the summers of our discontent

and the disparate deconstruction of the wokescolds

this is a useful retelling of one of the interesting vignettes of cancel culture back when it still rode high and still possessed the kind of power that basically no one could resist:

larry summers, one of the most connected and powerful democratic operators in the US and globally was hounded from his post as president of harvard over a “scandal” that was, in fact, not even a peccadillo. he simply spoke a simple, direct scientific truth at a symposium at which he was asked to do so and a bunch of the attendees got the vapors and went off on diatribes about misogyny because they had mistaken being scandalized for scandal and their own personal emotions for facts.

adding to the fun, my understanding is that he had, quite literally, been asked to “pick a provocative topic.”

i mean, i have no love for this guy and i disagree with him about an awful lot of things, but fair play to larry: he was in the right here and despite the little frisson of joy one gets from watching arsonists get set ablaze by their peers, it’s difficult not to feel bad for the guy. the whole thing was really quite instructive from a “leopards eating people’s faces party” sort of standpoint.

they really hung him out to dry.

when one looks closely and considers for a moment, the whole affair is actually one of the more ironic self indictments of the idea of science imaginable. no debate, no data, no refutation, just cancellation, censorship, and calumny. these are not the acts of galileo, they are the actions of a clerisy, exactly what science is not supposed to be. they really set some credibility on fire here. if one sought to set back the reputation of women in STEM, this would be difficult to improve upon.

helen expounds:

the real crime committed by summers was not “being wrong,” or even being biased. he wasn’t. it was betrayal which is why they turned on him with the special rancor that cults save only for the apostate.

perhaps another way to frame this “crime” is as grand theft narrative because the facts he presented did not lead to the answer the doctrine required and thus could not be allowed to be said. those in power do no censor you for being wrong, they censor you for being dangerous to their position.

one may not speak science to “the science™.”

first off, what did larry say? he said something very simple: men have greater variability in the expression of traits than women do. this is, in rather on the nose fashion, is referred to as the GMVH (greater male variability hypothesis) and it’s nothing even remotely controversial. you see it in height, weight (including birth weight), time preference, risk taking, running speed, aggression, and yes, intelligence.

there is nothing magic about this, it’s just math.

men are heterogametic, they have an X and a Y chromosome. women are monogametic (2 X’s). this means that men express all their X chromosomes fully and women randomly turn one off in each cell (mosaicism) and therefore on a systemic basis get an average expression of both X’s so, to the extent a trait is affected by X chromosomal material (and many are, the Y is kind of skimpy), men are rolling one die and women are rolling two and averaging. as a result, their traits converge more to the middle. again, it’s just math. probabilistic phenotypic expression does not care about feelings or doctrine.

this same pattern shows up in pretty much all mammals (leaving aside corner cases like monotremes).

what this means is that you get a graph like this.

and most studies show a variance of 1.1-1.25 in standard deviation of IQ/G.

in the middle of the curve range, there are a lot more women. the cutover is somewhere between 107-114 and 86-93 depending on who you ask, but somewhere in there, the frequency numbers are equivalent and outside them there are more men than women. this increases the further out the tails one travels.

hedges & nowell studied this in great detail and found that in the upper 5%, men outnumbered women 2.5:1. in the top 0.1%, it’s over 6:1 and in the very top of male slanted skills like math it’s over 7:1. and those are the kinds of folks that wind up teaching science at harvard so seeing s 6-7:1 slant in faculty gender would likely be a sign of true gender blindness. it could be even higher if the effects of ability are further magnified by variation in interest/preference. (i have not looked at that data and so have no real view on how large an effect it might or might not be)

of course, this issue has another tail: men are also vastly over-represented in the ranks of the deeply stupid by about the same rates (i think it may be a little lower just because having iq beneath certain levels is not always survivable, but am not sure) but it certainly manifests itself in prison populations. men outnumber women there about 14:1 far exceeding the 5:1 ratio by which men outnumber women in physics faculty positions.

being a guy is just more of a crapshoot in just about every way. we’re more likely to be millionaires, to be destitute, to be tall, short, to teach physics, to go to prison. we’re also less likely to have children but those who do tend to have more than women do. it’s just always been like that and each of these things is just a fact, backed by large amounts of observation and well understood and plausible functional pathways.

there are still very smart women who are good at math and physics, they are just less common and male and female intelligences manifest differently. women tend to score higher on verbal than men and men do better on math. everybody always wants to make this about “better” or “worse” but it’s not, it’s just different and different is good. men and women faced different evolutionary pressures and men evolved to be good at being men and women to be good at being women and we need both.

we are not the same and likely never will be and that’s not only fine, it’s vital.

and up until about 5 minutes ago, this was one of the least controversial ideas around.

so why aren’t we allowed to say this out loud?

we’re not allowed to say it because it’s true but that truth is inconvenient to a dogma that has become systematically important:

that there are no differences in traits or capability between genders or races and that it’s all one equal tabula rasa waiting for the correct nurture and socialization to put us on one identical level.

