nick012000 wrote:
The bell curve of male mathematical skill has a higher mean than the female one, but that doesn't stop either of them from having tiny numbers of individuals outstanding individuals.
That is the kind of misapplication of statistics we're talking about; how can you quantify them as outliers (ie significantly different from nearly all of the population) if you don't provide any higher order statistics (variance, confidence, skew, etc)? First order statistics like mean and median only provide measures of the "center" of the distribution. I suspect that the separation between the means is negligible compared to the variance.
The Man In Black wrote:
Doesn't seem as sufficient proof to me that any statistics the noob brings up must be faulty, unless you mean and implication derived from this theory, in which case you should point that out and provide the theory as supporting evidence to this, rather than just the theory. Or perhaps you mean an alternate form of Bayes' Theory and an implication from that. Either way, saying 'lolz bAyes' theorY' doesn't constitute a refutation to any rational person.
A nicer way to write Bayes is:
Pr(A|B)Pr(B) = Pr(A,B) = Pr(B|A)Pr(A)
which is read as: "The probability of A given B times the probability of B is the joint probability of both A and B".
It seems pretty clear to me that the implication was that one must make sure that any correlated variables in the population must be accounted for before trying to apply statistics drawn from the population. In this case, how does one separate the effects of socialization form the effects of sex?
Forevergrey wrote:
That is irrelevent. She is making claims based on a theorem, it is not our job to go looking for the theroem, it is her job to present this theorem to us, instead of being all "lawlz, hi, heres two words I may or may not have made up, why dont you go find out"
Everyone who has taken a stats or probability course knows Bayes. It's common knowledge and if you want to debate the applicability of statistics, you shouldn't complain about not knowing it. That is entirely your own problem.
MiB wrote:
How about comparing them to, say, oh, I don't know...wait, I really don't know, because there are like 0 mathematicians that are well known, with the possible exception of Newton.
Or ... hmmm
Pythagoras, Euclid, Des Cartes, Fermat, Gauss, Euler, Godel, Turing and Shannon to name just some of the <i>most</i> famous mathematicians.
Of course, the argument was about inherent female linguistic skill vs. inherent male mathematical skill. It's relevant to point out that most of the women in 'hard sciences' do not perform worse then the men. They perform about the same; there's just fewer of them. This points to a social condition instead of a biological one. Women are not particularly encouraged to enter the sciences, so most don't gain aptitude for them.
nick012000 wrote:
Quote:
Really, the noob was in the wrong here as well,
Really? How?
Basically you've made a large number of pseudo-scientific claims for biology-as-destiny.
1. That really is NOT the topic of this thread. Read page one, post one.
2. That argument is widely held to be mostly (but not totally) invalid, at least in part because it relies on a number of sweeping generalizations.
3. Your statements lacked support in this debate. (Aside from a book most of us haven't read and aren't willing to pay to read)