LESSWRONG
LW

Comment Permalink
DanielVarga00

[...] to complete a four-piece puzzle representing a horse (their measure of 'spatial ability')

I see at least two obvious confounding variables that can wildly influence this measure. (And I'm not saying I have any better measures to suggest.) The first question is whether fast hand movements are considered appropriate in the given society. If the norm for your gender is gentle, majestic movement, that slows you down. The second question is what your society's gender norms are for deliberateness/decisiveness.

Reply
See in context
by David_Gerard
1 min read
87

20

"In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society."

It is presently a commonplace of Western culture that women are worse at spatial reasoning than men, and this is commonly attributed to intrinsic biological differences.

It turns out this may be highly questionable. A study in PNAS studied two nearby tribes in northeast India, one with a strongly patriarchal organisation, one with a strongly matriarchal organisation. Both share the same agrarian diet and lifestyle and DNA tests indicate they are closely related.

In the patriarchal society, women did noticeably worse on spatial reasoning. In the matriarchal society, women and men did about the same.

The authors carefully do not overstate their results, claiming only that they demonstrated that culture influences spatial performance "in the task that we study." However, this promisingly suggests quite a bit of room for improvement of measurable aspects of intelligence may be feasible with proper attention to culture and nurture.

What measurable aspects of intelligence do you attribute to genetic causes? Can you test it this well? How would you fix it and help people be all they can be?

News coverage: ArsTechnica.

Personal Blog

20

Gender differences in spatial reasoning appear to be nurture
New Comment
87 comments, sorted by
top scoring
Click to highlight new comments since:
Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings
[-]Vladimir_M230

A study in PNAS studied two nearby tribes in northeast India, one with a strongly patriarchal organisation, one with a strongly matriarchal organisation.

A quibble -- "matrilineal" doesn't mean "matriarchal." The former means just that lineage is traced through maternal rather than paternal descent, and it's a well-attested phenomenon in various cultures. The latter means that women have a monopoly, or at least predominance, of social leadership and authority. The supposed existence of such societies in distant places and times is pretty much a myth concocted for ideological purposes.

Reply
[-]Tyrrell_McAllister120

A quibble -- "matrilineal" doesn't mean "matriarchal." The former means just that lineage is traced through maternal rather than paternal descent, and it's a well-attested phenomenon in various cultures. The latter means that women have a monopoly, or at least predominance, of social leadership and authority. The supposed existence of such societies in distant places and times is pretty much a myth concocted for ideological purposes.

According to the Ars Technica article, in the matrilineal society, "[m]en are not allowed to own land at all, any money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister, and inheritances go to the youngest daughter in the family." If that is accurate, then it seems reasonable to call the society matriarchal, at least in certain respects.

