Don't knock the research without researching it.
Do you know how to google? Just take any category I mentioned and google research shows women are better etc. If you need help ask a woman.
Last edited:
Siming Chen
- Thread starter Rhea
- Start date
Don't knock the research without researching it.
Do you know how to google? Just take any category I mentioned and google research shows women are better etc. If you need help ask a woman.
I had to laugh at "handle stress better". I can't tell you how many times I have seen a woman cry during a pressure situation. I just saw a woman cry during her first shift of work last week because she made a mistake. I've never seen a man cry during work because he made a mistake or in any pressure situation now that I think of it.
Last edited:
Holy ad hominem Batman!
I cant get caught defending russ,
Coz he is a madman.
Russ' claim- ...every time- was certainly overstatement, but the examples he offered are certainly proof it does happen, therefore cant be 'nonsense'.
See? We are all right. Beer us.
Coz he is a madman.
Russ' claim- ...every time- was certainly overstatement, but the examples he offered are certainly proof it does happen, therefore cant be 'nonsense'.
See? We are all right. Beer us.
Except that isn't what I said at all when you read all of what I said and don't try to remove context.
Be careful that you fully understand data (evidence) and that you don't try to make implications that aren't truly supported by the data. You Implication seems to be, "see, women are as smart and indeed actually smarter than men in all subjects because they get better grades in them". Now read the very first sentence in the link you cited for an example of what I mean. What it essentially says is that what most studies have found is that women are not as smart in most subjects as men as shown by tests of their knowledge in those subjects, but they still manage to get better grades in many of those those subjects anyway. This directly refutes what you were trying to use it for to imply. You have to be a little more careful with that. You also have to be sure that the study/s you rely on are conclusive enough but that is another topic.
But how can that be that they get better grades if they aren't as good in the subject you might (should) ask? There could lots of reasons. A few examples are that women could be doing their homework at a higher rate due to their higher conscientiousness (a trait that almost certainly has some basis in biology by the way). Could be that they are getting graded "easier" by their teachers consciously or unconsciously for a variety of reasons. Could be because on a conscious or unconscious level the teachers are devoting more of their time to them or tutoring them more or differently. Lots of other factors could be involved as well.
I suspect that there are indeed a number of factors involved but the primary one is probably the conscientiousness and that they essentially try harder and actually do their homework etc, but what is important is that we ask why and try to answer all these questions with the data we have, or far more importantly we strive to design studies such that they actually tell us what we are trying to find out with as little ambiguity as possible (which means eliminating the possibility for biases and the impact from other factors other than those we are trying to study etc).
To be fair I didn't read this particular study or essay or whatever it was in it's entirely to see what methodology it used or what conclusions it came to (guessing you didn't either), I just found it a little funny and ironic that you were using it to support an apparent implication that the very first sentence in it strongly refutes.
I think you are going to have a hard time arguing that anything else is more important than the survival of the species which is essentially what you just tried to do. Is it more important that we are smart, or more important that we reproduce and survive? Obviously lots of things have importance, but reproduction, and then the survival of the resulting offspring, will always supersede anything else in importance. If we want to grasp at straws a little bit then smarter could possibly be seen as being more important in the sense that the smarter we get, the more attention we are going to be paying to reproduction/survival of the offspring and to those things that can have a negative impact on them and the better we will be at addressing these things, but I don't think that is where you were trying to go with it.
But they haven't been proven wrong. We have proven that there are usually other factors also involved aside from biology, but not many people argued that there weren't other factors also involved (and by not many I mean none) so we have proven what everybody already knew and agreed on, that others factors are also involved aside from biology. Based on the totality of the evidence at hand today, there are really only two things we can say with a pretty high confidence level, and those things are that biology is almost always involved, and that one or more other factors are almost always involved. For any given circumstance, almost certainly the only real question is just what other factors are involved besides biology, and just how much of a factor was each of those factors in whatever particular instance.
I think your label of "male superiority" is an unfair one in light of the fact that I have specifically said I think women are superior in some things, and that just because one is better at more things doesn't necessarily equate to an inherent importance or value difference. The survival of the species depends on women (and men too). I'd say that's pretty damn important and valuable. If you can think of something more important let me know.
