The cause of sex-related ability tilt is irrelevant with regard to the consequences on STEM employment. Whether due to socialization alone, innate ability alone, some combination of the two, or causes we don't understand, the outcome is the same and the consequences are the same.
Exactly. It doesn’t matter what the causes are. The fact is it’s harming people as a whole and talented women aren’t being treated fairly. All the biology in the world doesn’t explain or fix this very real problem.
Also, we are not slaves to “biology”. We are perfectly capable of murdering each other but we don’t, because we have rules. Rules trump biology.
>The fact is it’s harming people as a whole and talented women aren’t being treated fairly.
What do you mean by this? Talented women aren't being treated fairly? Every girl has the option to choose a STEM field, but most don't. Nonetheless, women are in the majority for general enrollment at universities in Canada [1] (and I believe it is the same in the US). At my university in Alberta, we have numerous clubs, organizations, and programs supporting women going into STEM fields-- not including government-sponsored advertisement campaigns to encourage the choice for STEM. Around the world, there are countless organizations created to support and encourage women going to STEM [2], never mind various campus-specific programs and clubs especially in North America.
I don't really see how women are being harmed. Maybe most women don't want to go into STEM. Maybe the biology argument is valid? Even if it's not, where is the harm, exactly?
Thank you for choosing STEM. Be the best you that you can be. STEM does not matter what gender, race, etc just having a human brain and good ACT and SAT test scores.
I think the harm they are talking about is this metoo movement. Sexual harassment, sexual abuse, etc.
In the 1950s and 1960s women dominated computer science and math and other things and then , not enough women taking classes so the microcomputer was aimed at boys because of video games but they forgot girls play video games too.
My mother worked on a punch card system and trained by IBM and did work for the public school system on an IBM mainframe. She quit because I was born and she wanted to take care of me. But that was her choice.
That's pretty illogical. If you test positive for a virus, you'll want to think twice about taking antibiotics.
Also, we are not slaves to “biology”. We are perfectly capable of murdering each other but we don’t, because we have rules. Rules trump biology.
Culture trumps conscious mental entities like rules. Such an idea is needed to explain many of the things we see around the world and in history. (Like, why have Jewish people been able to locally dominate in tailoring in so many instances across literally thousands of years? It's certainly not because of some kind of tailoring gene, and it's not about "rules.") A strongly cultural view basically dismantles huge swathes of Alt-Right ideology, replacing it with something else which allows for everyone to participate. However, such a view also dismantles much of the current day Far Left ideology. I think it's high time that something more rational and more fitting with evidence came to replace that, however.
In my experience, qualitative arguments of the form above rarely change people's minds but a quantitative model will help.
The question asked is the causal network that contributes to mathematical genius and the distribution of contributing causal factors within the population -- P(genius | factors)
Various factors are clearly involved: P(genius | intelligence), P(genius | hard work), P(genius | self-confidence), and so on.
If we accept that those functions are probably not uniformly distributed and that some have a stronger impact than others, we can see that most arguments can be reduced to describing those functions or describing the distributions of those factors among the population.
Where most educated people's intuitions lead them astray is that the experience of segregation in higher education and employment has led them to vastly underestimate the actual variance in factors like intelligence, hard work and self-confidence among people.
Vanishingly few individual actually possess the right combination of factors required for mathematic genius.
That's an entirely reasonable skeptical point of view to take in the absence of other evidence. However, this question has also been examined. Using typical measures of socioeconomic status (e.g. an index of education + income), one finds that controlling for socioeconomic status does little to explain the black-white IQ gap. There is a sizable gap at every level of socioeconomic status. Data: http://sites.biology.duke.edu/rausher/Hm2.jpg
It's still ridiculous to tie it to 'race' because, a) there is no real biological classification of race, which means all of this data using such classifications is already inherently biased, and b) mere correlation again does not entail a causation, so there could very well be a third variable that ties it all together. I can think of a bunch right off the top of my head, like stereotype threat and the still all too common racism resulting in many educational disadvantages for black students.
The article's author also wrote a book advocating a universal basic income, “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State,” which was first published in 2006. In that book he allows that services for the disabled would need to be retained and could not be replaced with a UBI.
Of course. The problems of the disabled, the mentally ill and so forth are obvious, and the solution is obvious: don't remove all the social security besides UBI.
But that's also the downfall of UBI, because it means that most of the other transfers will remain a necessity, and the bureaucracy to distribute it will remain a necessity, and the whole issue of welfare dependency is back with us, and so is the constant discussion of what support and subsidy should be expanded.
(I'm looking at this from European angle where the welfare is often, though not always, stronger than in the US).
> The problems of the disabled, the mentally ill and so forth are obvious, and the solution is obvious: don't remove all the social security besides UBI.
The solution isn't to either remove all other benefit programs or to retain them all. in a static, unchanging way.
Its to build UBI in a way that it naturally grows with productivity, and keep existing means-tested benefit programs (whether general or targetted to specific narrow needs like disability) and count UBI income the same as earned income in the means tests for those programs, phasing the programs out as the UBI rises to a level where it is no longer possible to qualify for them. This does leave you with the administrative costs of those programs for some time, but with dropping caseload which reduces the total costs (both benefit and administrative) over time, eventually to zero when the programs are retired because UBI makes them obsolete.
