Why Are More Boys Than Girls Retarded in School? (1928) | Hacker News Reader

Why Are More Boys Than Girls Retarded in School? (1928)

jstor.org

24 pointssublinear18 comments

About 15 years ago I first heard that men generally have higher standard deviation than women over various measurable properties including IQ. I didn't know it was controversial until Damore's controversy at Google in 2017.

I still think it sounds highly plausible, since I didn't hear of any studies that would disprove it (links are appreciated).

If true it would constitute a benign at least partial explanation for men/women imbalance in some professions.

More about this on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis

IMHO the evidence points to this being a cultural effect that can be changed with policy.

Do you think it's fully cultural? I agree that it can partly be the case, but I doubt that it would explain all of the difference for several reasons:

- Wikipedia cites the study that showed this effect for the brain size (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8675415/)

- IQ is known to be mostly genetic (see e.g. Pinker's "Blank Slate"), so it's unlikely (though not impossible) that the differences in IQ stddev are cultural

- Wikipedia cites another study that found similar effect in birds: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7423667/. This kind of difference could evolve due to different reproduction strategies for males and females.

I suspect things have changed somewhat since 1928, but it likely boils down to something quite normal, like, boys are interested in different things to women. Which is surely just an evolutionary thing.

Its also likely to be a direct reflection, back then, of the expectations of that era.

The social construct is such an abstract nonexistent idea that many think is the way it should be, but it that just because we have the ability to reason etc...

Look at where we are holistically, are we really better off today if you look at every comparable data point across time?

The reasoning I've always heard (over 15 years or so) was that girls/women exhibit autistic traits differently from boys/men, leading to a different in diagnosis rates.

People who think (consciously or not) that all things have massively changed since the golden age / bad old days are often wrong.

Less genome redundancy? Men have a single copy of most X chromosome genes. So if any of them are defective and affect cognition, there is no backup. Women have a second X chromosome, that reduces the impact of a defective gene there. Daltonism and hemophilia are less prevalent in women for this reason.

Content aside, the typeface and general presentation of information is beautiful.

Race and gender based IQ research is having its moment on Twitter.

Larry Summers just got appointed to the board of OpenAI.

Is society ready to have this conversation? Probably not.

In the case of boys, you have both poles covered: more retarded guys than girls in average but also a similar chunk with gifted guys.

On race, more than race itself the issue lies on lacking proper food and resources and parents or neighbours having a role to be reflected.

Tulsa used to it fine in the US with succeding, educated Black people, but you know what happened.

Don't open that can of worms, because it can backslash lots of smartasses.

There are also significance physical differences between the sexes, but not between races. Maybe hormones or genes have an effect? The former should be easily testable.

AFAIK the greatest genetic variability is within sub-Saharan Africa, the most likely variations will be within groups there. Comparing white to black Americans seems a waste of time at best, and looking for a desired result at worst.

Opponents of such studies are seem to make the racist assumption that the only difference that might be found is that white people are superior. Surely the opposite is just as likely (maybe even more so as black Africans have fewer non-homo sapiens genes).

I is also pretty certain that any difference (between races or sexes) would not be swamped by individual variation. The only noticeable difference would be in the far tails of the distributions.

American Society has been having this conversation for over a hundred years.

It's amazing how long racist nonsense can sustain itself in a culture once it gets started.

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