CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

Re:CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia by motohagiography on Saturday March 09, 2019 @06:39PM (#19349265)

Would the drop out rate of men (assuming higher) provide an additional control? If low achieving men selected out of the data set before it was collected at the SAT level, there could be a long tail of underachieving men. This would certainly effect averaging, and if number of dropouts were greater than the 90th percentile, there could be some selection/survivor bias in play on how males appear as a group.

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Re:CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia by iguy on Saturday March 09, 2019 @06:56PM (#19349334)

From some quick googling, it sounds like less than half of high-school students take the SAT. In which case the bottom end of the scores will probably tell you nothing about the population.

"3.8 million students took the PSAT -- the practice version of the SATs ... 1.7 million students from the class of 2015 took the SAT"

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Re:CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia by belorn on Sunday March 10, 2019 @07:50AM (#19351576)

If we want to look at the long tail of intellectual ability, the opposite side would be intellectual disability. Either measured by IQ, diagnosed as neurodevelopmental disorders or now days more commonly both.

Both side of the bell curve has poor definitions and IQ tests are far from perfect as it is said to optimize the accuracy between IQ 70 and 100. That said, we do see more men in practically every kind of type of data set for both side of the bell curve.

To cite a professor of both biology and neurology, no society on earth like to talk or even think about the mentally disabled. The "downsides" of greater variability is a group that most people treat as they don't exist, so I would not be surprised if many people really believed that the only explanation for a different top 1% is discrimination.

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Re:CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia by thaumasiotes on Saturday March 09, 2019 @07:06PM (#19349369)

Dropout rate is not relevant, because we're only looking at high achievers and we believe their dropout rate is negligible. There are roughly equal numbers of boys and girls graduating high school (technically, there are more girls!), but there are many more high-achieving boys than girls. Boys are much more likely to excel.

This is not a statement about the group average, but about the group variance. The SAT is not a good tool to use to assess group averages; I already mentioned this.

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