Wait, is ToothSayer saying that giraffes are smarter than zebras because their long necks can reach those tasty leaves up top?

Your problem (and it's a profound problem that you don't even realize you have) is not understanding the big picture, or the subtleties of context. You may or may not have the mind to learn how to do so, but it's clear you've never been challenged sufficiently intellectually to develop that ability.

That comment came up in the course of discussing why certain jobs are attacked as being not equal, while no one seems to care about others. Here is the context:

This is a perfectly valid comment has nothing to do with white supremacy except in your fevered, big-picture-missing, brain.

The question is basically:
- Why do people care so much about gender/racial disparity in coding or STEM, and not in coal mining, garbage collection, or child daycare?

My answer was basically:
- This isn't really a push for equality, it's an attack on areas where white males have perceived power. It's a pure racist/sexist political movement.
- The movement doesn't even make logical sense, as white males, as a group, are the most remarkably achieving and peace-creating and feminist group on the planet. Why would you want to attack them?

Let me give you analogy. If someone said:

- Black representation in sports is hugely unequal and racially discriminatory, we have to cut them out and have far more Asians and whites, such that only 13% of elite sportsman are black.

My response would be:
- This isn't really a push for equality, it's an attack on areas where white males have perceived power. It's a pure racist/sexist political movement.
- The movement doesn't even make logical sense, as black people are the most achieving group by far in sports and athletic and kinesthetic achievement generally, and the best to watch. A political movement to try and cut them out of sports (or any field), down to their population level (13%), would be stupid and pointless and racist.

This would not make me a black supremacist. It would not shift the line at all on my views on black supremacy. It has nothing to do with black supremacy. It's a pushback against deranged, weirdo, totalitarian nutcases, like yourself and most on the left, who think that there isn't equality of opportunity unless there's equality of outcome, and that they must force this bizarre view on society through any means possible.

Yes that's what I'm saying. Why are you even here? You don't care about science or evidence or even honesty.

I would like to hear your opinion on the OP though.

1. Are there fewer women in coding because of sexism? Are there far more Asians in coding than blacks because of racism?
2. Are women and men identical? Do you believe men have the same verbal reasoning skills, on average, as women?
3. Should the guy who wrote the memo have been fired? Is it wrong to even discuss difference between men and women as an explanation for career choices and success?

Zebraism ITT.

Your reductionism is causing you to over-simplify again.


1. My wife, ironically an engineering masters, thinks that possibly women's and men's brains are different in some areas, but definitely that women are put off the hard sciences because they don't appeal to women as much as other subjects (which is self-perpetuating).

2. Of course they're not identical.

3. Probably yes. He brought his company into disrepute and they had every reason to sack him if they wanted to.

I think both are definitely, and I think the evidence is overwhelming. Spatial analysis for example is a slam dunk to men, women can't touch them. Women can respond to training in spatial analysis, but men respond as well, keeping their lead. Female cultural choices are also undeniable. But I think you'll find that cultural choices tend to follow innate ability, not the other way around. We're drawn to what we're good at. Culture is a feedback mechanism more than an initial cause.

For things like management ability, I think that's an open question, and the discrepancy is probably leaning toward pure culture, but who knows.

Also, you didn't really answer the question. I'm curious as to where people would put the line on this question, specifically about coding.
How does putting forth a thesis on male-female differences, that imo is in no way demeaning to women, "bring the company into disrepute"? Are we really going to go the way of "you can't discuss any idea that causes any fringe minority philosophy to loudly complain", as a society? I don't think that's healthy. It stifles discussion and gives far too much power to people with personality disorders and weird philosophies. Personally I think sacking people involved in the free and respectful exchange of ideas brings the company into disrepute. Those of who believe that though tend to not have personality disorders, and aren't the type to go screaming on Twitter, so I can understand the path of least resistance that a company takes.

This is correct. SAT scores don't predict much other than college grades for the first semester. The same with GRE, GMAT, LSAT, etc. UIUC does a lot of research on this and they've never found any significant correlations. I am the graduate chair and i decide who gets in. I ignore the GRE completely, especially if it's a foreign student.

