On April 13 2014 06:16 Darkwhite wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2014 02:05 kwizach wrote:On April 12 2014 23:36 Darkwhite wrote:On April 12 2014 08:04 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 21:32 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 07:15 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 03:04 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 00:28 Darkwhite wrote:On April 10 2014 09:46 kwizach wrote:
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I invite you to read Merim Bilalić, Kieran Smallbone, Peter McLeod and Fernand Gobet, "Why are (the best) women so good at chess? Participation rates and gender differences in intellectual domains", Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 22 March 2009, vol. 276 no. 1659, pp. 1161-1165. They show, through a statistical analysis, that the crushing differences in number of players between men and women account for 96% of the observed difference in results between the two. For the remaining 4%, you can turn to the cultural factors I mentioned, notably the stereotype threat effect that I discussed with Jumperer. This is the sort of nonsense you get when you assume that participation and skill are independent variables. If you apply the exact same methodology to basketball, you will similarly purport to show that tall players are overrepresented at the highest level, not because being tall is itself an advantage, but because there are more tall basketball players. What's really going on is that taller players perform better, increasing the chances that they keep playing, while coaches actively recruit and develop taller players - it's easier to make a tall player good, than a good player tall. Skill and participation are not at all independent. Actually, that is what happens when someone doesn't bother to read the scientific article he was presented with. Your argument is addressed on p. 1163. In short, there is no evidence that supports men have any kind of biological advantages for chess. In addition, " drop-out rates for boys and girls were similar" (see Chabris, C. F. & Glickman, M. E. 2006 "Sex differences in intellectual performance: analysis of a large cohort of competitive chess players", Psychological Science 17, pp 1040–1046). This means that the selection process is not a matter of boys performing better and therefore continuing to play more than girls, unlike your basketball example. Women simply do not turn to chess initially as much as men (for sociocultural reasons), and the ones who do perform virtually exactly as well as should be statistically expected from their numbers, the extremely small difference being explained by cultural factors. The statistics only account for people who have played chess in an organized environment. This is a fraction of the population, which is not selected at random nor only for sociocultural reason - primarily, they are selected for whether or not they find the game interesting and enjoyable. The article hinges on the assumption that the women who do play chess have wound up there by some sort of accident or happenstance, and that there is just as much talent among the women who don't play. Do you really find that likely? The article does not make any assumption on why the men and women who play chess do so. It looks at the respective chess performances of men and women in chess and demonstrates that 96% of the difference in representation in rankings can be attributed to the respective numbers of players of the two population. The population of women who play chess virtually does not play statistically worse than the population of men. For the remaining very small 4% difference, I provided evidence of the role of cultural factors in the form of scientific research done in social sciences on that very topic. Thus, chess rankings & performance simply does not support the idea of greater abilities for males. Since you cannot dispute these numbers, your objection is that there are fewer women because women are inherently worse at chess (due to lower relevant natural abilities). This runs into four problems. 1. You would expect this to still show among the population of women that does play chess, but it doesn't. The opposite is true. 2. The proportion of women starting to play chess then stopping (and therefore not being taken into account by Bilalić et al.) is the same as the proportion of men starting to play chess then stopping (and therefore not being taken into account by Bilalić et al.), as shown in the study by Chabris and Glickman which I referred to in my previous message. This means that the difference in numbers in men and women competing is simply not explained by women being unsuccessful/worse than men and therefore dropping out without having a chance to appear in the sample, since they drop out at the same proportion as men. 3. The remaining explanation is that there are simply way less women trying/engaging in chess than men in the first place. Unless you are going to tell me the explanation is that women are more physically deterred by a game with black & white squares (which would still be irrelevant to intelligence), this means that sociocultural factors explain the difference. 4. Beyond these points, there is zero evidence of biological factors explaining any sort of difference in chess performance. To sum up: looking at chess performance does not, in any way, support the hypothesis that men have abilities that women don't. Not a single aspect of the issue supports the hypothesis. It does assume it, implicitly - the worst sort of assumption. If the women who do show up in their material are selected for aptitude, directly or indirectly, then the women who don't show up will on average be less talented. This would mean that, if you could encourage additional women to play chess, you would mostly get poorer players, increasing the male-female gap on average and failing to eliminate it in absolute numbers. That's the problem with the population normalization magic the authors are doing with no effort to justify it, and no wall of text will change that. As a trivial illustration, we can play the same game with sprinting; less than one percent of the world's population have a recorded 100m performance this year. Thus, there should at least be a hundred people in the world faster than Usain Bolt. Doesn't seem very likely, does it? I'm not sure if you thought that describing my reply as a "wall of text" would somehow prevent anyone from noticing that you failed to reply to the arguments I just presented you with, but just in case, it didn't. Again, before I address the rehash of your previous posts that you just posted, let me insist on something that you keep on dodging: chess rankings & performance simply do not support the idea of greater abilities for males. Differences in ranking are virtually entirely explained by the overwhelming advantage men have in numbers, and the rest can be explained by the cultural factors I evoked earlier. Your initial argument that the fact that there are more men at the top means men have better abilities has therefore been entirely debunked - women perform just as well as men statistically. I can't stress this enough - there is nothing about chess rankings that supports the idea of greater abilities for male, as the study I showed you clearly demonstrates. Of course, this doesn't prevent you from claiming that men do still have greater abilities, but the point is that you cannot base your point on chess rankings since they simply do not support that idea in any way. So, to come back to the argument you have now been repeating for a couple of posts, you've switched from looking at chess rankings to claiming that if we were to take into account the women who have never tried chess and made them into chess players, we would see a decline in the average performance of females, creating a male-female gap (I use the word "creating", because contrary to what you said, there is no current male-female gap, as was repeatedly explained to you and proven by the article I cited). As I extensively explained in my previous post, however, you are basing yourself on absolutely nothing whatsoever to claim this. There is absolutely no evidence that indicates women who do not play chess would play worse than men who do not play chess, or that increasing the number of women playing/making everyone in the world play chess would result in a male-female gap. This is you making a claim based on your pro-male bias without the slightest bit of evidence to support it - there is simply no real-world foundation behind the idea that the cultural factors which lead less women to play chess correlate with lower abilities. The evidence we have for women who do play chess does not hint at this, and neither does the evidence for women who tried chess and stopped. There's literally nothing that even suggests your claim is true. I refer you to my previous post with regards to why less women play chess (sociocultural and not biological factors), and invite you to stop asserting things that you cannot substantiate with anything and which are clearly the product of your personal beliefs of male superiority. On April 11 2014 21:32 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 07:15 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 03:04 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 00:28 Darkwhite wrote:Here is a sample where females outnumber males, so that the participation bias should pull in the other direction. What's the non-biological explanation this time around? + Show Spoiler [img] + 1. As argued by many scholars who have studied the topic, it is problematic to use S.A.T. scores to evaluate gender performance in mathematics for several reasons, the most important of them being inadequate sampling. First, it is only a specific part of the general population which takes the test, preventing generalization. Second, there are more women who take the tests than men. As Janet Hyde writes, "assuming that SAT takers represent the top portion of the performance distribution, this surplus of females taking the SAT means that the female group dips farther down into the performance distribution than does the male group" (Supporting online material for the article I cite next, pp. 2-3). In fact, if you take a look at ACT scores, ACT being also a test taken by students going to college, there is no gender gap in scores in states where the test was administered to all students. See Janet S. Hyde et al., "Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance", Science 320, 25 July 2008, pp 494 ff. and the supporting online material. 