The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

I should've probably clarified better which is why I think you misunderstand me. If one looks at the comparative sex IQ distribution, this person will see that there are more women with an average IQ than man. However, that also means that there are less women with extremely high( IQ 125+) and low (IQ ~83). One can also see that there more men with very low IQs and very high IQs, but less man with an average IQ. The IQ range for men is therefore much more extreme.
For jobs at the top of a complex dominance hierarchie you need to have a high IQ, because you have to execute alot of complecated actions. This partially explains why there are fewer women in top positions.
Ofcourse you know some women who are excellent engineers and I never said they couldn't be excellent engineers. However, if you look at the average of jobs occupied by women, most of them choose not to be an engineer, or something similar, when they are free to choose whatever they want to be.

NOTE: This is not me saying women are stupid. Women, in most cases, are wiser than men although there are more men with a higher IQ than women.


Like I said in my previous post, when you encourage equality of outcome, the differences between man and women only get larger. When you only encourage one gender to occupy certain jobs you are actually discriminating against the other gender.

Nothing against you @Qzipco, but I do wish people relied on IQ a lot less. It's an incredibly flawed metric that people are moving away from in terms of determining overall "intelligence" (which doesn't actually have a fixed professional definition).

It is actually the most accurate thing psychologists can measure. If you think IQ is a flawed metric then you might aswell dismiss all of psychology. IQ is an extremely good predictor for long term life succes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson#Critique_of_political_correctness

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this person allows ideological bias to colour their analysis of intelligence in general.

IQ has issues. It is a flawed metric. I'm not dismissing it out of hand, I just simply think it shouldn't be quoted as much as it is, especially in random forum threads on the Internet. And before anybody starts, I'm very comfortable with my IQ as measured over the years. I don't need to project any dissatisfaction with IQ not representing me fairly

Do you have any proof to back up your thoughts because all I read is you saying that you think something without backing it up. Further more, you make a statement saying: "I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this person allows ideological bias to colour their analysis of intelligence in general." Is the wikipedia page suppose to back this claim up? All I read in the section which you linked in the wikipedia page is that Jordan Peterson critizises political correctness. If you do some more research on his thoughts, he backs up why ideologies like postmodernism are very dangerous. I also don't see how this is related to the discussion on IQ, could you elaborate on that?

Again, if you don't believe in IQ you might aswell dismiss all of psychology.

It's related to IQ because people who place emphasis on logic before emotions tend to buy into the concept of IQ (and also the use of it to segregate by gender and race) more than those who don't (by dint of how the arguments go).

I don't need to prove anything. You can simply Google it. There are cited Wikipedia articles on both IQ and intelligence in general. I'm not here to do that for people; if you don't want to do the bare minimum work to ensure your posts cannot be countered by a simple Google Search, then you're not willing to put the effort in to consider opposing arguments in general.

I posted a very neutral, apolitical note on the overuse of IQ as a metric. You seem to have responded to this incredibly negatively, instead of stopping to even consider the validity of such advice.

He spoke of the "alt-left" and went on to produce Elodeas "logic".
Yeah there may or may not have been violent anti protesters. They certainly exist, see Hamburg, but I've not seen all that many reports about them in this case. And the reports I saw were from sources that are known to think 9/11 and Sandy Hook were an inside jobs. Not gonna buy into them. If violent antifa members go on a havoc the media does report on it, as seen in the G20 protests. Nothing of that sort to see here.

What separates The Daily Show from the daily stormer?
Well the daily stormer is a hive of nazis who say the women who died is a "fat skank" and who are trying to find out where her funeral will be so they can sent violent nazis there. They also praised the guy who drove the car apparently.
So you say you cannot see a difference between that and the daily show? Seriously? Last I remember the daily show does not incite hatred like that. Not even close.
I've only visited the daily stormer once and it made me feel like reading historic Nazi propaganda in history text books.

Yeah men and women do differ biologically. But the conclusions James Damore made are wrong. As I said/linked to:
1.) The small subsample of women who apply to google is totally not required to follow the "standard women" as you can find it in the average population.
2.) The assumptions on what make a good worker for Google are just an opinion by Mr. Damore.

And the jobs are paid less because mostly Women work there I guess?

That's funny.. I totally buy into a logic and I don't think of the IQ score thing very highly. Probably because I've met too many people with "high IQ" who totally failed in life.

Psychology sure is one of those sciences that I do would dismiss rather quickly. I mean remember those experiments where researches faked mental illness, got themselves into relevant institutions and then had a hard time proving they were not sick anymore?

iQ may well be flawed, but is still a good indication of a certain type of intelligence. A different measure may show females have higher iQ, but that isn't the point.

The interesting thing here is it shows a difference in the distribution of iq between males and females, let alone between males and males etc.

This is purely statistical not about individuals or saying there aren't outliers.

In terms of employment, people should be treated as individuals.
Having a quota for females in engineering for example is ignoring that there are differences statically between the population of meals and females and the choices they make, and may force the company to employ less qualified individuals due to that policy.

That is only true, @mwreynolds, if you assume that nobody of the required race or gender can possibly meet expectations, for the job role offered.

Which, unless your recruitment pool is literally five people, is probably unlikely. It's a boogeyman argument, used to defend the principle of refusing diversity in the first instance. You could make the case for a specific position in a specific locale for a very specific timeframe. In all other cases, there are always going to be enough high-quality applicants for any role that you're not going to have to pick the first white dude you see. The general cultural makeup of most first-world countries is diverse enough as to ensure this.

Are you kidding me? backing up your statement with research is probably the most important thing. I, for instance, might not stumble upon articles you've read on this topic and can therefore form a different oppinion. The fact that I ask you to back up your claims by research shows that I do have interests in your claims about IQ because I want to look into them. Calling someone lazy for not wanting to google on some wikipedia articles on this subject, I find quite preposterous.

