about tests, the correlation between tests and academic appointments, and some basic math, you can at least say "If a group is under-represented in the sciences, it is mostly because their test scores are low." Which means that either the test is inaccurate, and they're really underrepresented, or the test is accurate and they aren't. It's not about the research -- it's about showing where the prejudice has to be hiding if there's any prejudice to be found.

Tichy 19y ago

Hm, in one sentence he claims that the gap shows up in all tests across all cultures, but then he goes on talking only about SAT scores. Some citations would have been in order... I don't think the SAT thing is very interesting: presumably (or possibly, at least) it is still a culture thing that women are less interested in maths, which would explain the gap by the end of high school. Several years ago I took some interest in the Bell Curve and IQ tests. The IQ test people also claim their tests are culture insensitive, but that is definitely not true. Just think about the following kind of test: show 10 kanji symbols on a page of the book and on the next page ask the reader to identify them. Clearly people familiar with kanji will have big advantage. That might sound constructed, but there were times when IQ testers concluded that people from primitive societies can't think in 3d because they would build a drawing of an abstract box as a 2d structure. That's so obviously a culture thing... Anyway, not refutations of IQ testing, but enough to let one be sceptical.

_h4xr 19y ago
"I don't think the SAT thing is very interesting: presumably (or possibly, at least) it is still a culture thing that women are less interested in maths, which would explain the gap by the end of high school." That could be it. But I'd actually be more worried about students who were just "less interested" than students who were interested and tried really hard. "The IQ test people also claim their tests are culture insensitive, but that is definitely not true. Just think about the following kind of test: show 10 kanji symbols on a page of the book and on the next page ask the reader to identify them." Actually, what IQ testers found was that the culturally insensitive tests exacerbate group differences. Unless there's something cultural in being able to remember a sequence of numbers and recite it in reverse, or to have high reaction time, or to remember the orientation of a set of geometric shapes.
- DaniFong 19y ago
  I used to tutor junior high and high school kids in physics. In junior high, nearly all the top students were girls. For some reason, in high school, there was this huge switch -- suddenly, most of the girls weren't interested in physics or math. It was weird, but I suspect that it's largely a matter of social pressures. Luckily, I've had no direct experience with this. I skipped high school.

DaniFong 19y ago

The article is bullshit. I didn't read anything after the quote "On all standardized exams, including IQ tests, men score higher than women on mathematical reasoning sections." That's simply not true. Women are known to score higher (and have since the 60's) on tests of calculation, which is just one example. To have such a sweeping fallacy stated as a general truth betrays a disgustingly prejudiced intent. There are volumes more wrong with the whole essay, but really it's not worth my time. If you take any particular statement there, and dig a little deeper, you'll be sickened by what comes out.

_h4xr 19y ago
"Women are known to score higher (and have since the 60's) on tests of calculation, which is just one example." That's true. Usually, the breakdown is that women are much better at arithmetic and the like, but men are much better at more abstract problems. Which is going to make someone a better EE professor?
- DaniFong 19y ago
  Well, we weren't talking about EE professors. But, if we were, we're talking about the top 1% of quantitative ability, in which case there's barely any statistical validity in what is written there at all. Here's a good piece of data. The Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins has been testing youth (~12 years old) across the country since 1972. One of the first things that they noticed was that of the students scoring above 700 on the math SAT, boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1. Okay, wow. They have, of course, run the tests every year since then, and now it's down to a 3:1 ratio. This indicates a very, very strong cultural variable. The fact that this isn't even mentioned, again, betrays bias.
  - _h4xr 19y ago
    I hadn't heard about that. I imagine it may be cultural, but again, note that the SAT's ability to measure top scorers has been dampened. As far as I know, standard deviation is more significant than absolute difference in the men/women IQ debate. Men swamp women at the high ends because there are more male geniuses and male morons.

jsnx 19y ago

I know a few smart women. Even if there are important statistical differences between men and women in the way of analytical ability, we still have to take individual men and women on their own merits. It's too bad that colleges are unfairly admitting sub-par women, but then again, that's probably not as bad a thing as admitting all those god damn business majors...

pius 19y ago

I'm not particularly impressed by the research but, then again, I'm black . . . I'm probably not bright enough to understand all this "basic calculus" and other "smart" talk.

viergroupie 19y ago

Well, the distribution of asian SAT scores looks vaguely bimodal, so let's validate our preconceived notions by arbitrarily stuffing two gaussians inside. Very methodical.

DaniFong 19y ago
With enough Gaussians, we can say anything!