2. In the US and some other nations, there are actually no longer gender differences in mathematics performance in the general population. Some gender differences do remain in the U.S. among the most mathematically talented, but the gap has been closing steadily and it does not exist in some other nations, meaning that sociocultural and not biological factors are behind it. I direct you to Nicole M. Else-Quest et al., "Cross-National Patterns of Gender Differences in Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis", Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 136, No. 1, 2010, pp. 103-127 and Janet S. Hyde, Janet E. Mertz, "Gender, culture, and mathematics performance", PNAS, Vol. 106, No. 22, 2009, pp. 8801-8807. It's interesting how SATs get criticized for inadequate sampling while chess statistics are fair game. I'm sure people with FIDE ratings are not a specific part of the general population, preventing generalization. You seem to be confused about who is arguing what with respect to the chess population. You brought it up (after Jumperer) to argue the point that men had superior abilities than women. I explained to you that your example did not support your point since the chess performances of the two populations are statistically equivalent. I'm not trying to argue that people with FIDE ratings are not a specific part of the population, you were making that generalization, and I showed you that even among the specific population you had chosen your point was not true. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:
The excess women taking the SATs actually works in their favor; the graph I linked gives the straight ratio without any normalization. Despite a larger number of women being tested, there are still significantly more men with the best scores. Notice that this larger talent pool is the exact reason given, with regards to chess, for the lack of top female players. While it is true that the excess women could hurt the female average score, it certainly shouldn't hurt their absolute representation, at any level. Yes, I was addressing average male and female scores. The problem I referred to with regards to the higher number of women, potentially including more less-capable candidates, still impacts the M/F ratios at the lower levels. Beyond this, however, the sampling problem remains entirely. Since the test is mainly taken by those who wish to attend college, and men are very much in the majority when it comes to studies in engineering/physics, for example, you could expect more men that have put an emphasis on maths to take the SATs than women. I'm not sure why you think SAT scores are at all representative of anything, let alone evidence of the role of biological factors. With regards to the parallel you draw to chess, in chess women statistically performed just as well as men. In the case of SATs, they did not (with plenty of non-biological possible reasons, as I said). In addition, the possibility of a negative impact of higher numbers of women on their average scores (and on the M/F ratios at the bottom) raised by Hyde pertained to the attributes of the excess population for women. I'm not sure what comparison you're making with chess here. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:
It is true that Hyde has sort-of pretended to show that there is no gender gap in maths. She has done this through sheer intellectual dishonesty, in particular:
- including pre-pubescent students in the sample; the same sort of group where girls are taller than boys
- using minimum-level tests such as the NCLB, which doesn't distinguish between average, above-average and exceptional performances, but primarily singles out ineptitude The articles I cited used the tests which allow for the most accurate comparisons among the U.S. population and among other countries (TIMSS and PISA tests for cross-countries). They take into account different stages, and certainly do not present only averaged aggregates. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:Even so, when Hyde has done everything in her power to rig the testing to diminish the gender gap, one problem remains - that, while averages of males and females approach each other, the variability of male scores remains significantly higher. What this means is that, when you look at only the most talented, such as the 95 percentile, you will find an overwhelming male dominance. Exactly like we see in the International Mathematical Olympiad, or in universities. I would be interested to see exactly which countries do not have a significant gap between men and women at the higher levels; many are included here, in what seems a fairly robust trend. + Show Spoiler +Arrows show that the outliers typically aren't stable from the 2003 to the 2006 PISA test. This objection is pretty funny considering that if you had bothered to look at the three articles I cited, you would have noticed that it is completely false: the variability hypothesis is tested each time, and extensively so in Hyde & Mertz (2009). I even referred to those results when I wrote "Some gender differences do remain in the U.S. among the most mathematically talented, but the gap has been closing steadily and it does not exist in some other nations, meaning that sociocultural and not biological factors are behind it". Several measures are examined and explained at the 95th percentile and above, exactly what you argued they should have done. Like I said, a gap does remain in the U.S., but it is smaller than before, it varies across ethnicities (for Asians, it is girls who score better above the 99th percentile), and it is nonexistent in some other countries, pointing clearly towards the role of sociocultural factors. If you read the articles, you will see that Denmark and the Netherlands are examples of countries where males did not have greater variability than females. I asked you to explain why cultural barriers are insurmountable for women in chess, but not for players from Vietnam and the Phillipines. You have still given no such explanation - you immediately jumped to citing crude statistical analysis on small, unrepresentative samples, which you put your fullest trust in, while criticizing SATs as unrepresentative. Again, you are using chess players to support a broader point about women's abilities. I'm not calling the chess players population representative. You are. And again, your premise that "cultural barriers are insurmountable for women in chess" is factually false: women perform exactly as well as men in chess, as the study I provided you with earlier shows. What exactly do you not understand about this? On April 11 2014 21:32 Darkwhite wrote:And the variance is not at all small - the problem is that Hyde apparently does not understand variability, or does not want to understand it. Quoting her: All [variance ratios], by state and grade, are > 1.0 [range 1.11 to 1.21...]. Thus, our analyses show greater male variability, although the discrepancy in variances is not large. 1.11-1.21 is incredibly significant - not for the average person, but it guarantees that the higher echelons will be dominated by men. Netherlands, and you can see in the PISA-graph, does fall into the exact same pattern as all other countries. You are just picking the freak outliers - which are not stable over three years - and ignoring the general trend. I'm not sure what data you're using, but as you can see in the article by Hyde and Myers, the M/F variance ratio for Denmark was 0.99, 1.00 for the Netherlands, and, for another example, 0.95 for Indonesia. You seem to be the one confused about the data - the claim of universal greater variability for males across countries is factually false. On April 11 2014 21:32 Darkwhite wrote:
Asian girls are well represented in the high percentiles because Asians in general outperform the rest. If you look at the Asian students in isolation, the gender gap is every bit as visible, both in statistical material and real world selection processes such as the Mathematical Olympiad. The sentence "Asian girls are well represented in the high percentiles because Asians in general outperform the rest" is completely nonsensical. The numbers for the 99th percentile for the Asian population studied in the article disprove the idea that there is universally a preponderance of men at the top. I've shown you this is simply not true across countries, and in this case it's not true across ethnicities either. Clearly, this points to the role of sociocultural factors on variability. On April 11 2014 21:32 Darkwhite wrote:
I brought up SATs in addition to chess because it shows how readily you change your explanations around. You postulate that the discrepancies in chess performances is a population effect, but when this obviously cannot be true for SAT, population effects are suddenly irrelevant, samples are unrepresentative, sociocultural blah. Note that a very simple variability theory accounts for all the explanandum at once. I don't "postulate" anything about chess rankings, since there are no discrepancies in chess performance - women perform just as well as men statistically. The fact that you are still denying this very clearly illustrates how you are refusing to let evidence and scientific research get in the way of your preconceived bias about male superiority. With regards to S.A.T.s, the possibility of this particular aspect of sampling bias was put forward by Hyde because there is an actual reason (in terms of student grades) to believe that the best students tend to apply for college education. It was just a possibility, however, and we can entirely dismiss it if you want to - it won't change the fundamental sampling bias problems that still apply to the population. On April 11 2014 08:39 Xiphos wrote:On April 11 2014 07:15 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 03:04 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 00:28 Darkwhite wrote:On April 10 2014 09:46 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
