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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1959 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 3, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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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.

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