I Got Your “Empowerment” Right Here, Baby . . .

So, the other day, our agency celebrated “Empowering Women in the Workforce”.  I heard it was a good place to meet girls, so . . .

The keynote speaker was “The Honorable” Dot Harris, Director of the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity for the Department of Energy.  A diversicrat, in other words.  Some highlights from her speech:

“Women have an IQ five points higher than men.”

I’m not making this up.  Apropos of nothing at all, this was the first thing out of her mouth.

So, first of all, no, they don’t.  In the categories most relevant to STEM (the purported focus of her speech) they are behind men in IQ.  And that’s especially true at the level Ms. Harris is supposedly operating.  And second, I’m pretty sure this is not the glass house she really wants to be throwing stones in.

"Our students place #31 against other countries in academics"

Thank you, immigration!  But in point of fact, and with very few exceptions, we educate students much better than their nations of origin do.

"Women make $.70 on the male dollar."

Mostly bogus:  This Forbes article summarizes a bunch of studies showing that, with appropriate controls, the differential is in single digits, and sometimes favors women over men.

"Girls in Georgia and Tennessee are told to be nurses."

The point being that they aren’t told to be doctors, presumably like the girls in Blue states are and like boys everywhere are.  I googled around unsuccessfully trying to find a citation for or against this 50s-era factoid, but for now, I’m betting that the same class of people decrying the alleged tracking of girls into nursing are also crying that the shortage of nurses means we have to have immigration reform now!  Yup, I’m betting that’s the case.

In Defense of Critical Thinking

Steve wrote a couple of articles on Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow:

Most of the experiments recounted in Thinking, Fast and Slow aren’t as prima facie silly, but Kahneman, a literal-minded soul, often seems to miss the fundamental point of why his subjects fall for his little hoaxes so often:

“Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure and a passion for detail.

“Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?”

Wrong! Kahneman scoffs at your intuition: “Did it occur to you that there are more than 20 male farmers for each male librarian in the United States?”

Well, no, actually, I didn’t know.  Come to think of it, nor do I know the measured frequency of the traits listed among either farmers or librarians.  Give me that information, and I can calculate the conditional probabilities.  As it is, though, the only correct answer to the question as written is:  insufficient information.

Steve continues:

Did it occur to Kahneman that anybody who isn’t trying to deceive us would have added, “So, Steve’s just not cut out for his life of slopping hogs” or the like? As con men, conjurors, and comedians demonstrated long before Kahneman, most people trust in the speaker’s good faith. They play along and try to guess what is being implied. So it’s easy to pull the rug out from under us.

Yes, but there is still such a thing a critical thinking.  For instance, here is another Kahneman problem from Michael Lewis’ Vanity Fair review that Steve quotes:

“Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright,” they wrote. “She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.”

Which alternative is more probable?

(1) Linda is a bank teller.
(2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

The vast majority—roughly 85 percent—of the people they asked opted for No. 2, even though No. 2 is logically impossible. (If No. 2 is true, so is No. 1.)  The human mind is so wedded to stereotypes and so distracted by vivid descriptions that it will seize upon them, even when they defy logic, rather than upon truly relevant facts. Kahneman and Tversky called this logical error the “conjunction fallacy.”

Well said, and I would add that this is exactly the kind of problem that tests use to measure critical thinking skills.  Unfortunately, Kahneman mixes bogus problems like the first in with true logic challenges like the second in an effort to show that stereotypes are worthless.

More Geoffrey Miller

Steve has more quotes from Miller's Spent. A sample:

Alumni of [elite universities] work very hard to maintain the social norm that, in casual conversation, it is acceptable to mention where one went to college, but not to mention one’s SAT or IQ scores. If I say on a second date that “the sugar maples in Harvard Yard were so beautiful every fall term,” I am basically saying “my SAT scores were sufficiently high (roughly 720 out of 800) that I could get admitted, so my IQ is above 135, and I had sufficient conscientiousness, emotional stability, and intellectual openness to pass my classes. Plus, I can recognize a tree.” The information content is the same, but while the former sounds poetic, the latter sounds boorish.

Arnold Kling vs. IQ

Arnold Kling has an article in TCS on Race, IQ and Education. Kling has written about this subject before, so I was more skeptical than Half Sigma about Kling's newfound "race realism."

Kling draws an analogy between the World Series and the Nobel Prize:

I do not think that anyone believes that the result of the World Series says something about the people of Boston per se. No one thinks that if you replaced Josh Beckett and David Ortiz with citizens selected at random from the Boston phone book you would still have a championship team.

In contrast, I think that people believe that the result of the Nobel Prize in economics says something about Jews per se. And yet, if you were to replace, say, Eric Maskin, with a Jew selected at random, the result would be as absurd from a Nobel Prize perspective as replacing Ortiz or Beckett on the Red Sox with random Bostonians.

In order for someone to believe that a Red Sox win tells us something about the superior innate aptitude for baseball among Bostonians, he must believe four things:

1. That an independent measure of baseball aptitude shows a higher mean among Bostonians than the population at large;

2. That the common factor of Red Sox players is that they are all Bostonians;

3. That the Red Sox wins a disproportionate share of World Series; and

4. That selection for the Red Sox is random.

Clearly, three of these are false. There is no independent measure of baseball aptitude. The common factor among Red Sox players is that they were recruited to play for the Red Sox because of their demonstrated skill at baseball; the common factor is not that they are Bostonians (unless "Bostonian" includes Californians recruited to play for the Red Sox).

Now consider Jews and the Nobel Prize:

1. Independent measures of the intelligence of Jews show a mean IQ of about one SD above the U.S. mean;

2. Jews do not become Jews by virtue of their success at science; they are Jews first;

3. The over-representation of Jews among Nobel laureates goes back to their emancipation; and

4. The only common factor among Jewish nobelists is . . . their Jewishness, not membership in a team!

Kling wants everyone to be evaluated as an individual, and laments the race-consciousness of our society. So let's imagine a world in which everyone's individual IQ (and "law-abiding quotient", and "assimilability quotient", and "cooperativeness quotient", and "enterprise quotient", etc.) is known and available. Then we could evaluate each individual individually, and be done with group distributions.

We should realize that we are as far from that ideal as we are from any other utopia. In the mean time: it matters who your relatives are, because absent additional knowledge, these are useful proxies for who you are, or will be, or who your children will be. This is reality, and it ought to inform social policy in a rational way, not just because racial identity is stronger that municipal identity as Kling maintains.

What we presently do is live in a fantasy world of public discourse that our elites have constructed for us, in which the underperformance of non-Asian minorities on a battery of academic and social outcomes is now and forever blamed on the irrational racism of white America, and our social policy is formulated to combat this disparity based on this belief. If the belief in white racism is, in fact, not the correct explanation for this disparity; if the correct explanation lies in the innate mean aptitudes of non-Asian minorities; then our social policy is a sham and destined to fail.

Update: Noah Millman's discussion of race and IQ, jumping off from Saletan's Slate article that put this back in the news is better, and less mean-spirited, than my own. But this jumped out:

The left is already comfortable with the idea of multi-culturalism and race-consciousness.

These are not the same thing. To be specific: the left prescribes multiculturalism for Northern European, and specifically Anglo-Protestant, culture, and race-consciousness for everyone else. This is the summary formula for the destruction of the West. As the growing evidence supports the idea that what we call civilization -- liberty, self-government, the rule of law, enterprise, cooperation, and transparency -- is a uniquely Northern European heritage, we might be roused to defend ourselves against the claims of the multiculturalists, and this the left will not abide.