Yes, the world is a complex place. Yes, any finding in the social sciences may not show what it purports to show due to biases and flaws in the methodology. We can do better here than simply ignoring all evidence on the basis that it might be wrong however. Remember that ‘belief’ in some idea is not a binary thing, 0 and 1 are not probabilities, all beliefs are open to future revision in either direction in light of new evidence. A rationalist should be trying to refine their degree of belief by asking questions and doing further research.
Greater variance in male performance is both a widely observed phenomenon in many domains and something that you would expect to see given the differing selection pressures on males and females. It need not be an emotionally laden observation since it is not inherently implying that either gender is ‘better’ than the other in some way, it is merely an observed regularity of our world.
So if you dispute the evidence for greater variance in male performance generally and in intelligence measures specifically please address your criticisms to specifics. What specifically are the biases in standard IQ tests or measures of income that you have an understanding of and how do they act to produce misleading results? What other data (experimental is preferable but anecdotal is admissible for consideration) do you have to offer on this issue? This is a perfect example of a question we can collectively apply our rationality to in order to improve the accuracy of our probability estimates.
Or don’t. Just say ‘I don’t believe any of this evidence should influence my beliefs because the world is complex and evidence can be wrong’ if you choose. But do not pretend that that is either a noble or rational stance to take on an issue.
I have a thought on these studies that give evidence for unequal intelligence between the sexes (or races.) They can have very scary, emotional connotations. They used to scare me. Then I thought about it a bit and asked “What am I scared of?” And I realized that I was scared that, if these genetic inequalities were real, I’d have to be a sexist or racist.
But think for a minute. Suppose the “worst-case scenario” were true. Suppose women really did have worse brains than men, for genetic reasons. What would be my logical response?
It occurred to me that the only responsible way to react to such news would be to treat it as a disease to be cured. And then start working on biology to fix it. I am not an anti-Semite because I’m aware that Tay-Sachs disease affects Ashkenazic Jews.
If there were genetic differences between sexes or races, I’d be less likely to favor affirmative action at the college or employment level, because it wouldn’t be effective. The injustice would be biological, not social, and it would be best fixed biologically.
The real reason people are scared of genetic differences is the naturalistic fallacy. Just because an inequality is natural doesn’t mean it’s good. If some people have the misfortune to have low IQ’s for genetic reasons, and if higher IQ would make their lives better, then shouldn’t we be working on fixing that?
(Note: this is not an argument that IQ differences exist or are meaningful. I’m just arguing that if they turn out to be real, there are non-sexist, non-racist ways to deal with that reality. I’m of the belief now that knowing what reality is like can never be intrinsically immoral.)
If there were genetic differences between sexes or races, I’d be less likely to favor affirmative action at the college or employment level, because it wouldn’t be effective. The injustice would be biological, not social, and it would be best fixed biologically.
With the caveat that a biological injustice and a social injustice are not mutually exclusive—there may be genetic differences between sexes/races, but that would not eliminate the possibility of additional unnecessary social barriers to college or work.
ETA: I should also have remembered that ‘biological’ does not equal ‘genetic.’
Though there’s an added harm if the average varies across groups, especially groups where membership is easy to recognize. Because then, people (reasonably) make generalizations, and high-IQ members of a low-IQ group are harmed by negative opinions. Add in the fact that people have biases, and stereotyping is likely to go even beyond what’s reasonable, so the problem becomes even worse.
But yes, if some individuals have low IQ for genetic reasons (or other reasons beyond their control) I consider it a bad thing and we ought to see about fixing it. I think Eliezer made this point earlier.
The injustice is that each individual is not maximally intelligent. The variance in intelligence between individuals just means that this is more unjust for some people than others.
I’m not sure whether I’d want to be maximally intelligent. You could say the injustice is that individuals are less intelligent than would be optimal for their flourishing, or whatever.
One of the major concerns here are Gattaca-type scenarios, where when you’re looking for very smart people you’ll throw out all of the applications from females to maximize your odds of getting a very smart person. Obviously someone with the time to look at every application wouldn’t do that, as the smartest applicant could still be a female. But usually there are some factors that you use first to throw away some of the stack so you don’t have to look at them all.