Reply
4christina
I have to disagree here. A matrilineal society, as I stated in my previous comment, does in fact often give women more access to familial resources, as these are often given to women to be managed or inherited from women, by women. This is a common theme in matrilineal societies--women have significant power over family life. The matrilineal doesn't just refer to family names--but also the line through which resources are obtained. However, you will tend to find that men dominate the political sphere in these societies(where applicable), so they are not matriarchal. Please make the linguistic distinction when discussing these terms. Power over family life is referred to by '-lineal' suffixes and power over politics in the public sphere is referred to by '-archy' suffixes. A person who supports a matriarchal society (real or imagined) may not support a matrilineal one (real or imagined) or vice versa. These would not be logically inconsistent positions. It is confusing when people disagree on the meanings of the terms themselves.
1sam0345
Hence often piously called matriarchal, as in "The Afro American family tends to be matriarchal" In practice, "matrilineal" societies are often societies where no one knows, or much cares, who the father is. As our society becomes increasingly like this, the proposition that women benefit from this arrangement starts to smell funny. Men in a matrilineal society contribute substantially less to the support of women and children, and often the relationship is that between a pimp and his bitches: the women (plural) support the man (singular). The male contribution is frequently large and negative.
0Tyrrell_McAllister
The distinction between private and public life is important in large communities. It seems probable to me that the distinction would be weaker in small communities, where family obligations and family-based authority are likely to be the root of all obligations and claims to authority. ETA: I didn't mean for that to sound like a confident declaration. I'm really open to learning something here. Are the public and private spheres so distinct in smaller communities? I wouldn't expect them to be, but I don't have a lot of anthropological knowledge. But if my expectation is correct, then the -lineal/-archal distinction wouldn't be so relevant.
3sam0345
Purportedly matriarchal societies resemble underclass society. Women do the work and raise the children, and males rough up the girls from time to time, have sex with them, and take their stuff. Thus in primitive "matriarchal" societies, women own the land, and men don't exactly own the women, but rather predate on women and children erratically. It is the society depicted in rap songs. Back in the days when anthropologists were allowed to classify cultures as less civilized and more civilized, "matriarchal" was not the word they used. Today, "matriarchal" is best understood as a euphemism for scientific terminology that has become utterly unspeakable.
7Tyrrell_McAllister
This sounds good as rhetoric. And it's not rhetoric to which I am entirely unsympathetic. But its relevance to the current discussion doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. Of the society in the OP, it is alleged that "money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister". That is not true of the society that rap songs depict.
6[anonymous]
Very true, the society of the OP appears to be different. The society of the underclass is a society where men use money to buy status symbols that help them build coalitions among men and gain success among women. Their women often give them gifts of great value or support them. But it is in a sense very similar to the kind of societies often associated with tropical agriculture in some parts of the world, where women provide and work supporting their men, while men work less and not so much to support anyone but to obtain high status trophies from hunting or war which boosts their reproductive success (rape as a result of violence/warfare is also a significant contribution). Its actually a very neat adaptation. Additional resources beyond a certain level hit diminishing returns for female reproductive success faster than for male reproductive success. So if women are the ones with the material resources it seems a good idea for sisters and mothers to use part of their surplus to boost the social standing of their sons and brothers. Also females might benefit genetically (in the form of sexier sons more likley to spread genes) by trying to use resources to catch a male's attention. And from the male's perspective a female that supports you or provides gifts can boost you success with other females as well. So you might want to take a loot at her even if she's less attractive than your norm. Since you aren't expected to support your offspring your fidelity isn't that vital either, since your children won't get much resources directly from you in any case, thus "bastards" aren't really as problematic to women here as they are to women in patriarchal monogamous society (where they are potentially "stealing" resources from her offspring that need as much investment from the father as they can get).
0Tyrrell_McAllister
This all sounds pretty plausible to me. I certainly wouldn't expect that the society in the OP is some kind of Angel One-style matriarchal utopia.
3sam0345
Well that is what people with tenure tell us. Sociobiology suggests that a male will support his own offspring twice as much as he will support his nieces and nephews, and four times as much as he will support his half sister's children, thus the alleged observation is surprising. Folk anecdote is that the flow of support is pretty much proportional to paternal certainty. In those societies with low paternal certainty, for which we have observations that are not filtered through tenured observers, women and children support adult males, not the other way around. If a man is supporting his sister, which is to say his sister's children, rather than his own, this suggests an environment of low paternal certainty. In an environment of low paternal certainty, there is also a high probability that a sister is in fact a half sister, reducing the male propensity to support women and children to insignificant levels, resulting in the observed behavior that in such societies, successful men predate on women and children, and unsuccessful men are ignored by women and men alike - observed, that is by poor ignorant racist people, whose observations are apt to be curiously different from those of highly intelligent tenured people. It seems that common folk observe people acting as biology predicts, and the tenured folk observe something different.
7Tyrrell_McAllister
None of the reporting I've seen claims that the men with their own children are giving their resources to their sisters. But I haven't read the research article itself, which is behind a paywall, so I'm open to correction. Does the article say that married men are giving their resources to their sisters (rather than to their wives)? If not, your objection is irrelevant. In general, your appeal to "folk anecdote" and sociobiology can at best show that such societies should be rare. To show that none at all exist is to incur a heavier burden of evidence than you have borne. Evolutionary psychology (EP) predicts that men who are exclusively homosexual are rare. And indeed they are. But EP is not falsified by the existence of a minority of men who are exclusively homosexual, because EP does not place a fatally large amount of probability mass on there being no exclusively homosexual men. Similarly, even if EP (plus induction from folk anecdote) predicted that societies are overwhelmingly likely to be set up along the lines that you describe, that would not suffice to make it extremely unlikely for a few societies to deviate far from your description. (I'm afraid that your focus on the untrustworthiness of tenured scholars makes no sense to me. If anything, it is the untenured scholars, whether inside or outside academia, whose job security depends on pandering to their audience.)
9Vladimir_M
On a tangential note, it is my impression (admittedly based on relatively little evidence and perhaps biased) that getting tenure nowadays involves severe enough scrutiny that it really is extremely hard for anyone who harbors disreputable beliefs to get through the process, even if he tries to hide them. I can think of some examples of people who got tenure two, three, or more decades ago doing uncontroversial work and then proceeded to voice disreputable beliefs once shielded by it, to the great frustration and anger of their academic colleagues. However, I can't think of any more recent examples. If this is true, then it might be that aside from these old exceptions who are nearing retirement or already retired, it is more probable to see a disreputable belief expressed as a self-destructive act of an untenured academic than by a tenured academic who takes advantage of the privilege to speak his mind -- since the latter is practically guaranteed to be rigorously selected for sincere belief in the respectable consensus. Also, tenured academics still have huge incentives to fall in line with the respectable consensus. Unlike the untenured ones, for them it's more about carrots than sticks, but the incentives are still there.
[-]sam0345110

On the big issues, race differences, gender differences, sexual preferences, anti communism and islamophobia, the official truth held by the tenured is complex, subtle, and nuanced. They are both permitted and forbidden to acknowledge statistical differences between groups, permitted to acknowledge these differences in some ways and some circumstances and not in other ways and other circumstances, permitted to make deductions from statistical differences to particular cases in some ways and some circumstances and not in other ways and other circumstances, permitted to acknowledge and forbidden to admit various topics

Thus a high IQ tenured individual with a deep knowledge of what is acceptable can steer quite close to the truth on these topics, though the closer he gets, the cleverer and more knowledgeable he has to be, and and on the margins, barely permitted truth has sometimes rather suddenly become forbidden truth, causing some tenured academics to abruptly recant of previously uncontroversial peer reviewed publications.