the level of special pleading that gets baked into this idea pushes well over the line into magical thinking. no one would accept this line of reasoning in other traits. sure, you can train to run, but you will never be usain bolt: you lack the genes, the femur length, the height, the fast twitch muscle density, the hip geometry. nothing can make you sprint 100 meters like he does. practice may help, but if you were not born with the goods, training alone cannot cut it. we know this about every other trait and then act like intelligence and disposition are somehow the exception. but they aren’t. ask a breeder of dogs or horses.

but the falsity “it’s all socialization and nurture” is the underpinning to regimes of seized privilege. it’s used to invert the interpretation of systemic outcomes by presuming that the wrong variables in the equations are fixed. this is used to support the great false premise of DEI and affirmative action:

if we’re all born with equal potential, then any variance in outcome is proof of discrimination.

and why are we so determined to believe this? because that belief allows us to intervene and claim justification for demanding preferencing and for accusing others of privilege and prejudice. because it means that if we don’t win, it’s your fault.

that’s it. it’s really that simple.

it’s been wielded like a mace through social science, hard science, systems, and institutions. IQ tests must be racist because some groups score low. no. the tests were great, it’s just the group variance is real. but they still get effectively all but banned as job assessments. SAT? same. they get nerfed and broken so that now they have a massive leveling bias in the center.

nothing about this is real or objective, it’s literally whole sets of “scientists” warping the lenses of their telescopes so they can pretend that the sun revolves around the earth. doesn’t align with the model? your data measurement must be broken.

it has nothing to do with fairness or accuracy and never did. it’s all about “give me stuff” and “i want to win.”

it cannot sustain consistency because it never made any sense.

the exact same people who say “there are not enough women in orchestras, auditions need to be blind” then call blind auditions racist when they do not like the outcome.

this went on for so long because this orthodoxy got its hooks into the universities, the journals, the science bodies, corporations, all of it. there was a deep need for this to be so and the more people who got jobs and power and prestige as a result, the more entrenched and institutionalized that need became.

even the supreme court weighed in.

they all but banned using IQ tests for hiring not because the tests were not good indicators of ability or likelihood of success but because they were and this led to less hiring of certain subgroups. sure some companies were likely racist, perhaps duke power was, i don’t know, but they made the idea general: they called the tests themselves racist and biased.

but they weren’t, they were accurately measuring a fact that team tabula rase did not like: that there are large and durable divergences in intelligence and aptitude between groups. if the core tenet of your belief set is that “this cannot be so” or that “if it is so, it’s because they were not afforded equal opportunity and are owed redress and will rise to the level of others given the chance” then all you can do is blame the test (or the society) and then use either one to demand preferencing.

the griggs v duke power case quite literally made it illegal ot use aptitude/intelligence tests as the controlling screen for employment if they had a “disparate impact” on “protected groups.” it was a classic travesty of the burger court, fully embracing and institutionalizing the idea that you could not use intelligence tests if :

• they disproportionately exclude a protected group, and

• the employer cannot show that the tests are meaningfully related to specific job performance

that second standard is basically impossible. you’d need to do it for each job and have no control group from which to draw comparison (as you did not hire the failures). this was structured to make compliance impossible.

duke power may well have been acting in discriminatory fashion, but the tests applied were the wonderlic personnel test (used by the NFL until 2022 as part of the combine) and the bennet mechanical comprehension test. neither was controversial until the court made them so.

(not that the army still uses whole batteries of similar tests to exclude and sort candidates. they know full well it works and is vital and carved out an exception for the ASVAB as “vital to a well fucntioning military.” huh.)

the point was to move a standard from “disparate treatment” to “disparate outcome” because treating everyone the same was not getting the outcome that the social planners desired.

“not getting what i want” became proof of “you have acted badly. blind auditions are not to be allowed.

there has been a lot of rollback.

the democratization of science in places like X and substack in the great breaking free of the 2020-2 period is difficult to overstate. the once rag tag mobs of dissident academics and anthropomorphic animals of questionable goodness actually fricking won. “trust the experts” is over. change is coming. even peak clownworld yale is walking it back.

but it’s going to take some doing and there will be great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments along the way.

this road will be bumpy for a very simple reason:

these groups that have grown accustomed to preference and privilege will revert to what they know: that if they do not get everything they want it must be discrimination.

they will outright champion it without a trace of irony.

they will project their prejudices onto you.

they will sort and assort people not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin and the nature of their gametes.

and they are going to lose on this one. the science, the evidence and the society is simply not on their side. people have had enough, and the femtosecond it became OK to speak these things the idea that disparate impact = discrimination started to fall apart. goodness what terrible discriminators those kenyans must be in the NYC marathon…

this arguemnt was never defensible, they won it not by marshalling evidence but by proscribing and canceling dissent.

they did not debate, they shouted down.

but the bully pulpit has been deconstructed.

summers could 100% give his talk today.

and that my friends is progreess.

things are getting better.