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Swimmer963 comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong
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Hello!
I actually started an account two years ago, but after a few comments I decided I wasn't emotionally or intellectually ready for active membership. I was confused and hurt for various reasons that weren't Less Wrong's fault, and I backed away to avoid saying something I might regret. I didn't want to put undue pressure on myself to respond to topics I didn't fully understand. Now, after many thousands of hours reading and thinking about neurology, evolutionary psychology, and math, I'm more confident that I won't just be swept up in the half-understood arguments of people much smarter than I am. :)
Like almost everyone here, I started with atheism. I was raised Hindu, and my home has the sort of vague religiosity that is arguably the most common form in the modern world. For the most part, I figured out atheism on my own, when I was around 11 or 12. It was emotionally painful and socially costly, but I'm stronger for the experience. I started reading various mediocre atheist blogs, but I got bored after a couple of years and wanted to do something more than shoot blind fish in tiny barrels. I wanted to build something up, not just tear something down (no matter how much it really should be torn down.)
The actual direct link to Less Wrong came from TV Tropes. I suspect it's one of the best gateway drugs because TV Tropes, while not explicitly atheist or rationalist, does more to communicate the positive ideals and emotional memes of LW-style rationality than most of the atheosphere does. For the first time, I got the sense that "our" way of thinking could be so much more powerful than simply bashing religion and astrology.
One important truth beyond atheism that I have slowly come to accept is inborn IQ differentials, between individuals and groups of individuals. I had to face the fact that P(male| IQ 2 standard deviations above mean) was significantly higher than 50%. I had to deal with the fact that historical oppression probably wasn't the end-all be-all explanation for why women on average hadn't done as much inventing and discovering and brilliant thinking as men. I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
I further learned that my brain was modular, and the bits of me that I choose to call "I" don't constitute everything. My own brain could sabotage the values and ideals and that "I" hold so dearly. For a long time I struggled with the idea that everything I believed in and loved was fake, because I couldn't force my body to actually act accordingly. Did I value human life? Why wasn't I doing everything I possibly could to save lives, all the time? Did I value freedom and autonomy and gender equality? Why could I not help sometimes being attracted to domineering jerks?
It took me a while to accept that the newly-evolved, conscious, abstractly-reasoning, self-reflecting "I" simply did not have the firepower to bully ancient and powerful urges into submission. It took me a while to accept that my values were not lies simply because my monkey brain sometimes contradicted them. The "I" in my brain does not have as much power as she would like; that does not mean she doesn't exist.
Other, non-rationality related information: I love writing, and for a long time I convinced myself that therefore I would love being a novelist. Now, I recognize that I would much rather compose a non-fiction or reflective essay, although ideas for fiction stories still flood in and I rarely do much about it due to laziness and/or fear. I fell in love with Avatar: The Last Airbender for its great storytelling and its combination of intelligence and idealism. I adore Pixar and many Disney movies for the sweetness and heart. I like somewhat traditional-sounding music with easily discernible lyrics that tells a story; I can't get into anything that involves screaming or deliberate disharmony. Show-tunes are great. :)
I don't want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar; I consciously cultivate it and am lucky to have it. If this disposition will be "destroyed by the truth"...well, I have a choice to make then.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and I for one am glad to have you here (again)! You sound like someone who thinks very interesting thoughts.
I can't say that this is something that has ever really bothered me. Your IQ is what it is. Whether or not there's an overall gender-based trend in one direction or another isn't going to change anything for you, although it might change how people see you. (If anything, I found that I got more attention as a "girl who was good at/interested in science"...which, if anything, was irritating and made me want to rebel and go into a "traditionally female" field just because I could.
Basically, if you want to accomplish greatness, it's about you as an individual. Unless you care about the greatness of others, and feel more pride or solidarity with females than with males who accomplish greatness (which I don't), the statistical tendency doesn't matter.
I think that more than idealism, what I wouldn't want to lose is a sense of humour. Idealism, in the sense of "believing that the world is good deep down/people will do the best they can/etc", can be broken by enough bad stuff happening. A sense of humour is a lot harder to break.
Arguably, if it was "broken" this way it would be a mistake (specifically, of generalizing from too small a sample size). I have a job where I am constantly confronted with suffering and death, but at the end of the day, I can still laugh just like everyone else, because I know my experience is a biased sample and that there is still lots of good going on in the world.
I know that it's not particularly rational to feel more affiliation with women than men, but I do. It's one of the things my monkey brain does that I decided to just acknowledge rather than constantly fight. It's helped me have a certain kind of peace about average IQ differentials. The pain I described in the parent has mellowed. Still, I have to face the fact that if I want to major in, say, applied math, chances are I might be lonely or below-average or both. I wish I had the inner confidence to care about self-improvement more than competition, but as yet I don't.
ETA: I characterize "idealism" as a hope for the future more than a belief about the present.
As long as you know your own skills, there is no need to use your gender as a predictor. We use the worse information only in the absence of better information; because the worse information can be still better than nothing. We don't need to predict the information we already have.
