Douglas_Knight comments on Gender differences in spatial reasoning appear to be nurture - Less Wrong

12 Post author: David_Gerard 03 September 2011 11:56AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (87)

Comments (87)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 03 September 2011 06:04:43PM 1 point [-]

Of course nurture plays a role in differences in spatial reasoning. In this particular study, each additional year of education dropped puzzle completion time by 4%.

Correlation is not causation. This is well studied and the causation runs the other way, at least in western societies.

Comment author: Vaniver 04 September 2011 03:59:02PM 1 point [-]

The average duration of education in the matrilineal society was, if I remember correctly, 4.5 years. I don't think we can apply Western studies about the link between g and education to poor India without significant caveats.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 04 September 2011 12:39:33AM 0 points [-]

Just to confirm, are you saying that higher education in western societies correlates with worse performance on the kinds of puzzles in this study?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 04 September 2011 01:12:19AM *  5 points [-]

I believe that Douglas is asserting not that the correlation is inversely related but that the direction of the causual relationship goes the other way. That is smarter, faster thinkers manage to stay in school longer.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 04 September 2011 04:54:11PM 1 point [-]

Thanks. I should have been able to see that.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit