A certain fraction of the dumbest -- most foolish? -- males behave in ways that get themselves killed. From 'misuse of power tools' to 'disrespecting gang members' -- they end up in an early grave. Are the numbers such that survivorship bias could explain some of the result?
This is a very good point, as the reported difference increases into early adulthood. Also wonder if criminality -> imprisonment add to possible selection bias
I think this holds a lot of merit, and I am skeptical that IQ or g distributions are really normal distributions, because it is very difficult to live below a certain level of IQ but there is no similar limiting factor on the upside. That should skew the median and mean values of the distribution, and especially if males have a much wider spread that should lead to a more skewed outcome. Then again, if most of the testing is in school children that shouldn't affect things quite as much as testing in adults.
I am really skeptical of where they get the testing results for adults, and would want to see how those were collected. IQ testing seems to be pretty standard when intaking counselling patients, but that is a very highly selectively biased process so one hopes they are not using that. Yet still, how otherwise does one get a bunch of adults to sit down and take a few hours worth of tests that isn't itself a huge selection bias?
Very true, although it would only catch the 18-24 crowd, and the gap gets huge the older people get according to that graph. Still, I would put a lot more weight on studies that look at compulsory testing sources.
Problem with using compulsory military service tests is that they often use test results to decide your job, so people might fake bad results for preferred jobs.
In Finland it atleast used to be that if you tested too well you got 6 month extension on your slavery.
Response-rates might be biased by IQ or SES but the total number of men who die young in any modern society is too small to substantially affect the averages here.
There’s also the matter of parallel parking. I don’t think I’ve ever known a woman who was confident at it, and plenty who admit they can’t do it at all.
True story, once in my youth I was walking down the street of a major city with a friend when a girl pulls up to us in her car, rolls down the window, and asks, “Can either of you guys parallel park? Would you be willing to park my car right here?”
My friend and I looked at each other astonished. She was fairly pretty and I was single at the time so I was about to say “sure” but he said dismissively, “Psshh, there’s a parking garage 3 blocks that way.”
I was annoyed, he was married, but he insisted she was just abusing her good looks for a favor and wouldn’t have gone for me anyway. Yeah, maybe, but not much of a wingman, was he?
This is a dumb point. 1.77% of men die before age 30 in the US. For women it is 1.29%. This is a miniscule difference. It has a negligible effect on mean IQs (plus Richard already disproved a stronger version of this argument [selection bias] in the article).
I realised what it is that I most like about Richard Hanania. Obviously he's smart and curious, but in addition, he has absolutely no shame in telling you what he thinks about anything, regardless of liberal pieties etc. I'm not being snarky, it makes his posts super valuable, I don't have to filter for BS. It's refreshing!
Wow, you're incessant trolling seems to indicate that you really took this post personally. Chill out! Richard never said you're dumb. Being a girl doesn't mean you have a low IQ. I'm a girl too and was from the smartest in my class in school. The very fact that you have a blog and have written books probably means that you are able to express your thoughts and ideas clearly and are likely smarter than most people out there. So take a chill pill.
1) It's ironic that Jensen 1998 gets cited this way. That chapter is actually a very weak part of the book, and he doesn't even provide sources for some of the claims, as he assumed readers would take them for granted. Clearly, they did and still do. Again, amusingly, Jensen seems to have changed his mind on this matter after writing the book. He was not particularly interested in the sex difference question.
2) Lynn misunderstands Jensen's method (correlated vectors). He thinks the correlations are Cohen's d estimates, but that's not the case. These correlations don't correspond to gap sizes, one has to look at the regression slope + intercept to get that.
3) Spatial ability is sometimes in some batteries, but yes, it is often left out probably due to the inconvenient large male advantage. Reaction time/speeded tests also show a moderate to large male advantage and are not normally included.
4) Women don't actually have an advantage on verbal fluency, at least, not to any noticeable degree. It's amusing this claim keeps being repeated. I speculate this has to do with the blabbering woman stereotype. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916221082116
5) We have a meta-analysis on the way which confirms Lynn's pattern using lots and lots of studies as well as standard meta-analysis methodology (Lynn used very simple methods because he was old). Depending on a few method choices, the male advantage in adulthood comes out to about 3 IQ before any adjustment for reliability. There isn't really any way to make this go away.
6) There are a few sophisticated thinkers who have found a way out of this, sort of. They cling to the hope of this study of opposite sex siblings in NLSY79. https://twitter.com/Scientific_Bird/status/1740507243043287197https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289606001115?via%3Dihub Deary et al 2007 used some fancy SEMs to make the sex gap "go away", at least, p > .05. In fact the men still scored about 1 IQ higher. They didn't report their confidence interval, or tell the readers how many models they had to try to get this result. I don't think this result will hold if the data are reanalyzed. In any case, Emily Willoughby analyzed the adult opposite sex siblings in the Minnesota family study and found that brothers were smarter than sisters by about 3-4 IQ points. There are probably a few more datasets with adult siblings of opposite sex where one could repeat this analysis. The whole point of this analysis is to control for some of the potential selectivity biases in dumb men not responding to surveys as much as dumb women do (presumably due to women's higher compliance/conscientiousness in general).
7) I think hereditarian thinking will move towards Lynn on this matter, just as it has on every other matter. You might like to know that Lynn was one of the earliest promoters of embryo selection for intelligence enhancement. See Lynn's Eugenics from 2001.
I cant understand something. Why did lynn explain gender gap by evolutionary hypothesis? Women and Men have same DNA and natural selection history. Gender chromosomes are very small part of genome.
The Y chromosome is by far the smallest chromosome in humans, and both men and healthy/regular women only have one functioning copy of their X chromosomes. It goes without saying that the Y chromosome still makes a world of difference, and that even subtle mutations in terms of numbers of basepairs changed can have substantial effects in terms of phenotype, but the evolutionary argument is fundamentally still "men have more biological advantages than women today" --> "what we have today is because of evolution" --> "men evolved their advantages because it's evolutionarily better", which is just a secular form of "God made us that way".
It makes sense if you fully accept the premise and invent a framework that all premises must conform to, but doesn't explain any of the exceptions that could just as easily be argued. For example, apparently Lynn says it's women who exist to be beautiful and Richard says that's basic science; tell that to birds and incels/facemaxxers.
More importantly, the genetic basis is rather lacking. I believe there is a general consensus that the agricultural age tended towards fewer men having more wives, but that doesn't necessarily select for Y-chromosome encoded male intelligence. If the inherent Y chromosome male advantage of superior strength is what allows them more wives, there's no reason for intelligence-favoring alleles to be found in the Y chromosome. Instead, the male offspring of more intelligent wives would find an advantage over the male offspring of less intelligent wives, but women would still not only be carriers, but very likely genetic beneficiaries of such selection.
Can you speak to the issue of defining intelligence with appropriate ecological validity?
I believe it was reading your blog that I first encountered the idea that because men and women know different things and tend to solve different problems, inherently gender neutral ideas about knowledge and problem solving are difficult to construct. Of course one might be tempted to define problem solving by proxy with "success", but that seems difficult; fertility would appear to be the most outside-view interpretation there. And men and women clearly often succeed in different ways in society on other terms.
Maybe I missed something because I thought this was actually already well known. I’ve also never been particularly bothered by it, but I also believe that inherent human worth isn’t dependent on intelligence. The interesting question to me is why the gender that has, on average, higher IQ scores is also (by many measures) less successful, at a population level, in modern western society than the gender with lower average IQ scores. I’m curious about what that says about how incentives have shifted over time - the evolutionary pressures that shaped us are (for lack of a better word) blunted in our current society, and traits that once led to reproductive success may have become maladaptive. Or maybe the picture has always been more complex, since a species can continue successfully even when a fairly small percent of males are reproductively successful, so long as many females are.
Mostly because modern western society has been broadly re-engineered to both force artificial equality and actively punish what was, until recently, perfectly normal male behavior, like competition, not wanting to sit down for eight fucking hours a day, or engaging in any behavior more risky than staying in a desk.
Also, you've hit on the broader point that the likes of Scott Alexander has made which has stopped me from having any patients with people who dismiss the g-factor. Namely, that individuals overwhelming response to their own IQ is to say "yeah, that sound about right":
We have an incredible measure of people's capabilities and needs that the activist class of the nation overwhelmingly seeks to invalidate and destroy because it goes against their pre-existing beliefs. It'll be a long fight to destroy this, but doing so is essential for the betterment not only of mankind, but of each one of the uncountable millions of individuals we punish every day for the crime of not wanting to see something we don't like.
In virtually every domain, men have much more variation in ability than women. It makes intuitive sense to me for men to dominate the extremes since the payoff for being amazing at something vs average is much higher. Women follow a more uniform distribution all around.
If you think back to public high school, which is pretty much the last time in our life where selection effects don’t factor in, you can see this in action. In gym class, think about the difference in athletic ability between the captain of the basketball team and the least athletic boy in the class. The gap between these two is much more drastic than the gap between the most athletic and least athletic girls.
In musical ability it’s the same way. When I think back to concert band in middle and high school, making the cut required about average musical ability. Many more boys missed the cut than girls, even on male dominated instruments like drums and saxophone. However, on virtually every instrument the best players were boys. Same goes for drawing, singing, dancing, virtually everything.
What's your view on the "extreme/autistic male brain" theory? Learning an instrument, much like learning chess and other skills, is primarily a function of how much effort is put in. A subset of highly-focused men have the capacity to write code, practice guitar, or play time-wasting video games for every waking hour.
It’s totally bro science AKA just a vibe, I’m not married to the idea. But I’m not as familiar with the world of classical music so I can’t really speak on that. But I am familiar with Jazz, where the high level players are pretty much all male, with a handful of exceptions ofc. I’m certain sexism plays some role in that, but physical attributes like lung capacity, hand size/muscle strength, and overall dexterity+ hand eye coordination would all be non trivial advantages that men could have on many instruments, even putting aside the more controversial theories about male vs female sexual strategies.
It’s also worth mentioning that in my experience, high school orchestra was about 90% women. Far more girls than boys took up violin and other instruments in my fairly ordinary upper middle class suburban school district. So if they’re roughly even at the highest professional levels that would support my point unless my experience was a major outlier.
I also have experience in electronic music, which is a decidedly inclusive environment, where factors like lung capacity don’t come into play, and the genre is enjoyed by men and women equally. Yet top DJs and producers are like 95% men.
I think your experience at a classical music conservatory is closer to being an outlier than mine, since everyone you come into contact with at that level are all in the top 0.1% of talent level to begin with. You’re dealing with people who have amazing skills to begin with, so differences in things like lunch capacity at that level only have an effect on the margins. At that level, there’s not going to be a big difference between men and women because there’s not likely to be a difference between any two people to begin with. The vast majority of people who pick up a violin will never be at that level, because of a mix of factors that mostly come down to innate talent combined with environment.
But ultimately, the highest levels are the end point of a variety of filters people pass through starting at a young age where the talent pool gets smaller and smaller. But ultimately getting to that point requires picking up a violin at a young age to begin with. If 9 out of every 10 kids who pick up a violin are girls, and the elite professional orchestras are 70% women, that would indicate that men are overrepresented at the highest levels, even if at that level there’s not much of a difference between men and women. The first time many elite musicians pick up a violin is grade school orchestra, this is the origin of the talent pool that then passes through multiple filters, and I’m saying in my memory that this was about 90% female. I don’t think my school was a major outlier, but maybe it was and literally everywhere else in America kids who start violin lessons are 50/50 boys and girls.
Obviously with DJing and producing electronic music, while it’s not as much based on music talent as being accepted to a music observatory is, liking and being good at it is absolutely essential to making it a career. It’s like a 9-5, it has to be your life if you want to make it your career. The vast majority of people who try fail. Most of the people who make it in electronic music are incredibly talented at it.
My whole point is that there are more men at the tail ends of the bell curve of human ability, more women at the top. So they’re the same “on average” but the distribution of men is more varied. This doesn’t mean there isn’t variance in women. I think this applies across domains, beyond just iq. I gave music as one example. Again, this is just total “bro science” and vibe based on what I observe in the world. I could be totally wrong.
I think the thing is that nothing you’re saying here is actually refuting my basic point. I’m not shifting the goal posts here. Plus I love how you cut off half of that “even if at that level...” sentence to completely change the context a refute a different point to what I was actually making.
Obviously the factors that go into someone being an elite musician are complex. There are a million factors at play. But sometimes with a complex system, we can design of simple mental model to get a fuzzy picture of some aspect of it.
Let’s say you have 100 kids given a violin at age 3. Of those 100, let’s say 6 of them end up in a major cities orchestra at the highest level as adults. I have no idea what the number is, but it’s obviously small since only the best of the best get there. You’re dealing with the far right tail of the bell curve. If it’s 3 men and 3 women, this doesn’t mean men and women have an equal chance of being great musicians, because we don’t know how many of those original 100 were boys vs girls. Get it? Maybe boys and girls play violin at equal rates, but this is not my experience. In my experience, kids who play violin are mostly girls, even if that’s not the case historically.
I expect "pregnancy brain" plays a role in the relative performance during adulthood. Populations with greater TRF probably have a larger gap in IQ test scores.
Men probably need more raw intelligence to compensate for their impulsivity and lack of discipline. These days it’s not enough, though, since women are doing much better in school.
Oh, the sweet irony of Harvard which so earnestly defended affirmative action all the way to its demise at the Supreme Court has now become a national laughing stock precisely because of its affirmative action hiring of its plagiarizing president. Now, at least the most obvious example of the malignancy has been excised.
No, it's okay as long as you don't affront ethnic groups with institutional power. Then it can serve as the pretext for getting rid of you. Kind of like how they got AL Capone on tax evasion.
Anybody who lives in the real world or has studied Thomas Sowell or Steven Pinker should know that comparing any two groups by any measure will almost never yield identical results. That should be the default intuition. The woke would have it otherwise.
Cool, so when is Sowell going to acknowledge the significant influence of heritability on poorer black performance instead of constantly blaming “culture” exclusively?
Yeah, that matches my intuitions despite having been told the opposite my whole life.
There's also Berkson's paradox, though, which is insanely strong for me personally here. That is to say, stupid men are near-completely invisible to me - I edit them out of my landscape except for threat assessment purposes, and forget them as quickly as possible when they are forced upon my awareness. This doesn't happen with women. Thus, my experience is that women are much dumber (much more than 3-4 points). And of course I am unable to forget or overlook some truly stunning examples of male stupidity, which makes me also biased to believe the "more male morons and geniuses" idea.
One wrinkle for me: Prior to learning more about these topics, especially as a kid, I was often confused as a result of the various personality gaps. My day to day holistic impressions suggested women were smarter than men, whereas actual conversations involving analytic reasoning suggested otherwise.
I really appreciate your willingness to tackle a topic that’s politically incorrect. Truth should be more important than what any of us wants. I do have to admit that as I’m a female software engineer whose sense of identity probably centers a bit more than it should around having always been considered intelligent, I am somewhat biased toward reading this and trying to find flaws in your reasoning and data.
I wanted to point out that your evolutionary biology explanation may have missed the mark. You said that female sexual value was more determined by physical attractiveness, which I don’t think anyone could deny. However, evolution does not select directly for sexual value, it selects for success in raising offspring who reproduce. Obviously sexual value plays a role in this (you can’t successfully raise offspring you don’t have), but I see a few issues here - first, genetics account for only a part of what we would consider attractiveness, with lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, and disease prevention and grooming/presentation also playing large roles. Second, I would argue that the ability to select a good mate and otherwise ensure your offspring’s access to resources and physical protection are far better predictors of successful reproduction of offspring than physical attractiveness, and all of those things take intelligence. This is borne out by the observation that highly attractive women don’t seem to have more offspring than women of average attractiveness, and I suspect this was true even in pre-modern times. Attractiveness does play a role in whether a man is willing to commit resources to raising the offspring he fathers with a woman, but only to some degree - the trope of men wanting to have sex with the hot chick but marry the responsible woman is a trope for a reason.
To me it comes down to how you define intelligence. Evolution has selected for men who successfully compete with other men for status, resources, and access to women (since a single high-status male can have many offspring over a lifetime) and it’s selected for women who are able to form alliances, be alert for danger, and secure resources and protection for their children. Since a female can have a comparatively smaller number of offspring in her life, females are more likely to invest in each individual offspring rather than maximizing the number of offspring. While men have an advantage in spacial reasoning, women tend to be good at tasks that require great attention to detail such as project management, tasks that require caring for others such as many jobs in the medical field, and may have some advantages in fields that involve building relationships and cooperation such as sales or politics. Most people will define intelligence as analytics, mathematical ability, and knowledge, but why do we define it that way? Why is that a better definition of intelligence than the ability to keep track of many small details, figure out where they fit on a timeline, build the relationships needed to get them done, and follow up and keep everything on track? Clearly this requires a great deal of brain power but we tend not to think of it as intelligence and it tends not to be the sort of ability measured by an IQ test.
In the end, we may find that men and women are on average better at different tasks, but each is optimized for evolutionary fitness based on their different reproductive characteristics. Calling some parts of evolutionary fitness “intelligence” while others are not considered to be intelligence may be an inexact science.
Can the notion that men are more present at both extremes also tilt the numbers somewhat? Men are more numerous at the low end of IQ, but also at the top end. So if the low end drops from the measurements, the high end weighs more on the final numbers. That could explain 1 or 2 more IQ points, and explain the discrepancy.
This is called the greater male variability hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis), and it argues that the average man is as intelligent as the average woman but that the standard deviation is bigger for men. I think Richard is arguing against the GMVH.
Then he needs to argue some more, because from the Wikipedia page it seems that modern studies tend to confirm the GMVH :) At least he should take it into account here as it could actually explain some of the difference.
The GMVH and males having higher average IQ are not mutually exclusive. RH does not argue with GMVH in this essay, just points out that it's insufficient to explain the data he does present.
I don't see it. He mentions the fact that more men are at the (low) margins of society, not at all the GMVH. I just checked again, nothing that relates to that precise theory.
I was going to inquire about this. Specifically, a perhaps 1/3 s.d. difference between two populations in IQ is significant only if lots of important things in life are strongly correlated with IQ. But as far as I can tell, that's not true. More IQ is useful, of course, but interpersonal skills are clearly more important, etc. etc. Where IQ becomes important is in certain narrow areas of endeavor that are, as it were, heavily g-loaded. Academia, STEM, and at the extreme, being a research-oriented mathematics professor come to mind. But when you're looking at small subsets that select hard on one factor, population variances start to matter as much as or more than population means -- the canonical example is that while men are on the average taller than women, 7 of the 10 shortest humans on record are male. So in the narrow areas where it is practically important, variances may be more important than means.
IQ is a measure of general intelligence, which is correlated with every activity involving intellectual or creative imput. And not just the obvious ones like mathematics researchers. It's a valuable tool in physical pursuits as well. Not enough to make up for a lack of baseline athletic capability, but the smarter athletes still learn new things faster, and process information more quickly, which absolutely helps as long as their body can take the demands.
The only reason it doesn't correlate even more with positive life outcomes than it already does is because:
1) There are a lot of negative physical- and mental-health problems correlated with high IQ, both in those with it, and moreso in their children.
2) Modern society actively punishes objective measures of intelligence in a cruel, foolish quest to enforce societal-wide equality.
The first of these might forever be intractible, but it can be somewhat ammeliorated even today with what we know about human health, and we can expect better in the future assuming the Chinese don't cause the apocalypse with another leak from their bioweapons program. But there's zero reason we should tolerate the second in any form. It's an entirely artificial imposition on our society, brought on by completely unjustifiable measures such as Griggs v. Duke and the abolition of standardized tests for university admissions.
It's harder being on the left end than the right, and they're certainly more vulnerable to negative pathologies; but plenty of successful, functional, normal people have IQs in the 80s, even today. You're not gonna see them become doctors or engineers or CEOs, but they don't need to be.
It's the 70s and below where things get really hard. They don't even let you in the military anymore after that.
Also, there's a bunch of people who have really weird, dumb ideas about IQ, even if they accept the premise that it's both mostly genetic and immutable. Like the people who think that having an IQ in the 120s is somehow a bad thing. Midwittery, even.
There's nothing middle of the road about it. An IQ of 120 means you're smarter than 91% of Americans, and billions of people living today. Richard Feynman had an IQ in the low 120s, and he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Granted, Feynman's general intelligence was very likely higher than this IQ test measured, but that's why IQ only mostly rather than completely correlates with g, and you don't have to be doomed to professional mediocrity in a high-cognitive-demand profession just because you're only smarter than 90% of Americans rather than 99%.
It makes sense that men evolved to provide for the tribe and women evolved to nurture the tribe. Both of these are equally hard and equally important jobs in very different ways. IQ scores would reflect more abstract intelligence and favor men for that reason. Let me tell ya though every wife I know thinks their husband is a complete domestic moron. I believe the differences in sexes is a strength for our species. So let's embrace that men generally make better engineers and women generally make better nurses. We need both for a healthy society.
It wasn't so much about providing for the tribe -- at least, not at first -- as it was being smart enough to figure out how to kill the guy who was bigger and stronger than you. The construction of the first weapons totally rebalanced human culture, and in a much more egalitarian direction. It used to be we generally lived in harems ruled by an alpha male who allowed his subordinates just enough access to mating to keep them satiated, and the excess males were expelled to the wilderness. This declined rapidly when all of a sudden the biggest and strongest alpha could be undone by one unhappy rival scoring one lucky cut with a flint knife.
Nicholas Wade details this in A Troublesome Inheritance. I highly recommend the book.
How well does g or IQ correlate with the subjective sense of someone “seeming” smart. Not the way Trump seems smart to a rube, but the way a smart person can instantly tell who else is smart when having an intellectual conversation. Obviously this is subjective, but I find it easy to observe who is smart or not.
Based on this measure, in my broader social group, where husbands and wives all went through elite educational institutions, almost all husbands seem noticeably smarter than their wives. Can marrying up explain all of this? I can’t recall a notable contingent of very smart women who all failed to find a husband.
Also, in this same social group, while in college, women studied more hours and took school more seriously than guys. Even if the girls got slightly better grades, educational success per hour spent was almost certainly lower for the girls.
Last, men disproportionately achieve in high-iq fields like tech, finance, academia, etc. We can’t attribute all of that to “systemic” factors.
All this to say, men being smarter than women has seemed obvious to me since I was in high school. The incentives and publication bias in academia to not observe this is obvious. You say racial IQ differences are more controversial, but not by much. This seems like one of those things that many guys could get their wife to agree to privately, but is hard to say out loud.
I'll guess that a large part of "seeming smart" is really measuring "general knowledge", which men clearly outperform at all levels of IQ/g.
For example, my smartest girlfriend almost certainly had a higher IQ than me. But this wasn't immediately clear to me until I was studying for the GMAT and realized she was capable of effortlessly acing the math section, while I was scoring in something like the 95th percentile, but only with great effort. Worst of all, she was an English major who had basically just retained her math knowledge from high school; I had majored in Econ and at least taken statistics and Calc 3 in college and went on to work in finance.
BUT -- on a test of general knowledge, she would have scored really, really poorly. She didn't know anything about history, geography, politics, the world. She knew English-language literature, pop culture/celebrity gossip, and that was about it. She also didn't really have an interest in business or using her abilities to make money. But her brain, when she bothered to apply it to a g-loaded problem, could just demolish it utterly.
Fair points. So IQ measures brainpower, even if a person does not express it in obvious ways.
That said, I find it hard to believe that having more “general knowledge” is not indicative of a type of intelligence that may be missing from these quantitative scores. To display this knowledge you need to synthesize and recall complex ideas and narratives, and then apply and communicate that knowledge appropriately. That’s a cognitive skill.
Intelligence has nothing to do with knowledge. Intelligence is what we're born with. Knowledge is what we pick up along the way. Smart people can, and do, pick up enstupiding knowledge all the time. Hence why they tend to be overrepresented in both cults and terrorist organizations.
Yes, I'd posit the ability to gain knowledge is some combination of three abilities:
1. Raw memorization ability. Seems to be loosely correlated with g, cf. eidetic memories, or idiot savants with superlative capacity for memorization but not-so-high IQ.
2. Reasoning ability that helps you memorize better and fit facts into coherent narratives. This is the part you describe, which I'd agree is highly correlated with g.
3. Exposure to relevant information: do you read the news every day, or do you do something else with that time. Do you ever read about history, politics, science, etc., or not? I'd also say this is loosely correlated with g. With a low enough IQ you have no real interest in anything in the world except your immediate environment. But at higher levels of intelligence, there are a LOT of intellectually stimulating diversions that don't build general knowledge. In my old girlfriend's case, it was reading literary novels and being actively involved in a book club that discussed them. For someone else, probably male, it might be analyzing optimal play in chess, or (more likely these days) a particular video game.
Women tend to try hard in school and get better grades because it’s pro social behavior and they are more prone to social pressures. Getting good grades in school is primarily a norm following social pursuit not an intellectual one (not that it doesn’t mean they’re smart). Men are more likely to become experts and dominate fields because the pay off for being amazing vs just average is much greater for them than it is for women. Both in helping you get laid and making you admired by other men.
When you write : "the pay off for being amazing vs just average is much greater for [men] than it is for women"
do you mean :
(i) "The smartest women gain less advantages from their superior intelligence compared to the average women than what the smartest men gain from their superior intelligence compared to the average men"
For example (made up numbers): Whereas women above 120 IQ are 30% happier than women below 120 IQ, men above 120 IQ are 50% happier than men below 120 IQ.
or do you mean :
(ii) "The smartest women gain less advantages from their superior intelligence than the smartest men gain from their superior intelligence ?"
For example (made up numbers): whereas women above 120 IQ rate 5/10 on the hedonometer, men above 120 IQ rate 8/10 on the hedonometer.
Any evidence that substantiate either (i) or (ii) ?
I would say mostly 1, but now that I’m thinking about they may have more absolute gains from intelligence as well just because it works both ways. The costs of being low vs average intelligence also seems to be higher for men than women, for example much higher rates of homelessness, prison, etc and all sorts of outcomes associated with low intelligence.
I don’t like to think of things in terms of “happiness” because for many people the goal isn’t necessarily to be happy. But for the sake of the model I guess it useful to keep it simple.
I don’t have any scholarly evidence, it would be near impossible to design a study to support this argument anyway. I’m totally bro sciencing here and just spit balling a theory to explain my observations. But I think it’s intuitively very obvious that a man becoming highly skilled in something has a greater return socially, both in terms of their position among other men and in turn their success with women. An ugly guy who becomes incredible at guitar will earn the respect of his male peers and get laid. An ugly girl who becomes incredible at guitar will earn the respect of *male* peers, it won’t make much of a difference in her admiration from female peers vs being average, and it won’t have a major impact on her success with men romantically.
Of course this is an oversimplification, but in general we find this to be true. It makes sense from an evo psych standpoint as well. If men do more high risk, high reward hunting then the payoff for being the smartest is much greater than the payoff being the smartest low risk, low reward woman gatherer. Again, this is oversimplified but you can see how it makes sense.
I’m not insulting women, at all. Getting good grades and staying in school is pro social behavior, which is why women are better at it. Founding a tech company is high risk, high reward, which is why men are better at it. It doesn’t mean women aren’t smart, or can’t found a tech companies or take risks.
We probably have a fundamental disagreement over the degree in which differences in outcomes between men and women are rooted in biology vs social constructed.
This doesn’t mean I think one sex is “superior” or “smarter” than the other. In fact the entire premise of that idea is ridiculous.
If the “real” IQ difference is 2-4 pts (let’s say 3) and known methodology biases account for 1 point , then the purported true difference is approx 2 pts. Is that a meaningful difference in the real world? Or more for bragging rights?
Also, what are the confidence intervals on all of the point estimates gleaned from the studies? For example, whatever the point estimate difference is from each study, (or standard deviation quantum), it is important to know if that represented a statistically significant difference within that particular study. Now, each individual study may lack sample size and power to show a true difference (ie. false negative), so a “meta-analysis” framework is reasonable to increase statistical power….but if that is the case, any meta analysis needs to be methodologically rigorous to make sure the data being combined is being used in a legit fashion.
All that said, it’s not inconceivable that males may have slightly higher IQ, given that male brains are larger even when indexed to physical size (weight, height, BMI, BSA, or whatever metric of size you want). But it is important that such a positive assertion be sustained by scientifically and statistically valid data.
Small diffs on the average can become large diffs at the extremes (and men are more variable to begin with.) It's basically another argument that patriarchy just happens by default in a state of nature, even before you get into personality differences.
I generally agree with the conclusion. Though I think if there are big areas of female advantage that aren't really tested, they are social areas. The ability to read people, "read the room", etc.
Of course, a lot of social ability is something that is distinct from intelligence, and in some cases, intelligence may hamper it. This tradeoff is likely at least part of the reason why human intelligence hasn't been selected for more aggressively by natural selection. In the hunter-gatherer environment, the marginal survival advantage conveyed by intelligence is at some point more than offset by the fact that your interest in strange questions makes you a weirdo that has trouble forming alliances with other men and that women don't want to have sex with you.
But if we go beyond intelligence per se and talk about knowledge: men have more general knowledge, but women, at least traditionally, had more knowledge of what all their neighbors were up to. Of course, nowadays this has been partly displaced by things like celebrity gossip. But I wonder if this is purely a matter of how they spend their time, or if women have more innate ability for mentally mapping all the people they know and their relationship dynamics.
What's the point of deciding this question? It is true that in the past individual women were made inelegible for specific roles based on incorrect generalizations about women's fitness. But one does not need a correcte generalization not to treat individuals as individuas.
Why should anyone like or dislike a result? Maybe this is one of those questions for which a result could have no positive use, but possibly could be misused.
I agree that no one SHOULD, but many people DO dislike facts which contradict their worldview.
Western governments invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year into gender studies university departments producing "research" about the underrepresentation of women in $FIELD, and into initiatives (including grants and scholarships earmarked for women) intended to address the underrepresenation of women in $FIELD. If it were conclusively demonstrated that the underrepresentation of women in $FIELD is not primarily caused by sexism (or women lacking role models, or rigid childrearing practices etc.) but was in fact primarily caused by differences in male and female physiology, then those hundreds of millions of dollars could be invested in something more productive instead, and gender studies departments would be less well-equipped to fill the heads of impressionable undergrads with pseudoscientific nonsense. Sounds like a pretty "positive use" to me.
They're just playing the woke game in reverse. Not too smart to keep playing on someone else's chessboard. And even with the power of muh science behind everything, the longhouse is still winning for the time being, so either these "brilliant" men were tied up for four decades or there's more to it. By the way, you know this is all sorted by the fact that men's brains are, on average, larger and they have more testosterone, which makes them more competitive and focused. But, as a consequence, they're also weighed down by addiction, violence and impulsivity. Anyone obsessing over a few IQ points and too many women in the coding breakroom, I'm afraid, has already tilted their hand to weakness. We are trying to get to a place where we treat individuals as individuals, but Hanania and the Wokes keep the yin-yang mill going.
A certain fraction of the dumbest -- most foolish? -- males behave in ways that get themselves killed. From 'misuse of power tools' to 'disrespecting gang members' -- they end up in an early grave. Are the numbers such that survivorship bias could explain some of the result?
This is a very good point, as the reported difference increases into early adulthood. Also wonder if criminality -> imprisonment add to possible selection bias
Yes, it has been known for a long time that males tend to fall on the extreme sides of IQ. Very smart and very "not so smart" for the PC types.
I think this holds a lot of merit, and I am skeptical that IQ or g distributions are really normal distributions, because it is very difficult to live below a certain level of IQ but there is no similar limiting factor on the upside. That should skew the median and mean values of the distribution, and especially if males have a much wider spread that should lead to a more skewed outcome. Then again, if most of the testing is in school children that shouldn't affect things quite as much as testing in adults.
I am really skeptical of where they get the testing results for adults, and would want to see how those were collected. IQ testing seems to be pretty standard when intaking counselling patients, but that is a very highly selectively biased process so one hopes they are not using that. Yet still, how otherwise does one get a bunch of adults to sit down and take a few hours worth of tests that isn't itself a huge selection bias?
Places that have compulsory military service for both men and women, such as Israel could do this, and probably already do.
Very true, although it would only catch the 18-24 crowd, and the gap gets huge the older people get according to that graph. Still, I would put a lot more weight on studies that look at compulsory testing sources.
Problem with using compulsory military service tests is that they often use test results to decide your job, so people might fake bad results for preferred jobs.
In Finland it atleast used to be that if you tested too well you got 6 month extension on your slavery.
Response-rates might be biased by IQ or SES but the total number of men who die young in any modern society is too small to substantially affect the averages here.
But laura, women drive cars and thereby end uo w the same result because they suck at it. So we end uo probably equal on that point. Lol
The statistics say otherwise:
This for the USA
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/males-and-females
There’s also the matter of parallel parking. I don’t think I’ve ever known a woman who was confident at it, and plenty who admit they can’t do it at all.
True story, once in my youth I was walking down the street of a major city with a friend when a girl pulls up to us in her car, rolls down the window, and asks, “Can either of you guys parallel park? Would you be willing to park my car right here?”
My friend and I looked at each other astonished. She was fairly pretty and I was single at the time so I was about to say “sure” but he said dismissively, “Psshh, there’s a parking garage 3 blocks that way.”
I was annoyed, he was married, but he insisted she was just abusing her good looks for a favor and wouldn’t have gone for me anyway. Yeah, maybe, but not much of a wingman, was he?
This is a dumb point. 1.77% of men die before age 30 in the US. For women it is 1.29%. This is a miniscule difference. It has a negligible effect on mean IQs (plus Richard already disproved a stronger version of this argument [selection bias] in the article).
I realised what it is that I most like about Richard Hanania. Obviously he's smart and curious, but in addition, he has absolutely no shame in telling you what he thinks about anything, regardless of liberal pieties etc. I'm not being snarky, it makes his posts super valuable, I don't have to filter for BS. It's refreshing!
Wow, you're incessant trolling seems to indicate that you really took this post personally. Chill out! Richard never said you're dumb. Being a girl doesn't mean you have a low IQ. I'm a girl too and was from the smartest in my class in school. The very fact that you have a blog and have written books probably means that you are able to express your thoughts and ideas clearly and are likely smarter than most people out there. So take a chill pill.
Good summary. A few points.
1) It's ironic that Jensen 1998 gets cited this way. That chapter is actually a very weak part of the book, and he doesn't even provide sources for some of the claims, as he assumed readers would take them for granted. Clearly, they did and still do. Again, amusingly, Jensen seems to have changed his mind on this matter after writing the book. He was not particularly interested in the sex difference question.
2) Lynn misunderstands Jensen's method (correlated vectors). He thinks the correlations are Cohen's d estimates, but that's not the case. These correlations don't correspond to gap sizes, one has to look at the regression slope + intercept to get that.
3) Spatial ability is sometimes in some batteries, but yes, it is often left out probably due to the inconvenient large male advantage. Reaction time/speeded tests also show a moderate to large male advantage and are not normally included.
4) Women don't actually have an advantage on verbal fluency, at least, not to any noticeable degree. It's amusing this claim keeps being repeated. I speculate this has to do with the blabbering woman stereotype. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916221082116
5) We have a meta-analysis on the way which confirms Lynn's pattern using lots and lots of studies as well as standard meta-analysis methodology (Lynn used very simple methods because he was old). Depending on a few method choices, the male advantage in adulthood comes out to about 3 IQ before any adjustment for reliability. There isn't really any way to make this go away.
6) There are a few sophisticated thinkers who have found a way out of this, sort of. They cling to the hope of this study of opposite sex siblings in NLSY79. https://twitter.com/Scientific_Bird/status/1740507243043287197 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289606001115?via%3Dihub Deary et al 2007 used some fancy SEMs to make the sex gap "go away", at least, p > .05. In fact the men still scored about 1 IQ higher. They didn't report their confidence interval, or tell the readers how many models they had to try to get this result. I don't think this result will hold if the data are reanalyzed. In any case, Emily Willoughby analyzed the adult opposite sex siblings in the Minnesota family study and found that brothers were smarter than sisters by about 3-4 IQ points. There are probably a few more datasets with adult siblings of opposite sex where one could repeat this analysis. The whole point of this analysis is to control for some of the potential selectivity biases in dumb men not responding to surveys as much as dumb women do (presumably due to women's higher compliance/conscientiousness in general).
7) I think hereditarian thinking will move towards Lynn on this matter, just as it has on every other matter. You might like to know that Lynn was one of the earliest promoters of embryo selection for intelligence enhancement. See Lynn's Eugenics from 2001.
I cant understand something. Why did lynn explain gender gap by evolutionary hypothesis? Women and Men have same DNA and natural selection history. Gender chromosomes are very small part of genome.
Gene expression likely accounts for much of this gap.
The Y chromosome is by far the smallest chromosome in humans, and both men and healthy/regular women only have one functioning copy of their X chromosomes. It goes without saying that the Y chromosome still makes a world of difference, and that even subtle mutations in terms of numbers of basepairs changed can have substantial effects in terms of phenotype, but the evolutionary argument is fundamentally still "men have more biological advantages than women today" --> "what we have today is because of evolution" --> "men evolved their advantages because it's evolutionarily better", which is just a secular form of "God made us that way".
It makes sense if you fully accept the premise and invent a framework that all premises must conform to, but doesn't explain any of the exceptions that could just as easily be argued. For example, apparently Lynn says it's women who exist to be beautiful and Richard says that's basic science; tell that to birds and incels/facemaxxers.
More importantly, the genetic basis is rather lacking. I believe there is a general consensus that the agricultural age tended towards fewer men having more wives, but that doesn't necessarily select for Y-chromosome encoded male intelligence. If the inherent Y chromosome male advantage of superior strength is what allows them more wives, there's no reason for intelligence-favoring alleles to be found in the Y chromosome. Instead, the male offspring of more intelligent wives would find an advantage over the male offspring of less intelligent wives, but women would still not only be carriers, but very likely genetic beneficiaries of such selection.
Can you speak to the issue of defining intelligence with appropriate ecological validity?
I believe it was reading your blog that I first encountered the idea that because men and women know different things and tend to solve different problems, inherently gender neutral ideas about knowledge and problem solving are difficult to construct. Of course one might be tempted to define problem solving by proxy with "success", but that seems difficult; fertility would appear to be the most outside-view interpretation there. And men and women clearly often succeed in different ways in society on other terms.
Maybe I missed something because I thought this was actually already well known. I’ve also never been particularly bothered by it, but I also believe that inherent human worth isn’t dependent on intelligence. The interesting question to me is why the gender that has, on average, higher IQ scores is also (by many measures) less successful, at a population level, in modern western society than the gender with lower average IQ scores. I’m curious about what that says about how incentives have shifted over time - the evolutionary pressures that shaped us are (for lack of a better word) blunted in our current society, and traits that once led to reproductive success may have become maladaptive. Or maybe the picture has always been more complex, since a species can continue successfully even when a fairly small percent of males are reproductively successful, so long as many females are.
Mostly because modern western society has been broadly re-engineered to both force artificial equality and actively punish what was, until recently, perfectly normal male behavior, like competition, not wanting to sit down for eight fucking hours a day, or engaging in any behavior more risky than staying in a desk.
Also, you've hit on the broader point that the likes of Scott Alexander has made which has stopped me from having any patients with people who dismiss the g-factor. Namely, that individuals overwhelming response to their own IQ is to say "yeah, that sound about right":
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/27/against-individual-iq-worries/
We have an incredible measure of people's capabilities and needs that the activist class of the nation overwhelmingly seeks to invalidate and destroy because it goes against their pre-existing beliefs. It'll be a long fight to destroy this, but doing so is essential for the betterment not only of mankind, but of each one of the uncountable millions of individuals we punish every day for the crime of not wanting to see something we don't like.
