Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (23581)	10/6/2007 3:19:41 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 217714

C2, it's a mess, starting with selection bias. I'd want to read the actual results and study to try to get something useful out of it. From the report, it's just a load of wild generalisations and faulty thinking. For example, they say: < The effects of sex, age, and income on task performance were determined.> No they weren't. The CORRELATION of sex, age and income might have been determined, but not the effects. I have explained why income matters. It's because income is a way of measuring intelligence without doing the intelligence test. If you measure the output of something, you can usually get a reasonable guide to the thing you are really interested in. They should more sensibly have said "the effects of diet, parental intelligence and blood contents were determined". < Girls performed better at tasks requiring processing speed and motor dexterity, and boys were better at perceptual analysis. Girls also tested better in verbal learning, but surprisingly, their performance declined through adolescence. There were no sex differences in calculation ability.> Girls had bigger brains at a particular age, so of course they did better at "verbal learning" whatever that means. It doesn't explain what "declined through adolescence" means. Do they mean it failed to continue to improve? Well duh! That's what Mq the Amazing says. Once the brain has fully grown, that's it. Girls's brains are fully grown three years before boys. What did "calculation ability" mean? Girls should have been better, not the same, at the same age, until the boys were 20. Another fundamental problem [note cool pun] was the sample. Highly selective, with the testers picking and choosing among 35,000 families, coming up with only 385 youngsters aged 6 years to 18 years. If they had equal numbers in each year, that's only 32 in each year = 16 males and 16 females. Of which, 10 would have been Caucasian, 2 Hispanic, 2 Negro, 1 Chinese and 1 homosexual, with other groups such as the left-handed ignored. I'm sure you know that numbers like that are not good for testing extremely high IQs or even much use for much of anything detailed. You'd not be able to measure the 2.3 IQ point difference between males and females. When we can read actual test data, it might be of some interest. But for now, about all we can conclude from the study is that the people conducting the study are somewhat obsessive about money and have high envy levels, as well as low average intelligence. Or the person writing the article made it all up. Mqurice