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ViEtArmis comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
Apparently, the correction was in the form of altering essay and story questions to de-emphasize sports and business and ask more about arts and humanities. This hasn't been terribly effective. The gap is smaller in the verbal sections, but it's still there. Given that the entire purpose of the test is to predict college grades directly and women do better in college than men, explanations and theories abound.
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.