In virtually every domain, men have much more variation in ability than women. It makes intuitive sense to me for men to dominate the extremes since the payoff for being amazing at something vs average is much higher. Women follow a more uniform distribution all around.
If you think back to public high school, which is pretty much the last time in our life where selection effects don’t factor in, you can see this in action. In gym class, think about the difference in athletic ability between the captain of the basketball team and the least athletic boy in the class. The gap between these two is much more drastic than the gap between the most athletic and least athletic girls.
In musical ability it’s the same way. When I think back to concert band in middle and high school, making the cut required about average musical ability. Many more boys missed the cut than girls, even on male dominated instruments like drums and saxophone. However, on virtually every instrument the best players were boys. Same goes for drawing, singing, dancing, virtually everything.
What's your view on the "extreme/autistic male brain" theory? Learning an instrument, much like learning chess and other skills, is primarily a function of how much effort is put in. A subset of highly-focused men have the capacity to write code, practice guitar, or play time-wasting video games for every waking hour.
It’s totally bro science AKA just a vibe, I’m not married to the idea. But I’m not as familiar with the world of classical music so I can’t really speak on that. But I am familiar with Jazz, where the high level players are pretty much all male, with a handful of exceptions ofc. I’m certain sexism plays some role in that, but physical attributes like lung capacity, hand size/muscle strength, and overall dexterity+ hand eye coordination would all be non trivial advantages that men could have on many instruments, even putting aside the more controversial theories about male vs female sexual strategies.
It’s also worth mentioning that in my experience, high school orchestra was about 90% women. Far more girls than boys took up violin and other instruments in my fairly ordinary upper middle class suburban school district. So if they’re roughly even at the highest professional levels that would support my point unless my experience was a major outlier.
I also have experience in electronic music, which is a decidedly inclusive environment, where factors like lung capacity don’t come into play, and the genre is enjoyed by men and women equally. Yet top DJs and producers are like 95% men.
I think your experience at a classical music conservatory is closer to being an outlier than mine, since everyone you come into contact with at that level are all in the top 0.1% of talent level to begin with. You’re dealing with people who have amazing skills to begin with, so differences in things like lunch capacity at that level only have an effect on the margins. At that level, there’s not going to be a big difference between men and women because there’s not likely to be a difference between any two people to begin with. The vast majority of people who pick up a violin will never be at that level, because of a mix of factors that mostly come down to innate talent combined with environment.
But ultimately, the highest levels are the end point of a variety of filters people pass through starting at a young age where the talent pool gets smaller and smaller. But ultimately getting to that point requires picking up a violin at a young age to begin with. If 9 out of every 10 kids who pick up a violin are girls, and the elite professional orchestras are 70% women, that would indicate that men are overrepresented at the highest levels, even if at that level there’s not much of a difference between men and women. The first time many elite musicians pick up a violin is grade school orchestra, this is the origin of the talent pool that then passes through multiple filters, and I’m saying in my memory that this was about 90% female. I don’t think my school was a major outlier, but maybe it was and literally everywhere else in America kids who start violin lessons are 50/50 boys and girls.
Obviously with DJing and producing electronic music, while it’s not as much based on music talent as being accepted to a music observatory is, liking and being good at it is absolutely essential to making it a career. It’s like a 9-5, it has to be your life if you want to make it your career. The vast majority of people who try fail. Most of the people who make it in electronic music are incredibly talented at it.
My whole point is that there are more men at the tail ends of the bell curve of human ability, more women at the top. So they’re the same “on average” but the distribution of men is more varied. This doesn’t mean there isn’t variance in women. I think this applies across domains, beyond just iq. I gave music as one example. Again, this is just total “bro science” and vibe based on what I observe in the world. I could be totally wrong.
I think the thing is that nothing you’re saying here is actually refuting my basic point. I’m not shifting the goal posts here. Plus I love how you cut off half of that “even if at that level...” sentence to completely change the context a refute a different point to what I was actually making.
Obviously the factors that go into someone being an elite musician are complex. There are a million factors at play. But sometimes with a complex system, we can design of simple mental model to get a fuzzy picture of some aspect of it.
Let’s say you have 100 kids given a violin at age 3. Of those 100, let’s say 6 of them end up in a major cities orchestra at the highest level as adults. I have no idea what the number is, but it’s obviously small since only the best of the best get there. You’re dealing with the far right tail of the bell curve. If it’s 3 men and 3 women, this doesn’t mean men and women have an equal chance of being great musicians, because we don’t know how many of those original 100 were boys vs girls. Get it? Maybe boys and girls play violin at equal rates, but this is not my experience. In my experience, kids who play violin are mostly girls, even if that’s not the case historically.
I expect "pregnancy brain" plays a role in the relative performance during adulthood. Populations with greater TRF probably have a larger gap in IQ test scores.
Pregnancy brain, man. It is so weird and so real (speaking as a woman currently in the very home stretch of pregnancy).
This should be relativly easy to control for.
Men probably need more raw intelligence to compensate for their impulsivity and lack of discipline. These days it’s not enough, though, since women are doing much better in school.
actually boys do much better in schools but the statics that you have seen are much libral
Ask Claudine Gay.
Oh, the sweet irony of Harvard which so earnestly defended affirmative action all the way to its demise at the Supreme Court has now become a national laughing stock precisely because of its affirmative action hiring of its plagiarizing president. Now, at least the most obvious example of the malignancy has been excised.
No, it's okay as long as you don't affront ethnic groups with institutional power. Then it can serve as the pretext for getting rid of you. Kind of like how they got AL Capone on tax evasion.
Anybody who lives in the real world or has studied Thomas Sowell or Steven Pinker should know that comparing any two groups by any measure will almost never yield identical results. That should be the default intuition. The woke would have it otherwise.
Cool, so when is Sowell going to acknowledge the significant influence of heritability on poorer black performance instead of constantly blaming “culture” exclusively?
Yeah, that matches my intuitions despite having been told the opposite my whole life.
There's also Berkson's paradox, though, which is insanely strong for me personally here. That is to say, stupid men are near-completely invisible to me - I edit them out of my landscape except for threat assessment purposes, and forget them as quickly as possible when they are forced upon my awareness. This doesn't happen with women. Thus, my experience is that women are much dumber (much more than 3-4 points). And of course I am unable to forget or overlook some truly stunning examples of male stupidity, which makes me also biased to believe the "more male morons and geniuses" idea.
My experience exactly.
One wrinkle for me: Prior to learning more about these topics, especially as a kid, I was often confused as a result of the various personality gaps. My day to day holistic impressions suggested women were smarter than men, whereas actual conversations involving analytic reasoning suggested otherwise.
I really appreciate your willingness to tackle a topic that’s politically incorrect. Truth should be more important than what any of us wants. I do have to admit that as I’m a female software engineer whose sense of identity probably centers a bit more than it should around having always been considered intelligent, I am somewhat biased toward reading this and trying to find flaws in your reasoning and data.
I wanted to point out that your evolutionary biology explanation may have missed the mark. You said that female sexual value was more determined by physical attractiveness, which I don’t think anyone could deny. However, evolution does not select directly for sexual value, it selects for success in raising offspring who reproduce. Obviously sexual value plays a role in this (you can’t successfully raise offspring you don’t have), but I see a few issues here - first, genetics account for only a part of what we would consider attractiveness, with lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, and disease prevention and grooming/presentation also playing large roles. Second, I would argue that the ability to select a good mate and otherwise ensure your offspring’s access to resources and physical protection are far better predictors of successful reproduction of offspring than physical attractiveness, and all of those things take intelligence. This is borne out by the observation that highly attractive women don’t seem to have more offspring than women of average attractiveness, and I suspect this was true even in pre-modern times. Attractiveness does play a role in whether a man is willing to commit resources to raising the offspring he fathers with a woman, but only to some degree - the trope of men wanting to have sex with the hot chick but marry the responsible woman is a trope for a reason.
