Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I think it's also worth pointing out that their argument just changed dramatically, and that what they said in their followup can't readily be reconciled with their original claim that studies showed "fewer high IQ women".

View on HN

His argument from the wider variance in male IQs directly supports the statement of "fewer high IQ women", given some definitions of that term (i.e. where exactly you place the cutoff for high IQ). His follow up served to clarify the ambiguous term. I'm not sure where you're coming from here.

How so? You're evading supporting your argument. You just make claims.

I'm not sure you even realized you changed arguments when you switched from "there aren't as many high-IQ women" to "there is a higher variance in the distribution of male intelligence as there is in women". I'm curious to see how you'll rebut, and, if you do, will use your rebuttal to gauge how detailed my response will be.

(Obviously, there is a [weak] rebuttal that preserves the original claim with the new distributional argument).

If M ~ N(u,v_m) and W ~ N(u,v_w) [where N refers to the normal distribution], with v_m > v_w, then P(M > T) > P(W > T) for all T > u. I.e if the trait is approximately normally distributed with equal means among two groups, the group with the higher variance will exhibit more extreme values. Why is this a change in argument?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com