3 August Remarks.

Olympic competition: how do we keep it fair?

By “fair”, I mean: “how do I know that women continue to compete against other women and not against men”? Yes, the various sex tests have limitations, but Statistical Modeling talks about the worst possible solution:

I read an interesting op-ed by Jennifer Finney Boylan about classification of Olympic athletes as male or female. Apparently, they’re now checking the sex of athletes based on physical appearance and blood samples. This should be an improvement over the simple chromosome test which can label a woman as a man because she has a Y chromosome, even if she is developmentally and physically female. But then Boylan writes:

Most efforts to rigidly quantify the sexes are bound to fail. For every supposedly unmovable gender marker, there is an exception. There are women with androgen insensitivity, who have Y chromosomes. There are women who have had hysterectomies, women who cannot become pregnant, women who hate makeup, women whose object of affection is other women.

I’m starting to lose the thread here. Nobody is talking about excluding from Olympic competition women who have had hysterctomies or cannot become pregnant, right? And lesbians are allowed to compete too, no? And makeup might be required for Miss America competition but not for athletes. Boylan continues:

So what makes someone female then? . . . The only dependable test for gender is the truth of a person’s life . . . The best judge of a person’s gender is what lies within her, or his, heart.

Hmmm, so get the males who finished 4-6 in the male Olympic trials, and then tell them that they are women “in their hearts”. Presto: one way to win lots of gold medals!

Hey, this is yet another way that Obama is letting us down: he won’t spend political capital fighting for my right to have babies.

Update: when following the situation talked about by the Peoria Pundit, I followed the links and somehow got to someone else who had been banned by the Daily Kos rather than the person that PP was talking about.

I made a huge error and I don’t want to pretend that I didn’t.

What I said about the Daily Kos being a partisan blog still stands but is irrelevant to the issue in question.

Peoria Pundit: overreacts to a troll being banned from the Daily Kos.

The facts are these:

1. The Daily Kos is a partisan blog; it says so in the FAQ.

This is a Democratic blog, a partisan blog. One that recognizes that Democrats run from left to right on the ideological spectrum, and yet we’re all still in this fight together. We happily embrace centrists like NDN’s Simon Rosenberg and Howard Dean, conservatives like Martin Frost and Brad Carson, and liberals like John Kerry and Barack Obama. Liberal? Yeah, we’re around here and we’re proud. But it’s not a liberal blog. It’s a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory.

2. The person who got banned wrote repeated troll diaries. Check them out.

Barack Obama, Establishment Man
[...]
Obama’s African Hubris
[...]
Why Not Johnson for President? Hotlist
by L C Johnson [Subscribe]
Sun Jan 13, 2008 at 03:03:54 PM PDT

By L.C. Johnson (bio/blog)

No, not me. I’m referring to Robert L. Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television. Mr. Johnson (no relation, unfortunately, but I’m willing to be adopted) is an accomplished businessman. If you are looking for someone with a proven track record of successfully organizing and managing large organizations, then this Johnson is for you. The man also is not afraid to speak his mind about Senator Obama’s backdoor efforts to call Hillary Clinton a racist. Check out this piece at the NY Times blog:

[...]

Obama, What Drugs Are You Using?

This guy is a troll, pure and simple. Such behavior would get you banned at any partisan website.

Note: Peoria Pundit complains about censorship, and yet moderates his comments?

First Weekend in August Remarks

Workout notes 2100 yard swim; this was cut short due to electrical storms. I drove home to finish my workout on the treadmill only to have to drive back to recover the swimsuit and goggles that I had left in the shower! I am so forgetful.

I then decided to walk on the track and took 10 miles (80 laps on the 7 7/8 laps to the mile track) in 1:58:17: 12:18, 11:59, 11:54, 11:36, 11:51 (59:39), 11:44, 11:37, 11:39, 11:47, 11:48. My right leg hurt a bit (behind the knee) but that is par of the course during storm season. I am not sure as to how straight my knees were; they felt ok.