I believe this view is the biggest amount of BS ever spewed on these forums. And that's saying something.

From two different sources:



https://heri.ucla.edu/DARCU/CompletingCollege2011.pdf



There is zero possibility that your statement is accurate. The only cohort in which it could be accurate is the selection-biased group of those who remain in college after the first year. But this data is worthless because it's heavily selection biased.

In reality, SATs (and GREs) are excellent predictors of most things.

I really don't understand your view. You and your academic colleagues are not so obtuse that you would fail to appreciate the effect of selection bias in determining say, third year results or employment attainment vs SAT or GRE. Or are you? I've seen dumber things come out of academia when there's a political motive involved.

There are many studies out there, and it's easy to find a few that support either side. It mostly depends on who is funding it and what the methodology is and which predictors are used in the regression models. But most importantly, the studies that find significant correlations are aggregate studies across hundreds of schools and 100s of thousands of students.

When focusing on an individual school, these predictions tend to fail a lot.

The problem is that we don't know which schools failed and which were successful because the data is not open to the public yet.

Another problem is the truncated samples they use. They only have access to the students who actually enrolled, which is a tiny fraction of all the students who took the SAT. Truncated correlations come with a host of validity issues.


https://www.insidehighered.com/news/...reds-thousands

I'm sure you'll disagree and call me all kinds of names, while insinuating that my mind has been cucked by the political left, and that's ok. You have your opinion. I don't plan to change our admissions policies anytime soon though.

You are smarter than this, Black Peter. It makes me kind of sad. Here was have completely unequivocal data that's so significant it's beyond reproach.

The reason it's less predictive within a school is because schools tend to admit from a narrow range - Ivy Leagues admit mostly very high SATs, crap colleges, mostly very low SATs. But when you look across the entire student body - which is what we must do when comparing SATs with employment or educational outcomes - the data could not be clearer.

Standardized tests are under sustained highly dishonest academic attack right now becaues they are seen as excluding non-Asian minorities (who, by the way, massively under perform in college as well, in perfect correlation with their SAT underperformance). I feel really sad. If outright reality denial is reaching even people like you, things aren't good in academia.

I don't view it as reality denial. I don't really pay much attention to political arguments and we don't accept based on quotas. We accept based largely on grades and quality of prior institution, which is a great predictor. Prior success predicts future success. Also, publications matter a lot.

Haven't been reading, but has the mystery of the word "proven" been conclusively revealed yet?

Such as at a workplace and you look at a person and "prove" what you "scientifically" think they are with a series of gestures, do you and/or they get fired? Yes!

Let's just stick to SATs for undergrads for the time being- do you believe a 600 and a 1400 have equal likelihood of college success? Or if you want to be more specific, take two graduating HS seniors, one a random 600 from the sample of graduating HS seniors, the other a random 1400 from the sample of random HS seniors, choose a random degree program from a random university and enroll them both in it with a full scholarship (bypassing all other admissions criteria), do you think the 1400 will finish more often than the 600 or that the SAT is truly useless and it's a coinflip who does better?

I'll grant you the GRE might not work that well for graduate admission on some programs, compared to other data (you have pretty high quality data by the time someone has done a 4 year degree).

I was more taking exception with the SAT statement. I'm just flabbergasted first reading the scholarship and believing it, and then looking at raw data which shows enormous predictive ability, and the scholarship to be an outrageously dishonest cherry pick.

That type of quasi-experimental N-of-1 design doesn't control for the myriad of inter-correlating variables that are probably what is actually causing the effect that you seem sure exists.

Don't be a *****. It's a yes or no question. If you actually believe what you've been posting, just say the SAT is useless and they're both equally likely to finish.

I guess we should be grateful that academia has gone so completely insane that they're making statements that are obviously false even to the average person. It'll erode their credibility that much faster.