On the big issues, official truth tends to be sophisticated and subtle: It is on the minor and obscure issues that the official truth tends to be simplistic, rigid, and absurd, and it is on these obscure issues, not the big issues, where one will see O'Brien hold up four fingers and every high IQ person with tenure swears he is holding up five fingers because the party declares it to be so..

Reply
4Tyrrell_McAllister
There's no question but that tenured academics are subject to status-seeking incentives that aren't truth-tracking. Nonetheless, their assertions are entangled with the truth. The important question is, how do they compare to other sources of evidence in that regard? The incentive of scholars outside of academia to pander to their audience seems at least as large. And non-scholars might not be biased by status-seeking, but they also have less exposure to the evidence.
[-]sam0345120

The important question is, how do they compare to other sources of evidence in that regard?

To take an issue that is no longer controversial, and therefore less likely to get us massively downvoted than gender differences or little known primitive tribes with strangely politically correct ways of life, like Margaret Mead's Samoans: The Soviet Union.

As a source of information about the Soviet Union, academics were absolutely dreadful and utterly worthless compared to almost any other source of information. They engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed. After 1990, they improved markedly, and suffered total amnesia that their positions had once been completely different.

One would have received a far more accurate and up to date account of the problems of price control and central planning by listening to old Reagan speeches, than by reading Samuelson.

Recall Samuelson's infamous graph showing that the Soviet Union (thanks to its superior economic system) would inexorably overtake and soon surpass the united states.

The later editions of his book required greater adjustment of inconvenient facts to produce the de... (read more)

Reply
1Tyrrell_McAllister
Your citation of a blog post by a tenured academic (Don Boudreaux) gives me confidence in my position. If, further, those "old Reagan speeches" depended upon the work of academics (e.g., Hayek), then my position seems very secure to me. But I am more interested in spending my time in this conversation on the subject of the OP.
6sam0345
I chose the example of the Soviet Union because now, since 1990, academics can speak the truth on the Soviet Union. But their failure to speak that truth before 1990 implies that on one thousand other issues, they cannot speak the truth, which should undermine your confidence in your position. And since, on an issue where the truth is now permitted, the evidence is that academia was previously totally unreliable to the point of being entirely worthless, you would like to keep the issue to topics where the truth is, for the most part, still not permitted.
4Tyrrell_McAllister
But your example was incomplete. Your example of a "massive flagrant barefaced lie" was a forecast from 1961 of the projected growth of the USSR's real GNP versus the US's real GNP between the years of 1960 and 2000. You said of such claims that "doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed". Do you in fact have an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting that forecast from your link? (For reference, here is the 1961 forecast from the Samuelson text that they're talking about.) You damage your credibility even with those sympathetic to your conclusions when the examples you use to back up your general claims fail to be special cases of those general claim.
4sam0345
The lie was not that he made a wrong projection for the future, but that he adjusted the past to suit official government politics. That he was lying is evident from the fact that the official story was officially changed, like the vanishing commissar. Wrong reference. There is nothing obviously wrong with his 1961 forecast by itself. What is obviously wrong is that between his 1961 forecast and his 1970 forecast, Academia retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960 to accommodate official state department politics. The lie becomes apparent on comparing the 1970 forecast with the 1960. The problem is not that the predicted future has changed, but that the alleged past has changed. My example of a lie is that the data on which that projection was supposedly based was obviously fraudulent, since it got adjusted, not the projection itself. Comparing the later with the earlier projection, it is evident that Samuelson started with the prediction (inevitable Soviet Victory due its superior economic system), then invented the past to support the prediction. Similar adjustments of history continue today - but since 1990 Soviet history has now ceased to undergo additional changes, and the alarming frequency of changes to Soviet history before 1990 can now be ridiculed. It is now permissible to laugh at rewrites of Soviet history, but not permissible to laugh at rewrites of science history, even though we can easily discover the true history of science, while the truth of Soviet history can never be known.
2Tyrrell_McAllister
I did not criticize your example of a lie. I let that characterization stand unchallenged. My criticism was that you have not given an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting what you called a lie. Until you provide that, your example is not a special case of your general claim that "[academics] engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed." (Emphasis added.) (Providing a single example won't suffice to prove the general claim, of course. But an inability to provide such an example would be telling.)
-4sam0345
Let us suppose that a student was today to doubt one of the holy issues that are still today holy. Many of the questions on the SAT amount to "Are high status members of the state and academia always good and reliable?", and everyone knows the answer they are to give. Typical question on an issue that is still today holy: "Why was John Steinbeck the conscience of America". Answering "Because he was employed by Stalin" is not going to get you far.
[-]KPier100

As someone who's taken the SAT twice in recent months (and half a dozen more as practice), this is simply false.