To me it comes down to how you define intelligence. Evolution has selected for men who successfully compete with other men for status, resources, and access to women (since a single high-status male can have many offspring over a lifetime) and it’s selected for women who are able to form alliances, be alert for danger, and secure resources and protection for their children. Since a female can have a comparatively smaller number of offspring in her life, females are more likely to invest in each individual offspring rather than maximizing the number of offspring. While men have an advantage in spacial reasoning, women tend to be good at tasks that require great attention to detail such as project management, tasks that require caring for others such as many jobs in the medical field, and may have some advantages in fields that involve building relationships and cooperation such as sales or politics. Most people will define intelligence as analytics, mathematical ability, and knowledge, but why do we define it that way? Why is that a better definition of intelligence than the ability to keep track of many small details, figure out where they fit on a timeline, build the relationships needed to get them done, and follow up and keep everything on track? Clearly this requires a great deal of brain power but we tend not to think of it as intelligence and it tends not to be the sort of ability measured by an IQ test.
In the end, we may find that men and women are on average better at different tasks, but each is optimized for evolutionary fitness based on their different reproductive characteristics. Calling some parts of evolutionary fitness “intelligence” while others are not considered to be intelligence may be an inexact science.
Can the notion that men are more present at both extremes also tilt the numbers somewhat? Men are more numerous at the low end of IQ, but also at the top end. So if the low end drops from the measurements, the high end weighs more on the final numbers. That could explain 1 or 2 more IQ points, and explain the discrepancy.
This is called the greater male variability hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis), and it argues that the average man is as intelligent as the average woman but that the standard deviation is bigger for men. I think Richard is arguing against the GMVH.
Then he needs to argue some more, because from the Wikipedia page it seems that modern studies tend to confirm the GMVH :) At least he should take it into account here as it could actually explain some of the difference.
The GMVH and males having higher average IQ are not mutually exclusive. RH does not argue with GMVH in this essay, just points out that it's insufficient to explain the data he does present.
He does take it into account, his analysis of the GMVH forms a decent part of the essay.
I don't see it. He mentions the fact that more men are at the (low) margins of society, not at all the GMVH. I just checked again, nothing that relates to that precise theory.
Why else would more men be at the low margins? Do you you have an above third grade reading level?
Obviously your daddy didn't teach you elementary politeness. I'm not having conversations with spoiled brats.
I was going to inquire about this. Specifically, a perhaps 1/3 s.d. difference between two populations in IQ is significant only if lots of important things in life are strongly correlated with IQ. But as far as I can tell, that's not true. More IQ is useful, of course, but interpersonal skills are clearly more important, etc. etc. Where IQ becomes important is in certain narrow areas of endeavor that are, as it were, heavily g-loaded. Academia, STEM, and at the extreme, being a research-oriented mathematics professor come to mind. But when you're looking at small subsets that select hard on one factor, population variances start to matter as much as or more than population means -- the canonical example is that while men are on the average taller than women, 7 of the 10 shortest humans on record are male. So in the narrow areas where it is practically important, variances may be more important than means.
IQ is a measure of general intelligence, which is correlated with every activity involving intellectual or creative imput. And not just the obvious ones like mathematics researchers. It's a valuable tool in physical pursuits as well. Not enough to make up for a lack of baseline athletic capability, but the smarter athletes still learn new things faster, and process information more quickly, which absolutely helps as long as their body can take the demands.
The only reason it doesn't correlate even more with positive life outcomes than it already does is because:
1) There are a lot of negative physical- and mental-health problems correlated with high IQ, both in those with it, and moreso in their children.
2) Modern society actively punishes objective measures of intelligence in a cruel, foolish quest to enforce societal-wide equality.
The first of these might forever be intractible, but it can be somewhat ammeliorated even today with what we know about human health, and we can expect better in the future assuming the Chinese don't cause the apocalypse with another leak from their bioweapons program. But there's zero reason we should tolerate the second in any form. It's an entirely artificial imposition on our society, brought on by completely unjustifiable measures such as Griggs v. Duke and the abolition of standardized tests for university admissions.
It's harder being on the left end than the right, and they're certainly more vulnerable to negative pathologies; but plenty of successful, functional, normal people have IQs in the 80s, even today. You're not gonna see them become doctors or engineers or CEOs, but they don't need to be.
It's the 70s and below where things get really hard. They don't even let you in the military anymore after that.
Also, there's a bunch of people who have really weird, dumb ideas about IQ, even if they accept the premise that it's both mostly genetic and immutable. Like the people who think that having an IQ in the 120s is somehow a bad thing. Midwittery, even.
There's nothing middle of the road about it. An IQ of 120 means you're smarter than 91% of Americans, and billions of people living today. Richard Feynman had an IQ in the low 120s, and he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Granted, Feynman's general intelligence was very likely higher than this IQ test measured, but that's why IQ only mostly rather than completely correlates with g, and you don't have to be doomed to professional mediocrity in a high-cognitive-demand profession just because you're only smarter than 90% of Americans rather than 99%.
It makes sense that men evolved to provide for the tribe and women evolved to nurture the tribe. Both of these are equally hard and equally important jobs in very different ways. IQ scores would reflect more abstract intelligence and favor men for that reason. Let me tell ya though every wife I know thinks their husband is a complete domestic moron. I believe the differences in sexes is a strength for our species. So let's embrace that men generally make better engineers and women generally make better nurses. We need both for a healthy society.
It wasn't so much about providing for the tribe -- at least, not at first -- as it was being smart enough to figure out how to kill the guy who was bigger and stronger than you. The construction of the first weapons totally rebalanced human culture, and in a much more egalitarian direction. It used to be we generally lived in harems ruled by an alpha male who allowed his subordinates just enough access to mating to keep them satiated, and the excess males were expelled to the wilderness. This declined rapidly when all of a sudden the biggest and strongest alpha could be undone by one unhappy rival scoring one lucky cut with a flint knife.
Nicholas Wade details this in A Troublesome Inheritance. I highly recommend the book.
How well does g or IQ correlate with the subjective sense of someone “seeming” smart. Not the way Trump seems smart to a rube, but the way a smart person can instantly tell who else is smart when having an intellectual conversation. Obviously this is subjective, but I find it easy to observe who is smart or not.
Based on this measure, in my broader social group, where husbands and wives all went through elite educational institutions, almost all husbands seem noticeably smarter than their wives. Can marrying up explain all of this? I can’t recall a notable contingent of very smart women who all failed to find a husband.
Also, in this same social group, while in college, women studied more hours and took school more seriously than guys. Even if the girls got slightly better grades, educational success per hour spent was almost certainly lower for the girls.
Last, men disproportionately achieve in high-iq fields like tech, finance, academia, etc. We can’t attribute all of that to “systemic” factors.
All this to say, men being smarter than women has seemed obvious to me since I was in high school. The incentives and publication bias in academia to not observe this is obvious. You say racial IQ differences are more controversial, but not by much. This seems like one of those things that many guys could get their wife to agree to privately, but is hard to say out loud.
I'll guess that a large part of "seeming smart" is really measuring "general knowledge", which men clearly outperform at all levels of IQ/g.
For example, my smartest girlfriend almost certainly had a higher IQ than me. But this wasn't immediately clear to me until I was studying for the GMAT and realized she was capable of effortlessly acing the math section, while I was scoring in something like the 95th percentile, but only with great effort. Worst of all, she was an English major who had basically just retained her math knowledge from high school; I had majored in Econ and at least taken statistics and Calc 3 in college and went on to work in finance.
BUT -- on a test of general knowledge, she would have scored really, really poorly. She didn't know anything about history, geography, politics, the world. She knew English-language literature, pop culture/celebrity gossip, and that was about it. She also didn't really have an interest in business or using her abilities to make money. But her brain, when she bothered to apply it to a g-loaded problem, could just demolish it utterly.
Fair points. So IQ measures brainpower, even if a person does not express it in obvious ways.