Take this statement:

It is completely false and not supportable in any way. Proof:





End of story. Black Peter's statement is completely false. He's an expert academic in this subject. As is zoltan who posted earlier and made the same completely false statement.

Another example:



Whom the gods want to destroy, they first make insane? We're seeing this played out in real life, and I think it's irreversible. It's beautiful.

Yeah, i could be wrong. I've been wrong before. Certainly worth thinking about.

I see that you've resorted to your tired old tactic of repeat posting the same data that has already addressed, so i'll bow out of the thread now.

Nothing has been addressed. You waved your hands a bunch, and claimed that studies refuted it, which they do not. The data is real and unequivocal and it proves your claim (not just yours, across the literature) that SAT scores "don't predict except first year grades" to be absolutely false.

I'm not trying to bust your balls - the SAT was a throwaway comment from you and your main point was about the GRE - but it's not like your view isn't common. Zoltan, claiming expertise, claimed the same thing.

It's like having a conversation with a member of the Party, required to live their life under doublethink. It's extraordinary. And they've created a whole sophist structure in the literature to back up their reality denial. But when pressed, they know it's bull****, especially people like Peter who are smart and open minded. To admit it though makes the whole ediface come crashing down; destroys their authority and claims to viable epistemology, and puts them in conflict with their tribe.

Objective truth conflicts with politics and tribal loyalty, so politics and tribal loyalty wins. It's ugly but it's human nature I guess.

This is why it's irreversible like I said above. Academia are irreversibly in the process of beclowning themselves and destroying their crediblity.

By the way Peter, I had read your linked study in Inside Higher Ed and I did not think it was something a thinking person could take seriously. You being a thinking person, I assumed you weren't taking it seriously. It certainly had no relation to anything I had said; I assume you were going off on a non sequitur.

The first comment to the article says it all:
It is mind boggling how dishonest the authors are. It's like drug company cohort shopping in reverse. I know social science authors are bad at math, but this is so obtuse as to be deliberate. It really saddens me. I encourage the math guys here to read it critically for a good laugh.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/...reds-thousands

I don't even understand how a belief like that could start to propagate at that level. Lots of false beliefs are roughly wishcasting combined with insufficient interaction with reality, which is somewhat understandable, but basically everybody spent years in high school with morons floating around, if not in their classrooms (because they were busy tarding off in the regular/slow track instead of the honors one), at least in their hallways. Everybody knew they were dumb as bricks and weren't getting good SAT scores (or if you want to be a *****, good enough PSAT scores to get National Merit, which is generally made public). It's such a shared experience that it should be virtually common knowledge.

How you can go from that to refusal to state that SAT scores are correlated to college potential, and arguing for the exact opposite, I don't even have words. It would be difficult to believe if I weren't seeing it happen.

For those of you who don't quite understand what this hi falootin argument is about it comes down to this. The grades of sophomores at Harvard are almost totally unrelated to their SAT scores. But the grades of freshman are. So Toothsayer is pointing that the sophomore data is probably what it is because the lower scorers are more likely to flunk out or quit after the first year. Those lower scorers who remain are not a random sample since they have shown they can survive Harvard. And since the ability to survive that first year is a better predictor of future success than SAT scores you get very little correlation to SAT scores from the second year on.

But TS and TC are saying even that second statement wouldn't be true if it wasn't for the fact that the lower SAT scoring freshman still have quite high scores. They contend that if Harvard started admitting 1100 type scorers, not only would those freshman be much more likely to have worse grades or leave, but that even the ones who manged to survive would have worse grades on average the second year. In other words the 300 point deficit would spill over into subsequent years in spite of the fact that those lower scoring upperclassman showed a lot of laudable attributes by making it that far. Since however Harvard doesn't admit 1100's, we don't know if TS and TC are right.

You can now carry on with the big words.

Yep. SAT scores predict about 15% of the variance in 1st year college GPA. Using some very advanced math that I won't bother you with, I calculate that this means that other variables account for about 85% of the variance.

That's because most colleges admit students within a narrow range of test scores.