"I posted a very neutral, apolitical note on the overuse of IQ as a metric. You seem to have responded to this incredibly negatively, instead of stopping to even consider the validity of such advice". I gave counter arguments to your claim on IQ, and trust me I've looked into this subject. If you don't back up your claim by effidence then really trust your claim. If you find my response negitive only because I gave counter arguments to your oppinion then you are guilty of the same crime. I submitted a video, which in the description, has multiple articles to back up my statements and to my knowledge you haven't bothered to look at them. Instead you make personal attacks to Jordan Peterson. How can I consider the validity of your advice when you don't bother to

Saying stuff like that makes you look like this guy, and trust me you want to:

Yeah, Google it then.

I made no such personal attacks, I simply speculated that his position on topics like this are more due to ideological bias than actual grounded evidence. Why? Because topics like these are often co-opted by ideological arguments, unfortunately.

You seem offended on his behalf, which is weird. You should put as much lack of trust in his arguments as you do in mine. Wouldn't be fair, otherwise.

If you can't handle the sacred notion of IQ being questioned, perhaps don't rely on it in a debate.

I totally agree that quotas are stupid. It's trying to mend the symptoms, not the cause.
I study computer science. Far less than 50% of students there are women. Getting that higher should be the goal. And not by a forced quota.

As I see it the problem starts somewhere around preschool when boys are given toy cars in blue and girls are given toy puppets in purple. When in primary school people tell you "boys are good at math and girls are good at language", etc.
It's not hard to see why there are few female engineers when boys are given Lego to play while girls are not.
Lego is the reason why I first wanted to be an engineer. I only got lazy somewhere and decided engineering virtual things is easier to do...

That's also why I am so critical of all this "women chose these jobs" and "women score differently in these test".
So why is that? Because women are biologically different? Or because they've been made to behave like that by the culture they live in?

Women from Arabian countries chose to put on burkas even when visiting Germany. Do they?

It's a fairly brute and easy way to get to the target. Which is probably why that was chosen. I prefer awareness campaigns more too, since that seems to work where i live. Basically, spend some time debunking myths regarding the STEM fields.

This is a slightly more complicated topic than that. Symbols of oppression can easily become symbols of resistance. To some muslim women it may be nothing but oppression and a chapter of their life they want to forget, while to other it's a symbol of freedom, that they can choose to wear because they can.

Is it a sufficiently strong indicator of choice that it leaves other reasons, like image problems and reinforcement of roles, biting the dust? If it only indicates one type of intelligence, doesn't that leave the door wide open for many other forms to be more important? Doesn't that make IQ a very weak explanation, especially since it can also be tied to education level and that it can be trained for?

I agree insofar that in a perfect world, quotas would not be necessary.

However, they're necessary to correct biased hiring practises and other things that affect various professional disciplines. Because our world isn't perfect. And until we fix the underlying culture, until we get more people feeling more welcomed into the professions they're currently shying away from, these measures will always be necessary to an extent.

"That's funny.. I totally buy into a logic and I don't think of the IQ score thing very highly. Probably because I've met too many people with "high IQ" who totally failed in life.". Ofcourse some people are still going to fail if they have a high IQ, but on average this is not the case. You will encounter people with high IQ that failed but that is still a personal experience and says nothing about the average.

"Psychology sure is one of those sciences that I do would dismiss rather quickly. I mean remember those experiments where researches faked mental illness, got themselves into relevant institutions and then had a hard time proving they were not sick anymore". Are you going to dismiss physics and biology aswell because they've predicted so many things wrong in the past? If not, then you can't just dismiss psychology based on research which turned out to be not true.

"And the jobs are paid less because mostly Women work there I guess?". The wage gap doesn't look at the level of education one has, nor does it look at the work occupations. It just looks at how much money men make and how much money women make and then comes to the conclusion that women are payed less.

But why do we need the have 50% of women in "computer science". Sure if that's what they "want to do then there should be nothing stopping them.

Different people and statistical groups have different strengths, and they should be encouraged to pursue there own goals/dreams, no matter if they "fit" within typical strengths of there group or not.

Interesting when they give baby chimps human toys to play with, the boys play with the toy trucks and the girls play with the dolls. I wound why, social pressure or could it be that on average men and women are different and make difference choices. And why do some people thing that it is bad thing. Sure encourage more people to pursue different paths they may not have typically considered. But is not helpful to assume that every job role can be filled by a a ratio of the total population, ignoring, biological and social differences.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-29418230/monkey-test-shows-gender-choices

Big, huge, raging hint.

We're not monkeys.

We don't "need" 50% of women precisely in tech. We "need" the atmosphere to be more inclusive considering most of the major pioneers in software development were actually, factually, historically women. Something happened in the late 1900s to push them out, or rather, supplant them with more men.

These things never happen in isolation, right?

I think you need to stop supposing some kind of biological imperative behind choices made in peoples' professions, because it belies a lack of knowledge about the history of the disciplines we're using as examples.

My point was that it shows a statistical difference between the male and female populations, i'm not trying to use it for anything more than that, since it is only one type of test which dose not suit all types of people.
It also shows that being male doesn't mean much either in terms of predicting iq.

He's not wrong either. To be fair, NASA's lead programmer was female for the Apollo missions.

When nobody had any expectations one way or another, talented hands appeared. They are not absent among women. We need to expect that applicants have potential outside of gender. Not even by percentages, we need to expect the distinct possibility that if you're seeing an applicant, their demographic didn't impress on them, they broke the mould, they have an aptitude to be there.

Did you even read my post, let alone understand what i was saying.