When we already know that e.g. "this woman has IQ 150", or "this woman has won a mathematical olympiad" there is no need to mix general male and female IQ or math curves into the equation. (That's only what you do when you see a random woman and you have no other information.)
If there are hundred green balls in the basket and one red ball, it makes sense to predict that a randomly picked ball will be almost surely green. But once you have randomly picked a ball and it happened to be red... then it no longer makes sense to worry that this specific ball might still be green somehow. It's not; end of story.
If you had no experience with math yet, then I'd say that based on your gender, your chances to be a math genius are small. But that's not the situation; you already had some math experience. So make your guesses based on that experience. Your gender is already included in the probability of you having that specific experience. Don't count it twice!
To be perfectly accurate, any person's chances of being a math genius are going to be small anyway, regardless of that person's gender. There are very few geniuses in the world.
What's true of one apple isn't true of every apple.
It is particularly not rational to ignore the effect of your unconscious in your relationships. That fight is a losing battle (right now), so if having happy relationships is a goal, the pursuit of that requires you pay attention.
There is almost no average IQ differential, since men pad out the bottom as well. Greater chromosomal genetic variations in men lead to stupidity as often as intelligence.
Really, this gender disparity only matters at far extremes. Men may pad out the top and bottom 1% (or something like that) in IQ, but applied mathematicians aren't all top 1% (or even 10%, in my experience). It is easy to mistake finally being around people who think like you do (as in high IQ) with being less intelligent than them, but this is a trick!
Sorry, you're right, I did know that. (And it's exasperating to see highly intelligent men make the rookie mistake of saying "women are stupid" or "most women are stupid" because they happen to be high-IQ. There's an obvious selection bias - intelligent men probably have intelligent male friends but only average female acquaintances - because they seek out the women for sex, not conversation.)
I was thinking about "IQ differentials" in the very broad sense, as in "it sucks that anyone is screwed over before they even start." I also suffer from selection bias, because I seek out people in general for intelligence, so I see the men to the right of the bell curve, while I just sort of abstractly "know" there are more men than women to the left, too.
Another possible explanation comes to mind: people with high IQs consider the "stupid" borderline to be significantly above 100 IQ. Then if they associate equally with men and women, the women will more often be stupid; and if they associate preferentially with clever people, there will be fewer women.
(This doesn't contradict selection bias. Both effects could be at play.)
You'd have to raise the bar really far before any actual gender-based differences showed up. It seems far more likely that the cause is a cultural bias against intellectualism in women (women will under-report IQ by 5ish points and men over-report by a similar margin, women are poorly represented in "smart" jobs, etc.). That makes women present themselves as less intelligent and makes everyone perceive them as less intelligent.
Does anyone know of a good graph that shows this? I've seen several (none citing sources) that draw the crossover in quite different places. So I'm not sure what the gender ratio is at, say, IQ 130.
La Griffe Du Lion has good work on this, but it's limited to math ability, where the male mean is higher than the female mean as well as the male variance being higher than the female variance.
The formulas from the first link work for whatever mean and variance you want to use, and so can be updated with more applicable IQ figures, and you can see how an additional 10 point 'reporting gap' affects things.
Unfortunately, intelligence in areas other than math seem to be an "I know it when I see it" kind of thing. It's much harder to design a good test for some of the "softer" disciplines, like "interpersonal intelligence" or even language skills, and it's much easier to pick a fight with results you don't like.
It could be that because intelligence tests are biased toward easy measurement, they focus too much on math, so they under-predict women's actual performance at most jobs not directly related to abstract math skills.
Of course, if you use IQ testing, it is specifically calibrated to remove/minimize gender bias (so is the SAT and ACT), and intelligence testing is horribly fraught with infighting and moving targets.
I can't find any research that doesn't at least mention that social factors likely poison any experimental result. It doesn't help any that "intelligence" is poorly defined and thus difficult to quantify.
Considering that men are more susceptible to critical genetic failure, maybe the mean is higher for men on some tests because the low outliers had defects that made them impossible to test (such as being stillborn)?
The SAT doesn't seem to be calibrated to make sure average scores are the same for math, at least. At least as late as 2006, there's still a significant gender gap.
Not a rigorously conducted study, but this (third poll) suggests a rather greater tendency to at least overestimate if not willfully over-report IQ, with both men and women overestimating, but men overestimating more.
You're right; my explanation was drawn from many PUA-types who had said similar things, but this effect is perfectly possible in non-sexual contexts, too.
There's actually little use in using words like "stupid", anyway. What's the context? How intelligent does this individual need to be do what they want to do? Calling people "stupid" says "reaching for an easy insult," not "making an objective/instrumentally useful observation."
Sure, there will be some who say they'll use the words they want to use and rail against "censorship", but connotation and denotation are not so separate. That's why I didn't find the various "let's say controversial, unspeakable things because we're brave nonconformists!" threads on this site to be all that helpful. Some comments certainly were both brave and insightful, but I felt on the whole a little bit of insight was brought at the price of a whole lot of useless nastiness.
I like this post more than I like most things; you've helped me, for one, with a significant amount of distress.