That may be happening already. (Statistical discrimination is one model for employment discrimination, and as I recall it doesn’t hold up too badly; better than the Becker model, at least.) It’s not an intrinsically “Gattaca” idea.
Of course, in a world where there was a biological “fix” for low IQ, you’d have the issue of whether it should be voluntary (I’d say yes) and whether people who don’t opt for it should get preference from schools and employers (I’d say no, but tentatively) and what to do about access (it’s complicated.) But I’m fairly confident that if IQ matters for real life outcomes, then a world where it can be improved technologically is a better one.
I have a thought on these studies that give evidence for unequal intelligence between the sexes (or races.) They can have very scary, emotional connotations. They used to scare me. Then I thought about it a bit and asked “What am I scared of?” And I realized that I was scared that, if these genetic inequalities were real, I’d have to be a sexist or racist.
Yeah, I think this is a common reaction and it’s not an entirely unreasonable reaction because sexism and racism are bad. But as you’ve realized it is better to know the truth if you want to influence the world in a direction consistent with your values.
Just to be clear though, the claim is not that men are ‘more intelligent’ than women. It is that men have greater variance. This means more geniuses and more morons. It only carries value connotations if you believe more variance is inherently ‘better’, not if you believe higher intelligence is better. If you look at the scandal over Larry Summers’ comments on this issue you will see that the vast majority of people who were offended by his comments did not understand this distinction.
(Note: this is not an argument that IQ differences exist or are meaningful. I’m just arguing that if they turn out to be real, there are non-sexist, non-racist ways to deal with that reality. I’m of the belief now that knowing what reality is like can never be intrinsically immoral.)
Yes, this is the key. It is always better to know the truth if you wish to effectively influence the future. You still get to choose your own values though—if the way things are is not the way you think they should be then believing true things is your best bet for effectively resolving that discrepancy in a favourable way.
Yeah, I’m aware about the variance thing. The “geniuses” side of the graph stands out to me more, but probably only because of personal relevance. (I never took an IQ test but I’d guess I’m more likely top half than bottom half.) But you’re right, if there were higher variance among men, and if IQ mattered, then I’d believe we were also obligated to do something about low-IQ males.
Richard Whitmire (see http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/whyboysfail/) convinced me that there’s a serious educational problem among US and European boys. He examines the education system, not IQ, but if some of it turns out to be biological then we should be working on that too.
I think the problems with the education system in the US and Europe are more fundamental than just that it is failing boys. The real problem is that we have an educational system adapted for early 20th century industrial societies that for institutional reasons has been unable to adapt to a completely transformed economic and social landscape. The most obvious victims are certain groups of boys but the whole system is completely unsuited to the modern world and is structured in a way that makes it largely incapable of correctly diagnosing or doing anything to fix the problems.
Yes, but usually, when a grad student in mathematics believes she has above median intelligence with respect to the general population, she will turn out to be right.
Just to be clear though, the claim is not that men are ‘more intelligent’ than women. It is that men have greater variance. This means more geniuses and more morons. It only carries value connotations if you believe more variance is inherently ‘better’, not if you believe higher intelligence is better. If you look at the scandal over Larry Summers’ comments on this issue you will see that the vast majority of people who were offended by his comments did not understand this distinction.
The question isn’t necessarily whether men in general are better than women in general. The active question seems to be whether it’s alright for women to get high status positions.
The active question seems to be whether it’s alright for women to get high status positions.
The active question in what context? Clearly the variance issue has no bearing on this question. Whether greater variance in intelligence is a real phenomenon potentially has bearing on questions regarding whether institutional sexism in certain academic disciplines is a real issue and on the appropriateness of quota systems or ‘positive discrimination’ but I don’t see how anyone who understood the issue could claim that it was not ‘alright’ for women to hold high status positions. I’m sure some people make that unrelated claim but people believe all sorts of crazy shit.
The issue seems to be, in your misreading of my comment, that you expect I feel emotional about gender issues, and perhaps feel threatened indiscriminately by any statements about gender and intelligence. But I don’t. It happens that I’m not generally concerned about gender issues and am not on the look out to defend them. Personally, I don’t anticipate feeling threatened by any statements that might be true about gender.
On issues on which I am emotional (they exist), I feel much less threatened by statements if they are either clearly personal opinions/impressions or scientific statements that carry the specifics with them. I feel that if the specifics are there, I can trust that there is enough information to vet the statement, if needed, in the present or the future, and thus prevent inappropriate application. If the statement is a personal opinion/impression, we know the appropriate application of that.
So if the point is to discuss issues “rationally”, without stirring up emotions, then it would be a good norm to always signal clearly whether a statement is a personal opinion/impression OR a scientific claim. If the latter, it is the careful inclusion of the methodology/context that makes it scientific.
I apologize for jumping to conclusions. This is sort of why I think getting into specifics is important. If you just make a vague hand-wavey ‘this might not be true’ dismissal of a claim you leave your interlocutor with little choice but to try and guess what your true objection is and so read too much into your comment.
If you just make a vague hand-wavey ‘this might not be true’ dismissal of a claim
This isn’t what I did. My criticism was fairly focused, with a fairly specific solution:
Whenever intelligence is mentioned in a comparative or quantitative way, care should be taken to indicate exactly which dimension of intelligence is being measured. [...] it would be sufficient to indicate the particular test that was being used.
The part that had you thinking I was dismissing the claim was probably this:
When it comes to experimental studies in social science and psychology, I always weight their result low compared to my own observations of a lifetime, because if I’ve observed anything, I’ve observed that things are complex, and I know we haven’t developed tools to handle this complexity.
It probably would have been wise to omit this sentence, since it caused so much bias about my intentions. My idea is that researchers do try to tackle complex subjects, like intelligence, and will measure something or do some experiment and report the results, but the interpretation or relevance of the study is all ‘spin’ in the Abstract or heavily dependent upon the reader’s lifetime experience to understand the relevance.
For example, what is “intelligence”? This is something that a group of researchers have to define, and have to measure in some way, in order to do their study and get it published. Consider the Dreary study. They’ve measured something and called it general intelligence. This part is the spin. However, when you look at how they defined “general intelligence”—this is a scientific paper; they do tell us, and they’re specific—it is patent that they didn’t include social intelligence, emotional intelligence or “street smarts” in this conception of intelligence. Requiring this clarification isn’t dismissing the study results, it’s just emphasizing that the context and the specifics are important.
See the Deary study of practically the entire population of Scottish 11 year-olds, which found greater male variability. The introduction of the study also discusses the history of the greater male variability hypothesis, and some of the evidence for it.
There is a cross-cultural study which found that males have higher variance in most populations, but females do in others. (Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the difference is “cultural,” though it could.) I will try to dig it up. Even so, greater male variability is a robust finding.
This is the bit that I think is important when discussing results about intelligence:
We use the term general intelligence to mean the ability to use combinations of preexisting knowledge and abstract reasoning to solve any of a variety of problems designed to assess the extent to which individuals can benefit from instruction or the amount of instruction necessary to attain a given level of competence.
However, I’m not saying you need to include this information in your comment because you already made the context specific: the Deary study. So a person can dig deeper and find these details if they want to.
Even so, greater male variability is a robust finding.
Just to say, you didn’t actually support this. Unless it is supported in the Dreary study?
Just to say, you didn’t actually support this. Unless it is supported in the Dreary study?
It’s supported at least by the combination of the Deary study, and the cross-cultural study I mentioned that I’ll have to look up when I get home. I believe the author was Feingold. Good question, though.
My bad… The Feingold study is a meta-analyses of studies, some that find greater male variability, and some that find greater female variability in various dimensions.
This does not seem like an apt reply to the above. This:
I don’t believe any of this evidence should influence my beliefs because the world is complex and evidence can be wrong
Is a particularly bad straw man. “I weight their result low” seems to be doing the sort of thing you advocate, as opposed to “no influence”.