Mathematics teaching If you look at performances on standardized mathematics exams, there is very little difference between men and women. But if you look at the distributions, the women’s distribution is a bit more “normal” like with more scores in the “thick” of the bell curve whereas the male scores have somewhat thicker tails: more low performers and more ultra-high performers. Anyway, this is the conclusion of the following article.

Heather Mac Donald
Math Is Harder for Girls
. . . and also, it seems, for the New York Times.
28 July 2008

The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.

Lewin begins her piece with the mandatory mocking reference to former Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ suicidal speculations about why women are underrepresented on science and math faculties. She also manages to squeeze in a classic feminist trope for how our sexist society destroys girls’ innate abilities, invoking the infamous “talking Barbie doll [who] proclaimed that ‘math class is tough.’” Lewin implies that the new study blows Summers’ wide-ranging speculations on gender and math out of the water; all that holds women back from equal representation in MIT’s physics department, it seems, is Mattel and other patriarchal marketers of gender myths.

On the contrary, Science’s analysis of math test scores only confirms the hypothesis that cost Summers his Harvard post: that boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability. If you’re hoping to land a job in Harvard’s math department, you’d better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you’d better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces—though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate.

Lewin claims that the “researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.” This statement is simply wrong. Among white 11th-graders, there were twice as many boys as girls above the 99th percentile—that is, at the very top of the curve. (Asians, however, showed a very slight skew toward females above the 99th percentile, while there were too few Hispanics and blacks scoring above even the 95th percentile to compute their gender ratios.)

The Science researchers themselves try to downplay the significance of the two-to-one ratio for whites—the vast majority of students—on the grounds that it should produce a 67 percent to 33 percent disparity in male-to-female representation in math-dependent fields. Yet Ph.D. programs for engineering, they say, contain only about 15 percent women. Therefore, the authors conclude, “gender differences in math performance, even among high scorers, are insufficient to explain lopsided gender patterns in participation in some [science and math] fields.”

This reasoning is flawed, however, because the tests used in their study are pathetically easy compared with what would be required of engineering or other rigorous math-based Ph.D.s. The researchers got their data from math tests devised by individual states to fulfill their annual testing obligations under the federal No Child Left Behind act. NCLB has produced a mad rush to the bottom, as many states crafted easier and easier reading and math tests to show their federal overseers how well their schools are doing. The Science researchers analyzed the difficulty of those tests and found that virtually none required remotely complicated problem-solving abilities. That a gender difference at the highest percentiles shows up on tests pitched to such an elementary level of knowledge and skill suggests that on truly challenging tests, the gender difference at the top end of the distribution will be even greater. Indeed, between five and ten times as many boys as girls have been found to receive near-perfect scores on the math SATs among mathematically gifted adolescents, for example. Far from raising the presumption of gender bias among schools and colleges, the Science study strengthens a competing hypothesis: that the main drivers of success in scientific fields are aptitude and knowledge, in conjunction with personal choices about career and family that feminists refuse to acknowledge.

The same reality-denying feminists are itching to subject college science and math departments to gender quotas. They have already persuaded Congress to require university scientists to perform Title IX compliance reviews—a nightmare of bean-counting paperwork—covering everything from faculty composition to lab space. Misleading reporting like Lewin’s will only strengthen the movement to select cancer researchers and atomic engineers on the basis of their sex, not their abilities.

The Wall Street Journal, it should be noted, had no difficulty grasping the two main findings of the Science study: that “girls and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests,” as Keith J. Winstein reported on July 25, but that “boys more often excelled or failed.” That the New York Times, in an article over twice as long as the Journal’s, couldn’t manage to squeeze in a reference to the fact that boys outperformed girls at the top end of the curve should put its readers on notice: trust nothing you read here.

I do want to ad a caution: I am seeing more women in PhD programs in mathematics and can’t help concluding that those programs that encourage qualified women to pursue graduate degrees in mathematics are indeed doing a valuable service.

Religion:

I’ve subscribed to this guy’s videos:

One counterpoint: superstition gets very deeply ingrained. If one wants to help someone move toward rationality, one should avoid attacking but rather asking very gentle questions and letting them germinate over time.