And be aware that just because you recognize a difference between categories of people, it doesn't make you a hater or a sexist or someone with a male superiority complex or anything else of the like. It just makes you someone who doesn't want to play make believe.
If there were a bunch of people who repeatedly claimed "if a full grown cat and a full grown alligator got in a fight that cat would almost always win" and somebody else says "that is nonsense, the evidence just doesn't support that", well that doesn't make that person an alligator hater, it just makes them someone that likes dealing with truth and reality. Now it might be fair to infer that the guy claiming that cats will beat up alligators is irrationally pro cat or anti alligator or both, because there is obviously some reason that is causing him to ignore evidence and reality, but you could never reasonably infer that the guy who says the alligator would be favored to win is either anti alligator or pro cat either one. All you honestly infer about that person is that he likes dealing with reality (and for all we know he may actually hate alligators and love cats but just chooses to not let that interfere with his acceptance of truth and reality even though he actually hates the reality and wishes it were different).
I guess that depends on how you define "important stuff", but if I am correct in interpreting what you mean by that then men will likely, on average, still be a little better at most of it but the question is "by how much" followed by "how consequential is that amount".
Men have the advantage in both the physical and cognitive skills that are necessary for good pool so yes in 50 or 5,000 years men will still be better at it. Again, the real question is by how much.In fifty years, between robots and the computer programmers who run the robots, what will men do? Play pool I guess. I wonder if we’ll still be better than women at it.
He made a few bold statements he didn't even TRY to support
Researchers also found at one point that leaded gasoline causes no negativw environmental kmpact. Funnily enough, that research was paid for by the petroleum industry.
Really? What researchers? When? What was the prevailing view of the scientific community at the time?
You can be and were wrong on several. I will give you a couple of ways it can happen. You can misinterpret what a study was actually claiming to show. The producers of a study can claim that their study showed something that it didn't actually show. In your case both happened.
In any case, as mentioned before, my point was still illustrated (which was that participation rate is not usually and certainly not always the main explanation for performance differences between sexes). There are few things for which women are the best in the world, or better on average either one, regardless of participation level and even for those things in which they have a higher participation rate than men. Just as I said, even though there are billions of possibilities to pick from, it is difficult to find more than a handful that women are better at. I don't like that either, but not liking it is not a good enough excuse to justify pretending that it isn't true.
If, by sexist, you mean I have eyes and ears and a brain and am therefore capable of seeing that women and men are biologically different and as a result have different strengths and weaknesses on average, then yes, I am one of the most sexist people in the world. If, by sexist, you mean that I would use these truths to somehow discriminate against individuals, then I am one of the least sexist people in the world.
While I may (or may not) disagree with Mike on part of this topic (at least at first it seemed I did, but then it seemed that he ended up saying the exact same things I was saying so maybe there isn't much or any disagreement after all, not so sure now and he hasn't responded to my clarification in post 509 of the only three points I am arguing to clarify which of the 3 if any he disagrees with--it appears that he agrees with numbers 1 and 3 but might not with number 2 best I can guess at this point without more clarification??) I have to mostly agree with him on this one.
Does what Russ described happen where the person funding the study is essentially paying for an agreed upon predetermined finding (whether the agreement was explicit or just understood with a wink and a nod)? Yes, but it isn't the norm, darn sure isn't always the case, and in actuality is pretty rare, particularly if you exclude the social sciences. And in the cases where it does happen I think it is just as often the case where the person doing the study acted alone without the wink and the nod from the person doing the funding.
Now the social science fields are a different beast. The "just happened to find the result I was hoping and looking for through my creative engineering" thing does happen a whole lot more in the social science fields, but to some extent this is to be expected since you are now dealing with the study of people as opposed to things that aren't sentient. Although avoiding bias is always an incredibly difficult thing, it is easier when you are dealing with supernovas or gravity or meaningless numbers on a piece of paper than when you are specifically dealing with people and the implications and fallout that can come with your findings and the effects they can have on people along with how those findings may threaten our's or other's deeply held political beliefs etc.
