_h4xr

21 ms·

61.
by _h4xr 19y ago
" since the SAT doesn't correlate with academic performance at all beyond a slight correlation with GPA " Did you know that weight doesn't correlate very well with linebacker performance in the NFL? It could be that a 350-pounder is just as
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by _h4xr 19y ago
You should be careful about that "minorities" thing. Jews and Asians are minorities whose test scores are above the national average -- I think they would be very surprised to find that their collective underperformance was somehow an issue
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by _h4xr 19y ago
Prejudice d .
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by _h4xr 19y ago
Oh! So it's not a story about businesses being prejudice at all . It's a story about bad consumers! I get it. That makes sense. Why would anyone focus on the businesses, though, when they're making a perfectly rational decision -- perhaps
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by _h4xr 19y ago
That is an interesting story. What would be really interesting, though, is to read about the company that saw through this kind of prejudice -- that hired the equally-qualified minority workers at wages depressed by such prejudice, and th
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by _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
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by _h4xr 19y ago
"Why would a brilliant autocrat decide to trust the people's decisions?" http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/magic-o... " Many of the post-colonial nations experienced autocratic catastrophe, seemingly in proportion to th
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by _h4xr 19y ago
"I mean, say, hypothetically, that it took 15 genes to produce genius. Then the lack of redundancy and higher variability on the male genotype would be a hindrance, not an advantage." Not exactly. It would be more random, but depending on h
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by _h4xr 19y ago
"But intelligence isn't a gene. Researchers have, since the time of Dalton, tried to find a simple, biological basis for genius. You know, memory capacity, reaction times, brain size , brain structure convolution, etc. They haven't found
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by _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
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by _h4xr 19y ago
You skipped high school? How did that work out?
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by _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 ab
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by _h4xr 19y ago
Well, yeah. I mean, if you were to ask me before I'd heard about the IQ thing, I would have said the same. But new data caused me to reexamine my old assumptions -- why doesn't that work with everyone? An IQ that low doesn't imply what you
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by _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
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by _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 actu
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by _h4xr 19y ago
Are you saying the data are surprising, or that they're wrong?
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by _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 an
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by _h4xr 19y ago
Well, here's the approximate conversion between SATs and IQ: http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002360.html . And here's an interesting scatterplot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IQatWoN_GDP_IQ.png . Put those together, and... Also,
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by _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.
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Women and Minorities in Science (Warning: Basic calculus and statistics; political incorrectness)(lagriffedulion.f2s.com)
7 points by _h4xr 19y ago|46 comments
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by _h4xr 19y ago
Did the British rule of Britain have the same effect? How, then, could they have produced Newton and Babbage when Indian mathematicians were on the same path centuries (or millennia!) earlier?
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by _h4xr 19y ago
This was a negative? India was made up of numerous warring states, until one massive war that turned them into a possession of Britain. I'm not aware of how their economic situation changed after that, but if Africa is any indicator... htt
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by _h4xr 19y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computing_2400_BC-1... This is surprising. Indian mathematicians invented the 0, binary, formal language specs, logarithms... I wonder what changed.