Sexist filth. bah...

20% of all Nobel prizes are won by Jews, while only 0.2% of the world population are Jewish. Should we put on our tin-foil hats and speculate about the Jewish end-game? Are Jews oppressing the rest of us? Was Adolf onto something?

Neither has there ever been a great female composer

But given the above facts, this is not surprising. Composing music requires some exceptional abstract and systemic thought.

Simon Baron-cohen claimed that autism is an extreme masculine trait. There seems to be some non-random overlap between autism, masculinity and exceptional talents.

Your statistics would be relevant and possibly even correct if stereotypes were not communicable diseases. — unenlightened

This is very true, but it does nothing to further the inquiry, it does not exclude the very strong evidence for non-discriminatory factors, such as genetic differences and the behavioural characteristics. The fact that all the evidence strengthen each other as soon as we accept that evolution is true, makes Murray's case quite solid at its core.

So why are women so under-represented in majors with a high average level of IQ?

What Spelke claimed here is quite common, namely that women are discouraged to enter male dominated fields.

Pinker responses concisely: "I think you could take the same phenomenon and come to the opposite conclusion! Say there were really was such a self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating dynamic: a difference originates for reasons that might be arbitrary; people perceive the difference; they perpetuate it by their expectations. Just as bad, you say, is the fact that people don't go into fields in which they don't find enough people like themselves. If so, the dynamic you would expect is that the representation of different genders or ethnic groups should migrate to the extremes. That is, there is a positive feedback loop where if you're in the minority, it will discourage people like you from entering the field, which will mean that there'll be even fewer people in the field, and so on. On either side of this threshold you should get a drift of the percentages in opposite directions.

Now, there is an alternative model. At many points in history, arbitrary barriers against the entry of genders and races and ethnic groups to various professions were removed. And as soon as the barrier was removed, far from the statistical underrepresentation perpetuating or exaggerating itself, as you predict, the floodgates open, and the formerly underrepresented people reaches some natural level. It's the Jackie Robinson effect in baseball. In the case of gender and science, remember what our datum is. It's not that women are under-represented in professions in general or in the sciences in general: in many professions women are perfectly well represented, such as being a veterinarian, in which the majority of recent graduates are women by a long shot. If you go back fifty years or a hundred years, there would have been virtually no veterinarians who were women. That underrepresentation did not perpetuate itself via the positive feedback loop that you allude to."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What else is interesting is that the explanation regarding sexism is extremely vague, to the point of not being falsifiable in any case. It is as if those proponents put on their tin-foil hats and become the female version of Alex Jones. The Alex Jones' of academia.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Facts =/= sexists.

This is a classical response and poses an interesting hypothesis regarding the self-fulfilling prophecy of stereotypes.

There is only one big problem, lack of evidence. The "stereotype" is universal, which statistically severly stacks the odds against this hypothesis. Now, I know that you are not good at statistics (as you claimed that yourself). The odds of that "coincidence" is 1 in 2^195 (countries) -->

1 : 50000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

that the coin happens to falls on the same side in all those cases (metaphorically speaking).

Furthermore, stereotypes can be true. We are actually quite good at them.

At last, you can not claim "discrimination" as the only explanatory factor without providing evidence that all the other factors are false. That requires a lot of empirical work, and I have yet to see just one...

Well from an evolutionary point of view, women do not need as much skill nor talent as men do to reproduce and there is extremely strong scientific evidence for that:

"Geneticists have found that the diversity of the DNA in the mitochondria of different people (which men and women inherit from their mothers) is far greater than the diversity of the DNA in Y chromosomes (which men inherit from their fathers). This suggests that for tens of millennia men had greater variation in their reproductive success than women. Some men had many descendants and others had none (leaving us with a small number of distinct Y chromosomes), whereas a larger number of women had a more evenly distributed number of descendants (leaving us with a larger number of distinct mitochondrial genomes). These are precisely the conditions that cause sexual selection, in which males compete for opportunities to mate and females choose the best-quality males." (Pinker 2002)

Christopher Hitchens echoes that point in his polemic article:

That they are not the level of Kant or Hume that is certain. But that doesn't mean they aren't great philosophers. Kant and Hume, just like Wittgenstein, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Aquinas, etc. these people are unique - they are on an entirely different level. When we speak of philosophers, we don't speak of those very rare few only. Probably nobody in the whole world (whether they be male or female) today is at the same level as those people, and that alone speaks volumes. — Agustino

You're setting the bar unreasonably high. — Michael

This is probably the best critique so far.

My own bias tells me that Murray is not pointing to a curious fact in need of careful investigation and analysis, but attempting to justify the gender disparity as natural and inevitable rather than constructed. — unenlightened

This was my suspicion as well and I think you’re partly right on this one. But I also think that he is mostly spot on regarding innate differences between the genders. Ascribing everything to discrimination is scientifically completely unsound.