The SAT's questions for the essays are constructed to be as vague as possible, requiring no knowledge of history, current events, or literature; usually they are things like "Do we value only what we struggle for? " or "Is it always essential to tell the truth, or are there circumstances in which it is better to lie? " or "What gives us more pleasure and satisfaction: the pursuit of our desires or the attainment of them? ". It's possible that a question in the reading section would have a passage from a literary critic espousing the greatness of Steinbeck, followed by a question along the lines of "Why does the author of Passage A argue that Steinbeck was the conscience of America?", but I've never seen a question even this political.

Reply
5Tyrrell_McAllister
I thought that you insisted on talking about issues that weren't "still today holy." Why have you changed your mind? Do you mean for that to be an example of a question on an SAT exam, together with an answer that would be scored low because of its political content? I believe that if such an answer were given in a well-organized and technically well-written essay, it would receive a high score. Obviously you would have to explain why Steinbeck became the "the conscience of America" while the many other people employed by Stalin didn't. So you would have to refer at some point to the content of what he wrote or said in some detail. But if you did this in a way that demonstrated a familiarity with the material, and your argument were well-structured in a technical sense, then I think that you would pass just fine. Do you have an example of someone who took the SAT and got poor scores for well-written answers because of the views expressed in those answers?
2Tyrrell_McAllister
So, I took you at your word on this in my previous comment. But now I'm curious — What was the nature of this employment? A quick Google search didn't turn up any claims that Steinbeck received money from Stalin. Or were you using "employed" only in the sense of "used as a tool", without meaning to imply that Steinbeck was compensated?
-1Tyrrell_McAllister
What retroactive adjustment are you talking about? That blog post doesn't mention any claim by anyone about anything prior to 1960. What makes this sloppiness strange is that you surely could have found a correct citation to bolster your claim. It's very likely that some American academic after 1960 "retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960" for political reasons. Why do unnecessary harm to your credibility by mischaracterizing your citations?
6sam0345
Quoting from the article: Which 1970 graph implies the 1960s and before went backward between 1960 and 1970. The 1970 graph implies that the 1960s and before were worse than depicted in the 1960 graph. In 1910, the Russian Tsardom was a great power. In order to supposedly have rapid Soviet growth, and yet the Soviets are somehow still not yet surpassing the USA, it was necessary to retroactively deindustrialize the Russian Tsardom, and every year, retroactively deindustrialize it more and more. Samuelson's graph was one example of many of this retroactive deindustrialization, which sticks out more than most because occurring between two editions of his book - the Soviet implied starting point being worse in his 1970 graph than his 1960 graph.
3Tyrrell_McAllister
Why? Nothing implying that is stated in your link. The 1970 graph certainly implies that things didn't go as rosely for the USSR during the 60's as the 1961 graph predicted. But your link doesn't explain the derivation of the two graphs in enough detail for us to see that they imply different conditions in the USSR prior to 1960. Again, you could probably find an example of someone doing what you claim (an American academic after 1960 retroactively adjusting pre-1960 Soviet history for political reasons). I acknowledge that that probably happened more than once. But what you seem to think is documentation of such an event, just isn't. Furthermore, you never provided any documentation for your claim that doubting such assertions would get a student failed. This leads me to believe that you have a very skewed notion of how often such events happened, which gives me less confidence in your general conclusions about the attitude of academia at the time.
5Vladimir_M
You can find the graphs from Samuelson's book along with excerpts from his commentary in this paper (starting on page 8): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1517983 Now, the question is whether the 1970 graph can be interpreted in some reasonable way that wouldn't imply a revision of the claim about the 1960 GNP ratio in the 1961 book. (Not a revision of the prediction for the 1960s, mind you, but a revision of the 1960 figure that was already in the past when the 1961 edition was being prepared.) I would say that the answer to this question is no, though I can imagine that reasonable people might disagree. In any case, what I find really scary is the anti-epistemology that makes people believe that these numbers have any sensible meaning in the first place.
2Tyrrell_McAllister
Fair enough. My point is only that, until we know more information than sam0345's link provides, we cannot give a confident answer to this question. (Namely, we need to know the method by which Samuelson converted data into graphs.)
6sam0345
A subject where plain speaking is apt to result in being massively downvoted. The academics cited by OP describe a primitive and little known tribe behaving in an implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results, just as Margaret Mead's Samoans acted in implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results. We should therefore have as much faith in these anomalously well behaved primitives as we should have had in Margaret Mead's anomalously well behaved Samoans, or, returning to my much safer topic, those criminals so marvelously reformed the by Soviet Union's enlightened penal system. You would prefer to discuss evidence of academic reliability on topics where most evidence of academic unreliability will get the post presenting such evidence downvoted to -10, and thus disappeared from sight.
4Tyrrell_McAllister
Do you mean to say that you have evidence for your claim that you decline to present for fear of being downvoted? Or have you already presented (or pointed towards) all your evidence for your claim?
[-]HughRistik110

I think sam0345 may be exaggerating with a projection of -10, but I think he isn't exaggerating when he suspects that there are examples of academic unreliability that would be unfeasible to discuss on LW, even though I am a bit more optimistic about what LW can handle than Vladimir_M, for instance. It would be a bad mistake to even attempt to collect evidence on some topics.