Simply put, our biases regarding people are much more difficult to overcome, both from a desire standpoint and from an execution standpoint, than other types of biases, but even in the social sciences it certainly isn't the case where all results are "paid for" or "engineered" and probably not the majority and probably not usually having been done intentionally even when it does happen (although the intentional thing has been increasing at an alarmingly fast rate in recent times IMO).
Ok I will make you a deal. I will name 1000 things Women are better at than men. You pay me $1 for every one that is correct by vote. I pay you $1 for everyone voted not correct or $1 for each one if I can’t name at least 1 thousand. We both post $1000 to a reliable member. Good chance to prove your points and make a chunk of money.
As knowledgeable and as sure as you are I know you can’t refuse or it will prove you are as dumb as you sound.
Last edited:
You got that right that women cry. However, a man under stress who turns violent outnumbers a woman 75% to 25%. I think crying is a better solution than beating the crap out of someone or killing someone. But that's just me.
Oh.. So YOU happen to be an honest researcher, so you are going to carte blanch deny that the "research for pay" industry exists at all??????
Holy fookin' shite. You just completely lost all credibility with me, man, unless you wanna correct my perception of your view on here.
Even if only 5% of research is "for pay", that poses serious problems for science as a whole.
You seem to put a lot of faith in Google as a research source.
Google "Forrest Gump 2" and you'd think it was an actual movie coming out soon. There's even a trailer!
Hmmmmppppfh.
A key point through all of this is we can look at the way women tend to be and act. And we can look at the way men tend to be and act. And we can measure it a chronicle it all we want. But we are not separating innate differences from deep learned and thoroughly reinforced cultural differences. And if you meet someone who thinks he has all this figured out--like we have in this thread, beware... It is an intellectually bankrupt position....
As Harry Chapin says here,
"the boys were told to be themselves; the girls were told play roles,"
...
"the boys were taught to ask themselves, "How high?, how far?"
"The girls were told to reach the shelves while the boys were reaching stars..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KcbbzsRhZs
Sigh.. You're being intentionally dense on this. Yes, I did get rather flamboyant in my claims of "all" research being for pay, but the point stands.... If you are being funded by a political entity that has a strong agenda, and you don't find the result that agenda is looking for, then "in a number of cases" (better?) you don't get your grant renewed, and the political entity then claims "budgetary problems" or similar, and the research community tends to get the message on what is "expected".
But, on to your specific question.
The Rise and Fall of Leaded Gasoline
A certain "researcher" (Oh Dear!!), a certain C. Lowig in 1853 invented a process for the production of triethyllead salts. This did not get much interest until between 1915-1925, detailed study of organolead chemistry wasundertaken by Gruttner and Krause. (I assumed this wasn't just "Jed and Cletus" in their backyard just throwing together household goods? Perhaps they were......"researchers"?)
These organoleads were found to have perty durned good anti-knock properties by Thomas Midgley and his colleagues at the General Motors Research Laboratory in 1921. (great googlemoogley!! There's that "research" word again!!!)
Direct quote from the article, in with no less than the New York Times heaps praise upon this discovery:
Now, I had to look up the Perkin Medal, because it kinda sounded like something of a big deal, but then again, "I ain't no fancy schmancy scientists, such as yourself".
(though... it is me as a non-scientist bringing this obvious and egregious abuse of research science to your attention... curious)
What I found about the Perkins Medal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perkin_Medal
The Perkin Medal is an award given annually by the Society of Chemical Industry (American Section) to a scientist residing in America for an "innovation in applied chemistry resulting in outstanding commercial development." It is considered the highest honor given in the US chemical industry.
Sounds very "scientificky" to me... Kinda like all the scientists were having a big group hug, dontchaknow?
Now, here's the REAL home run... After this, I am just gonna wrap up this post and stew in my own self-satisfaction...