This also lets you start UBI at a very level level, and reduces risks and provides opportunities to address unforseen consequences of the UBI implementation, because you aren't doing a big-bang implementation where immediately the entire social support structure depends on UBI alone.
(Essentially, instead of being obsolete and removed when UBI is first implemented, other programs are deprecated and to be removed in the future with defined criteria.)
> and the solution is obvious: don't remove all the social security besides UBI.
I think that's where there are two camps within UBI supporters: those who want social security + UBI, and those who want to replace all or most social services with UBI. You can probably see how that maps to the political spectrum.
>Or consider the unemployed young man who fathers a child. Today, society is unable to make him shoulder responsibility. Under a UBI, a judge could order part of his monthly grant to be extracted for child support before he ever sees it. The lesson wouldn’t be lost on his male friends.
> Or consider teenage girls from poor neighborhoods who have friends turning 21. They watch—and learn—as some of their older friends use their new monthly income to rent their own apartments, buy nice clothes or pay for tuition, while others have to use the money to pay for diapers and baby food, still living with their mothers because they need help with day care.
The author seems to be proposing that child support for 3 children can/should be taken from their fathers' UBI grants. Therefore, the mother would receive a larger grant based on her number of children.
Assuming the father is a living US citizen whose identity and whereabouts the mother knows, of course.
Either way, that doesn't really affect the argument that a BI payment supposed to be a minimum for one person to live off is unlikely to stretch to paying for the food, living space and private health insurance costs for another three, even if another parent's minimum payment is also being garnished to help.
The author's arguments you've cited essentially amount to the view that children of single parents should be punished for their parents' life decisions. It looks particularly crass in the context of accompanying arguments in favour of spending money on adults who choose to "idle away their time" and including those fortunate enough to be "already living off other people’s money".
Those quotes are about enforcing responsibility and repercussions for unwise decisions, and how that functions as deterrence. Taking money away from the father is framed as punishment, the mother getting money is just a happy coincedence (remember he excludes children from the UBI and then he sketches a scenario where a dad has to lose a lawsuit before having to pay). He doesn't concede that people in some situations simply need more money to live, because that concession would be fatal. After all, if some people need more money than others then you need to do means testing (oh wait, that's what every country is already doing and the root cause of all the inefficiency he seeks to eliminate), which is the exact opposite of the UBI.
That is certainly correct in many cases but I don't think you can get around gizmo's argument in the general case. The father could not simply leave the mother but for example die in an accident. A one size fits all solution seems really problematic considering the huge differences between personal circumstances.
(1) "Shalizi’s first error is his assertion that cognitive tests correlate with each other because IQ test makers exclude tests that do not fit the positive [correlation matrix]. In fact, more or less the opposite is true. ... Cognitive tests correlate because all of them truly share one or more sources of variance."
(2) "Shalizi’s second error is to disregard the large body of evidence that has been presented in support of g as a unidimensional scale of human psychological differences. The g factor is not just about the positive [correlation matrix]. A broad network of findings related to both social and biological variables indicates that people do in fact vary, both phenotypically and genetically, along this continuum that can be revealed by psychometric tests of intelligence and that has has widespread significance in human affairs."
(3) "Shalizi’s third error is to think that were it shown that g is not a unitary variable neurobiologically, it would refute the concept of g. However, for most purposes, brain physiology is not the most relevant level of analysis of human intelligence. What matters is that g is a remarkably powerful and robust variable that has great explanatory force in understanding human behavior. Thus g exists at the behavioral level regardless of what its neurobiological underpinnings are like."
Conclusion: "In many ways, criticisms of g like Shalizi’s amount to “sure, it works in practice, but I don’t think it works in theory”. Shalizi faults g for being a “black box theory” that does not provide a mechanistic explanation of the workings of intelligence, disparaging psychometric measurement of intelligence as a mere “stop-gap” rather than a genuine scientific breakthrough. However, the fact that psychometricians have traditionally been primarily interested in validity and reliability is a feature, not a bug. Intelligence testing, unlike most fields of psychology and social science, is highly practical, being widely applied to diagnose learning problems and medical conditions and to select students and employees. What is important is that IQ tests reliably measure an important human characteristic, not the particular underlying neurobiological mechanisms."
Anyone interested in this topic should read the primary research papers.
The pattern of differences in IQ test answers between generations is not congruent with the pattern of differences between individual who do better and worse on average within generations -- at least according to the few studies which have looked at this question. For this reason, we can infer that the generational changes in IQ test scores are not changes in the same underlying factor that causes differences in performance within a generation. If we call the factor that causes within-generation differences in IQ test scores intelligence, then what differs between generations isn't intelligence. In other words, the Flynn effect is something other than what it might appear at first glance. It's still something of a mystery.
Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis can be used to demonstrate this, or you can just look at the correlation matrices.
I personally believe IQ is a fairly good predictor of intelligence the way people in (at least American) society think about it. This study attempts to prove that high IQ is good for most jobs. What it doesn’t prove is the high end of the spectrum where someone of 120 IQ compares with someone of 140IQ in extremely high level jobs. My experience is that creativity trumps IQ in most cases where people are considered generally intelligent. The people that really are viewed as most successful typically have a high or very high IQ, but are always very creative.