That said, I find it hard to believe that having more “general knowledge” is not indicative of a type of intelligence that may be missing from these quantitative scores. To display this knowledge you need to synthesize and recall complex ideas and narratives, and then apply and communicate that knowledge appropriately. That’s a cognitive skill.
Intelligence has nothing to do with knowledge. Intelligence is what we're born with. Knowledge is what we pick up along the way. Smart people can, and do, pick up enstupiding knowledge all the time. Hence why they tend to be overrepresented in both cults and terrorist organizations.
Yes, I'd posit the ability to gain knowledge is some combination of three abilities:
1. Raw memorization ability. Seems to be loosely correlated with g, cf. eidetic memories, or idiot savants with superlative capacity for memorization but not-so-high IQ.
2. Reasoning ability that helps you memorize better and fit facts into coherent narratives. This is the part you describe, which I'd agree is highly correlated with g.
3. Exposure to relevant information: do you read the news every day, or do you do something else with that time. Do you ever read about history, politics, science, etc., or not? I'd also say this is loosely correlated with g. With a low enough IQ you have no real interest in anything in the world except your immediate environment. But at higher levels of intelligence, there are a LOT of intellectually stimulating diversions that don't build general knowledge. In my old girlfriend's case, it was reading literary novels and being actively involved in a book club that discussed them. For someone else, probably male, it might be analyzing optimal play in chess, or (more likely these days) a particular video game.
Were you dating Caroline Ellison? Probably was just as attractive in any case :)
Women tend to try hard in school and get better grades because it’s pro social behavior and they are more prone to social pressures. Getting good grades in school is primarily a norm following social pursuit not an intellectual one (not that it doesn’t mean they’re smart). Men are more likely to become experts and dominate fields because the pay off for being amazing vs just average is much greater for them than it is for women. Both in helping you get laid and making you admired by other men.
When you write : "the pay off for being amazing vs just average is much greater for [men] than it is for women"
do you mean :
(i) "The smartest women gain less advantages from their superior intelligence compared to the average women than what the smartest men gain from their superior intelligence compared to the average men"
For example (made up numbers): Whereas women above 120 IQ are 30% happier than women below 120 IQ, men above 120 IQ are 50% happier than men below 120 IQ.
or do you mean :
(ii) "The smartest women gain less advantages from their superior intelligence than the smartest men gain from their superior intelligence ?"
For example (made up numbers): whereas women above 120 IQ rate 5/10 on the hedonometer, men above 120 IQ rate 8/10 on the hedonometer.
Any evidence that substantiate either (i) or (ii) ?
I would say mostly 1, but now that I’m thinking about they may have more absolute gains from intelligence as well just because it works both ways. The costs of being low vs average intelligence also seems to be higher for men than women, for example much higher rates of homelessness, prison, etc and all sorts of outcomes associated with low intelligence.
I don’t like to think of things in terms of “happiness” because for many people the goal isn’t necessarily to be happy. But for the sake of the model I guess it useful to keep it simple.
I don’t have any scholarly evidence, it would be near impossible to design a study to support this argument anyway. I’m totally bro sciencing here and just spit balling a theory to explain my observations. But I think it’s intuitively very obvious that a man becoming highly skilled in something has a greater return socially, both in terms of their position among other men and in turn their success with women. An ugly guy who becomes incredible at guitar will earn the respect of his male peers and get laid. An ugly girl who becomes incredible at guitar will earn the respect of *male* peers, it won’t make much of a difference in her admiration from female peers vs being average, and it won’t have a major impact on her success with men romantically.
Of course this is an oversimplification, but in general we find this to be true. It makes sense from an evo psych standpoint as well. If men do more high risk, high reward hunting then the payoff for being the smartest is much greater than the payoff being the smartest low risk, low reward woman gatherer. Again, this is oversimplified but you can see how it makes sense.
I’m not insulting women, at all. Getting good grades and staying in school is pro social behavior, which is why women are better at it. Founding a tech company is high risk, high reward, which is why men are better at it. It doesn’t mean women aren’t smart, or can’t found a tech companies or take risks.
We probably have a fundamental disagreement over the degree in which differences in outcomes between men and women are rooted in biology vs social constructed.
This doesn’t mean I think one sex is “superior” or “smarter” than the other. In fact the entire premise of that idea is ridiculous.
If the “real” IQ difference is 2-4 pts (let’s say 3) and known methodology biases account for 1 point , then the purported true difference is approx 2 pts. Is that a meaningful difference in the real world? Or more for bragging rights?
Also, what are the confidence intervals on all of the point estimates gleaned from the studies? For example, whatever the point estimate difference is from each study, (or standard deviation quantum), it is important to know if that represented a statistically significant difference within that particular study. Now, each individual study may lack sample size and power to show a true difference (ie. false negative), so a “meta-analysis” framework is reasonable to increase statistical power….but if that is the case, any meta analysis needs to be methodologically rigorous to make sure the data being combined is being used in a legit fashion.
All that said, it’s not inconceivable that males may have slightly higher IQ, given that male brains are larger even when indexed to physical size (weight, height, BMI, BSA, or whatever metric of size you want). But it is important that such a positive assertion be sustained by scientifically and statistically valid data.
Small diffs on the average can become large diffs at the extremes (and men are more variable to begin with.) It's basically another argument that patriarchy just happens by default in a state of nature, even before you get into personality differences.
I generally agree with the conclusion. Though I think if there are big areas of female advantage that aren't really tested, they are social areas. The ability to read people, "read the room", etc.
Of course, a lot of social ability is something that is distinct from intelligence, and in some cases, intelligence may hamper it. This tradeoff is likely at least part of the reason why human intelligence hasn't been selected for more aggressively by natural selection. In the hunter-gatherer environment, the marginal survival advantage conveyed by intelligence is at some point more than offset by the fact that your interest in strange questions makes you a weirdo that has trouble forming alliances with other men and that women don't want to have sex with you.
But if we go beyond intelligence per se and talk about knowledge: men have more general knowledge, but women, at least traditionally, had more knowledge of what all their neighbors were up to. Of course, nowadays this has been partly displaced by things like celebrity gossip. But I wonder if this is purely a matter of how they spend their time, or if women have more innate ability for mentally mapping all the people they know and their relationship dynamics.
Women are to this day the primary consumers, disseminators, and enthusiasts of gossip. And I say this as a gossip-enthusiast male.
What's the point of deciding this question? It is true that in the past individual women were made inelegible for specific roles based on incorrect generalizations about women's fitness. But one does not need a correcte generalization not to treat individuals as individuas.
>What's the point of deciding this question?
The only people who say this about scientific research are people who are afraid they won't like the answer.
Why should anyone like or dislike a result? Maybe this is one of those questions for which a result could have no positive use, but possibly could be misused.
>Why should anyone like or dislike a result?
I agree that no one SHOULD, but many people DO dislike facts which contradict their worldview.
Western governments invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year into gender studies university departments producing "research" about the underrepresentation of women in $FIELD, and into initiatives (including grants and scholarships earmarked for women) intended to address the underrepresenation of women in $FIELD. If it were conclusively demonstrated that the underrepresentation of women in $FIELD is not primarily caused by sexism (or women lacking role models, or rigid childrearing practices etc.) but was in fact primarily caused by differences in male and female physiology, then those hundreds of millions of dollars could be invested in something more productive instead, and gender studies departments would be less well-equipped to fill the heads of impressionable undergrads with pseudoscientific nonsense. Sounds like a pretty "positive use" to me.
Thx. Fully correct.
They're just playing the woke game in reverse. Not too smart to keep playing on someone else's chessboard. And even with the power of muh science behind everything, the longhouse is still winning for the time being, so either these "brilliant" men were tied up for four decades or there's more to it. By the way, you know this is all sorted by the fact that men's brains are, on average, larger and they have more testosterone, which makes them more competitive and focused. But, as a consequence, they're also weighed down by addiction, violence and impulsivity. Anyone obsessing over a few IQ points and too many women in the coding breakroom, I'm afraid, has already tilted their hand to weakness. We are trying to get to a place where we treat individuals as individuals, but Hanania and the Wokes keep the yin-yang mill going.