Do you disagree with the general stance presented, that the methodology/context of an experimental study matters, and these things should be taken into consideration when evaluating their effects on our beliefs?
Do you disagree with the general stance presented, that the methodology/context of an experimental study matters, and these things should be taken into consideration when evaluating their effects on our beliefs?
No, and I would welcome discussion of the specific issues that people are taking into account, as I said. I am open to the possibility that there is some major flaw that renders these results questionable that I have not previously encountered. What I am objecting to is precisely the lack of such specifics. It is not enough to say that things are complex and studies can be flawed or misleading. These are trivially true facts and to imply that your interlocutor is unaware of them on Less Wrong of all places is disingenuous.
There have been a few comments in this thread that are taking the same kind of approach—dismissing the claims on the basis of unspecified flaws in the supporting evidence but never offering specific rebuttals to any of the disputed claims.
Yes, the world is a complex place. Yes, any finding in the social sciences may not show what it purports to show due to biases and flaws in the methodology. We can do better here than simply ignoring all evidence on the basis that it might be wrong however. Remember that ‘belief’ in some idea is not a binary thing, 0 and 1 are not probabilities, all beliefs are open to future revision in either direction in light of new evidence. A rationalist should be trying to refine their degree of belief by asking questions and doing further research.
Greater variance in male performance is both a widely observed phenomenon in many domains and something that you would expect to see given the differing selection pressures on males and females. It need not be an emotionally laden observation since it is not inherently implying that either gender is ‘better’ than the other in some way, it is merely an observed regularity of our world.
So if you dispute the evidence for greater variance in male performance generally and in intelligence measures specifically please address your criticisms to specifics. What specifically are the biases in standard IQ tests or measures of income that you have an understanding of and how do they act to produce misleading results? What other data (experimental is preferable but anecdotal is admissible for consideration) do you have to offer on this issue? This is a perfect example of a question we can collectively apply our rationality to in order to improve the accuracy of our probability estimates.
Or don’t. Just say ‘I don’t believe any of this evidence should influence my beliefs because the world is complex and evidence can be wrong’ if you choose. But do not pretend that that is either a noble or rational stance to take on an issue.
I agree that we can do better.
I have a thought on these studies that give evidence for unequal intelligence between the sexes (or races.) They can have very scary, emotional connotations. They used to scare me. Then I thought about it a bit and asked “What am I scared of?” And I realized that I was scared that, if these genetic inequalities were real, I’d have to be a sexist or racist.
But think for a minute. Suppose the “worst-case scenario” were true. Suppose women really did have worse brains than men, for genetic reasons. What would be my logical response?
It occurred to me that the only responsible way to react to such news would be to treat it as a disease to be cured. And then start working on biology to fix it. I am not an anti-Semite because I’m aware that Tay-Sachs disease affects Ashkenazic Jews.
If there were genetic differences between sexes or races, I’d be less likely to favor affirmative action at the college or employment level, because it wouldn’t be effective. The injustice would be biological, not social, and it would be best fixed biologically.
The real reason people are scared of genetic differences is the naturalistic fallacy. Just because an inequality is natural doesn’t mean it’s good. If some people have the misfortune to have low IQ’s for genetic reasons, and if higher IQ would make their lives better, then shouldn’t we be working on fixing that?
(Note: this is not an argument that IQ differences exist or are meaningful. I’m just arguing that if they turn out to be real, there are non-sexist, non-racist ways to deal with that reality. I’m of the belief now that knowing what reality is like can never be intrinsically immoral.)
With the caveat that a biological injustice and a social injustice are not mutually exclusive—there may be genetic differences between sexes/races, but that would not eliminate the possibility of additional unnecessary social barriers to college or work.
ETA: I should also have remembered that ‘biological’ does not equal ‘genetic.’
Surely the injustice here, if any, is that different individuals are differently intelligent, not that the average varies across groups?
Mostly, yes.
Though there’s an added harm if the average varies across groups, especially groups where membership is easy to recognize. Because then, people (reasonably) make generalizations, and high-IQ members of a low-IQ group are harmed by negative opinions. Add in the fact that people have biases, and stereotyping is likely to go even beyond what’s reasonable, so the problem becomes even worse.
