Yet another "hard-wired" argument - from UK chess expert

[grimbletart]

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/chess/11548840/Nigel-Short-Girls-just-dont-have-the-brains-to-play-chess.html

Nigel Short, one of the UK's greatest chess players claims women are hard-wired not to play the game well.

Love this little gem (not). "I don't have the slightest problem (he says) in acknowledging that my wife possesses a much higher degree of emotional intelligence than I do. Likewise, she doesn't feel embarrassed in asking me to manoeuvre the car out of our narrow garage."

Wrong Nigel love. You don't have emotional intelligence, not because you are a man, but because you spend half your life hunched over a board game instead of of interacting with the rest of the human race. Your wife is bad at getting the car out of the garage not because she is a woman but because she is a fucking awful driver.

The recognised peers within that academic focus that read and review the paper with their approval.

Whom would you accept?

"The recognised peers within that academic focus that read and review the paper with their approval."

This doesn't quite make sense. Do you mean you want to know who peer reviewed the original submission, or that you want to know who the authors would accept as their critics?

I can think of two critics of research into gender-based brain differences from within the psychology/neuroscience* community off the top of my head - Dr Cordelia Fine and Prof Gina Rippon.

• OT, but I had a conversation with a research psychologist yesterday that suggests that there is some dispute about which of these terms is valid for a number of areas of research in this field, but that of course is just one opinion and I don't know any more about it than that

Partial

Your own sense of logic must tell you that nature and nurture are inseparable variables in such studies. I very much doubt that any study went from "the average difference between male and female on this test was X" to "and we can state that this difference is definitively attributable to innate rather than socialised factors"

Maths is my profession. I do know what iff means. It did not make sense in your sentence.

Maths is my profession as well, so when challenged I need to look closely. There was indeed a flaw in my argument.

So, thank you Uptoapoint

"Papers have shown that males have the same intelligence, as females but the variance could be wider" (or that the variance is the same for both genders)

So, the error maybe to accept the argument, given it is flawed.

Or to reject the argument given that it is true.

Thanks Buffy
The paper we are drawing attention to states its case in the tight lipped vocab that you would expect. And the points that you have drawn attention to are very relevant.

However, can I please just take out one statement from your extract:

Thus, it will remain methodologically difficult to ascertain the nature and causes of any sex differences in abilities among adults. .

I do not feel that the author(s) is trying to imply that there is any significant difference between the sexes.

However I do believe s/he is allowing for a difference in the variance of such measures.

These considerations, though, probably apply more to means than to variances.

In other words, the considerations in difference between variances do merit some discussion.

Thank you Buffy

Given that the core of their contribution is the finding of sex differences applying to variances,

Isn't this the essence of the argument?

There is no difference in the means,... just the variances

Sorry again Buffy, what is the issue that we have been arguing?

Bit of a cop out Buffy

Oh give over, partial.

Given that I was the person posting a lot of the previous posts, and also responding to others, I think it a little odd that it should then be suggested that I am not reading them.

It is funny, isn't it, that some women (and some men, though not enough of them) are a bit touchy about half-arsed theories used to justify the oppression of women. I wonder why that is. Are we expected to be fucking nice about it?

Again, I ask: what is the "ideal" outcome? What is it people want from these so-called theories? It may be my limited understanding (due to being without a willy) but I cannot see these "scientific theories" being of any use in any way in our struggle for liberation and equality. Many more reasonable and patient and intelligent posters have said what I thought more eloquently. Therefore I have decided to use my time more productively by looking at pictures of cute kittens on the internet (and I don't even like cats) and leave this thread.

Bye! Don't miss me now!

Just for you LordC

cheezburger.com/8286775040

Was going to post a long screed about my experience of fighting my way through preconceptions about what girls were supposed to be interested in, rather than what I was really interested in. But it's late, and I can't be bothered. I will however, mention a couple of things from my undergraduate degree (in physics - I have a PhD in theoretical physics and work as a research scientist).

Item 1. I was at Oxford (not name dropping, just that the collegiate system is relevant here). Colleges did their own admissions. We and the mathematicians totted up how many female undergrads there were in our year - I think 32 for each subject out of a total of about 200 for each. In line with the roughly 15% that most universities had (this was back in the 80s). But... and it's a big but... there were still 3 women's colleges. 24 out of the 32 women in maths and in physics were at the 3 women's colleges. Roughly 1 in 3 of the men's mixed colleges took a woman in maths and in physics each year (in fact, some of our male friends at a nearby college told us their admissions tutor had actually said to them over a glass of sherry "I have to take a girl every 3 years or so to shut the equal ops people up.")

Item 2. My undergraduate tutor (eventually prof in astrophysics, woman FRS) campaigned long and hard to get blind marking introduced. There had always been disproportionately more men getting firsts than women, and disproportionally more women getting seconds. The official line was that men were more likely to be brilliant or lazy, whereas women were dull, conscientious plodders. Blind marking came along and lo! the discrepancy disappeared. (Lest you are labouring under the illusion that physics has yes/no answers so there can be no scope for massaging the results - it all comes down to that subjective judgement about how "elegant" a proof is - the commonly held wisdom was that men were the ones who could come up with the intuitive leap that enabled them to do in 5 lines what a woman took 3 pages of algebra to accomplish - funny how that didn't stand up once the scripts were anonymised).

Lurcio, I have a feeling that the item 2 results (pre blind marking) were the kind of thing informing partial's "instinct" so thanks for posting.

Just thought of an upbeat memory from my undergraduate days which I thought I'd post before I go to bed. I used to work in the college library, and my favourite spot was a little side room - I used to snuggle up in there with my work, underneath the portrait of the college's female Nobel laureate. Both cosy and inspiring!