6 ms·

It's interesting to realize that if two groups have the same mean but different variability, the higher-variability group will have more outliers, on both the h

It's interesting to realize that if two groups have the same mean but different variability, the higher-variability group will have more outliers, on both the high end and the low end. The danger is a kind of genetic fatalism, assuming that what we should do is just to be determined by our genes and how our bodies work. For example, it's possible for a man to produce many children by impregnating lots of women concurrently. I get the feeling that some men decide that the way that a person wins life is that they reproduce as much of their genetic material as possible, so they try to win. It seems like this kind of justification is used to excuse a wide variety of bad behavior: cheating, rape, women as chattel, etc. It's debatable whether the argument made by the article is actually a real thing, and how much it contributes to the inequality we see in the world. I think social effects have a bigger influence. But even if we took the argument as fact, it doesn't mean that we have to accept every naive consequence. We don't need to say "Of course the vast majority of CEOs, world leaders, and very wealthy people are male, because the most intelligent people are almost all male". We can choose to have a better society than that.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago
I once found a "casual encounters" ad on craigslist, in which a woman sought men to attend a certain type of party, which type I do not remember. I looked it up at Urban Dictionary, the objective of that kind of party is to impregnate as many women as possible. I contemplated attending but then concluded that I want to know who my children are, and that they would want to know who their father is. Even under the best of circumstances it is painful not to know one's father - look at Steve Jobs. I was once invited to have unprotected sex with a complete stranger. She was quite lovely, definitely someone I would want to be with but we just happened to stumble across each other at Burning Man. I expected I would never see her again so I declined.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I suspect this is not unusual. I was asked to be a sperm donor at a party by a lesbian couple I'd never met before. They were completely serious, but the catch was no contact with the child. The problem with arguments from reproductive psychology is that we know very little about reproductive psychology in history. So modern ideas about female partner choice shaping genetics aren't necessarily a given. It's not unlikely there was plenty of rape, random sex with strangers because why not?, and all kinds of other non-vanilla behaviour. Edit: And there's another issue - the implication that selecting for male variability is more successful as a species-wide reproductive strategy than selecting for high IQ. That may be true, but it's a slightly strange place to end up in, because it implies that both ends of the bimodal curve are equally successful, and there's no selection advantage to being at the top of the curve. (If there were the bimodal would collapse to a standard Gaussian.)
  - pedrosorio 11y ago
    "both ends of the bimodal curve" Technically it's still a unimodal curve (single mode, roughly at the center of the distribution - i.e. ~= mean, median), it's just that the variance is increased.
  - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
    There are other traits than IQ which promote the success of the species. Even if unintelligent, physical strength and endurance enable one to hunt, to flee from predators. Sharp eyesight and sensitive hearing. Those of African heritage commonly have Sickle Cell Anemia. While it is a crippling illness it gives one resistance to malaria; in much of Africa that enables one to live longer than those with healthy blood cells.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      ...or red hair, or blue eyes, which spread simply because they were so darn cute. They're only like 12,000 years old!
      - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
        A recent study found that those with blue eyes are predisposed to alcoholism. Doubtlessly that will lead to employment discrimination against those with brown eyes, as management types like to party. I once read that every human society that had agriculture also had beer. We have had agriculture for roughly 12,000 years.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > Those of African heritage commonly have Sickle Cell Anemia. While it is a crippling illness it gives one resistance to malaria; in much of Africa that enables one to live longer than those with healthy blood cells. That's not quite right. Being heterozygous for the sickle-cell trait produces reduced symptoms from malaria (but not immunity), while being homozygous for the trait produces sickle cell disease and and, consequently, greater vulnerability to malaria (since malarial infection, in addition to its other effects, frequently produces sickle cell crises in persons with sickle cell disease.)
MichaelCrawford 11y ago
My Russian instructor at Caltech was the victim of Bride Abduction while vacationing in Soviet Georgia when she was fifteen years old. Her, uh, "fiance's" mother failed to understand why Valentina was unhappy about it.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
stefantalpalaru 11y ago
> But even if we took the argument as fact, it doesn't mean that we have to accept every naive consequence. We don't need to say "Of course the vast majority of CEOs, world leaders, and very wealthy people are male, because the most intelligent people are almost all male". We can choose to have a better society than that. I don't think that intelligence is the most important factor for those positions, so let's talk about researchers and university teachers instead. Do you really think that society would be better if less intelligent people would be better represented there?
- dagw 11y ago
  Certainly for university teachers we don't want to solely go on 'intelligence'. Looking back at my university career the correlation between how good a teacher someone was and how they ranked globally as researchers within their field was at best very weakly correlated. In fact I think hiring undergraduate lecturers based on their research performance is a pretty flawed idea, but that's a different debate.
- tfinniga 11y ago
  Well, there is a reason why I chose those examples. I'm not arguing for diversity at all costs, which seems like what you're arguing against. I'd say in general having researchers and university teachers that are intelligent is good. Diversity is also good. There should be a balance - I think that diverse researchers and teachers can solve problems that a homogenous group of researchers would never solve. For example, what problems do researchers tackle? They tend to choose problems that they see, and may never try to solve problems that affect other groups. Or they may choose solutions that only work for people like themselves. For example, a lot of computer graphics algorithms like face recognition don't work well for black faces. Even more troublesome, many cameras (both digital and film) have a dynamic range that works well for white faces, but poorly for black faces. Another example, the amount of research into male birth control vs. female birth control is very uneven. Would it be worth it to have slightly less intelligent but much more diverse researchers and teachers? Would society as a whole be better off? It has to be a balance, but I'd bet the answer is 'sometimes yes'. All of this is somewhat beside my main point, which is that I think it's simplistic to say that society and morality should only be determined by genetics.
throwaway999666 11y ago
> But even if we took the argument as fact, it doesn't mean that we have to accept every naive consequence. We don't need to say "Of course the vast majority of CEOs, world leaders, and very wealthy people are male, because the most intelligent people are almost all male". We can choose to have a better society than that. Which in practice means help relatively successful women crack "the glass ceiling", while the men who find themselves in the bottom of the lower half of the distribution in some sense by societal standards can get stuffed.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago

I once found a "casual encounters" ad on craigslist, in which a woman sought men to attend a certain type of party, which type I do not remember. I looked it up at Urban Dictionary, the objective of that kind of party is to impregnate as many women as possible. I contemplated attending but then concluded that I want to know who my children are, and that they would want to know who their father is. Even under the best of circumstances it is painful not to know one's father - look at Steve Jobs. I was once invited to have unprotected sex with a complete stranger. She was quite lovely, definitely someone I would want to be with but we just happened to stumble across each other at Burning Man. I expected I would never see her again so I declined.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I suspect this is not unusual. I was asked to be a sperm donor at a party by a lesbian couple I'd never met before. They were completely serious, but the catch was no contact with the child. The problem with arguments from reproductive psychology is that we know very little about reproductive psychology in history. So modern ideas about female partner choice shaping genetics aren't necessarily a given. It's not unlikely there was plenty of rape, random sex with strangers because why not?, and all kinds of other non-vanilla behaviour. Edit: And there's another issue - the implication that selecting for male variability is more successful as a species-wide reproductive strategy than selecting for high IQ. That may be true, but it's a slightly strange place to end up in, because it implies that both ends of the bimodal curve are equally successful, and there's no selection advantage to being at the top of the curve. (If there were the bimodal would collapse to a standard Gaussian.)
- pedrosorio 11y ago
  "both ends of the bimodal curve" Technically it's still a unimodal curve (single mode, roughly at the center of the distribution - i.e. ~= mean, median), it's just that the variance is increased.
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  There are other traits than IQ which promote the success of the species. Even if unintelligent, physical strength and endurance enable one to hunt, to flee from predators. Sharp eyesight and sensitive hearing. Those of African heritage commonly have Sickle Cell Anemia. While it is a crippling illness it gives one resistance to malaria; in much of Africa that enables one to live longer than those with healthy blood cells.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    ...or red hair, or blue eyes, which spread simply because they were so darn cute. They're only like 12,000 years old!
    - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
      A recent study found that those with blue eyes are predisposed to alcoholism. Doubtlessly that will lead to employment discrimination against those with brown eyes, as management types like to party. I once read that every human society that had agriculture also had beer. We have had agriculture for roughly 12,000 years.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Those of African heritage commonly have Sickle Cell Anemia. While it is a crippling illness it gives one resistance to malaria; in much of Africa that enables one to live longer than those with healthy blood cells. That's not quite right. Being heterozygous for the sickle-cell trait produces reduced symptoms from malaria (but not immunity), while being homozygous for the trait produces sickle cell disease and and, consequently, greater vulnerability to malaria (since malarial infection, in addition to its other effects, frequently produces sickle cell crises in persons with sickle cell disease.)

MichaelCrawford 11y ago

My Russian instructor at Caltech was the victim of Bride Abduction while vacationing in Soviet Georgia when she was fifteen years old. Her, uh, "fiance's" mother failed to understand why Valentina was unhappy about it.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

stefantalpalaru 11y ago

> But even if we took the argument as fact, it doesn't mean that we have to accept every naive consequence. We don't need to say "Of course the vast majority of CEOs, world leaders, and very wealthy people are male, because the most intelligent people are almost all male". We can choose to have a better society than that. I don't think that intelligence is the most important factor for those positions, so let's talk about researchers and university teachers instead. Do you really think that society would be better if less intelligent people would be better represented there?

dagw 11y ago
Certainly for university teachers we don't want to solely go on 'intelligence'. Looking back at my university career the correlation between how good a teacher someone was and how they ranked globally as researchers within their field was at best very weakly correlated. In fact I think hiring undergraduate lecturers based on their research performance is a pretty flawed idea, but that's a different debate.
tfinniga 11y ago
Well, there is a reason why I chose those examples. I'm not arguing for diversity at all costs, which seems like what you're arguing against. I'd say in general having researchers and university teachers that are intelligent is good. Diversity is also good. There should be a balance - I think that diverse researchers and teachers can solve problems that a homogenous group of researchers would never solve. For example, what problems do researchers tackle? They tend to choose problems that they see, and may never try to solve problems that affect other groups. Or they may choose solutions that only work for people like themselves. For example, a lot of computer graphics algorithms like face recognition don't work well for black faces. Even more troublesome, many cameras (both digital and film) have a dynamic range that works well for white faces, but poorly for black faces. Another example, the amount of research into male birth control vs. female birth control is very uneven. Would it be worth it to have slightly less intelligent but much more diverse researchers and teachers? Would society as a whole be better off? It has to be a balance, but I'd bet the answer is 'sometimes yes'. All of this is somewhat beside my main point, which is that I think it's simplistic to say that society and morality should only be determined by genetics.

throwaway999666 11y ago

> But even if we took the argument as fact, it doesn't mean that we have to accept every naive consequence. We don't need to say "Of course the vast majority of CEOs, world leaders, and very wealthy people are male, because the most intelligent people are almost all male". We can choose to have a better society than that. Which in practice means help relatively successful women crack "the glass ceiling", while the men who find themselves in the bottom of the lower half of the distribution in some sense by societal standards can get stuffed.