[extropy-chat] Harvard president criticized over comments

[Patrick Wilken]

On 18 Jan 2005, at 21:06, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:

> Last I heard, someone was claiming that the means were the same for 
> the male and female distributions, but the male variance was higher.  
> Which I suppose makes sense, viewed as a cost/payoff for an 
> evolutionary gamble.

This is essentially correct according to SAT scores, although I think 
the mean for males is very very slightly higher in math, and v. v. 
slightly lower in verbal scores. Because top universities select from 
the very extreme of the tail of the distribution it tends to favor 
males candidates much more than females, but the *average* ability of 
men and woman are not much different. In fact innate differences may be 
vanishingly small when compared to other environmental factors.

Interestingly I remember being told that math departments at top 
institutions also had a disproportionate number of left-handers. The 
thought was that there was a connection between asymmetries in brain 
development and mathematical ability. Male fetal development might 
actually be more prone to stresses in the womb (on many measures we are 
the weaker sex) and that's causing the greater variations in male math 
ability.

best, patrick