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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?
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.
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.
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