I invite you to read Merim Bilalić, Kieran Smallbone, Peter McLeod and Fernand Gobet, "Why are (the best) women so good at chess? Participation rates and gender differences in intellectual domains", Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 22 March 2009, vol. 276 no. 1659, pp. 1161-1165. They show, through a statistical analysis, that the crushing differences in number of players between men and women account for 96% of the observed difference in results between the two. For the remaining 4%, you can turn to the cultural factors I mentioned, notably the stereotype threat effect that I discussed with Jumperer. This is the sort of nonsense you get when you assume that participation and skill are independent variables. If you apply the exact same methodology to basketball, you will similarly purport to show that tall players are overrepresented at the highest level, not because being tall is itself an advantage, but because there are more tall basketball players. What's really going on is that taller players perform better, increasing the chances that they keep playing, while coaches actively recruit and develop taller players - it's easier to make a tall player good, than a good player tall. Skill and participation are not at all independent. Actually, that is what happens when someone doesn't bother to read the scientific article he was presented with. Your argument is addressed on p. 1163. In short, there is no evidence that supports men have any kind of biological advantages for chess. In addition, " drop-out rates for boys and girls were similar" (see Chabris, C. F. & Glickman, M. E. 2006 "Sex differences in intellectual performance: analysis of a large cohort of competitive chess players", Psychological Science 17, pp 1040–1046). This means that the selection process is not a matter of boys performing better and therefore continuing to play more than girls, unlike your basketball example. Women simply do not turn to chess initially as much as men (for sociocultural reasons), and the ones who do perform virtually exactly as well as should be statistically expected from their numbers, the extremely small difference being explained by cultural factors. The statistics only account for people who have played chess in an organized environment. This is a fraction of the population, which is not selected at random nor only for sociocultural reason - primarily, they are selected for whether or not they find the game interesting and enjoyable. The article hinges on the assumption that the women who do play chess have wound up there by some sort of accident or happenstance, and that there is just as much talent among the women who don't play. Do you really find that likely? The article does not make any assumption on why the men and women who play chess do so. It looks at the respective chess performances of men and women in chess and demonstrates that 96% of the difference in representation in rankings can be attributed to the respective numbers of players of the two population. The population of women who play chess virtually does not play statistically worse than the population of men. For the remaining very small 4% difference, I provided evidence of the role of cultural factors in the form of scientific research done in social sciences on that very topic. Thus, chess rankings & performance simply does not support the idea of greater abilities for males. Since you cannot dispute these numbers, your objection is that there are fewer women because women are inherently worse at chess (due to lower relevant natural abilities). This runs into four problems. 1. You would expect this to still show among the population of women that does play chess, but it doesn't. The opposite is true. 2. The proportion of women starting to play chess then stopping (and therefore not being taken into account by Bilalić et al.) is the same as the proportion of men starting to play chess then stopping (and therefore not being taken into account by Bilalić et al.), as shown in the study by Chabris and Glickman which I referred to in my previous message. This means that the difference in numbers in men and women competing is simply not explained by women being unsuccessful/worse than men and therefore dropping out without having a chance to appear in the sample, since they drop out at the same proportion as men. 3. The remaining explanation is that there are simply way less women trying/engaging in chess than men in the first place. Unless you are going to tell me the explanation is that women are more physically deterred by a game with black & white squares (which would still be irrelevant to intelligence), this means that sociocultural factors explain the difference. 4. Beyond these points, there is zero evidence of biological factors explaining any sort of difference in chess performance. To sum up: looking at chess performance does not, in any way, support the hypothesis that men have abilities that women don't. Not a single aspect of the issue supports the hypothesis. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 03:04 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 00:28 Darkwhite wrote:Here is a sample where females outnumber males, so that the participation bias should pull in the other direction. What's the non-biological explanation this time around? + Show Spoiler [img] + 1. As argued by many scholars who have studied the topic, it is problematic to use S.A.T. scores to evaluate gender performance in mathematics for several reasons, the most important of them being inadequate sampling. First, it is only a specific part of the general population which takes the test, preventing generalization. Second, there are more women who take the tests than men. As Janet Hyde writes, "assuming that SAT takers represent the top portion of the performance distribution, this surplus of females taking the SAT means that the female group dips farther down into the performance distribution than does the male group" (Supporting online material for the article I cite next, pp. 2-3). In fact, if you take a look at ACT scores, ACT being also a test taken by students going to college, there is no gender gap in scores in states where the test was administered to all students. See Janet S. Hyde et al., "Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance", Science 320, 25 July 2008, pp 494 ff. and the supporting online material. 2. In the US and some other nations, there are actually no longer gender differences in mathematics performance in the general population. Some gender differences do remain in the U.S. among the most mathematically talented, but the gap has been closing steadily and it does not exist in some other nations, meaning that sociocultural and not biological factors are behind it. I direct you to Nicole M. Else-Quest et al., "Cross-National Patterns of Gender Differences in Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis", Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 136, No. 1, 2010, pp. 103-127 and Janet S. Hyde, Janet E. Mertz, "Gender, culture, and mathematics performance", PNAS, Vol. 106, No. 22, 2009, pp. 8801-8807. It's interesting how SATs get criticized for inadequate sampling while chess statistics are fair game. I'm sure people with FIDE ratings are not a specific part of the general population, preventing generalization. You seem to be confused about who is arguing what with respect to the chess population. You brought it up (after Jumperer) to argue the point that men had superior abilities than women. I explained to you that your example did not support your point since the chess performances of the two populations are statistically equivalent. I'm not trying to argue that people with FIDE ratings are not a specific part of the population, you were making that generalization, and I showed you that even among the specific population you had chosen your point was not true. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:
The excess women taking the SATs actually works in their favor; the graph I linked gives the straight ratio without any normalization. Despite a larger number of women being tested, there are still significantly more men with the best scores. Notice that this larger talent pool is the exact reason given, with regards to chess, for the lack of top female players. While it is true that the excess women could hurt the female average score, it certainly shouldn't hurt their absolute representation, at any level. Yes, I was addressing average male and female scores. The problem I referred to with regards to the higher number of women, potentially including more less-capable candidates, still impacts the M/F ratios at the lower levels. Beyond this, however, the sampling problem remains entirely. Since the test is mainly taken by those who wish to attend college, and men are very much in the majority when it comes to studies in engineering/physics, for example, you could expect more men that have put an emphasis on maths to take the SATs than women. I'm not sure why you think SAT scores are at all representative of anything, let alone evidence of the role of biological factors. With regards to the parallel you draw to chess, in chess women statistically performed just as well as men. In the case of SATs, they did not (with plenty of non-biological possible reasons, as I said). In addition, the possibility of a negative impact of higher numbers of women on their average scores (and on the M/F ratios at the bottom) raised by Hyde pertained to the attributes of the excess population for women. I'm not sure what comparison you're making with chess here. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:
It is true that Hyde has sort-of pretended to show that there is no gender gap in maths. She has done this through sheer intellectual dishonesty, in particular:
- including pre-pubescent students in the sample; the same sort of group where girls are taller than boys
