Thursday, September 13, 2018

Censored explanation of male intelligence

Math professor Theodore P. Hill writes:
In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.

Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.
This got him into trouble:
Theodore Hill, a retired professor of mathematics at Georgia Tech, claims that activists successfully pressured the New York Journal of Mathematics to delete an article he had written for the academic journal because it considered a politically incorrect subject: the achievement gap between men and women at very high levels of human intelligence.
This is a subject that women appear to be incapable of understanding. Or maybe they understand it, and are desperate to censor research that they cannot refute. Either way, you can forget about hearing the truth in today's colleges.

Update: This issue has drawn commentary from Terry Tao, Tim Gowers, and Lubos Motl.

It is funny to see these prominent mathematicians make excuses for leftist egalitarian groupthink. Gowers actually says that it is a myth that being good at math is a question of raw brainpower. He presumes that there are no many female mathematicians because of discrimination, lack of role models, and similar reasons. He doubts that women are really so picky as to only want to mate with the top 30% or so of men. So he rationalizes rejecting the paper. He later retracted some of his criticisms of the paper.

It is instructive to see Gowers' thought process in action. He is a brilliant mathematician and he struggles with some fairly simple ideas that are commonly observed about male-female sex differences. It is impossible that the ideas are difficult for him. It can only be that many years of leftist brainwashing have made it difficult for him to think clearly on the subject.

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