timorl @timorl@qoto.org

Two of my friend once wrote a paper that was vaguely related to intelligence, and they got it in to a quite big IQ research conference. They came back complaining how racist the whole thing was. So far, so good, maybe they are just SJWs confronted with actual Science™ for the first time, and seeing slightly shifted Gauss curves made their snowflake hearts melt into tears. But they went into considerably more detail and... yeah.

One of the main parts of the event was a talk from an invited guest, clearly revered within the community. The talk was about differences in IQ between races, and at the end the presenter went into a rant, including claims that it can be inferred from the IQ curves and the distributions of jobs in the US that the average black neurosurgeon should be an office drone (this part might differ slightly in details, as I'm relaying from memory what my friend was relaying from memory, but the gist should be intact). Now, considering that black neurosurgeons are AFAIK not disastrously incompetent, we can infer that the person giving the talk had trouble in their relation to reality in one of the following ways:

1. The influence of IQ on neurosurgeon ability is far smaller than they believed.

2. The differences in IQ are far smaller than the research indicates.

Obviously one can ask "¿Por qué no los dos?", and I suspect that is the correct answer. Influence of IQ on personal success is hard to prove (the attempt I know of produced no evidence of this, while producing evidence that average IQ correlates with quality of life within a country), and it's a simple fact that personal beliefs of researchers are biasing studies in nontrivial ways (there are some famous ESP studies that had very hard to explain and apparently unintentional problems). Considering the latter, the fact that the IQ research community (or at least a significant part of it – I'm not sure whether this was _the_ biggest IQ conference, but it was definitely mainstream enough) seems to be reality-defying racist implies that their results should be taken with a grain of salt.

And yes, I only mean a grain not completely discredited – they seem to try following proper methodology and sometimes get credible effects that are big enough that they cannot be completely explained away by their bias. Just don't believe any titles or abstracts automatically, you have to dig deeper to actually learn something.

@velartrill

@velartrill There are probably some differences, because why wouldn't there be? After all, minds are obviously affected by genes, and since groups of humans have sometimes lived apart for long enough for the genes to diverge in other areas, they probably also diverged in this one. However, it's relatively unlikely for these differences to be significant in most cases, as the evolutionary pressures on the minds weren't sufficiently varied between isolated societies. I don't want to go into evolutionary psychology too much (mostly because I'm not famililar with it enough to recognize the difference between a fringe theory and some actual findings), so I'm not gonna be guessing in which situations such pressures could arise and remain constant over sufficient periods of time. Let's just say I expect this is quite rare.

If you focus on IQ, there are the Ashkenazi, who are poster-boys for the whole theory, since they carry genes that have been identified to correlate with IQ (and autism risk, yay...). They managed to end up in a situation in which they both were forced to have children within their group, and forced to rely on jobs that required lots of mental work *and* had a culture which assigned higher status to people being... nerdy (the latter points are probably intertwined). And even for them the actual influence of genes is heavily intertwined with the aforementioned culture, so it's not that easy to say how significant which one is.

Within the topic of IQ, I just remembered an anectode that might be somewhat important as far as trusting IQ research goes, separate post incoming.

@velartrill
> if you haven't seen it for yourself, consider yourself very lucky

I have, both from women and men, but extremely rarely. I can think of maybe up to 10 instances over my life, depending on what exactly you consider an instance.

> i am not the outlier here

Well, IIRC you do have a mental ilness, so I wouldn't expect your experience to be typical. On the other hand I don't know the details, so I'm not sure how relevant this is.

Perhaps more to the point this might be culture dependent – I'm not american and I expect there might be some cultural differences in emotioinal expression. We might have also lived in somewhat different subcultures within our cultures, which could explain the difference in our experience?

> it's the one thing that works in the vast majority of situations, and doing anything else will make matters worse.

My experience is completely different. In such situations I attempt to empathize with the other persons emotions, listen to what they are saying and respond. So far this has served me well, and my relationships with the people involved seem fine. I am pretty sure that in at least one of the cases attempting to "take charge" would have made matters much worse.

This advice is dangerous not only because situations and the people going through such episodes vary, but also the responders. Maybe some people are better at taking charge, but others have different conflict resolution strategies. I suspect it's more important that the person executing such strategy does it well, rather than tries using a specific one.

Yes, men and women are different, contrary to what liberalism would like to believe (and I actually too, but well, not believing in reality seldom helps). But the difference is not *that* big – humans have some significant cognitive differences from other mammals, which I would argue diminish the relative importance of gender differences. The variance in character traits is big enough that any sweeping generalizations over all, or even just most, people of one gender must fail. You still get strong statistical evidence for any specific gender related trait, but there is enough of these that a majority of people will have some of them atypical for their gender.

I'm not convinced that our civilisation is failing (maybe the US is, but that's not the whole civilisation), so this argument doesn't convince me at all. Some parts of Chesterton's Fence have definitely been buldozed with too much zeal, but from my point of view the net effect was still positive.

Besides, our civilisation went through many changes unrelated to gender roles in a very short period of time. Focusing on just these changes oversimplifies the whole thing.

I understand you won't go back to being a feminist – I suspect that even if we agreed about all the facts, there would still be enough value differences between us that we would disagree about overall goals. I'm just trying to point out that I think you have overcorrected from the feminist beliefs into something that is again not accurate – I hope you stay open to the possibility that this is the case. My thesis is that gender-related forces are not the main thing driving human behaviour – they are massively more important than your previous ideology stated (which might make them appear larger), but they are only one of many factors influencing people.

Sorry for the shitty psychoanaysis in the last paragraph, but I think it was necessary. If it's any consolation, writing it down made me wonder if I'm not overcorrecting for some of the ideologies I have held previously (not related to gender at all), but this requires more introspection to fully explore.

@velartrill I'm pretty sure you are massively overgeneralizing. Neither is this kind of mental state as common as you describe, nor as drastic, nor exclusive to women (although I guess you might not be saying the last part?). And the effects of reactions you describe are definitely not as clear cut – different people react massively differently in emotional situations and generalizing to "always attempt to take charge when a woman is emotional" is a recipe for disaster.

In general I think you are overstating the importance of gender in many areas. Do you really think it's that crucial, or is it just an attempt to (over)correct for the liberal/parts of feminism insistence that gender is completely irrelevant?