I'm a psych junkie, and by following certain online debates and reading journals, I've run into several topics where peer-review studies that aren't publicized contradict the public story. With some of these topics, LW has proven itself to not be quite ready for them, though Vladimir_M sometimes dances around them, and I and others have discussed some of the lighter ones. Other topics are not discussable in public at all in any forum where a speaker wants to retain any reputation. In fact, it would be a hazard to others to even mention these topics on LW, given that many people comment here with their real names, and LW would be tarred by even tolerating serious discussion of those findings.

Reply
3Tyrrell_McAllister
It is difficult to continue this conversation productively because the nature of your claim is such that you will not want to give examples to back it up or to clarify what you mean. The only solution that I can think of is to continue the conversation via private messages. I publicly promise to keep the contents of such a conversation private. (I also extend this offer to sam0345.) ETA: My impression of you from reading your comments leads me to expect that such a conversation would be dispassionate and to-the-point.
4sam0345
There are lots of areas where I can give examples of stuff that used to be unmentionable in academia, such as the frequent revisions of the history of the Soviet Union. Which examples imply that there is lots of stuff that is still unmentionable in academia - and what is unmentionable in academia is for the most part unmentionable on LW.
2sam0345
Here is an experiment: Try it on any tenured scholar who will play. History gets revised with alarming frequency. But since the history of science is the history of what scientists actually wrote, science being a communal endeavor carried out on the permanent record, for science history we can check official history against the actual record. Revisions of science history are markedly less credible than other revisions of history. We cannot really know to what extent males really support females in that matrilineal tribe, but we can really know what Lamarck wrote, Galileo wrote, Darwin wrote, and so on and so forth. Taunt a tenured academic, any tenured academic, with such a revision of history, any such revision. He will weasel and wobble, and try to sound as if he is agreeing with the true version without quite disagreeing with the official version, but if pinned, will in the end piously assure us the latest version of history is true, and all earlier versions false, irrespective of whether his field of expertise has anything to do with science, history, or science history, even if you quote him chapter and verse of the latest version of history and also the writings of the original scientists that contradict it. Like Winston Smith after the interrogation, he will assure you that black is white and up is down. Perhaps to get tenure, you need to pass a test similar to that given to Winston Smith.
7Tyrrell_McAllister
The inferential distance between us on the reliability of contemporary academics is too large to cross in a comment thread. So let it simply be taken as read that you do not accept that the assertions of contemporary academics are evidence for what they assert. This brings us back to the main point of my previous comment. By restricting what you accept as evidence, you make it harder to gather your probability mass into a small region of the space of possibilities. Let an HGL society be a society in which "[m]en are not allowed to own land at all, any money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister, and inheritances go to the youngest daughter in the family." (HGL are the initials of the authors of the study in the OP.) You have claimed that the observation of an HGL society would be "surprising". The percentage of societies that are HGL societies is something between 0% and 100% (inclusive). Your evidence justifies placing a certain probability distribution over the interval from 0% to 100% for the percentage of societies that are HGL societies. Even though you have restricted the kind of evidence that you will accept, sociobiology and anecdote are still powerful evidence, so it is plausible that they could justify heaping most of your probability mass over the left end of the interval — i.e., over the lower percentages. But you claim to do more than that. You aren't just claiming to be able to push most of your probability mass towards the left end of the interval. You say that you can heap most of your mass directly over 0.00% (which is what you must have if observing even one HGL society would be "surprising"). Sociobiology is still, to a large extent, a qualitative science. You undertake a heavy burden if you want to argue that such a qualitative science justifies concentrating so much of your probability mass over such a small region in the space of possibilities. Remember, this is a field where we can't even predict with confidence t
3sam0345
Yet oddly, before the Soviet Union fell, my predictions for its future were spot on, while the CIA and academia were completely wrong. From 1980 onwards there was a vast amount of evidence that the Soviet Union was in a state of rapid collapse - which evidence anyone who paid attention to academia rejected because it was incompatible root and branch with the world view of academia and with modern twentieth century history taught in Academia. By taking academics seriously, people rejected evidence wildly and radically inconsistent with academic worldview. On a very wide range of topics, there is a great deal of evidence wildly and radically inconsistent with the academic world view, much of it coming from low status people, such as white refugees. (Brown refugees have slightly higher status, though still not enough to overcome the presumption of academic truthfulness) You ignore that evidence, because you have to say "Either academics are uniformly lying, or these ignorant white trash folks are repeating baseless rumors". If it does not fit in with the official line, and comes from a low status source, you ignore it. Since I assume that the official line is worthless, I don't ignore it. What justifies my position is that for another supposedly matrilineal society that academics love as absolutely wonderful and highly functional, the Mosuo, folk wisdom is that it is composed of whores and pimps, similar to the culture celebrated in rap music and game blogs, where there is no significant transfer of consumables to women and children, and large transfer from women and children to a minority of men. Thus in addition to sociobiology, I have folk evidence, evidence from low status people, that academics are making stuff up. Which is what I had in the 1980s for the Soviet Union.