From the book by Nickerson, S. P., “Tetraethyl Lead: A Product of American Research' - a semi-quoted synopsis (as I can't copy directly from this particular google book upload)
"Mr. Frank Howard of Standard Oil had been interested in Mr. Midgley's research in the anti-knock properties of organolead compounds, and Dr Edward B. Peck, a research chemist at Standard Oil suggested that Dr. Charles A. Kraus, of Clark University, who had extensive experience with organolead compounds, should be consulted."
DIRECT quote here from that book - "Standard Oil employed Kraus as a consultant, although he remained at the university to continue his research."
Yeah.. So now he is getting paid as a "consultant" by an organization which stands to profit greatly from his research..... As long as the compound is deemed "safe".
So.... Do you see NOW, my inherent distrust that all research is on the up-and-up. This Dr. Kraus was a research scientist at the forefront of his field, and all of a sudden a "benefactor" stepped in, likely paying him many times his salary in "consulting fees". If the product WORKS, you really think he put much effort into the part of his research that determined whether the leaded compounds would be re-released into the atmosphere upon burning, and what the negative consequences might be?
In short, there is a metric shite-ton of "Dr" this, and "researcher" that dotted throughout the debacle of the rise and fall of leaded gasoline. Doesn't matter if scientists ultimately brought about it's fall.. They also brought about its rise. And the science was surely compromised at first in the name of profits, and it was only other scientists looking to make a name that amounted enough evidence to defeat the special interests. The entire point of this research was to boost octane so the autombile could build, large, powerful engines to fuel the American consumer's thirst for power and speed. Prior to this, smaller, MUCH more efficient engines (but less powerful) had been designed, but were being shipped to Japan. Scientists, and their invention of a method to put lead into gasoline, basically delayed the adoption of smaller, more eco-friendly gasoline engines for decades. No thought as to whether what they were doing was SAFE... But was it PROFITABLE? Pardon me if I sneer in their general direction for a moment. And that of those who put their faith blindly in scientists. (Note, I fully support SCIENCE, but understand that SCIENTISTS are a weak link, as they are human, and therefore, for sale.)
And to me, for every scientist out there looking to make the world a better place out of a pure sense of human compassion, there are 5 more looking to make a name for themselves, or to ally themselves with big companies to make lots of money.
This leaded gasoline is but a single example of the downsides of science, and an illustration that (practical, not idealistic) science CAN be (and periodically, verifiably, IS) a pay-for-play deal. Stuff like this is the only reason global climate change is still debated, because of the failures of scientists to stand strong in the face of easy corporate money.
Last edited:
Suffering succotash! I just read your next post and you quote Google about 8 times.
Take a break, you're losing it again. You can't ride the Short Bus forever.
I did not. I quoted books that just happened to have been scanned into books.google.com. And I quoted columbia.edu article. Both of which reference the original research.
See, this is where I chose to be different, and actually spoonfed you the names, dates, and organizations, plus the source books/articles.
I chose not to be intellectually lazy such as yourself, and not just say "google it", so I don't have to do any work. The point IS, Mike Page challenged me to tell which "scientists and researchers" acted in direct opposition to scientific impartiality, and I did so.
Now, hurry up and response with some little non-sequitur or another...
Last edited:
It is exactly what you said, and you said it repeatedly. You said that men are innately better than women at billions of things, and that women are only better than men at babies. Everything else - billions of things! - men are innately better.
Lol that’s not at all what the first sentence of the abstract says or means. It wouldn’t have taken too much for you to look at a couple of the citations and see that there is some mixed evidence of female superiority from standardized tests like the SAT. Women mostly do better than men, but there are exceptions depending on the area and the age. But in grades, women do better at all ages and in all subjects.
It is interesting that you interpreted that one sentence that way...
I have to ask you: You talk a lot about the biology of gender differences, science, social science, grant funding, etc. as if you have a lot of experience in those areas. My guess from reading your posts is that you do not, but you are nonetheless willing to dive right in as if you did. Right?
I'll just try to learn to cope with it instead.
I thought we we talking about beers.
I emerge disappointed.
I emerge disappointed.
That is a wonderful quality to have. To be able to pat yourself on the back and explain to yourself what an intellectual and gifted researcher you are.