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A comment on The Fields Medal should return to its roots. Parent comment

Re:The Fields Medal should return to its roots by cycrutchfield on Sunday February 11, 2018 @05:08PM (#16355110)
All it would require is just that the standard deviation for math ability in men (whether by nature or nurture, I am making no judgment either way) is only very slightly higher than for women. Since we are looking at the tail of the distribution, the result would not be surprising.
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Re:The Fields Medal should return to its roots by 77pt77 on Sunday February 11, 2018 @08:24PM (#16355867)
That hypothesis got Larry Summers in a lot of trouble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_b...

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Re:The Fields Medal should return to its roots by tzs on Sunday February 11, 2018 @07:53PM (#16355746)
As Helena Cronin noted of men: "more dumbbells but more Nobels" [1].

[1] https://www.edge.org/annual-question/2008/response/10670

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Re:The Fields Medal should return to its roots by yorwba on Monday February 12, 2018 @01:49AM (#16357004)
I once did some calculations to explore the expected effect of that difference in standard deviation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997524

I'm on my phone right now and can't redo it for the gender ratio of Fields medalists, but I expect that the effect would cover most of the difference, since the cutoff for the award does seem quite high.

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