But yes, if some individuals have low IQ for genetic reasons (or other reasons beyond their control) I consider it a bad thing and we ought to see about fixing it. I think Eliezer made this point earlier.
The injustice is that each individual is not maximally intelligent. The variance in intelligence between individuals just means that this is more unjust for some people than others.
I agree that’s the main bad thing, but I’m not sure it would be properly called an “injustice”, and I have strong reservations about the “maximally”.
I’m not sure whether I’d want to be maximally intelligent. You could say the injustice is that individuals are less intelligent than would be optimal for their flourishing, or whatever.
One of the major concerns here are Gattaca-type scenarios, where when you’re looking for very smart people you’ll throw out all of the applications from females to maximize your odds of getting a very smart person. Obviously someone with the time to look at every application wouldn’t do that, as the smartest applicant could still be a female. But usually there are some factors that you use first to throw away some of the stack so you don’t have to look at them all.
That may be happening already. (Statistical discrimination is one model for employment discrimination, and as I recall it doesn’t hold up too badly; better than the Becker model, at least.) It’s not an intrinsically “Gattaca” idea.
Of course, in a world where there was a biological “fix” for low IQ, you’d have the issue of whether it should be voluntary (I’d say yes) and whether people who don’t opt for it should get preference from schools and employers (I’d say no, but tentatively) and what to do about access (it’s complicated.) But I’m fairly confident that if IQ matters for real life outcomes, then a world where it can be improved technologically is a better one.
Yeah, I think this is a common reaction and it’s not an entirely unreasonable reaction because sexism and racism are bad. But as you’ve realized it is better to know the truth if you want to influence the world in a direction consistent with your values.
Just to be clear though, the claim is not that men are ‘more intelligent’ than women. It is that men have greater variance. This means more geniuses and more morons. It only carries value connotations if you believe more variance is inherently ‘better’, not if you believe higher intelligence is better. If you look at the scandal over Larry Summers’ comments on this issue you will see that the vast majority of people who were offended by his comments did not understand this distinction.
Yes, this is the key. It is always better to know the truth if you wish to effectively influence the future. You still get to choose your own values though—if the way things are is not the way you think they should be then believing true things is your best bet for effectively resolving that discrepancy in a favourable way.
Yeah, I’m aware about the variance thing. The “geniuses” side of the graph stands out to me more, but probably only because of personal relevance. (I never took an IQ test but I’d guess I’m more likely top half than bottom half.) But you’re right, if there were higher variance among men, and if IQ mattered, then I’d believe we were also obligated to do something about low-IQ males.
Richard Whitmire (see http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/whyboysfail/) convinced me that there’s a serious educational problem among US and European boys. He examines the education system, not IQ, but if some of it turns out to be biological then we should be working on that too.
I think the problems with the education system in the US and Europe are more fundamental than just that it is failing boys. The real problem is that we have an educational system adapted for early 20th century industrial societies that for institutional reasons has been unable to adapt to a completely transformed economic and social landscape. The most obvious victims are certain groups of boys but the whole system is completely unsuited to the modern world and is structured in a way that makes it largely incapable of correctly diagnosing or doing anything to fix the problems.
You and everybody else
Yes, but usually, when a grad student in mathematics believes she has above median intelligence with respect to the general population, she will turn out to be right.
The question isn’t necessarily whether men in general are better than women in general. The active question seems to be whether it’s alright for women to get high status positions.
The active question in what context? Clearly the variance issue has no bearing on this question. Whether greater variance in intelligence is a real phenomenon potentially has bearing on questions regarding whether institutional sexism in certain academic disciplines is a real issue and on the appropriateness of quota systems or ‘positive discrimination’ but I don’t see how anyone who understood the issue could claim that it was not ‘alright’ for women to hold high status positions. I’m sure some people make that unrelated claim but people believe all sorts of crazy shit.
You read way too much into my comment!
