Opinions of a Wandering Waif

cocknbull:

I Hate This Mess: You can burn me at the stake for this…

shonecakepastrypie:

growbeards:

But I said it before, and it looks like science has backed me up.

Men are more intelligent than women.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-405056/Men-intelligent-women-claims-new-study.html

According to a recent study, men have an I.Q…

 Someone else must’ve pointed out all that’s wrong with this article before me, but I’m bored and annoyed:

Firstly, IQ scores measure knowledge, not intelligence. A slight but important disctinction that explains why Native Americans, for example, score lower, on average on IQ tests than whites. [Easy example from a study I recently read: a math question includes a casual reference to an escalator. If you live near a city, that’s all well and good for you. If you were raised on a reservation with little to no outside influence, that question is gonna fuck you up. It doesn’t mean you’re any less intelligent when it comes to math — it means you don’t have knowledge of what a goddamn escalator is.]

Secondly, in relation to my first point, these tests are never culturally neutral/unbiased. Does the fact that Native American students, to stick with the example, tend to score lower suggest in any way that there is some biological aspect of Native American citizens that makes them intellectually inferior to white or black people? Absolutely not, and you’re a fucking moron if you even think race exists, biologically-speaking (and the conductor of this study himself has actually suggested that). Are there social/cultural insitutions at work that necessarily disadvantage Native American people (and women and black people and homosexuals, etc.)? Absolutely, there are. Is that grounds to say women are necessarily dumber, on average? No. Fuck, no.

Thirdly, the conductor of the survey suggests that intelligence is directly linked to brain size. ‘Asians have the biggest brains, so they’re the smartest. Blacks are dumbest, because their brains are small, and whites are in between.’ Really? Wasn’t this argument thrown out a hundred years ago? In any case, the newest research shows that there is an extremely minor correlation and that people with very small brains still score high on IQ tests (see Cernovsky, 1991), and that black people actually tend to have slightly larger brains than white people (Cernovsky 1991, and several more sources I’m not in the mood to list) — but of course, why would someone such as this researcher let facts interfere with causing a needless sexist, racist controversy?

Fourthly, as the article itself states, more female scores were examined than male. That alone casts severe doubt on the veracity of the conclusions drawn.

Fifthly, the integrity of this survey’s conductor, as I’ve alluded to, is severely questionable. This is a man who put forth “evidence” that black people are simply necessarily dumber than white people, based on brain size (which, when his “evidence” for this claim was reviewed, showed the exact opposite — black people tend to have larger brains, as I’ve said, and as well, the research he cited actually came to the conclusion that brain size was dependent on climate/location, NOT ON RACE, yet he decided to use it as “proof” regardless (see Cernovsky, 1995)), and, also, on “research” he gathered from a “nonscientific semipornographic book and to an article in the Penthouse magazine’s Forum” (see Weizmann, Wiener, Wisenthal, and Ziegler, 1991).

Sixthly, just as a personal prediction, I would not be surprised if, in the next ten years when homosexuality becomes more widely accepted, this jackasshole comes out with a study trying to prove homosexuals have smaller brains and are, therefore, dumber.

It’s nonsensical psuedo-scientific, faux-intellectual racist, misogynistic sexist bullshit that makes me ashamed to have a caucasian cock.