2Tyrrell_McAllister
(Emphasis added.) You are correct in saying that the conventional wisdom among academics was that the Soviet Union was not about to collapse. However, there were academics in academia and government who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union at least as precisely as Reagan did. And I see no evidence that anyone ever failed a course for predicting a rapid collapse of the Soviet Union.
2sam0345
Observe that Robert Gates furtively concealed the fact that it was he himself that was making the prediction, which suggests that making such a prediction might have bad consequences for one who made it.
3Tyrrell_McAllister
You seem to have misread the article. Gates didn't predict the break-up of the Soviet Union. It was a business partner of Stephen Brand who made the prediction in a presentation that Gates saw. According to the article cited by the Wikipedia entry: Gates was denying that the Soviet Union would break up, not predicting it. Gates "jumped in" on a presentation by someone else. It was that "someone else" who made the prediction. What evidence supports your claim that Gates ever predicted the break-up of the Soviet Union?
-1wedrifid
What is that terminology?
4CaveJohnson
By Jove don't feign innocence friend, naturally he speaks of savages that need civilizing. Remember White man's burden and all that.
8[anonymous]
Made me chuckle. Though you really should update your vocabulary. White man's burden, as in aggressively spreading Western values to others "for their own good" is as popular as ever, it is however broken broken down into and covered by other terms, such as spreading democracy, ensuring respect for human rights, nation building and humanitarian interventions. Much more friendly and humble sounding that way you see. Also as another LWer once noted to me in a PM, much of the Hansonian foragers vs. farmers paradigm, would basically be called savages vs. civilized men by 19th and 18th century European intellectuals. This is interestingly true for both negative and positive attributes (recall the enduring myth of the noble savage and what characteristics he is said to posses that are superior to civilized man). But while some bias may be at work here, I'm inclined to believe that the whole foragers vs. farmers distinction is basically accurate enough to be useful.
0lessdazed
Less and more "civilized", it seems.
9Vaniver
The study asserts that in the patrilineal society, some households are headed by women or headed jointly, but most are headed by men. In the matrilineal society, men are forbidden from owning land (and are supposed to hand over cash earnings to their wife or sister). It does not discuss what percentage of the households are headed by women/men/jointly, and appears to assume all of them are headed by women.
4sam0345
This alleged aspect of matrilineal societies is more piously hoped for by white ivy league anthropologists, than actually observed.
3Vaniver
Indeed. It was somewhat obvious when reading the paper that they tested the degree of male dominance in the patrilineal society but reported no such tests in the matrilineal society.
4jsalvatier
That's a fairly strong claim, what is your source on that?
9Vladimir_M
See for example this book excerpt from Cynthia Eller's The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. There are plenty of other sources you'll find if you just google for the relevant terms.
2jsalvatier
Thanks!
2christina
Upvoted for your precision and accuracy in pointing out the distinction between the words matriarchal and matrilineal. A matriarchal society would be one where women dominated in political power. My short Internet search did not turn up any societies I would call both matriarchal (instead of matrilineal) and likely to be real, so I assume they are either extremely rare or nonexistent. A matrilineal society such as the one in the study is one that traces its ancestry through the female line--this trait does not mean that females have political power in the culture. I would add that matrilineal societies may also tend to differ from patrilineal socities in that women may have greater access to resources within the family, such as family earnings and inheritances. This does not make the society matriarchal since men still occupy the positions of political power. Sidenotes: * The Wikipedia article on matriarchy I linked to presently asserts that "There are no known societies that are unambiguously matriarchal" with six references to this statement. Contradictions to this statement exist in the article, but from what I read they are not as well supported (at least not the ones I saw--I did not read the entire article). Hence why the Wikipedia article seems to me to support the likely rareness or nonexistence of matriarchal cultures. And yes, I do give some amount of credence to Wikipedia, even with all its flaws. * The second link I include about the Mosuo culture living in China seems to be matrilineal rather than matriarchal as supported by this statement in the article: "Political power in Mosuo society tends to be in the hands of males, which for many scientists disqualifies them as a true matriarchy, and they would be rather called "matrilineal"." * The matrilineal Nagovisi of the third link I included are interesting in that they are also described as having "anarchistic tendencies", and so do not seem to have a strong central political structure dominating
-4sam0345
Han Chinese tend to assume that Mosuo women are whores and Mosuo men are pimps. Anthropologists, who we should believe because they have tenure, assure us otherwise.
7christina
What is the point of this statement?
[-]Barry_Cotter110

He's signalling contrarianism, specifically an anti-progressive political attitude. Note that the first sentence is a statement, and I would bet a large amount of money that it's true, based on no more evidence than I've seen on this page. The second sentence is pure snark.