- using minimum-level tests such as the NCLB, which doesn't distinguish between average, above-average and exceptional performances, but primarily singles out ineptitude The articles I cited used the tests which allow for the most accurate comparisons among the U.S. population and among other countries (TIMSS and PISA tests for cross-countries). They take into account different stages, and certainly do not present only averaged aggregates. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:Even so, when Hyde has done everything in her power to rig the testing to diminish the gender gap, one problem remains - that, while averages of males and females approach each other, the variability of male scores remains significantly higher. What this means is that, when you look at only the most talented, such as the 95 percentile, you will find an overwhelming male dominance. Exactly like we see in the International Mathematical Olympiad, or in universities. I would be interested to see exactly which countries do not have a significant gap between men and women at the higher levels; many are included here, in what seems a fairly robust trend. + Show Spoiler +Arrows show that the outliers typically aren't stable from the 2003 to the 2006 PISA test. This objection is pretty funny considering that if you had bothered to look at the three articles I cited, you would have noticed that it is completely false: the variability hypothesis is tested each time, and extensively so in Hyde & Mertz (2009). I even referred to those results when I wrote "Some gender differences do remain in the U.S. among the most mathematically talented, but the gap has been closing steadily and it does not exist in some other nations, meaning that sociocultural and not biological factors are behind it". Several measures are examined and explained at the 95th percentile and above, exactly what you argued they should have done. Like I said, a gap does remain in the U.S., but it is smaller than before, it varies across ethnicities (for Asians, it is girls who score better above the 99th percentile), and it is nonexistent in some other countries, pointing clearly towards the role of sociocultural factors. If you read the articles, you will see that Denmark and the Netherlands are examples of countries where males did not have greater variability than females. Fun fact: men are being limited in the science field. http://www.discriminations.us/2012/07/obama-moves-toward-quotas-limiting-men-in-science/http://www.openmarket.org/2012/07/10/quotas-limiting-male-science-enrollment-the-new-liberal-war-on-science/That's why girls are catching up. You already posted the same two links earlier in the thread, and I already replied. On April 09 2014 20:13 puppykiller wrote:
Some really good posts by kwizach in this thread. Thanks man, I appreciate it. You are lying through your teeth at this point. If you still cannot see how the population argument, with regards women in chess, relies on the assumption that there is as much, untapped potential among the women who do not play chess as those who actually do, then we're done here. Again, the findings of the scientific authors of the study is that the women chess players perform just as well as the men chess players statistically. You on the other hand, were trying to argue that women in general have less abilities than men based on chess results. Unfortunately for you, chess results show the two perform virtually equally well statistically, as the study demonstrated. As I wrote earlier, you therefore simply cannot base your idea of greater male competence on chess rankings since they simply do not support that idea in any way. The findings of the article do not rest on any assumption pertaining to the non-playing population. On April 13 2014 00:08 Darkwhite wrote:
A very brief explanation of Merim Bilalić, Kieran Smallbone, Peter McLeod and Fernand Gobet, "Why are (the best) women so good at chess? Participation rates and gender differences in intellectual domains", Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 22 March 2009, vol. 276 no. 1659, pp. 1161-1165 :
Look at FIDE ratings of registered players. From this, calculate the mean and variation of the male and female subsets of the population. If we now do a direct comparison between male and female players, we will see that males vastly outnumber females in the top ranks. We will also see that there are more male players than female. Then we ask; how would the rankings look, if the male and female subsets were equally large?
Essentially, what we have to do to make the comparison is to imagine what would happen with a larger female playerbase. So, what we do is invent new, hypothetical female players, by drawing them from a population with mean and variation derived from the current female player base. We can now choose three different assumptions:
- New players will be more talented on average (this is absurd)
- New players will be exactly the same on average (this assumes that the current female players are representative of the female population, i.e. that there is no selection for aptitude on who plays chess, i.e. that skill and participation are independent variables - this is what's done in the article)
- New players will be less talented on average (this assumes that the women who choose to play chess today are, on average, the most talented women)
The conclusions in the article rests on the unfounded assumption that women who don't play chess are at least as talented as the women who do. There are very good reasons to think this assumption is false. No. That is not at all what the article did. Seriously, did you even read it? The comparison is not made by "imagining" how non-chess playing women would fare. That has strictly nothing to do with the content and results of the study. What the authors do is compare the performances of actual playing men and women using only the data available for playing men and women - no projection based on assumptions for non-players is made. They compared the real performance of players from both sexes to the expected performance of those players, not to the expected performance of non-players or by using the expected performance of non-players. What you are misleadingly suggesting is simply not in the study. Either you did not read it, or you did read it and misunderstood it, or you did read it and decided to misrepresent it. To go back to the wider point that you are again trying to make, however, I'll refer you to my previous post: there is absolutely no evidence that indicates women who do not play chess would play worse than men who do not play chess, or that increasing the number of women playing/making everyone in the world play chess would result in a male-female gap. This is you making a claim based on your pro-male bias without the slightest bit of evidence to support it - there is simply no real-world foundation behind the idea that the cultural factors which lead less women to play chess correlate with lower abilities. The evidence we have for women who do play chess does not hint at this, and neither does the evidence for women who tried chess and stopped. There's literally nothing that even suggests your claim is true. I refer you to my previous post with regards to why less women play chess (sociocultural and not biological factors), and invite you to stop asserting things that you cannot substantiate with anything and which are clearly the product of your personal beliefs of male superiority. On April 12 2014 15:54 KlaCkoN wrote:
Kwizach, you are a god among men. I wish I had your patience for holding peoples hands through arguments already made once. ahah, cheers :-) Directly quoted from the article: Show nested quote +Once participation rates of men and women are controlled for, there is little left for biological, environmental, cultural or other factors to explain. The only way to control for participation rates, is to estimate what would have changed if populations were equally large. Again quoting: Show nested quote +The next 70 pairs show a small but consistent advantage for men—their superiority over the corresponding female player is a little greater than would be expected purely from the relative numbers of male and female players. How do they estimate this expected superiority purely from relative numbers? Naive statistics, of course. We draw additional female players from the same distribution as observed in the real female players, assuming that these are representative for the additional female players who would have played, if participation rates were equal. Then we calculate the difference between the hypothetical and the factual. Mathematically, that's what it all comes down to.
I'm impressed at the way you keep inserting in the article content that simply is not there. The article does not make a comparison between the actual male chess population on the one hand, and the actual female chess population + a projected female chess population based on the statistics of the actual female chess population on the other hand, in order to have matching numbers between the two. They do not, contrary to what you're saying, "draw additional female players from the same distribution as observed in the real female players".
What the article does is compare the actual and expected performances of the top 100 male and female players - they do not invent additional female players, they look at the best 100 from both groups, and they calculate their expected performances by using the mean and variability of both actual populations. At no point in the analysis do they project the data onto imaginary additional female players. The methodology is thoroughly explained in appendix A, at the end of the paper:
Given a distribution with known mean μ and s.d. δ, this final formula defines the expectation of the kth highest value within a sample of size n, valid provided n is large and k is relatively small. As such, it affords us a method for estimating the expected rating of a range of top players from the German chess data for each gender; indeed, we use the formula to calculate the expected ratings of the top 100 male and female players using the mean and s.d. of the population (the German chess data), in turn allowing us to determine the expected difference in rating between those players.
That is how participation rates are controlled - not by the method you are suggesting. There is absolutely nothing "naïve" about the statistical method used here. You simply did not understand the mathematical operations at play.
On April 13 2014 06:16 Darkwhite wrote:
Now, there are two possible extremes:
- exactly all the most talented female chess players are already playing because of targeted and self-selection
- there is exactly as much untapped talent among the females who don't play, because that's the easiest way to do statistics
All the mathematics in the article implicitly assumes the second extreme, whether you're able to notice or not.
You did not understand the "mathematics" of the article - again, the article does not make any assumption on a female population not already described by the data used.
