Trust Explained, No Fight to Cut Costs, and Boys Outnumber Girls in Math Skills
Trust explained: It’s caused by a brain hormone known as oxytocin. Distrust is caused by testosterone.
Larry Summers vindicated: At the far right tail of the math test distribution, boys outnumber girls 4 to 1. They also outnumber girls on the left (moron) tail, however; and girls outnumber boys on verbal skills.
Nice to have trust broken down to its bare essentials.
What do you expect from the New York Times? They have never had any idea how to control health care costs.
On the distribution of math and other skills, there is an evolutionary survival value explanation for these results. Nature protects the sex that carries and nurtures the children and experiments with the other sex. That’s why males dominate at both ends of the distribution.
The only reason this is at all controversial is that political correctness skews our sensitivities. It would probably cause no consternation at all for me to point out that among morons, boys out number girls 4, 5, or 6 to 1.
But if I say the same thing about the genius end of the distribution, a whole cadre of people are ready to do the St Vitus dance in reaction.
I want to second what Bruce said about the New York Times.
Larry, don’t ever apply for the job of president of Harvard.
Is the “trust chemical” something you could slip into the punch bowl prior to a political rally?
How about serving it to a dinner companion when you are out for a romantic evening?
You can always tell when it is getting late on a Friday afternoon.
Oxytocin is also called “the cuddle drug.”
I remember a newscast a couple years ago about someone who broke into a veterinary clinic a couple of years ago and stole a bunch of it, apparently thinking it was oxycontin.
The news anchors had a great time speculating on the effects of a cuddle drug on someone on his way to prison.
Larry sez “On the distribution of math and other skills, there is an evolutionary survival value explanation for these results”
Sure Larry, in the distant eons of time, while the women did hard physical labor, hunting animals, fighting neighboring tribes, the species was advantaged by men staying at home, deriving eigenvalues and line integrals, maybe the occasional Galois field.
The problem with trying to make a case using outliers is that there are so few of them. Every other field: law; medicine; music; C level executives have shown that as the social barriers are reduced, the proportion of women, including at the highest achievement levels, have become more equal. There’s no reason to believe that math and science are that different. In ten or twenty years people will look back at this discussion and realize how silly it was.
your statistics
Artk, I think you are confusing two different things. And they are the same two things that always get confused in these discussions.
There are two sets of factors that determine how many women get to be a full professor of mathematics at Harvard or MIT: (1) Personal desires, social influences and discrimination and (2)Innate mathematics ability.
The question about innate ability is whether in the far out right tail of the distribution — say, at least three standard deviations away from the mean and maybe more — whether the population is half male and half female. I believe you will find overwhelming evidence that it is not.
If it is any comfort, they are not equal in the extreme left tail either. But at the mean of the distribution, the numbers probably are half and half.
Nature experiments (allows more variation) in the sex that doesn’t carry the young.