tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post488299408207304782..comments2024-03-29T05:19:17.638-07:00Comments on The Neurocritic: Hey Girl, You're Really Bad at Math!The Neurocritichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08010555869208208621noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-39370635242713966152008-03-01T12:25:00.000-08:002008-03-01T12:25:00.000-08:00...practice could explain why there were so many T...<I>...practice could explain why there were so many T2 stars (heh; a little fMRI humor there).</I><BR/><BR/>Calculatedly nerdy humor...<BR/><BR/>You're correct about practice effects. I reread the methods, and the easy problems were given at the beginning of the scanning session, <B>before</B> either of the IATs were administered. The two critical sets of problems were both difficult, <I>(e.g., "Is 19 × 6 – 6 ^ 2 = 78?" and "Is 98/7 + 19 × 3 = 81?")</I>.The Neurocritichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08010555869208208621noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-3742079376606482732008-02-29T19:57:00.000-08:002008-02-29T19:57:00.000-08:00The Neurocritic asked:[NOTE: but why did the contr...The Neurocritic asked:<BR/><BR/><I>[NOTE: but why did the control group perform significantly better at Time 2, when the problems were much more difficult, than at Time 1?]</I><BR/><BR/>That's a fair question, but the answer could be just as easy as: practice effects. The bane of many pre/post intervention test experiments is the fact that people just don't sit there and exude their skills. They tend to learn about the test they are taking and very often improve. I don't know whether or how much harder the T2 math problems were here, but we are talking Dartmouth undergraduates here, and practice could explain why there were so many T2 stars (heh; a little fMRI humor there).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-14137484372790388912008-02-26T07:20:00.000-08:002008-02-26T07:20:00.000-08:00The social mechanisms have been explained recentl...The social mechanisms have been <A HREF="http://www.xkcd.com/385/" REL="nofollow">explained recently too</A>, although not in a peer reviewed journal.Bob O'Harahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09924796617668384141noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-56270601272983693652008-02-22T00:33:00.000-08:002008-02-22T00:33:00.000-08:00I was being glib with that comment, here's what he...I was being glib with that comment, here's what he <A HREF="http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html" REL="nofollow">actually said</A>:<BR/><BR/>"There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call <B>the high-powered job hypothesis</B>. The second is what I would call <B>different availability of aptitude at the high end</B>, and the third is what I would call <B>different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search</B>. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described."<BR/><BR/>So he ranked women's supposed reluctance to work 80 hr weeks while bearing and raising children above the higher-variance-in-men issue.The Neurocritichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08010555869208208621noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-53830780626199182842008-02-21T12:01:00.000-08:002008-02-21T12:01:00.000-08:00Contrary to popular belief, Larry Summers did not ...Contrary to popular belief, Larry Summers did not say women are any worse at math than men. He said that one thing contributing to skewed gender ratios in higher education is that on many traits have higher variance across males than females. <BR/><BR/>Imagine you only want to accept the best 10 people for some program, and your population of people is composed of a high-variance group and a low variance-group -- since you're picking from the far tail, you'll get mostly the high-variance group. <BR/><BR/>Note that this holds not just for "good" traits, but also bad ones. For example, imagine instead of "does crazily well at math" you were selecting for "plays crazily poorly with others". What gender ratio would you expect here? So, among the many things that make prisons male-dominated, the higher variance -- independent of mean -- of male social skills may contribute.stephenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03258157447504826716noreply@blogger.com