In addition, since you conveniently keep avoiding my rebuttal of your point on the non-playing female population, allow me to re-iterate: there is absolutely no evidence that indicates women who do not play chess would play worse than men who do not play chess, or that increasing the number of women playing/making everyone in the world play chess would result in a male-female gap. This is you making a claim based on your pro-male bias without the slightest bit of evidence to support it - there is simply no real-world foundation behind the idea that the cultural factors which lead less women to play chess correlate with lower abilities. The evidence we have for women who do play chess does not hint at this, and neither does the evidence for women who tried chess and stopped. There's literally nothing that even suggests your claim is true. I refer you to my previous post with regards to why less women play chess (sociocultural and not biological factors), and invite you to stop asserting things that you cannot substantiate with anything and which are clearly the product of your personal beliefs of male superiority. If you wish to claim otherwise for the non-playing female and male populations, where is your evidence?
On April 13 2014 06:21 Xiphos wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2014 06:16 Darkwhite wrote:On April 13 2014 02:05 kwizach wrote:On April 12 2014 23:36 Darkwhite wrote:On April 12 2014 08:04 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 21:32 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 07:15 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 03:04 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 00:28 Darkwhite wrote:
[quote]
This is the sort of nonsense you get when you assume that participation and skill are independent variables. If you apply the exact same methodology to basketball, you will similarly purport to show that tall players are overrepresented at the highest level, not because being tall is itself an advantage, but because there are more tall basketball players. What's really going on is that taller players perform better, increasing the chances that they keep playing, while coaches actively recruit and develop taller players - it's easier to make a tall player good, than a good player tall. Skill and participation are not at all independent. Actually, that is what happens when someone doesn't bother to read the scientific article he was presented with. Your argument is addressed on p. 1163. In short, there is no evidence that supports men have any kind of biological advantages for chess. In addition, " drop-out rates for boys and girls were similar" (see Chabris, C. F. & Glickman, M. E. 2006 "Sex differences in intellectual performance: analysis of a large cohort of competitive chess players", Psychological Science 17, pp 1040–1046). This means that the selection process is not a matter of boys performing better and therefore continuing to play more than girls, unlike your basketball example. Women simply do not turn to chess initially as much as men (for sociocultural reasons), and the ones who do perform virtually exactly as well as should be statistically expected from their numbers, the extremely small difference being explained by cultural factors. The statistics only account for people who have played chess in an organized environment. This is a fraction of the population, which is not selected at random nor only for sociocultural reason - primarily, they are selected for whether or not they find the game interesting and enjoyable. The article hinges on the assumption that the women who do play chess have wound up there by some sort of accident or happenstance, and that there is just as much talent among the women who don't play. Do you really find that likely? The article does not make any assumption on why the men and women who play chess do so. It looks at the respective chess performances of men and women in chess and demonstrates that 96% of the difference in representation in rankings can be attributed to the respective numbers of players of the two population. The population of women who play chess virtually does not play statistically worse than the population of men. For the remaining very small 4% difference, I provided evidence of the role of cultural factors in the form of scientific research done in social sciences on that very topic. Thus, chess rankings & performance simply does not support the idea of greater abilities for males. Since you cannot dispute these numbers, your objection is that there are fewer women because women are inherently worse at chess (due to lower relevant natural abilities). This runs into four problems. 1. You would expect this to still show among the population of women that does play chess, but it doesn't. The opposite is true. 2. The proportion of women starting to play chess then stopping (and therefore not being taken into account by Bilalić et al.) is the same as the proportion of men starting to play chess then stopping (and therefore not being taken into account by Bilalić et al.), as shown in the study by Chabris and Glickman which I referred to in my previous message. This means that the difference in numbers in men and women competing is simply not explained by women being unsuccessful/worse than men and therefore dropping out without having a chance to appear in the sample, since they drop out at the same proportion as men. 3. The remaining explanation is that there are simply way less women trying/engaging in chess than men in the first place. Unless you are going to tell me the explanation is that women are more physically deterred by a game with black & white squares (which would still be irrelevant to intelligence), this means that sociocultural factors explain the difference. 4. Beyond these points, there is zero evidence of biological factors explaining any sort of difference in chess performance. To sum up: looking at chess performance does not, in any way, support the hypothesis that men have abilities that women don't. Not a single aspect of the issue supports the hypothesis. It does assume it, implicitly - the worst sort of assumption. If the women who do show up in their material are selected for aptitude, directly or indirectly, then the women who don't show up will on average be less talented. This would mean that, if you could encourage additional women to play chess, you would mostly get poorer players, increasing the male-female gap on average and failing to eliminate it in absolute numbers. That's the problem with the population normalization magic the authors are doing with no effort to justify it, and no wall of text will change that. As a trivial illustration, we can play the same game with sprinting; less than one percent of the world's population have a recorded 100m performance this year. Thus, there should at least be a hundred people in the world faster than Usain Bolt. Doesn't seem very likely, does it? I'm not sure if you thought that describing my reply as a "wall of text" would somehow prevent anyone from noticing that you failed to reply to the arguments I just presented you with, but just in case, it didn't. Again, before I address the rehash of your previous posts that you just posted, let me insist on something that you keep on dodging: chess rankings & performance simply do not support the idea of greater abilities for males. Differences in ranking are virtually entirely explained by the overwhelming advantage men have in numbers, and the rest can be explained by the cultural factors I evoked earlier. Your initial argument that the fact that there are more men at the top means men have better abilities has therefore been entirely debunked - women perform just as well as men statistically. I can't stress this enough - there is nothing about chess rankings that supports the idea of greater abilities for male, as the study I showed you clearly demonstrates. Of course, this doesn't prevent you from claiming that men do still have greater abilities, but the point is that you cannot base your point on chess rankings since they simply do not support that idea in any way. So, to come back to the argument you have now been repeating for a couple of posts, you've switched from looking at chess rankings to claiming that if we were to take into account the women who have never tried chess and made them into chess players, we would see a decline in the average performance of females, creating a male-female gap (I use the word "creating", because contrary to what you said, there is no current male-female gap, as was repeatedly explained to you and proven by the article I cited). As I extensively explained in my previous post, however, you are basing yourself on absolutely nothing whatsoever to claim this. There is absolutely no evidence that indicates women who do not play chess would play worse than men who do not play chess, or that increasing the number of women playing/making everyone in the world play chess would result in a male-female gap. This is you making a claim based on your pro-male bias without the slightest bit of evidence to support it - there is simply no real-world foundation behind the idea that the cultural factors which lead less women to play chess correlate with lower abilities. The evidence we have for women who do play chess does not hint at this, and neither does the evidence for women who tried chess and stopped. There's literally nothing that even suggests your claim is true. I refer you to my previous post with regards to why less women play chess (sociocultural and not biological factors), and invite you to stop asserting things that you cannot substantiate with anything and which are clearly the product of your personal beliefs of male superiority. On April 11 2014 21:32 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 07:15 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 03:04 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 00:28 Darkwhite wrote:Here is a sample where females outnumber males, so that the participation bias should pull in the other direction. What's the non-biological explanation this time around? + Show Spoiler [img] + 1. As argued by many scholars who have studied the topic, it is problematic to use S.A.T. scores to evaluate gender performance in mathematics for several reasons, the most important of them being inadequate sampling. First, it is only a specific part of the general population which takes the test, preventing generalization. Second, there are more women who take the tests than men. As Janet Hyde writes, "assuming that SAT takers represent the top portion of the performance distribution, this surplus of females taking the SAT means that the female group dips farther down into the performance distribution than does the male group" (Supporting online material for the article I cite next, pp. 2-3). In fact, if you take a look at ACT scores, ACT being also a test taken by students going to college, there is no gender gap in scores in states where the test was administered to all students. See Janet S. Hyde et al., "Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance", Science 320, 25 July 2008, pp 494 ff. and the supporting online material. 