Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 3 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Kevin 14 June 2010 06:14AM

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Comment author: Emile 15 June 2010 12:44:41PM *  8 points [-]

I don't know the ins and the outs of the Summers case, but that article has a smell of straw man. Especially this (emphasis mine) :

You see, there's a shifty little game that proponents of gender discrimination are playing. They argue that high SAT scores are indicative of success in science, and then they say that males tend to have higher math SAT scores, and therefore it is OK to encourage more men in the higher ranks of science careers…but they never get around to saying what their SAT scores were. Larry Summers could smugly lecture to a bunch of accomplished women about how men and women were different and having testicles helps you do science, but his message really was "I have an intellectual edge over you because some men are incredibly smart, and I am a man", which is a logical fallacy.

From what I understand (and a quick check on Wikipedia confirms this), what got Larry Summers in trouble wasn't that he said we should use gender as a proxy for intelligence, but merely that gender differences in ability could explain the observed under-representation of women in science.

The whole article is attacking a position that, as far as I know, nobody holds in the West any more : that women should be discriminated against because they are less good at science.

Well, he also seems to be attacking a second group that does exist (those that say that there are less women in science because they are less likely to have high math ability), mostly by mixing them up with the first, imaginary, group.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 23 June 2010 12:21:08AM *  3 points [-]

The whole article is attacking a position that, as far as I know, nobody holds in the West any more : that women should be discriminated against because they are less good at science.

Well, I think PZ Myers is a liar who has never heard of such people, but they do exist. Robin Hanson, for one. More representative is conchis's claim early in the comments that

some [Oxford] admissions fellows were discounting female students’ grades on the basis that they were more likely to reflect conscientiousness than talent.

Rewritten: I've heard hints along these lines in America, where girls get better grades, in both high school and college, than boys with the same SATs. This is suggested to be about conscientiously doing homework. If American colleges don't want to reward conscientiousness, they could change their grading to avoid homework.

That would make them be like my understanding of Oxford, where I believe grades are based on high-stakes testing, not on homework. But I also thought admissions was only based on high-stakes testing, too. That is, I don't even know what the quoted claim means by "grades," nor have I been able to track down people openly admitting anything like it.

Do British students get grades other than A-levels? Are there sex divergences between the grades and A-levels? A-levels and predictions? I hear that Oxbridge grades are lower variance for girls than boys. I also hear that boys do better on the math SATs than on the math A-levels, which seems like it should be a condemnation of one of the tests.

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