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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

The most surprising thing about this post is that 5% of OKCupid males and 10% of OKCupid females think the earth is larger than the sun. WTF?!

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I think you also have to take jokers and drunken misclicks into account. I'm willing to bet that the true numbers are significantly lower.

Then again, it's pretty bad for anyone in America in 2010 to answer this question incorrectly.

When I got this question I answered it incorrectly, just because it was so ridiculous :)

That would explain why the numbers are so high, but not why the number for women is twice the number for men. Are there that many more female jokers or drunken misclickers?

Or drunken crossdressing jokers?

Possible explanation: A larger percentage of fake accounts on OKC are female accounts? Women are much more likely to be messaged, so if you're trolling it makes sense that you would choose a female account.

According to a Gallup poll from 1999 18% of Americans think the Sun revolves around the Earth. Another 3% had no opinion. North Western University did a similar poll in 2005 and got a similar result of 20%

I'm rather curious about those who had no opinion.

"Does the sun revolve around the earth?" "Meh, maybe? Never thought about it. I don't really look up or care"

What would be interesting to me is if they broke that statistic down geographically, such that we could measure ignorance (or at least the effectiveness of the local education system) by region or country.

I wish they had asked more stupid questions. Though I honestly don't care if gay or straight people answered correctly, more curious as to how dumb people in general really are.

They probably have, I just hope the release the information at some point.

Welcome to the real world.

so what is the real world % of people who think the Earth is larger than the Sun? surely OKCupid has some selection bias?

surely OKCupid has some selection bias?

"People who like other people"?

people looking for a date != "people who like other people"

first thing I thought there are much more high school kids than anyone else. Then I found this: http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/older_lover/Age-Distribution-With...

and this: http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/09/selection_bias_everywhe...

I'm surprised nobody has suggested the possibility of people not interpreting the question literally.

I.e. "larger" in terms of what? Importance? Population? Perceived size from our point of view?

Absolute size is the interpretation that makes most sense to us male geeks, but it is not by any means the only option you could think of.

To me that would explain why more women pick the unusual option, as they are more likely to think outside the rational box. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are ignorant.

Probably poor reading comprehension. 100 questions in and it's easy to pick the wrong answer.

They need Google-style auto-correction ;)

It's a curious result, but as a debunking it's a bit of a strawman. Someone (whom I don't agree with, should be noted) wishing to keep gays from teaching don't do so because they worry about the quality of the lectures, but because they don't want their kids to have a gay role model, acting as an endorsement for homosexuality.

No, it's pure "ick factor" and a desire to keep the existence of gay people off their child's radar.

I don't see anyone outlawing morbidly obese teachers or teachers with multiple speeding tickets, although those are not attributes you look for in a role model.

EDIT: It could also be an honest opinion that homosexuals are dangerous; still not related to lesson quality, but more honest than the role model justification.

Even if it's "ick factor", what does that have to do with lesson quality?

Also, I've found that not assuming the worst possible about people I disagree with helps a lot in creating a world view that isn't completely black and white.

I don't think it's that surprising. Not everyone is scientifically literate, and there's always going to be a certain percentage of people who will come up with the wrong answer when queried on a basic scientific or historical fact. And this group does tend to skew female.

You DO realize that by almost any measure, about 50% of Americans are below-average, don't you?

If there was ever a convincing argument that women are dumber than men, this is it.

...and that's the fastest I've ever accumulated downvotes.

Come on guys, I didn't say that women are dumber than men. I just said that this is the single most convincing piece evidence for that. Doesn't say much for the existing evidence given that this is a crappy non-scientific OKCupid blog post, now does it? Knee-jerkers.

> Come on guys, I didn't say that women are dumber than men. I just said that this is the single most convincing piece evidence for that.

You're missing the deeper implication that you're cruising around the Internet looking for, and pouncing on, such evidence. Why is it important to you whether or not women are dumber than men?

> given that this is a crappy non-scientific OKCupid blog post

In my opinion, OKCupid's OKTrends blog posts are second only to MythBusters in putting out interesting, entertaining, scientific answers to questions for which a lot of people are either completely uncertain of the answer or have terrible misconceptions.

>Why is it important to you whether or not women are dumber than men?

Wouldn't you want to know if you carry within you an inherent deficit or advantage? I do. That's why I got my genome sequenced. Now I know my risk of colorectal cancer. Knowledge is power. Blah blah blah.

Also it's interesting. And clearly it's not just interesting to me, but to HN as a whole. There's a sex-related post on the front page practically every time it loads.

>OKCupid's OKTrends blog posts are second only to MythBusters in putting out interesting, entertaining, scientific answers to questions

So you admit that in terms of one scientific fact that has implications for a person's understanding of size, scale, and space, women are inferior to men.