Reply
6[anonymous]
Hey don't be too hard on him, a man needs to get his metacontrarian fix somewhere!
-6Multiheaded
3CharlieSheen
He explained it in another post. To be honest if when I first read this I was a step or two nearer to him in inferential distance I would have probably found the comment witty. Considering he has spent some effort to shorten the chain, I'm changing my vote on it.
2CronoDAS
Indeed, the post should be edited to reflect this.
0sam0345
And I would say that categorizing societies as matrilineal and patrlineal, though no myth, is deceptive, since it implies a symmetry between such societies, when in fact the important difference is whether mating patterns result in males supporting wives and children, or girlfriends and children supporting adult males.
0David_Gerard
Yeah, that was mine, sorry - should have been clearer. Per Tyrell McAllister's comment, I thought the descriptions pretty clearly met the level of -archal, not merely -linear.
[-]Scott Alexander180

A strange result. When I hear "spatial abilities depend on nurture", I expect something like "our society teaches boys to be good at sports and video games and other things that require spatial reasoning, so they have more practice."

This suggests it's a function of social status, which raises the question of why social status increases spatial reasoning skills. The authors admit education only makes up a third of the difference (and if education was the only issue, we would expect language skills to suffer in the same way, but the "popular wisdom" is that women usually test for better language skills). Homeownership is another weird one - why should owning a home give you better spatial skills (if we assume that the homeowner and their spouse both navigate the rooms of the house the same amount and so on).

The only explanation I can think of is stereotype threat, but again that makes the whole "women are better at language skills" thing weird if we can't explain where the stereotypes came from originally. Now I want to know whether the stereotype that men are better at spatial and women better at language skills evolved multiple times in multiple societies, or whether it's just a function of Westerners introducing it everywhere they went.

Reply
9NancyLebovitz
One thing I've heard is that mothers in mainstream American culture let little boys explore (get farther from their mothers) than little girls. When I say I heard it, I mean a friend of mine told me she'd read it somewhere, so I'm just mentioning it as a possible sort of thing, not anything with formal research behind it. In any case, more early opportunities to move around independently seem like a plausible candidate for improving spacial abilities. I don't know whether it would corelate with patriarchal vs. matriarchal.
2BillyOblivion
This is anecdote, not data, but I've got two girls by two different mothers almost a generation apart. One is currently four years old. I was the stay at home dad between 6 and 18 months, and both her mother and I strongly encouraged her active investigation of the world around her. I was a bit more willing to let her get herself into physical difficulty or get a little dinged up than mom was (babies bounce better than teenagers), but both of us really tried hard to do anything like the "little girls don't do that, little boys do" sort of thing. I'm not saying that we tried to get her gender neutral toys, but we both pushed her towards knowledge and exploration. For most of a year her most common playmate was a very active boy almost exactly a year older, and he roughhoused with her just as he would another boy (and we let him). This is a little girl that likes to watch the IPSC vidoes (of other women mostly) (although that may just be because she knows I approve), who was siging the I Love Guns song after only one hearing (not the whole thing), and who will try to climb any rock, any obstacle whatever, as long as she can do it in a skirt. Fights like HELL to avoid pants. And I've NEVER seen a girl more enamored of princesses. I swear to GHOD I have no idea where she gets it. She even gets upset when Mommy doesn't want ot wear a skirt (mom is not exactly a girly girl). I have NO idea where she gets it. Her language and (to some degree math) skills are above normal (she can answer some math questions, but her ability to actually puzzle them out is hit and miss, I'm not good enough to tell whether she's doing better than guessing or not), but I have less ability to map her ability to catch or throw a ball. I should be working more on that with her, but I suxor at it. I don't think nature or nurture has the full say, life is not a hand of poker that you are dealt, it's more like Gin Rummy with several decks. And lots of jokers.
3David_Gerard
Anecdotally, I've had several female friends attribute it to stereotype threat.
3NancyLebovitz
Could you expand on that? Do they mean that they have better spacial abilities when they're by themselves?
3David_Gerard
I mean that they credit the beaten-down feeling they get when they contemplate STEM subjects to stereotype threat (and they name it as stereotype threat). This was in a Google+ discussion so good it went 70+ comments and one blocking.
1NancyLebovitz
Is the discussion still available?
3David_Gerard
Found it at last! (Google is terrible for searching G+ o_0 ) Stereotype threat mentioned by a coupla people there, and by others elsewhere - the term appears to be gaining currency in my social circles.
1NancyLebovitz
Thanks. There wasn't much new to me there, but I hadn't heard about sexism being structured differently in Nicaragua, which was quite interesting.
1David_Gerard
The poster in question has a bit of a habit of generalising from themselves to the world, so I would take it as personally anecdotal before basing a huge amount upon it.
2NancyLebovitz
Fair enough. Still, it wouldn't surprise me too much if it were true. I think a lot of what we call sexism is actually a Victorian variant rather than the whole range of possible sexisms.
[-]BillyOblivion170

Assume for the next 3 sentences that this single study is accurate, replicable and does show what it claims to.

