I’ve read the transcript. Some thoughts, which accidentally turned into a giant wall of text:
Just as you avoid high crime neighborhoods, it does make sense to avoid events where there’s going to be a predominantly black population attending, just for your own safety.
This may well go without saying, but clearly one needn’t feel unsafe going to, for instance, an African-American Studies department brunch, or a symposium on improving education in the inner cities, both of which will be disproportionately attended by black people.
Different levels of educational attainment can probably be explained by geographic or socioeconomic factors, which are a priori more likely than genetic explanations because such socioeconomic gaps knowably exist.
Can you cite some evidence that affirmative action is as prevalent as you claim, or that it leads to negative perception of blacks in the workplace? My impression was that there are enough highly qualified candidates for most things, and little enough difference in ability between them, that institutions can (often/usually) favor blacks without accepting underqualified people.
That we aren’t allowed to have workplaces where men can fart and make off-color jokes, but that any office you go into, you will hear the women making very insulting jokes about men.
Is there any way you can provide evidence for this? It doesn’t match my experience, and I’m not even sure this is the sort of thing one can easily keep track of.
Then there’s the widespread attack on civilized values. And you see this throughout the media. Over the past 30 or 40 years, the TV husband keeps getting dumber and dumber, he becomes more… Homer Simpson was bad enough, now we have Peter Griffin, a complete retard. People living in the suburbs are made out to be lame and boring. Meanwhile ghetto culture is glorified. There’s a consistent attack on people that obey the law. There’s a consistent attack on people that contribute to society.
This is a separate claim from all your others and requires some sort of citation or supporting evidence.
regarding the bits about Trayvon Martin: you say that the story in the media is false, but you don’t say what you believe the truth is or give any evidence that the commonly accepted story is false.
you don’t give any stats on black-against-white hate crimes, and this is the sort of thing there’s very likely hard data on. I’ll look it up later, but if you have a source please cite it.
EDIT: According to wikipedia, about 13% of the US is black and about 18% of hate crime offenders are black. This doesn’t say much about whether the black hate criminals are committing crimes against whites or against women/gays/hispanics/other minorities. Different rates of conviction among people of different races (it’s widely believed that the US courts are biased against blacks) may also be clouding this. Given that, I’m not confident that the difference is statistically significant, especially if one were to control for poverty. I couldn’t find much about black against white hate crime specifically, because google mostly gave me results from weird fringe groups. Overall I see weak evidence at best for the OP’s assertion.
Just because I think that most women are bad at math
The commonly accepted view is that women and men are equally good at math on average, but the best men are better than the best women because there’s more spread. “Most women are bad at math” is an exaggerated stereotype.
regarding the bits about Trayvon Martin: you say that the story in the media is false, but you don’t say what you believe the truth is or give any evidence that the commonly accepted story is false.
Even the media now, grudgingly, admit that their initial reporting was false or heavily distorted (and somehow all the errors went the same way). NBC has even fired three reporters over the most egregious example of this. Unfortunately, since the corrections weren’t as prominent as the initial headlines, there are a lot of people who still believe some version of the distorted initial account.
The media always has a strong incentive to generate a narrative out of the collection of facts they obtain. Certain narratives are more popular than others. This makes the news a terrible indicator of what is going on unless they directly report statistics, which they also usually fuck up. Paying attention to the news seems to be of negative utility.
“Most women are bad at math” is an exaggerated stereotype.
It’s not all that surprising though, for those reasons. Lots of folks will happily say “most people are stupid”. The stereotype is explainable simply by setting the bar high enough. Though by itself, that will also yield “Most men are bad at math”—several varieties of selective perception might explain this, but I most prefer xkcd’s.
xkcd’s is a good explanation. Also, the longer tail means that in the bubble of elite math departments, experience will seem to indicate that men are better on average. Of course, just because a stereotype’s existence is unsurprising doesn’t mean it’s not exaggerated or that it’s rational to believe.
but the best men are better than the best women because there’s more spread
Er, this is probably wrong. If one thinks that the spread will have an effect, one won’t have the best men be better than the best women, one will just have a thicker tail for men than for women.
A thicker tail means, in a finite population, a longer (visible) tail. Consider a world with 100 men and 100 women. Suppose IQ is a normal distribution, the women have standard deviation 10 IQ points, and the men have standard deviation 15 IQ points. Since about 1% of any population will be 3 standard deviations above the mean, you expect the smartest woman to have IQ 130 and the smartest man to have IQ 145.
Good point. The finite nature of the populations means that the expectation is that the thicker tail will correspond to a larger observed maximum. So my statement was wrong.
The commonly accepted view is that women and men are equally good at math on average
Some googling informs me that there’s a gender gap on the math SAT and other standardized tests. It may be that you have in mind some way in which these tests don’t reflect a real gap in average math ability, but I think it’s more likely that you confused the data on math ability and the data on IQ. A .3 standard deviation gap would mean 62% of women are below the male average. I agree that this makes “most women are bad at math” an exaggeration, though more male spread means the numbers look worse the higher you set the bar.