The issue seems to be, in your misreading of my comment, that you expect I feel emotional about gender issues, and perhaps feel threatened indiscriminately by any statements about gender and intelligence. But I don’t. It happens that I’m not generally concerned about gender issues and am not on the look out to defend them. Personally, I don’t anticipate feeling threatened by any statements that might be true about gender.
On issues on which I am emotional (they exist), I feel much less threatened by statements if they are either clearly personal opinions/impressions or scientific statements that carry the specifics with them. I feel that if the specifics are there, I can trust that there is enough information to vet the statement, if needed, in the present or the future, and thus prevent inappropriate application. If the statement is a personal opinion/impression, we know the appropriate application of that.
So if the point is to discuss issues “rationally”, without stirring up emotions, then it would be a good norm to always signal clearly whether a statement is a personal opinion/impression OR a scientific claim. If the latter, it is the careful inclusion of the methodology/context that makes it scientific.
I apologize for jumping to conclusions. This is sort of why I think getting into specifics is important. If you just make a vague hand-wavey ‘this might not be true’ dismissal of a claim you leave your interlocutor with little choice but to try and guess what your true objection is and so read too much into your comment.
This isn’t what I did. My criticism was fairly focused, with a fairly specific solution:
The part that had you thinking I was dismissing the claim was probably this:
It probably would have been wise to omit this sentence, since it caused so much bias about my intentions. My idea is that researchers do try to tackle complex subjects, like intelligence, and will measure something or do some experiment and report the results, but the interpretation or relevance of the study is all ‘spin’ in the Abstract or heavily dependent upon the reader’s lifetime experience to understand the relevance.
For example, what is “intelligence”? This is something that a group of researchers have to define, and have to measure in some way, in order to do their study and get it published. Consider the Dreary study. They’ve measured something and called it general intelligence. This part is the spin. However, when you look at how they defined “general intelligence”—this is a scientific paper; they do tell us, and they’re specific—it is patent that they didn’t include social intelligence, emotional intelligence or “street smarts” in this conception of intelligence. Requiring this clarification isn’t dismissing the study results, it’s just emphasizing that the context and the specifics are important.
See the Deary study of practically the entire population of Scottish 11 year-olds, which found greater male variability. The introduction of the study also discusses the history of the greater male variability hypothesis, and some of the evidence for it.
There is a cross-cultural study which found that males have higher variance in most populations, but females do in others. (Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the difference is “cultural,” though it could.) I will try to dig it up. Even so, greater male variability is a robust finding.
This is the bit that I think is important when discussing results about intelligence:
However, I’m not saying you need to include this information in your comment because you already made the context specific: the Deary study. So a person can dig deeper and find these details if they want to.
Just to say, you didn’t actually support this. Unless it is supported in the Dreary study?
It’s supported at least by the combination of the Deary study, and the cross-cultural study I mentioned that I’ll have to look up when I get home. I believe the author was Feingold. Good question, though.
Oh, I see I parsed your sentence wrong anyway. I thought there were some unidentified number of studies that showed women had greater variability.
My bad… The Feingold study is a meta-analyses of studies, some that find greater male variability, and some that find greater female variability in various dimensions.
huh. Well, does this control for age? The population should be around age 20, when both genders are at peak mental capacity.
This does not seem like an apt reply to the above. This:
Is a particularly bad straw man. “I weight their result low” seems to be doing the sort of thing you advocate, as opposed to “no influence”.
Do you disagree with the general stance presented, that the methodology/context of an experimental study matters, and these things should be taken into consideration when evaluating their effects on our beliefs?
No, and I would welcome discussion of the specific issues that people are taking into account, as I said. I am open to the possibility that there is some major flaw that renders these results questionable that I have not previously encountered. What I am objecting to is precisely the lack of such specifics. It is not enough to say that things are complex and studies can be flawed or misleading. These are trivially true facts and to imply that your interlocutor is unaware of them on Less Wrong of all places is disingenuous.
There have been a few comments in this thread that are taking the same kind of approach—dismissing the claims on the basis of unspecified flaws in the supporting evidence but never offering specific rebuttals to any of the disputed claims.