2. In the US and some other nations, there are actually no longer gender differences in mathematics performance in the general population. Some gender differences do remain in the U.S. among the most mathematically talented, but the gap has been closing steadily and it does not exist in some other nations, meaning that sociocultural and not biological factors are behind it. I direct you to Nicole M. Else-Quest et al., "Cross-National Patterns of Gender Differences in Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis", Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 136, No. 1, 2010, pp. 103-127 and Janet S. Hyde, Janet E. Mertz, "Gender, culture, and mathematics performance", PNAS, Vol. 106, No. 22, 2009, pp. 8801-8807. It's interesting how SATs get criticized for inadequate sampling while chess statistics are fair game. I'm sure people with FIDE ratings are not a specific part of the general population, preventing generalization. You seem to be confused about who is arguing what with respect to the chess population. You brought it up (after Jumperer) to argue the point that men had superior abilities than women. I explained to you that your example did not support your point since the chess performances of the two populations are statistically equivalent. I'm not trying to argue that people with FIDE ratings are not a specific part of the population, you were making that generalization, and I showed you that even among the specific population you had chosen your point was not true. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:
The excess women taking the SATs actually works in their favor; the graph I linked gives the straight ratio without any normalization. Despite a larger number of women being tested, there are still significantly more men with the best scores. Notice that this larger talent pool is the exact reason given, with regards to chess, for the lack of top female players. While it is true that the excess women could hurt the female average score, it certainly shouldn't hurt their absolute representation, at any level. Yes, I was addressing average male and female scores. The problem I referred to with regards to the higher number of women, potentially including more less-capable candidates, still impacts the M/F ratios at the lower levels. Beyond this, however, the sampling problem remains entirely. Since the test is mainly taken by those who wish to attend college, and men are very much in the majority when it comes to studies in engineering/physics, for example, you could expect more men that have put an emphasis on maths to take the SATs than women. I'm not sure why you think SAT scores are at all representative of anything, let alone evidence of the role of biological factors. With regards to the parallel you draw to chess, in chess women statistically performed just as well as men. In the case of SATs, they did not (with plenty of non-biological possible reasons, as I said). In addition, the possibility of a negative impact of higher numbers of women on their average scores (and on the M/F ratios at the bottom) raised by Hyde pertained to the attributes of the excess population for women. I'm not sure what comparison you're making with chess here. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:
It is true that Hyde has sort-of pretended to show that there is no gender gap in maths. She has done this through sheer intellectual dishonesty, in particular:
- including pre-pubescent students in the sample; the same sort of group where girls are taller than boys
- using minimum-level tests such as the NCLB, which doesn't distinguish between average, above-average and exceptional performances, but primarily singles out ineptitude The articles I cited used the tests which allow for the most accurate comparisons among the U.S. population and among other countries (TIMSS and PISA tests for cross-countries). They take into account different stages, and certainly do not present only averaged aggregates. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:Even so, when Hyde has done everything in her power to rig the testing to diminish the gender gap, one problem remains - that, while averages of males and females approach each other, the variability of male scores remains significantly higher. What this means is that, when you look at only the most talented, such as the 95 percentile, you will find an overwhelming male dominance. Exactly like we see in the International Mathematical Olympiad, or in universities. I would be interested to see exactly which countries do not have a significant gap between men and women at the higher levels; many are included here, in what seems a fairly robust trend. + Show Spoiler +Arrows show that the outliers typically aren't stable from the 2003 to the 2006 PISA test. This objection is pretty funny considering that if you had bothered to look at the three articles I cited, you would have noticed that it is completely false: the variability hypothesis is tested each time, and extensively so in Hyde & Mertz (2009). I even referred to those results when I wrote "Some gender differences do remain in the U.S. among the most mathematically talented, but the gap has been closing steadily and it does not exist in some other nations, meaning that sociocultural and not biological factors are behind it". Several measures are examined and explained at the 95th percentile and above, exactly what you argued they should have done. Like I said, a gap does remain in the U.S., but it is smaller than before, it varies across ethnicities (for Asians, it is girls who score better above the 99th percentile), and it is nonexistent in some other countries, pointing clearly towards the role of sociocultural factors. If you read the articles, you will see that Denmark and the Netherlands are examples of countries where males did not have greater variability than females. I asked you to explain why cultural barriers are insurmountable for women in chess, but not for players from Vietnam and the Phillipines. You have still given no such explanation - you immediately jumped to citing crude statistical analysis on small, unrepresentative samples, which you put your fullest trust in, while criticizing SATs as unrepresentative. Again, you are using chess players to support a broader point about women's abilities. I'm not calling the chess players population representative. You are. And again, your premise that "cultural barriers are insurmountable for women in chess" is factually false: women perform exactly as well as men in chess, as the study I provided you with earlier shows. What exactly do you not understand about this? On April 11 2014 21:32 Darkwhite wrote:And the variance is not at all small - the problem is that Hyde apparently does not understand variability, or does not want to understand it. Quoting her: All [variance ratios], by state and grade, are > 1.0 [range 1.11 to 1.21...]. Thus, our analyses show greater male variability, although the discrepancy in variances is not large. 1.11-1.21 is incredibly significant - not for the average person, but it guarantees that the higher echelons will be dominated by men. Netherlands, and you can see in the PISA-graph, does fall into the exact same pattern as all other countries. You are just picking the freak outliers - which are not stable over three years - and ignoring the general trend. I'm not sure what data you're using, but as you can see in the article by Hyde and Myers, the M/F variance ratio for Denmark was 0.99, 1.00 for the Netherlands, and, for another example, 0.95 for Indonesia. You seem to be the one confused about the data - the claim of universal greater variability for males across countries is factually false. On April 11 2014 21:32 Darkwhite wrote:
Asian girls are well represented in the high percentiles because Asians in general outperform the rest. If you look at the Asian students in isolation, the gender gap is every bit as visible, both in statistical material and real world selection processes such as the Mathematical Olympiad. The sentence "Asian girls are well represented in the high percentiles because Asians in general outperform the rest" is completely nonsensical. The numbers for the 99th percentile for the Asian population studied in the article disprove the idea that there is universally a preponderance of men at the top. I've shown you this is simply not true across countries, and in this case it's not true across ethnicities either. Clearly, this points to the role of sociocultural factors on variability. On April 11 2014 21:32 Darkwhite wrote:
I brought up SATs in addition to chess because it shows how readily you change your explanations around. You postulate that the discrepancies in chess performances is a population effect, but when this obviously cannot be true for SAT, population effects are suddenly irrelevant, samples are unrepresentative, sociocultural blah. Note that a very simple variability theory accounts for all the explanandum at once. I don't "postulate" anything about chess rankings, since there are no discrepancies in chess performance - women perform just as well as men statistically. The fact that you are still denying this very clearly illustrates how you are refusing to let evidence and scientific research get in the way of your preconceived bias about male superiority. With regards to S.A.T.s, the possibility of this particular aspect of sampling bias was put forward by Hyde because there is an actual reason (in terms of student grades) to believe that the best students tend to apply for college education. It was just a possibility, however, and we can entirely dismiss it if you want to - it won't change the fundamental sampling bias problems that still apply to the population. On April 11 2014 08:39 Xiphos wrote:On April 11 2014 07:15 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 03:04 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 00:28 Darkwhite wrote:
[quote]
This is the sort of nonsense you get when you assume that participation and skill are independent variables. If you apply the exact same methodology to basketball, you will similarly purport to show that tall players are overrepresented at the highest level, not because being tall is itself an advantage, but because there are more tall basketball players. What's really going on is that taller players perform better, increasing the chances that they keep playing, while coaches actively recruit and develop taller players - it's easier to make a tall player good, than a good player tall. Skill and participation are not at all independent. Actually, that is what happens when someone doesn't bother to read the scientific article he was presented with. Your argument is addressed on p. 1163. In short, there is no evidence that supports men have any kind of biological advantages for chess. In addition, " drop-out rates for boys and girls were similar" (see Chabris, C. F. & Glickman, M. E. 2006 "Sex differences in intellectual performance: analysis of a large cohort of competitive chess players", Psychological Science 17, pp 1040–1046). This means that the selection process is not a matter of boys performing better and therefore continuing to play more than girls, unlike your basketball example. Women simply do not turn to chess initially as much as men (for sociocultural reasons), and the ones who do perform virtually exactly as well as should be statistically expected from their numbers, the extremely small difference being explained by cultural factors. The statistics only account for people who have played chess in an organized environment. This is a fraction of the population, which is not selected at random nor only for sociocultural reason - primarily, they are selected for whether or not they find the game interesting and enjoyable. The article hinges on the assumption that the women who do play chess have wound up there by some sort of accident or happenstance, and that there is just as much talent among the women who don't play. Do you really find that likely? The article does not make any assumption on why the men and women who play chess do so. It looks at the respective chess performances of men and women in chess and demonstrates that 96% of the difference in representation in rankings can be attributed to the respective numbers of players of the two population. The population of women who play chess virtually does not play statistically worse than the population of men. For the remaining very small 4% difference, I provided evidence of the role of cultural factors in the form of scientific research done in social sciences on that very topic. Thus, chess rankings & performance simply does not support the idea of greater abilities for males. Since you cannot dispute these numbers, your objection is that there are fewer women because women are inherently worse at chess (due to lower relevant natural abilities). This runs into four problems. 1. You would expect this to still show among the population of women that does play chess, but it doesn't. The opposite is true. 2. The proportion of women starting to play chess then stopping (and therefore not being taken into account by Bilalić et al.) is the same as the proportion of men starting to play chess then stopping (and therefore not being taken into account by Bilalić et al.), as shown in the study by Chabris and Glickman which I referred to in my previous message. This means that the difference in numbers in men and women competing is simply not explained by women being unsuccessful/worse than men and therefore dropping out without having a chance to appear in the sample, since they drop out at the same proportion as men. 3. The remaining explanation is that there are simply way less women trying/engaging in chess than men in the first place. Unless you are going to tell me the explanation is that women are more physically deterred by a game with black & white squares (which would still be irrelevant to intelligence), this means that sociocultural factors explain the difference. 4. Beyond these points, there is zero evidence of biological factors explaining any sort of difference in chess performance. To sum up: looking at chess performance does not, in any way, support the hypothesis that men have abilities that women don't. Not a single aspect of the issue supports the hypothesis. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:On April 11 2014 03:04 kwizach wrote:On April 11 2014 00:28 Darkwhite wrote:Here is a sample where females outnumber males, so that the participation bias should pull in the other direction. What's the non-biological explanation this time around? + Show Spoiler [img] + 1. As argued by many scholars who have studied the topic, it is problematic to use S.A.T. scores to evaluate gender performance in mathematics for several reasons, the most important of them being inadequate sampling. First, it is only a specific part of the general population which takes the test, preventing generalization. Second, there are more women who take the tests than men. As Janet Hyde writes, "assuming that SAT takers represent the top portion of the performance distribution, this surplus of females taking the SAT means that the female group dips farther down into the performance distribution than does the male group" (Supporting online material for the article I cite next, pp. 2-3). In fact, if you take a look at ACT scores, ACT being also a test taken by students going to college, there is no gender gap in scores in states where the test was administered to all students. See Janet S. Hyde et al., "Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance", Science 320, 25 July 2008, pp 494 ff. and the supporting online material. 2. In the US and some other nations, there are actually no longer gender differences in mathematics performance in the general population. Some gender differences do remain in the U.S. among the most mathematically talented, but the gap has been closing steadily and it does not exist in some other nations, meaning that sociocultural and not biological factors are behind it. I direct you to Nicole M. Else-Quest et al., "Cross-National Patterns of Gender Differences in Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis", Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 136, No. 1, 2010, pp. 103-127 and Janet S. Hyde, Janet E. Mertz, "Gender, culture, and mathematics performance", PNAS, Vol. 106, No. 22, 2009, pp. 8801-8807. It's interesting how SATs get criticized for inadequate sampling while chess statistics are fair game. I'm sure people with FIDE ratings are not a specific part of the general population, preventing generalization. You seem to be confused about who is arguing what with respect to the chess population. You brought it up (after Jumperer) to argue the point that men had superior abilities than women. I explained to you that your example did not support your point since the chess performances of the two populations are statistically equivalent. I'm not trying to argue that people with FIDE ratings are not a specific part of the population, you were making that generalization, and I showed you that even among the specific population you had chosen your point was not true. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:
The excess women taking the SATs actually works in their favor; the graph I linked gives the straight ratio without any normalization. Despite a larger number of women being tested, there are still significantly more men with the best scores. Notice that this larger talent pool is the exact reason given, with regards to chess, for the lack of top female players. While it is true that the excess women could hurt the female average score, it certainly shouldn't hurt their absolute representation, at any level. Yes, I was addressing average male and female scores. The problem I referred to with regards to the higher number of women, potentially including more less-capable candidates, still impacts the M/F ratios at the lower levels. Beyond this, however, the sampling problem remains entirely. Since the test is mainly taken by those who wish to attend college, and men are very much in the majority when it comes to studies in engineering/physics, for example, you could expect more men that have put an emphasis on maths to take the SATs than women. I'm not sure why you think SAT scores are at all representative of anything, let alone evidence of the role of biological factors. With regards to the parallel you draw to chess, in chess women statistically performed just as well as men. In the case of SATs, they did not (with plenty of non-biological possible reasons, as I said). In addition, the possibility of a negative impact of higher numbers of women on their average scores (and on the M/F ratios at the bottom) raised by Hyde pertained to the attributes of the excess population for women. I'm not sure what comparison you're making with chess here. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:
It is true that Hyde has sort-of pretended to show that there is no gender gap in maths. She has done this through sheer intellectual dishonesty, in particular:
- including pre-pubescent students in the sample; the same sort of group where girls are taller than boys
