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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25712 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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evidence points towards an advantage of men over women in fluid intelligence (Gf) [2]–[4], but also in crystallized intelligence (Gc) and general knowledge [5], [6].

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4210204/

Women’s ways of knowing, the seminal work on women’s development theory, by women:

The first 3(lowest) among the 5 types of women’s ways of knowing are:

The Silence: These women viewed themselves as being incapable of knowing or thinking, appeared to conduct little or no internal dialogue and generally felt no sense of connection with others.

Received Knowledge: Received knowledge describes the epistemological position in which women in the study perceived knowledge as a set of absolute truths received from infallible authorities. Received knowers tended to find disagreement, paradox or ambiguity intolerable since these violated the black-and-white absolutist nature of knowledge .

Subjective knowers rely on their own subjective thoughts, feelings and experiences for knowledge and truth - the "infallible gut" as Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule refer to it. Along with the nascent discovery of the inner voice, subjective knowers showed a general distrust of analysis and logical reasoning and did not see value in considering the weight of evidence in evaluating knowledge. Instead, they considered knowledge and truth to be inherently personal and subjective, to be experienced rather than intellectualized.[1] Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule state that subjective knowers often block out conflicting opinions of others, but may seek the support and affirmation of those in agreement.[1] The authors note that half of the women in their study occupied this position, but that they were spread across the full range of ages.[

Much like Kohlberg, who found that women were on average, stuck at a lower level of moral development than men, they found that most women are epistemiologically stuck in early adolescence (the infallible gut people):

Relationship to Perry's cognitive development theory

Subjective knowledge is similar to Perry's multiplicity, in that both emphasize personal intuition and truth.[4] However, Perry identified the typical age of the transition to multiplicity as early adolescence, while the women in the above study exhibited this transition over the whole spectrum of ages studied.

Lol, indubitably based. Are you aware of the Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART) and the results that have been derived when comparing the sexes? Here is a post by Emil Kirkegaard talking about it (note a higher total CART score implies higher performance on the test).

A 2016 book by Keith Stanovich found on the topic of sex differences: "[I]t can be seen that the total score on the entire CART full form was higher for males than for females in both samples and the mean difference corresponded to a moderate effect size of 0.52 and 0.65, respectively. ... Moving down the table, we see displayed the sex differences for each of the twenty subtests within each of the two samples. In thirty-eight of the forty comparisons the males outperformed the females, although this difference was not always statistically significant. There was one statistically significant comparison where females outperformed males: the Temporal Discounting subtest for the Lab sample (convergent with Dittrich & Leipold, 2014; Silverman, 2003a, 2003b). The differences favoring males were particularly sizable for certain subtests: the Probabilistic and Statistical Reasoning subtest, the Reflection versus Intuition subtest, the Practical Numeracy subtest, and the Financial Literacy and Economic Knowledge subtest. The bottom of the table shows the sex differences on the four thinking dispositions for each of the two samples. On two of the four thinking dispositions scales—the Actively Open-Minded Thinking scale and the Deliberative Thinking scale—males tended to outperform females."

There is also a possibility to indirectly measure sex differences in rationality by checking who believes irrational things, but "it is important to sample widely in beliefs without trying to select ones that men or women are more apt to believe". Kirkegaard draws attention to a 2014 study that does such a thing. This study instructed participants to select on a five-point scale how much they agreed or disagreed with a claim, and "scores were recoded such that a higher score reflected a greater rejection of the epistemically unwarranted belief". The unsupported beliefs were grouped into the categories "paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscience". In all of them, men scored higher than women, suggesting greater male rejection of unsupported beliefs in every category.

In other words, the supposedly "misogynistic" traditional belief that women are less rational and more flighty than men... is probably entirely correct.

Just to point out though none of that supports your claim that their reply would be obviously less correct on quora. That's the claim that you need to buttress. Do you see why?

Because someone answering a particular quora question is self-selecting. First to be on quora in the first place and second to answer that particular question.

It could be 8 out 10 women have worse general knowledge, but that given the selection pressures men and women's answers on quora are equally correct because only the 2 out of 10 women post there, and so on and so forth.

You can't evidence a specific claim like this with general statistics. Consider: Men generally have less knowledge of fashion than women. Positing this is overall true for a moment, it doesn't mean that men answering fashion questions on a website will statistically answer worse than the women, because it is highly likely those men are very unusual, otherwise they wouldn't be answering questions on fashion in the first place. They are very likely to have greater fashion knowledge than the average man. Whether they have more knowledge than the average woman on the website we could only determine by analyzing answers on the platform itself.

So you still haven't actually evidenced the women on quora would be obviously less correct in general. You may have evidenced that if you pick a random woman and ask her a general knowledge question she will on average do worse than a random man. But that wasn't your claim.

To evidence a claim about quora you will have to analyze data from quora (or something similar perhaps), or find a way to unconfound the general data to account for selection effects on quora. Which in itself probably requires you to analyze a lot of data about quora.

Or to put it another way, the fact 8 out of 10 men know little about the goings on on Love Island, doesn't tell you much about the level of knowledge a man who CHOOSES to answer a question on Love Island has. Because interest in the topic is a factor in both level of knowledge and wanting to answer the question.

Is this about the legality of my statement vis a vis the rules of themotte, or about its truth/probability?

If the latter, I agree that those sources do not prove that a woman’s quora answer is on average less correct. But they do make it more likely my statement is true. I don't think women who answer general questions on the internet are subject to selection effects as strong as men on fashion forums.

If the former, demanding that a commenter proves every inflammatory statement is a prohibitively high standard.

Oh i'm not a mod ao I'm commenting on its truth/probability vis a vis the sources you quoted only. Personally i wouldn't consider you've done enough to show female answers would be obviously more incorrect.

You perhaps need to hedge a little more. Obviously is a very certain and consensus building word so your evidence should be equally convincing, i think. Probably or likely would give you more leeway.

I know you’re not a mod, but the law casts a long shadow. Yeah, I agree with you, it is not ‘obvious’, only likely . It was a stylistic flourish, to accentuate the whiplash, scooby doo effect of that comment. At the time, it seemed like a good idea.

It's good to have you lay out the evidence behind your claims, better late than never. I must note that that's not the point, both me and Nara are asking you to submit such evidence proactively, and not after moderation.

You do not need citations for saying that water is wet. But if you are making an inflammatory claim (and someone arguing that they didn't think it was inflammatory is not much of an excuse), then you need to show up and hand receipts before being accosted by security.

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