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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1196 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 3, 2025

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I've been thinking that perhaps the woke/liberal/feminist (there is a lot of overlap between these groups) hatred for intelligence research and FUD-creation around the IQ concept is not merely about the incendiary topic of "race" or ethnicity and IQ that might pop up if society takes IQ seriously, and not just about the basal opposition to anything that goes against "tabula rasa", but perhaps also because men are more extreme in IQ than women. Nature takes more risks with men, while women are somewhat more clustered around the mean. Why does that matter, if the average IQ is almost the same for women and men? Because most of the geniuses are going to be men. Even at 130 IQ there is a major difference. Something like 6/10 of individuals with 130+ IQ are men. If you go up to 145+ IQ, there are fewer and fewer women compared to men. With high intelligence being one of the key ingredients to make for better leadership of groups and societies, this should naturally lead to an overweight of positions in the highest offices being filled by men in a meritocratic society concerned with getting the best results for its future. Feminists may have discerned this IRL and in data, and of course do not want to be ruled over by men. Thus they seek to obfuscate and mislead around the topic. Thoughts?

With high intelligence being one of the key ingredients to make for better leadership of groups and societies

I would like to challenge this. While obviously we don't want the leaders to be idiots, I am not sure I would prefer a 150 IQ psychopath to 120 IQ kind and moral person as a leader. To me, the main role of the leader is to set goals, make choices and keep the group from descending into chaos, and I am not sure sky-high personal IQ is the best way for that. Maybe some other qualities - which I am not ready to define, but could tentatively call as "not being an evil asshole"? - are at least as important? I do not doubt we need to require the leader be smarter than average - but I think there's a point of diminishing returns where pure IQ power stops being the thing that matters. I don't know where this point is, but I think the premise "the more IQ, the better leader, no exceptions" needs at least to be seriously questioned.

This of course is complicated by the fact that a lot of our current leaders are, to be blunt, psychopaths or borderline psychopaths. Some of them aren't that high IQ either, to be honest. So we're not doing great in this area, and we only have ourselves, as a society, to blame for that. I'm not going to name names here because everybody would have their own examples depending on their political and personal proclivities, but there are enough examples for everybody. But if we want to do better, sometime in the future, I am not sure "higher IQ score" is the metric we need to concentrate all our efforts on. I have seen enough high-IQ assholes to make this questionable for me.

So it’s not the philosophical tradition of equality that got us the French and American revolutions, the 14th amendment, and the suffragists, all before IQ was really conceptualized. And it’s not the specter of communism, even though it influenced plenty of other groups to try their own flavors of radical egalitarianism. Nor can it be pure guilt-by-association with the Nazis; progressives certainly wouldn’t jump the gun there. And it’s definitely, certainly nothing to do with battles fought during the Civil Rights movement, such as the only Supreme Court case most people could think of relating to IQ.

No, women hate and fear IQ because they know it proves men are superior.

Seriously?

Why have you shaped your objection into one reddit-esque snark? The post would be more informative if you elaborated a bit more on each point instead.

I’d say it got the point across.

But sure. I think associations with racism are the key reason progressives are bearish on IQ research. They get their own Wikipedia article with top billing on the IQ page. By the time of Griggs v. Duke, the political valence was firmly settled. It didn’t get any less political by the Charles Murray era, when the criticism again focused on racial differences.

If the question of sex differences has gotten second billing since at least the Civil Rights movement, do you think it’s gotten more important to modern progressives?

I don't necessarily believe this to be the case, but an amusing thought: What if the feminist hoe-maddening over IQ is not because they believe such a concept could be used to incorrectly characterize men as smarter than women, but because they already do (at least subconsciously) believe men are smarter than women. And where IQ research, or the IQ concept, is only further pouring fuel on the fire in legitimizing this belief and spreading awareness of it.

Three potential non-mutually exclusive drivers come to mind that could lead to the female belief that men are smarter than women:

  1. Lived ExperienceTM. Women—with their allegedly greater Empathy, Social Intelligence, and Emotional Intelligence that they love gassing themselves up about—have cultivated a sense of the Hanania-pill (posted below by @FtttG) through their lifetimes of interacting with men and women.
  2. A mild case of the Apex Fallacy. If when considering the distribution of men in some trait, women automatically focus on some top quantile of men. If one only mentally compares some top quantile of men against the same quantile of women in IQ—in the presence of greater male variability—one could conclude that men are smarter than women.
  3. A less mild case of the Apex Fallacy. Similar to 2), but greater male variability is no longer a necessary condition. If one only mentally compares some top quantile of men against a less restrictive quantile of women (such as women as a whole) in IQ, one could conclude that men are smarter than women.

