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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality.

And they've had the reins and got to be the null hypothesis for decades. All of their interventions failed. We can play the snipe down studies game all day but in the end one story is backed up by observed reality and the other is backed up by blind dogma.

But I honestly don't even care if this ridiculous debate is settled, all I want is for the blank slatists to actually have to justify their interventions and pay some cost when the inevitably fail. That all the costs of their failures are dumped on their outgroup is unacceptable.

And they've had the reigns and got to be the null hypothesis for decades. All of their interventions failed. We can play the snipe down studies game all day but in the end one story is backed up by observed reality and the other is backed up by blind dogma.

pretty much:

https://i1.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ccf_20170201_reeves_3.png?w=768&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C9999px&ssl=1

The black-white achievement gap has proven impervious to all efforts to fix it

same for the gender gap

https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/satnew.png

But individual absolute ability may have increased , but group differences persist. It's intellectually dishonest to claim that enough hasn't been tried. Policy makers have invested considerable money and effort at narrowing such gaps, with piss-poor results to show for it.

Regarding the gender gap in math ability, has any country tried to just make girls take twice as many math classes as boys do for a generation to see if that would reverse it?

Don't most girls not participate in such programs? You can only really expect to have an effect on the ones who participate, so if most don't participate, you are closer to not having the program at all than you are to having it for all the girls.

Yes, but that probably says something about female interest in STEM, which is probably somewhat correlated with aptitude. You could of course argue that this, too, is caused by an all-pervasive patriarchy, but given that the presence of such programs in a society has a negative correlation with female interest in STEM (i.e. the so-called "gender equality paradox"), I find that harder and harder to believe.

AFAIK just about all sex difference correlate with gender equality, including obviously-societal ones such as gender differences in names:

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1432940616653152259

(And of course it's been shown to apply to e.g. gender stereotypes too, though that could very well be due to stereotype accuracy.)

I don't know why they correlate like this, but I feel like this gives you something equivalent to the phenotypic null hypothesis for the gender equality paradox: if the paradox applies to some variable X, and X is causally upstream of some variable Y, then a priori you'd expect the paradox in X to create a paradox in Y.

There are more people with an interest in, and a knack for, STEM to be found within the male than within the female population. Given that environmental interventions have rather spectactularly failed to reverse course in this regard, Occam's razor would suggest that biology plays a factor here.

The thing is, as kids, boys will look at what men do and mimic that, whereas girls will look at what women do and mimic that. I don't know whether it is the sex difference in programming etc. that is biological, or if it is the sex difference in mimicry that is biological. I wouldn't expect it to be both, because what would that lead to if you took all the world's female programmers and male elementary school teachers and had them create a society where they raised a generation of ordinary children? Would the boys in this society do programming (and thus be mimicking women), or mimic men (and thus do teaching)?

Since I don't know the answer to this question, I can't tell if the sex difference in programming is innate or not.

I mean, they obviously don't, see, e.g., grip strength.

Just for reference, do you have data on sex differences in grip strength not correlating with gender equality?

As for the gender equality paradox, that is, that there is less interest in STEM among women in countries that score higher on a variety of gender equality, indices, the correlation is negative.

I realize the correlation is negative and don't see how that's a relevant response to my point about names.

Well, given that a whole host of environmental interventions targetting the mimicking effect that we tried for decades seem to have had - at best - virtually no effect, chances are that these proposed environmental causes don't explain the whole picture, or even large part of it.

Have code camps actually changed girls' perceptions of whether men or women are more likely to end up as programmers? If not, then even if the mimicry hypothesis is true, you wouldn't expect it to change their behavior, and therefore the failure of the intervention is of no evidentiary value for the validity of the mimicry hypothesis.

It seems to me you have created a completely generalisable dismissal against virtually all arguments proposing a biological cause, given that you seem to treat the failure of environmental interventions as a knock against biological explanations. I am not even sure what you are saying here?

?

I don't think I said that failure of environmental interventions is a knock against biological explanations. I just questioned whether the relevant environmental interventions had been tried.

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