- using minimum-level tests such as the NCLB, which doesn't distinguish between average, above-average and exceptional performances, but primarily singles out ineptitude The articles I cited used the tests which allow for the most accurate comparisons among the U.S. population and among other countries (TIMSS and PISA tests for cross-countries). They take into account different stages, and certainly do not present only averaged aggregates. On April 11 2014 04:24 Darkwhite wrote:Even so, when Hyde has done everything in her power to rig the testing to diminish the gender gap, one problem remains - that, while averages of males and females approach each other, the variability of male scores remains significantly higher. What this means is that, when you look at only the most talented, such as the 95 percentile, you will find an overwhelming male dominance. Exactly like we see in the International Mathematical Olympiad, or in universities. I would be interested to see exactly which countries do not have a significant gap between men and women at the higher levels; many are included here, in what seems a fairly robust trend. + Show Spoiler +Arrows show that the outliers typically aren't stable from the 2003 to the 2006 PISA test. This objection is pretty funny considering that if you had bothered to look at the three articles I cited, you would have noticed that it is completely false: the variability hypothesis is tested each time, and extensively so in Hyde & Mertz (2009). I even referred to those results when I wrote "Some gender differences do remain in the U.S. among the most mathematically talented, but the gap has been closing steadily and it does not exist in some other nations, meaning that sociocultural and not biological factors are behind it". Several measures are examined and explained at the 95th percentile and above, exactly what you argued they should have done. Like I said, a gap does remain in the U.S., but it is smaller than before, it varies across ethnicities (for Asians, it is girls who score better above the 99th percentile), and it is nonexistent in some other countries, pointing clearly towards the role of sociocultural factors. If you read the articles, you will see that Denmark and the Netherlands are examples of countries where males did not have greater variability than females. Fun fact: men are being limited in the science field. http://www.discriminations.us/2012/07/obama-moves-toward-quotas-limiting-men-in-science/http://www.openmarket.org/2012/07/10/quotas-limiting-male-science-enrollment-the-new-liberal-war-on-science/That's why girls are catching up. You already posted the same two links earlier in the thread, and I already replied. On April 09 2014 20:13 puppykiller wrote:
Some really good posts by kwizach in this thread. Thanks man, I appreciate it. You are lying through your teeth at this point. If you still cannot see how the population argument, with regards women in chess, relies on the assumption that there is as much, untapped potential among the women who do not play chess as those who actually do, then we're done here. Again, the findings of the scientific authors of the study is that the women chess players perform just as well as the men chess players statistically. You on the other hand, were trying to argue that women in general have less abilities than men based on chess results. Unfortunately for you, chess results show the two perform virtually equally well statistically, as the study demonstrated. As I wrote earlier, you therefore simply cannot base your idea of greater male competence on chess rankings since they simply do not support that idea in any way. The findings of the article do not rest on any assumption pertaining to the non-playing population. On April 13 2014 00:08 Darkwhite wrote:
A very brief explanation of Merim Bilalić, Kieran Smallbone, Peter McLeod and Fernand Gobet, "Why are (the best) women so good at chess? Participation rates and gender differences in intellectual domains", Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 22 March 2009, vol. 276 no. 1659, pp. 1161-1165 :
Look at FIDE ratings of registered players. From this, calculate the mean and variation of the male and female subsets of the population. If we now do a direct comparison between male and female players, we will see that males vastly outnumber females in the top ranks. We will also see that there are more male players than female. Then we ask; how would the rankings look, if the male and female subsets were equally large?
Essentially, what we have to do to make the comparison is to imagine what would happen with a larger female playerbase. So, what we do is invent new, hypothetical female players, by drawing them from a population with mean and variation derived from the current female player base. We can now choose three different assumptions:
- New players will be more talented on average (this is absurd)
- New players will be exactly the same on average (this assumes that the current female players are representative of the female population, i.e. that there is no selection for aptitude on who plays chess, i.e. that skill and participation are independent variables - this is what's done in the article)
- New players will be less talented on average (this assumes that the women who choose to play chess today are, on average, the most talented women)
The conclusions in the article rests on the unfounded assumption that women who don't play chess are at least as talented as the women who do. There are very good reasons to think this assumption is false. No. That is not at all what the article did. Seriously, did you even read it? The comparison is not made by "imagining" how non-chess playing women would fare. That has strictly nothing to do with the content and results of the study. What the authors do is compare the performances of actual playing men and women using only the data available for playing men and women - no projection based on assumptions for non-players is made. They compared the real performance of players from both sexes to the expected performance of those players, not to the expected performance of non-players or by using the expected performance of non-players. What you are misleadingly suggesting is simply not in the study. Either you did not read it, or you did read it and misunderstood it, or you did read it and decided to misrepresent it. To go back to the wider point that you are again trying to make, however, I'll refer you to my previous post: there is absolutely no evidence that indicates women who do not play chess would play worse than men who do not play chess, or that increasing the number of women playing/making everyone in the world play chess would result in a male-female gap. This is you making a claim based on your pro-male bias without the slightest bit of evidence to support it - there is simply no real-world foundation behind the idea that the cultural factors which lead less women to play chess correlate with lower abilities. The evidence we have for women who do play chess does not hint at this, and neither does the evidence for women who tried chess and stopped. There's literally nothing that even suggests your claim is true. I refer you to my previous post with regards to why less women play chess (sociocultural and not biological factors), and invite you to stop asserting things that you cannot substantiate with anything and which are clearly the product of your personal beliefs of male superiority. On April 12 2014 15:54 KlaCkoN wrote:
Kwizach, you are a god among men. I wish I had your patience for holding peoples hands through arguments already made once. ahah, cheers :-) Directly quoted from the article: Once participation rates of men and women are controlled for, there is little left for biological, environmental, cultural or other factors to explain. The only way to control for participation rates, is to estimate what would have changed if populations were equally large. Again quoting: The next 70 pairs show a small but consistent advantage for men—their superiority over the corresponding female player is a little greater than would be expected purely from the relative numbers of male and female players. How do they estimate this expected superiority purely from relative numbers? Naive statistics, of course. We draw additional female players from the same distribution as observed in the real female players, assuming that these are representative for the additional female players who would have played, if participation rates were equal. Then we calculate the difference between the hypothetical and the factual. Mathematically, that's what it all comes down to. Now, there are two possible extremes: - exactly all the most talented female chess players are already playing because of targeted and self-selection - there is exactly as much untapped talent among the females who don't play, because that's the easiest way to do statistics All the mathematics in the article implicitly assumes the second extreme, whether you're able to notice or not. Let's see how kwizach will weasel his way out of this one.
By pointing out what is actually in the article. But yeah, don't let evidence get in the way of your sexism.
On April 13 2014 06:26 Djzapz wrote:
I don't see how they determine that "Once participation rates of men and women are controlled for, there is little left for biological, environmental, cultural or other factors to explain". It seems to me like they outright assume that you either play or you don't and nothing else needs to be factored in.
I guess that's why it's unsubstantiated in the paper. They have no basis for saying that.
That is not what they assume. Their statement refers to the populations they studied, and is perfectly correct. With regards to your following post, there is nothing naïve about the 96%. It's the mathematical result which describes the correspondence between male and female performances. It's entirely accurate.
On April 13 2014 04:32 Jumperer wrote:
I cant consider them equal until a girl manage to become a world champion at poker/chess/dart/starcraft/LoL. If tiger woods can do it in golf then a girl shouldn't have trouble breaking into one of the 424878 non physically demanding sport and be a world champion.
No more excuses.
The fact that winners are more likely to come from the largest group engaging in the activities you listed is not an excuse, it's a simple statistical fact. As written in the Bilalić et al. article I cited:
Even if two groups have the same average (mean) and variability (s.d.), the highest performing individuals are more likely to come from the larger group. The greater the difference in size between the two groups, the greater is the difference to be expected between the top performers in the two groups. Nothing about underlying differences between the groups can be concluded from the preponderance of members of the larger group at the far ends of the distribution until one can show that this preponderance is greater than would be expected on statistical sampling grounds.
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