There's a lot of speculation but it's not proven. One of the big challenges when comparing these kind of claims is that the brain is plastic so it requires extra work to figure out what percentage of the identified difference is explained by differences in what activities people engage in. Since most big studies show more variation within a group than between groups, there's good reason to question whether this is measuring anything other than social effects.

The other challenge is figuring out what activities actually have a low-level differences translate into significant advantages. There are very few job where a single low-level difference is both significant and the only path to success — in most fields, there isn't a single model of top performer.

Yikes. I had to look it up.

So the Internet intelligentsia have:

  - Re-discovered that hard and soft sciences (or, gasp, the liberal arts) attract different people
  - Declared their preferences (and themselves) superior
  - Invented a disparaging name for the inferior class

I feel like I've seen this movie before. It does not end well.

If by “the Internet intelligentsia” you mean one guy last month, sure. Not his fault a few VCs are promoting it.

His actual point is more like “ML developers are making a lot of money but don’t talk about themselves in the media; journalists don’t earn as much and you have to hear them complain about it all the time”.

It's a nonsensical idea that serves a narrative, so it's promoted by ignoramuses. Check.

Take this "actual point" to its logical ... well, I was going to say "conclusion", but it occurs to me that there's no point here at all. The unemployed are not happy? The ultra-wealthy know better than to incite class wars? No idea.

But anyone who coins the term "wordcel" to label a group they are not a part of, certainly seems to have ill intent.

Well, it is a joke. There's a genre of Twitter jokes based on "men are better at spatial visualization" studies where they imagine men entertaining themselves by rotating objects in their heads as a hobby.

I think the joke inventor made up a philosophy behind it to stop the VC guys from turning it into a culture war thing. He also put crypto guys under "wordcels" not "shape rotators" because they like writing whitepapers.

https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words

I feel that I'm a victim here.

First time I heard of rotators and wordcels, but yeah, when I was in high school we were actually given tests to see how much of a rotator or wordcel we really were -- the idea being to make career suggestions based on the results. I did fairly well on the rotator tests, which involved things like telling which way a particular gear or pulley in a given mechanism will turn. I struggled with the wordcel tests, which involved picking out a sequence of letters.

Do you know who ran the board on the wordcel tests? Like, all of the girls.

Just another anecdata point, so don't take it seriously.

I have never seen this meme