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wedrifid comments on Less Wrong: Open Thread, September 2010 - Less Wrong
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If you read my comment, you would have seen that I explicitly assume that we are not under-represented among deaf or gay people.
If less than 4% of us are women, I am quite willing to call that a minority. Would you prefer me to call them an excluded group?
I specifically brought up atheists as a group that we should expect to over-represent. I'm also not hunting for equal-representation among countries, since education obviously ought to make a difference.
That seems like it ought to get many more boos around here than mentioning the western world as the source of the scientific method. I ascribe differences in those to cultural influences; I don't claim that aptitude isn't a factor, but I don't believe it has been or can easily be measured given the large cultural factors we have.
This also doesn't bother me, for reasons similar to yours. As a friend of mine says, "we'll get gay rights by outliving the homophobes".
Which groups should I pay more attention to? This is a serious question, since I haven't thought too much about it. I neglect non-neurotypicals because they are overrepresented in my field, so I tend to expect them amongst similar groups.
I wasn't actually intending to bemoan anything with my initial question, I was just curious. I was also shocked when I found out that this is dramatically less diverse than I thought, and less than any other large group I've felt a sort of membership in, but I don't feel like it needs to be demonized for that. I certainly wasn't trying to do that.
Given new evidence from the ongoing discussion I retract my earlier concession. I have the impression that the bottom line preceded the reasoning.
I expected your statement to get more boos for the same reason that you expected my premise in the other discussion to be assumed because of moral rather than evidence-based reasons. That is, I am used to other members of your species (I very much like that phrasing) to take very strong and sudden positions condemning suggestions of inherent inequality between the sexes, regardless of having a rational basis. I was not trying to boo your statement myself.
That said, I feel like I have legitimate reasons to oppose suggestions that women are inherently weaker in mathematics and related fields. I mentioned one immediately below the passage you quoted. If you insist on supporting that view, I ask that you start doing so by citing evidence, and then we can begin the debate from there. At minimum, I feel like if you are claiming women to be inherently inferior, the burden of proof lies with you.
Edit: fixed typo
Mathematical ability is most remarked on at the far right of the bell curve. It is very possible (and there's lots of evidence to support the argument) that women simply have lower variance in mathematical ability. The average is the same. Whether or not 'lower variance' implies 'inherently weaker' is another argument, but it's a silly one.
I'm much too lazy to cite the data, but a quick Duck Duck Go search or maybe Google Scholar search could probably find it. An overview with good references is here.
Is mathematical ability a bell curve?
My own anecdotal experience has been that women are rare in elite math environments, but don't perform worse than the men. That would be consistent with a fat-tailed rather than normal distribution, and also with higher computed variance among women.
Also anecdotal, but it seems that when people come from an education system that privileges math (like Europe or Asia as opposed to the US) the proportion of women who pursue math is higher. In other words, when you can get as much social status by being a poly sci major as a math major, women tend not to do math, but when math is very clearly ranked as the "top" or "most competitive" option throughout most of your educational life, women are much more likely to pursue it.
I have no idea; sorry, saying so was bad epistemic hygiene. I thought I'd heard something like that but people often say bell curve when they mean any sort of bell-like distribution.
I'm left confused as to how to update on this information... I don't know how large such an effect is, nor what the original literature on gender difference says, which means that I don't really know what I'm talking about, and that's not a good place to be. I'll make sure to do more research before making such claims in the future.
I'm not claiming that there aren't systematic differences in position or shape of the distribution of ability. What I'm claiming is that no one has sufficiently proved that these differences are inherent.
I can think of a few plausible non-genetic influences that could reduce variance, but even if none of those come into play, there must be others that are also possibilities. Do you see why I'm placing the burden of proof on you to show that differences are biologically inherent, but also why I believe that this is such a difficult task?
Either because you don't understand how bayesian evidence works or because you think the question is social political rather than epistemic.
That was the point of making the demand.
You cannot change reality by declaring that other people have 'burdens of proof'. "Everything is cultural" is not a privileged hypothesis.
It might have been marginally more productive to answer "No, I don't see. Would you explain?" But, rather than attempting to other-optimize, I will simply present that request to datadataeverywhere. Why is the placement of "burden" important? With this supplementary question: Do you know of evidence strongly suggesting that different cultural norms might significantly alter the predominant position of the male sex in academic mathematics?