He points out a few well-established facts:

(1) The standard deviation in IQ among men is significant higher than among women, which makes men dominate both ends of the extreme on the spectrum. The results is that pretty much all exceptional geniuses and idiots are men.

(2) Philosophy is the only humanities major that has an average IQ that is above economists and engineers, while the field is still dominated by men. Also note the clear correlation between IQ and Gender in different majors.

(3) The Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, has been given to 44 people since it originated in 1936. All have been men. (...) In a large sample of mathematically gifted youths, for example, seven times as many males as females scored in the top percentile of the SAT mathematics test. We do not have good test data on the male-female ratio at the top one-hundredth or top one-thousandth of a percentile, where first-rate mathematicians are most likely to be found, but collateral evidence suggests that the male advantage there continues to increase, perhaps exponentially. Men also consistently outscore women on SAT Maths scores.

(4) Even in the 20th century, women got only 2 percent of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences—a proportion constant for both halves of the century—and 10 percent of the prizes in literature.

(5) Thus, for reasons embedded in the biochemistry and neurophysiology of being female, many women with the cognitive skills for achievement at the highest level also have something else they want to do in life: have a baby. In the arts and sciences, forty is the mean age at which peak accomplishment occurs, preceded by years of intense effort mastering the discipline in question.

(6) I have omitted perhaps the most obvious reason why men and women differ at the highest levels of accomplishment: men take more risks, are more competitive, and are more aggressive than women.

(7) Evolutionary biologists have some theories that feed into an explanation for the disparity. In primitive societies, men did the hunting, which often took them far from home. Males with the ability to recognize landscapes from different orientations and thereby find their way back had a survival advantage. Men who could process trajectories in three dimensions—the trajectory, say, of a spear thrown at an edible mammal—also had a survival advantage. Women did the gathering. Those who could distinguish among complex arrays of vegetation, remembering which were the poisonous plants and which the nourishing ones, also had a survival advantage. Thus the logic for explaining why men should have developed elevated three-dimensional visuospatial skills and women an elevated ability to remember objects and their relative locations—differences that show up in specialized tests today.

(8) One hypothesis for explaining this paradox is that three-dimensional processing absorbs the extra male capacity. In the last few years, magnetic-resonance imaging has refined the evidence for this hypothesis, revealing that parts of the brain’s parietal cortex associated with space perception are proportionally bigger in men than in women.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The links can be found in either the text or here.

Fine.



It's Tiff

Weren't you the bloke who criticised others for the pointless behaviour regarding gaming?

TheWillowOfDarkness — TheWillowOfDarkness

I remember you from the old PF. I will skip this one.

Yeah, got plenty of statistics. I loved to use Excel for those things, especially with standard modules and formulas. God bless Microsoft.

My field is more managerial than analytical.

Business conservative and I lean more towards the pragmatic side of conservatism. With a background in industrial engineering and business management, economics and actually studied philosophy for a brief moment.

With influences of Anscombe, Foot, MacIntyre, Aristotle, Hume, Burke, Kekes, Oakeshott, Hobbes, Hayek, Friedman, Sowell -- and Pinker of course.

As an interesting side note, I am fully aware that many people think that 'slavery' and women's right to vote are good arguments against conservatism and in favour of change -- Burke was explicit on the crucial importance of change -- and people use this as an excuse for radical untested ideas that sound nice on paper. They have to realise that the opposite can also happen and things could get ugly:



Let alone the insane increase in homicides and rapes.

People are so extremely naive. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, and still manges to cock up -- ends up as the worst performing economy in the world. Now see how many people suffer, because of "change."

A Precautionary Principle for Institutional Change starts at the bottom of page 14. The irony here is painful. — csalisbury

It is impossible for me to continue reading after I stated that, right? You try too hard to antagonise. Go take a break, this is getting desperate.

I'm saying that his argument for conservatism would apply perfect well to slave-owning systems. I'm saying his argument fails to explain why it would not apply to them. — csalisbury

The argument applies to everything you dip.

I am done with this for now.

He thinks Xavier Marquez, BS in philosophy and mathematics, MA in political science, dissertation which won him the award Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Philosophy and well published author is unironically defending slavery. >:O

But he has got 800+ posts on The Philosophy Forum, that must count for something, so Marquez's arguments must be "blisteringly bad."

Okay, one thing is to read things, another thing is to understand.

What did the author say regarding changes. He mentions it throughout the entire paper, and even dedicates an entire chapter to it: A Precautionary Principle for Institutional Change. There is absolutely no way you could have missed it, if you read it.

Did you actually read it or just rush through it. I suspect the latter since the author has been explicit about how we should deal with changes. Slavery is such a silly (counter) example, because it is obviously intolerable. The author swept it away with such ease in the earlier chapters.