The math gap is much larger in the United States than it is in Northern Europe. In general, gender inequality and poorer math performance by females are correlated. Moreover, over time, most of the gender gap has gone down. Most relevant study (although I do remember having reservations about some aspects of their methodology the last time I looked at that in detail, and I don’t unfortunately remember what they were.)
I’ve read the transcript. Some thoughts, which accidentally turned into a giant wall of text:
This may well go without saying, but clearly one needn’t feel unsafe going to, for instance, an African-American Studies department brunch, or a symposium on improving education in the inner cities, both of which will be disproportionately attended by black people.
Different levels of educational attainment can probably be explained by geographic or socioeconomic factors, which are a priori more likely than genetic explanations because such socioeconomic gaps knowably exist.
Can you cite some evidence that affirmative action is as prevalent as you claim, or that it leads to negative perception of blacks in the workplace? My impression was that there are enough highly qualified candidates for most things, and little enough difference in ability between them, that institutions can (often/usually) favor blacks without accepting underqualified people.
Is there any way you can provide evidence for this? It doesn’t match my experience, and I’m not even sure this is the sort of thing one can easily keep track of.
This is a separate claim from all your others and requires some sort of citation or supporting evidence.
regarding the bits about Trayvon Martin: you say that the story in the media is false, but you don’t say what you believe the truth is or give any evidence that the commonly accepted story is false.
you don’t give any stats on black-against-white hate crimes, and this is the sort of thing there’s very likely hard data on. I’ll look it up later, but if you have a source please cite it.
EDIT: According to wikipedia, about 13% of the US is black and about 18% of hate crime offenders are black. This doesn’t say much about whether the black hate criminals are committing crimes against whites or against women/gays/hispanics/other minorities. Different rates of conviction among people of different races (it’s widely believed that the US courts are biased against blacks) may also be clouding this. Given that, I’m not confident that the difference is statistically significant, especially if one were to control for poverty. I couldn’t find much about black against white hate crime specifically, because google mostly gave me results from weird fringe groups. Overall I see weak evidence at best for the OP’s assertion.
The commonly accepted view is that women and men are equally good at math on average, but the best men are better than the best women because there’s more spread. “Most women are bad at math” is an exaggerated stereotype.
Even the media now, grudgingly, admit that their initial reporting was false or heavily distorted (and somehow all the errors went the same way). NBC has even fired three reporters over the most egregious example of this. Unfortunately, since the corrections weren’t as prominent as the initial headlines, there are a lot of people who still believe some version of the distorted initial account.
The media always has a strong incentive to generate a narrative out of the collection of facts they obtain. Certain narratives are more popular than others. This makes the news a terrible indicator of what is going on unless they directly report statistics, which they also usually fuck up. Paying attention to the news seems to be of negative utility.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.html
Thanks for the heads-up! I stopped paying attention to the story after about 48 hours.
It’s not all that surprising though, for those reasons. Lots of folks will happily say “most people are stupid”. The stereotype is explainable simply by setting the bar high enough. Though by itself, that will also yield “Most men are bad at math”—several varieties of selective perception might explain this, but I most prefer xkcd’s.
xkcd’s is a good explanation. Also, the longer tail means that in the bubble of elite math departments, experience will seem to indicate that men are better on average. Of course, just because a stereotype’s existence is unsurprising doesn’t mean it’s not exaggerated or that it’s rational to believe.
Er, this is probably wrong. If one thinks that the spread will have an effect, one won’t have the best men be better than the best women, one will just have a thicker tail for men than for women.
A thicker tail means, in a finite population, a longer (visible) tail. Consider a world with 100 men and 100 women. Suppose IQ is a normal distribution, the women have standard deviation 10 IQ points, and the men have standard deviation 15 IQ points. Since about 1% of any population will be 3 standard deviations above the mean, you expect the smartest woman to have IQ 130 and the smartest man to have IQ 145.
Good point. The finite nature of the populations means that the expectation is that the thicker tail will correspond to a larger observed maximum. So my statement was wrong.
Thanks for making me think it out well enough to explain.
Some googling informs me that there’s a gender gap on the math SAT and other standardized tests. It may be that you have in mind some way in which these tests don’t reflect a real gap in average math ability, but I think it’s more likely that you confused the data on math ability and the data on IQ. A .3 standard deviation gap would mean 62% of women are below the male average. I agree that this makes “most women are bad at math” an exaggeration, though more male spread means the numbers look worse the higher you set the bar.
The math gap is much larger in the United States than it is in Northern Europe. In general, gender inequality and poorer math performance by females are correlated. Moreover, over time, most of the gender gap has gone down. Most relevant study (although I do remember having reservations about some aspects of their methodology the last time I looked at that in detail, and I don’t unfortunately remember what they were.)