Rationality Quotes May 2013

katydee

Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

I don't suppose you've got a cite for the central claim here? It's a decent enough example of reasoning from the bottom line whether or not it turns out to be true, but I Googled a couple different sets of keywords, and the only thing that came up besides a whole mess of birth records and obstetricians' papers was Warwick's lecture notes.

This paper is my best lead so far, but it's behind a paywall at the moment. I think it's in "Bayerthal (1911)", whatever that turns out to be.

9Morendil13y

Google turns up a source for the "women of genius" quote, a book "Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities" by D. Halpern. The book's quote is from someone named Bayertahl, and it's an indirect quotation from a 1989 article, "Sexual Dimorphism in the Human Brain: Dispelling the Myths" supposedly by a J. Janowsky. I say supposedly because looking for a fulltext leads me to a version with a similar title ("Sexual Dimorphism of the Human Brain: Myths and Realities") but is by M. A. Hofman and D. F. Swaab; it contains the Bayertahl quote in the original German and says that the primary source is this 1932 article by a Louis Bolk, "Hersenen en Cultuur" (Brains and Culture). This is also a full text, in Dutch; Google's translation seems to roughly confirm the claim as reported by Warwick (though the "women of genius" quote does not seem to appear in Bolk's article, at a first cursory glance).