So, by your own logic — csalisbury

Note that I do not have to defend the author at all, I have my own political standings.

I lament that you were radicalized, — Mongrel

Ironically, the conservatism that I subscribe to is anti-radical and anti-ideological.

Mew, csa and others already did.

Good good, now go back and read what Xavier Marquez had to say regarding those changes.

Good job lads. Wonders can happen when you actually read stuff huh?

Well and good, except what if opponents of a system he thinks we ought be epistemically deferent too, think that system is evil, and so intolerable? — csalisbury

Exactly. And what was the outcome?

tip: see Democrats VS Republicans (the great Abe)

edit: by the way, the arguments in the paper are all too familiar to me for obvious reasons, I just have to get used to his terminologies, AND I would strongly advise you to do the same.

http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/973/an-epistemic-argument-for-conservativism/p3

edit: oh sorry, a bit too quick in reply without properly reading what you said.

when they hit the mark exactly. — csalisbury

Interesting. How does "Slavery" destroy his paper?

edit(2): I have read the paper as well up to page 14.

I am proud of you son.

Welcome mew. Good to see that you immediately set the proper example, by actually reading it and attempting to understand it before criticising, which really ought to be common sense on a philosophical forum.

No — csalisbury

Then any criticism regarding the author can be dismissed.

I strongly advise you to read the substance -- and attempt to understand it -- before you criticise it.

Have you actually read the paper kid?

Philosophy is quite tedious if "the bug has not bitten you."

Am I honestly the only one who looked up the actual paper and read a reasonable amount of it?

The author explicitly deals with "slavery" and "other large violations of basic human rights, famine." Page 11 for the lazy mongols, which is probably all of you that replied.

But this is simply missing the crux. As the paper's title suggests, an epistemic argument for conservatism. The crux of the paper is that conservatism is a viable (or even sound) strategy to deal with "the weakness of human reason" in the "complexity of the social world."

Ironically enough, unenlightened (and some others) is (are) perfect example(s) to prove the crux of the paper. You lot even struggle with some basic economics. Thank god none of you hold any position of power, and probably never will.

The replies to this post are hilarious. It proves the crux of the paper: "the weakness of human reason"

Here is the full paper by the way.

Sure Zzz.



Checkmate!

God no.

Think about what "wealth" means -- without equivocating. How it is calculated/determined. Everybody assumes the colloquial terminology, which makes this report -- provided by the Guardian, what a surprise -- extremely misleading.

Ah this one is an absolute gem. Every time someone brings this up, you know they have zero interest in understanding a complex phenomenon such wealth creation.

I find empty insults unconvincing. — unenlightened

None of what I said are insults. It is a simple observational fact having read your post. You show a lack of understanding in economics. Have you heard of the The Luddite Fallacy (which is closely linked to the Lump of labour fallacy) -- both are well known and accepted among economists.

What you portray is the equivalent of Trump stating that climate change is a Chinese hoax. Pointing out that he severely lacks basic understanding of climate sciences would not be an insult, but rather an obvious observational fact.

Another obvious fact is that -- provided that no one wants to come off as painfully ignorant -- Trump has probably never taken an honest look at climate change. Parallel to you, it is bloody obvious that you have never looked up what technological advancements do to the economy, especially regarding jobs. And when I say looked up, I mean reading up some proper economic papers. So, why is it that you start a discussion about factual notions, but you can not be arsed to look up the actual facts? Your interests do not lie in becoming better informed about the world, but to confirm and reiterate your own predisposed narrative. "Intellectuals" are probably one of the most ignorant people of the world, Chomsky takes that throne with pride.

I will help you, this is a decent start.

Why won't it happen? — unenlightened

Because those in power have a better understanding of economics than a random forum dweller spouting out some Marxist's flavoured dystopia, who thinks he knows how the world works by reading some dense literature about dialectical materialism, while being isolated from reality.

Rachel, this is called laziness. Ambition is pointless without discipline.

So why are drugs rarely discussed in a philosophical context? — dukkha

Drugs languish mental coherency and distort brain functions in arbitrary (often pleasurable) ways. There is no wisdom in drugs.

Should we take drugs? — dukkha

Objectively speaking regarding human flourishing, no.

(I am not talking about medicine, key distinction here)

Do you? — dukkha

I have done a lot. No wisdom was found.

We should stop here, before we all get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochondriasis

Tinnitus is hell. My greatest nightmare. I saw a documentary where a woman committed suicide (with professional assistance) because the suffering was unbearable.

I occasionally go to dance parties, and I won't enter without these:

therefore there is no underlying metaphysical moral reality. — Noble Dust

Try telling Trayvon Martin that morals are relative and there is no metaphysical moral telos. — Noble Dust

>Understands that the nature of the discussion is descriptive ethics
>Discusses metaethics

◔_◔