Have to also account for how that brain is wired up and, maybe most critically, how it responds to stressors and setbacks.

Having two people of equal (and relatively high) IQ but with different neurochemistry you can still find one a neurotic wreck who can nonetheless make good contributions to a group, and the other can be calm and decisive and able to actually take responsibility for the group's actions and inspire the group to follow him.

I'm never going to say ONE factor determines all observed differences, but a brain awash in testosterone will produce far more behaviors we expect as 'leaderly' than one awash in estrogen.

And on the other hand, cortisol is the stress hormone, (see the previous links) which can trigger cognitive disruptions... but also lead someone to be decisive out of pure survival instinct.

I can say that my perception is that women that attain leadership position read to me as high-cortisol style leaders. Constantly stressed, constantly making decisions because they have to and are basically in continual fight-or-flight mode. And if they're high-IQ enough, they are able to navigate those decisions well, but they're never emotionally comfortable with it.

If cortisol is too low, of course, then the response to dangers/threats is delayed so even if they make good decisions, they might come too late to make a difference.

If the majority of women at all IQ levels fall into the low-T/High-C quadrant, it would explain why there's just fewer female leaders overall.

I also think there’s something to be said for how large male-dominated orgs have chosen a decision structure or maybe also a leadership structure that suits their strengths. I don’t think it makes sense to make this out to be more powerful than it is, but I think as you say even if women make equally good or even better (as I think some research suggests) decisions, time is money, faster can be better, and sometimes forcefully imposing decisions on others can also be more effective than we give it credit for. It does make me wonder is sociologists could invent a managerial structure that improves performance across several axes. However I think research on this also attracts hucksters and bad science, so it’s hard to tell a legit management consultant (assuming they exist) from a bad one.

but I think as you say even if women make equally good or even better (as I think some research suggests) decisions, time is money, faster can be better, and sometimes forcefully imposing decisions on others can also be more effective than we give it credit for.

From an evolutionary standpoint, yeah. Men in a hunting band have to respond a lot quicker to a changing environment than women gathering berries, in general. Slow decisionmaking kills, or lets the prey escape, which is also bad.

So women might have a decent structure for reaching consensus on important matters (do these fruits look ripe? Are these berries poisonous? which section of the forest shall we forage in today?) It will necessarily be more slow and 'sensitive' to feedback from the group members, whereas for men, if the guy leading the hunt screams "GRUG! THROW SPEAR NOW!" better to not talk back and just DO IT.

This is the exact observation that, twenty years ago, cost Larry Summers his position as President of Harvard. It is called the "greater male variability hypothesis."

Interestingly, although many of the "greater male variability hypothesis" charts I find online "illustrate" the bell curve differences by showing a flatter but equally-centered curve for men (lower in the middle, higher at the edges), the only clear male-to-female comparison I can find (PDF warning, also cited here) that uses hard numbers shows male curves that are both slightly flatter, and also shifted higher (i.e. centered more to the right).

I wonder what this means for men in their social experiences with other men.

Does it mean that with a flatter curve you don't know what sort of personality you're going to bump into? While women bump into 'another basic bae'?

cost Larry Summers his position as President of Harvard.

It frustrates me that whenever his name is mentioned, I picture Douglas Urbanski.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

I sincerely doubt that the average person, or even well read feminists, are aware of the precise IQ stats here. I didn't know the how the skew worked a mere few years ago, and I've been keyed into the IQ 'debate' for ages.

Men are better leaders than women even when IQ is identical, though.

Yeah I have that impression too, primarily based on the fact that every progressive woman I have talked about it with in person, upon explaining the iq variance situation, immediately scoffed "Oh so men are smarter than women are they?" And when I say "Yes, but it also means men are dumber than women." They usually stopped being so angry. But their anger doesn't go away entirely, and it feels like wounded pride to me.

Yeah I have that impression too, primarily based on the fact that every progressive woman I have talked about it with in person, upon explaining the iq variance situation, immediately scoffed "Oh so men are smarter than women are they?"

Which is actually funnier than it sounds at first. It suggests either A) a conflation of average and variance, even after an explanation of variance or B) the apex fallacy, where in a discussion on the distributions of men and women in some trait, women automatically jump to focusing on the right side of the distribution for men. Or both A and B. Ironically enough, either would provide mild Bayesian evidence for updating one's priors in favor of men being smarter than women.

Richard Hanania certainly agrees with you.

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