Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Really? You think there are inherently more intelligent men than women?

Uh, yes. This is a well-established fact.

Women have two X chromosomes, both of which get used [1], and men only have one. So this should be your baseline expectation. In women, that genetic information used to construct the brain, gets, loosely speaking, averaged together.

It is of course also consistent with every empirical observation. E.g. the on the math SAT, 1.6x as many men score 700-800, 2x as many men score 800, despite the fact that the school system is biased against boys. And on grade school and high school math contests (such as the AMC, the AIME), the male/female ratio increases more and more the higher the scores go, up to 89% male before sample size was too small for me to get a read on the proportion. Of the top 10 Jeopardy champions, 9 out of 10 are male.

[1] that both X chromosomes get used as they do in the rest of the body is something you wouldn't want to just assume -- among various ways to verify this, see https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/seeing-x-chromoso...

Sorry but that's pseudo-scientific bollocks. Far from being "well-established fact" it is actually contentious and poorly supported by the evidence.

Intelligence testing is a human created concept. There are all manner of cultural biases encoded in it. Intelligence is more than just being good at sums which is what your math SAT example seems to suggest.

Jeopardy champions are hardly a representative group. They're a self-selecting group by definition : those who chose to go on a quiz show. Maybe men show a bias towards showing off on TV or are better at remembering random facts. Your example doesn't control for any of those.

Yeah, Jeopardy could be self-selecting based on a sex-specific mental trait.

But you seem to be ignoring the test scores. Why is that?

You're ignoring the part of my reply where I respond to your point about test scores. Why is that?

Did you edit your post? Maybe I overlooked a paragraph.

The math SAT questions aren't a "bunch of sums." And I agree with you about cultural bias. As I stated, the school system is biased against boys. So the SAT math scores should understate the male/female ratio at that level.

No I didn't edit it. You overlooked it.

Sorry for being careless in my reading.

These are good points ("Intelligence testing is a human created concept").

However it wouldn't be surprising to me if higher end SAT scores would be highly correlated with likelihood of being hired at FAANGs of this world later in life.

If the above is true, and given that the SAT score distribution is shallower and wider for males, then it'd probably follow that there would be more males employed at those places than females, even if the hiring would be totally controlled for biases?

Or, is it your point that there's (probably) correlation here, but not causation? As in, there's bias against females (there most likely is), so more males are hired, and it's an independent fact that males have broader SAT scores distribution. Ergo, if we controlled for biases, then faang hiring results would be 50/50 male/female, even if SAT score distribution would stay the same?

Interesting thing about the chromosomes - in other species where the chromosome situation is reversed, like birds I think, the female is the one that displays more variability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com