You're missing the deeper implication that you're cruising around the Internet looking for, and pouncing on, such evidence. Why is it important to you whether or not women are dumber than men?

Perhaps he is, in fact, cruising the information looking for evidence that women are dumber than men. So what? His desire for knowledge harms no one. You imply (without evidence) that he is biased. What is the point of your comment, besides lowering his status?

The point of my comment was to reply to his comment which was questioning why he was downvoted. I downvoted neither of his comments.

Come on guys, I didn't say that women are dumber than men. I just said that this is the single most convincing piece evidence for that.

Well, I think we need to spend a little time agreeing on the definition of "dumber." Does it mean IQ? General knowledge? Something else?

If we can agree on a test of some kind that we can apply to a single person, how do we determine whether a group of people is smarter or dumber than another group of people?

For example, let's say Test "A" is to ask a single question, whether the Sun is larger than the Earth. Let's say that 90% of group "M" gets this question right, while only 10% of group "F" gets this question right. Is group "M" smarter than group "F?" That doesn't make any sense because the group isn't an organism, it isn't smart or dumb.

And we can't extrapolate much about members of "F." What if "F" consists of 100 people, 90 of whom are illiterate and the remaining 10 are Astronomy PHds, while "M" consists of 100 high school seniors. Is "F" now smarter than "M" because ten of its members are more educated than all of the Ms?

Selection bias matters. Remember that the OkCupid sample consists of people who are dating online. The information is interesting, but might be skewed. Perhaps a lot of educated, intelligent women are in monogamous relationships and not dating?

We see this phenomenon in job hunting, where a random sample of programmers looking for a job is a terrible representation of programmers overall.

Sure, selection bias matters. I never said OKcupid was statistically valid. In fact, in my second comment I disparaged it.

First, you are confusing lack of intelligence with ignorance. A person can be intelligent, but ignorant of basic facts. It's not terribly common in our society, where basic education is afforded to most, but it's a distinction that needs to be made.

Second, the fact that more women got the answer wrong doesn't tell you anything about the average intelligence of each gender. What if women's intelligence distribution has a greater variance? There could be a bigger number of women (compared to men) at the extreme ends of the intelligence spectrum. I don't believe that's the case, but the "argument" you present is far from "convincing".

It's an individual fact, certainly, but it has greater implications for a person's understanding of the world. A professor I knew in college taught a non-majors general biology class, and every semester he put this question on- order according to size, the following: cell, organism, atom, molecule, organ. Apparently this was a very difficult question for them, and it expresses a fundamental lack of understanding of how things work. If they don't know that the Earth is smaller than the Sun, then how can they understand that the Earth is a satellite of the Sun?

>What if women's intelligence distribution has a greater variance?

Sure. But if anything, it has a smaller variance (if there is a difference; the "greater" male variance hypothesis is a bit under fire recently.)

If they don't know that the Earth is smaller than the Sun, then how can they understand that the Earth is a satellite of the Sun?

To be completely fair, there are stellar bodies much smaller than earth which an earth-sized planet could easily be a satellite of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_black_hole

Then again, if you know about such objects, you probably also know the earth is bigger than the sun.

>Then again, if you know about such objects, you probably also know the earth is bigger than the sun.

Tongue-in-cheek?

This suggests another reason why 5-10% of people got the question wrong - they weren't paying attention and clicked/typed the wrong choice.

(Ok, I admit it - I just don't know anything about astronomy. Also, elephants are bigger than the moon, right?)

Right, but there's still a sex difference. So you're saying women lack attention to detail?

Perhaps smart women are less likely to use the site than smart men. I have heard that more men than women use dating sites, so the intelligence distributions are also probably different.

Depends on how you define "bigger." If that refers to amount of mass versus volume then a stellar black hole is an extremely large object.

The question is actually difficult because an organism can be an microorganism or an animal with organs, so it's impossible to say which ones bigger. Also i'd say if you don't know that the earth is bigger than the sun than you most likely don't know how gravity works, and not that the earth is a satellite of the Sun.

The question is actually difficult because an organism can be an microorganism or an animal with organs, so it's impossible to say which ones bigger.

Only if you allow for comparisons between life forms. If you assume that he's speaking of a single life form that contains all the systems then the question is well-defined.

> If they don't know that the Earth is smaller than the Sun, then how can they understand that the Earth is a satellite of the Sun?

These facts are independent.

Not really. Whether or not a system is a satellite relationship is based on their comparative masses and orbits. If the Sun where the less massive we would refer to it as the satellite (well, there would be a lot more consequences, but that's one). If the objects were approximately equal we would call it a binary system with the more massive being referred to as the primary.

You just switched from volume to mass.

I did and I mentioned in a cousin comment that it's because astrological designations like "planet" and "orbit" are based on mass, not on volume.

Actually it's men with a wider curve. More mentally retarded and more geniuses are male. (FWIW)

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