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[–]Realwoman 11 insightful - 1 fun11 insightful - 0 fun12 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

And this is a problem why? Also, is IQ all that applicable when it comes to music?

[–]loq453 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

And this is a problem why?

It's not in homogeneous in societies like China or Japan, but for example in Israel where you have groups which have developed apart from each other and have significant difference genetic differences, Ashkenazi vs Mizrahi Jews, you get one group, the more capable one, taking over all important positions in society, and it creates strife. In that case the society should create systems of equalizing outcome to lower the strife. A lot of large empires in history had such social programs.

And again I've heard numerous complaints about the small amount of women among nobel prize winners and generally in high positions in science, but a lot of that is a result of biological differences, and the fact that while on average the intelligence between men and women is equal, men have a lot more extremes, so geniuses are predominantly men.

Hiring people purely on merit will result in massive discrimination, that is all I am saying.

Also, is IQ all that applicable when it comes to music?

Not IQ as such, but I am certain there is a genetic component to musical talent.

[–]Realwoman 9 insightful - 2 fun9 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

How is the it discrimination if the most capable people end up getting the job? This is true equality. Are you advocating for equality of outcome? I want the best musicians to play music when it go and listen too it and I want the smartest people to be in charge. Otherwise, it's unfair to to the capable person that gets looked over in favor of someone of inferior talent or achievement, purely for who they are. This is not justice, it's tyranny. And I don't want the doctor operating on me to be a diversity hire, sorry, I want her to be good at her job.

A lot of the differences between groups are cultural btw, not genetic.

[–]loq453 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It is not discrimination, but your outcome will end up skewed. Just look at affirmative action and racial structure of US universities. As it stands a quarter of students at high end universities are Asian, yet Asians make up only ~6% of US population, and this is with affirmative action hampering their enrollment and making it harder for them to enter universities. I personally think that it is bullshit what is being done to Asians in America, but it is done because people at large have complained about the racial inequalities in education.

A lot of the differences between groups are cultural btw, not genetic.

IQ is genetic, this has been shown time and time again, and in almost all of the modern day jobs IQ is the primary determining factor of success. It has been shown that high IQ correlates with high success in life. There are other forms intelligence, which are also genetic, but those are largely unimportant in a modern industrial and information based society.

[–]Realwoman 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I don't understand the first part of what you're saying. I'm against making it harder for Asians to enter university just because they're higher achievers.

IQ is genetic but differences between the IQ of different ethnicities are not well established.

[–]sisterinsomnia 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

"And again I've heard numerous complaints about the small amount of women among nobel prize winners and generally in high positions in science, but a lot of that is a result of biological differences, and the fact that while on average the intelligence between men and women is equal, men have a lot more extremes, so geniuses are predominantly men."

There is more to understand than this in who gets awarded the Nobel prizes:

First, in many of the early decades when the prizes were awarded very few women had the kind of training and positions getting to compete for the Nobel required as the first condition. Commonly shared cultural beliefs existed which saw higher education for women as wasted because they were expected to get married and then stay at home. Open sex discrimination also happened, and still happens in some countries, and to some extent who gets nominated for these prizes in the first place may also have been biased against women because the nominations came largely from existing university departments and therefore probably reflected whatever the current power structure might have looked like. It is harder to spot people who don't look the way you expect a genius to look for, if you start with a subconscious idea of how that might be!

Then in many of the relevant academic fields (largely STEM) the actual work is often done by teams, not by some isolated genius toiling in the attic (though Barbara McClintock did work like that for a while, in a shed), and it is possible that women, when very few in a field, have more trouble in getting admitted into teams as the only woman etc.

For these reasons (and for some murkier ones) I would not compare men and women in those Nobel statistics until we come to very recent years. The work someone gets the prize for was usually done several decades before the award is given. That lag means that it is only now we are seeing something more like a level playing field. Women do still get very different cultural messages about the inadvisability of an ambitious career path, the difficulty of combining family and intellectual work when the woman is supposed to do both and so on, which tilts the field a little even now. So I would keep an open mind on this question.

Second, the concept of 'genius' is not that easy to define. We have the myth of the lone genius who is just born that way and can achieve anything he (and it would be 'he' in the myth) without any environmental effects hampering his meteoric rise. But in reality if Isaac Newton had been a shepherd who never went to school we would not know anything about him, and even today there are people born who have minds capable of great things but not the environment needed for those minds to actually produce wonderful findings.

So the culture matters and one's position in the society in general. Women have rarely in the older history received the kind of education that being seen as a genius by others would require as the starting point.

What also matters is understanding that most great discoveries rely on something like the old saw about standing on the shoulders of giants to reach for the stars, and that close scientific communities are very necessary for the development of many of the ideas which later look like they came out of the mind of one person. As I mentioned earlier, women seem still have more trouble in being accepted into male-majority laboratory teams etc, though the Internet is improving their chances of having the necessary debate groups within their fields.

It is difficult to define 'genius,' but clearly it means much more than scoring in the extreme upper tail of some distribution. Producing very important results also requires much hard work, and for someone to be able to do that, others must care for that person's additional obligations, such as children, household chores, care of elderly parents, and so on. And much luck or privilege may be required for someone to pass all the obstacles en route to get to the starting position for the Nobel races. That process is not equal to all demographic groups.

The topic of what intelligence is, if it is inherited (about fifty percent of one (imperfect) measure, the IQ, appears to be), and how we can measure it is far too big to address here, but it's not the same thing as just the IQ, and it's not the same thing as just mathematical IQ.