I can certainly see this as a difficult task. For example, we can imagine that fictional rational::Harry Potter and Hermione were both taught as children that it is ok to be smart, but that only Hermione was instructed not to be obnoxiously smart. This dynamic, by itself, would be enough to strongly suppress the numbers of women to rise to the highest levels in math.
But producing convincing evidence in this area is not an impossible task. For example, we can empirically assess the impact of the above mechanism by comparing the number of bright and very bright men and women who come from different cultural backgrounds.
Rather than simply demanding that your interlocutor show his evidence first, why not go ahead and show yours?
I agree, and this was what I meant. Distinguishing between nature and nurture, as wedrifid put it, is a difficult but not impossible task.
I hope I answered both of these in my comment to wedrifid below. Thank you for bothering to take my question at face value (as a question that requests a response), instead of deciding to answer it with a pointless insult.
Actually, it would have been more productive, since you obviously didn't understand what I was saying.
I am not claiming that I have evidence suggesting that culture is a stronger factor in mathematical ability than genetics. What I'm claiming is that I don't know of any evidence to show that the two can be clearly distinguished. Ignorance is a privileged hypothesis. Unless you can show evidence of differences in mathematical ability that can be traced specifically to genetics, ignorance reigns here, and we shouldn't assume that either culture or genetics is a stronger factor.
The burden of proof lies on you, because you are appealing to me to shift my belief toward yours. I am willing to do this, provided you provide any evidence that does so under a sane framework for reasoning. Meanwhile, the reason the burden of proof is not on me is that I am claiming ignorance, not a particular position.
You're being incredibly critical, and have been so in other threads as well. I realize that this is your M.O., and is not solely directed at me, but I would appreciate it if you would specify exactly what I've said, here or in other comments, that has convinced you so thoroughly that I am unable to hold a rational discussion.
No, I rejected your specific argument because it was by very nature fallacious. There are other things you could have said but didn't and those things I may not have even disagreed with.
The conversation was initiated by you admonishing others. You have since then danced the dance of re-framing with some skill. I was actually only at the fringes of the conversation.
I haven't said that. Specifics quotations of arguments or reasoning that I reject tend to be included in my comments. Take the above for example. Your reply does not relate rationally to the quote you were replying to. I reject the argument that you were using (which is something I do consistently - I care about bullshit probably even more than you care about supporting your culture hypothesis). Your response was to weasel your way out of your argument, twist your initial claim such that it has the intellectual high ground, label my disagreement with you a personal flaw, misrepresented my claim to be something that I have not made and then attempt to convey that I have not given any explanation for my position. That covers modules 1, 2, 3 and 4 in "Effective Argument Techniques 101".
I don't especially mind the slander but it is essentially futile for me to try to engage with the reasoning. I would have to play the kind of games that I come here to avoid.
Absolutely not. In general people overestimate the importance of 'intrinsic talent' on anything. The primary heritable component of success in just about anything is motivation. Either g or height comes second depending on the field.
I agree. I think it is quite obvious that ability is always somewhat heritable (otherwise we could raise our pets as humans), but this effect is usually minimal enough to not be evident behind the screen of either random or environmental differences. I think this applies to motivation as well!
And that was really what my claim was; anyone who claims that women are inherently less able in mathematics has to prove that any measurable effect is distinguishable from and not caused by cultural factors that propel fewer women to have interest in mathematics.
It doesn't. (Unfortunately.)
Am I misunderstanding, or are you claiming that motivation is purely an inherited trait? I can't possibly agree with that, and I think even simple experiments are enough to disprove that claim.
Misunderstanding. Expanding the context slightly:
It doesn't. (Unfortunately.)
When it comes to motivation the differences between people are not trivial. When it comes the particular instance of difference between the sexes there are powerful differences in motivating influences. Most human motives are related to sexual signalling and gaining social status. The optimal actions to achieve these goals is significantly different for males and females, which is reflected in which things are the most motivating. It most definitely should not be assumed that motivational differences are purely cultural - and it would be astonishing if they were.
Are you speaking from an evolutionary context, i.e. claiming that what we understand to be optimal is hardwired, or are you speaking to which actions are actually perceived as optimal in our world?
You make a really good point---one I hadn't thought of but agree with---but since I don't think that we behave strictly in a manner that our ancestors would consider optimal (after all, what are we doing at this site?), I can't agree that sexual and social signaling's effect on motivation can be considered a-cultural.