So in the patriarchy the guys finished the task 35% faster. In the Matriarchy were the scores relatively equal to the men in the patriarchy, or the women?

Meaning does patriarchy produce a benefit for the men or does it somehow prevent the women from performing as well?

Reply
[-]Vaniver260

I checked out the actual study. The mean times to complete a four-piece puzzle representing a horse (their measure of 'spatial ability') was:

  • Patrilineal Males: 42.31s
  • Patrilineal Females: 57.2s
  • Matrilineal Males: 32.1s
  • Matrilineal Females: 35.4s

The difference between societies is strongly significant: the matrilineal society was significantly better at completing the puzzle. The sex difference in the patrilineal society is significant. The sex difference in the matrilineal society has a p-value of .025: that is, significant at the 5% level but not at the 1% level. In the matrilineal society, education was equal across genders, which explains a third of how much the gap closed (as education favored males in the patrilineal society).

The medians, though, are screwy:

  • Patrilineal Males: 32.5s
  • Patrilineal Females: 42s
  • Matrilineal Males: 27s
  • Matrilineal Females: 20s

As expected, the mean is larger than the median for every group. The median female in the matrilineal society, however, finished far faster than the median male in the matrilineal society- despite the males having a faster mean overall. The times overall appear lognormally distributed, but they don't provide the distrib... (read more)

Reply
1BillyOblivion
Huh. Be interesting to stuff a bunch of heads (still attached to their bodies of course) into an fMRI while doing spatial reasoning and see if a trained observer could reliably sort them by sex. Or even gender.
0DanielVarga
I see at least two obvious confounding variables that can wildly influence this measure. (And I'm not saying I have any better measures to suggest.) The first question is whether fast hand movements are considered appropriate in the given society. If the norm for your gender is gentle, majestic movement, that slows you down. The second question is what your society's gender norms are for deliberateness/decisiveness.
[-][anonymous]100

Meaning does patriarchy produce a benefit for the men or does it somehow prevent the women from performing as well?

Or c), does matriarchy prevent men from performing as well as they could biologically?

I'm not saying that I think this is the reason, just that I don't have evidence to rule it out.

Reply
[-]Vaniver110

Two quick comments (you can see more detailed stuff here):

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%. Human brains are very flexible, and good at getting better at doing things that they do repeatedly. Considering nature and nurture to be opposites is not even wrong. The last question of this post gets to the right issue- how do nature and nurture interconnect with one another? What nurture should we pair with a given nature?

Second, one study like this does not highly question a theory by itself. The question is where the winds of evidence blow you, not whether or not you have an arrow in your quiver.

Reply
2Douglas_Knight
Correlation is not causation. This is well studied and the causation runs the other way, at least in western societies.
1Vaniver
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.
1Tyrrell_McAllister
Just to confirm, are you saying that higher education in western societies correlates with worse performance on the kinds of puzzles in this study?
7JoshuaZ
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.
2Tyrrell_McAllister
Thanks. I should have been able to see that.
[-]CaveJohnson60

I defy the data.

Someone once presented me with a new study on the effects of intercessory prayer (that is, people praying for patients who are not told about the prayer), which showed 50% of the prayed-for patients achieving success at in-vitro fertilization, versus 25% of the control group. I liked this claim. It had a nice large effect size. Claims of blatant impossible effects are much more pleasant to deal with than claims of small impossible effects that are "statistically significant".

So I cheerfully said: "I defy the data."

Reply
[-]zslastman00

This critique of the paper makes a good case against it. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/10/E583.full

Reply
6jsalvatier
Care to elaborate?
[-]lessdazed150

Reporter's Headline: Gender Differences in Muscular Ability Appear to be Nurture

Hypothetical Study abstract:

Women remain significantly underrepresented in the construction, furniture moving, and bounty hunting workforce. Some have argued that muscular ability differences, which represent the most persistent gender differences in the biological literature, are partly responsible for this gap. The underlying forces at work shaping the observed muscular ability differences revolve naturally around the relative roles of nature and nurture. Although these forces remain among the most hotly debated in all of the sciences, the evidence for nurture is tenuous, because it is difficult to compare gender differences among biologically similar groups with distinct nurture. In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in muscular abilities, measured by maximum bench press, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society. We also show that about one-third of the effect can be explained by differences in sports participation. Given that none of our participants have experience with w

... (read more)
Reply
Moderation Log
More from David_Gerard
View more
Curated and popular this week
87Comments