Comment by majos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by majos | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I used to think this, but I don't any more. One argument that swayed me came from Izabella Laba [1], a math professor at UBC and former IMO competitor. The point that stood out to me is that women tend to be socialized away from extremes, for example it is generally more acceptable (to parents, guardians, and affiliated people choosing for children) for gifted boys to skip many grades than for gifted girls to do the same. Along the same lines, obsession and isolation in boys just seems to bother us less than the same thing in girls.

There's no great comcrete evidence backing this up (as far as I know). But Laba is one who should know, having once been a very mathematically gifted girl.

Maybe men really are outliers on a greater scale, but IMO we do enough tamping-down of female outliers that I'm not willing to draw that conclusion from the preponderance of male geniuses we see today.

[1] https://ilaba.wordpress.com/2017/06/24/gifted-while-female/

I just don't believe in this "social conditioning" thing. I've seen absolutely no evidence for it in my life. My sister grew up with three older brothers and we became a programmer, an electrician, and a mechanic. Right from birth she was surrounded by computers, electronics, engines and gears. She is not interested and will not be interested no matter how hard someone like you tries to make her interested. She is instead an artist and a wonderful one. She just did what she wanted to do.

I've had intimate relationships with more than twenty women in my life. I've had friendships and professional relationships with many times more. I'd hazard to guess that my experience with women is way above average for this forum. I've not met a single one who told me they really wanted to be a scientist/engineer/programmer etc but found that society didn't let them. In fact, I find the contrary to be true: the ones that have chosen those fields were offered more encouragement than I ever was.

Just let people do what they want to do.

Your extremely unusual anecdote is not good data.

Doesn't really dispute the IQ bell curve differences between men and women as we find that IQ is less and less socially constructed than we thought.

Men are much more likely to have a very low IQ and this is uncontroversial. Are they socialized this way or is increased variability only in one direction.

No, that is extraordinarily controversial.

Are you saying that the IQ distribution is not measured sufficiently well and there is controverse among statisticians whether men are really more likely to have scored below e.g. 70; or are you saying that there is controverse about the causes?

I'm saying that the claim made above is extraordinarily controversial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com