From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Date: Mon Jan 13 1997 - 23:45:14 MST
> >Even if De Garis's interpretations are hideous, his facts are still
> >facts--"things of substance".
>
> Bullshit. I have yet to see a single 'fact' on de Garis' part. As
> I said about a week ago, de Garis has made a number of estimations based on
> heresy and irrational testing. A fact is something that *is*. If someone
> says that there are 14 male geniuses to every 1 female genius, I'm not going
> to accept it as fact unless it is *proven* beyond a doubt. Show me all the
> SAT scores so I can see for myself if he is right. The question is this:
> did he see *all* the SAT scores before he made his conclusion? I very much
> doubt it.
That's one question, but not the one most worthy of spending energy on.
The point is this: if there is a 14-to-1 ratio of men to women at a certain
level of the SAT--assuming he didn't just make it up, which I grant you is
possible though I think unlikely--then that's just a number. Facts aren't
good or bad, they just are. The job is to determine if it means anything.
I suspect that there are many reasons for it: (1) de Garis probably chose
some arbitrary cutoff value specifically chosen to exaggerate the effect;
(2) more males take the SAT, because our culture encourages males more
than females, and de Garis probably didn't adjust for that either; (3)
the tests are written by men, and are designed to test the kinds of
intelligence that men find important; (4) other influences in our culture
encourage traits in boys that lead them to perform well on this one test.
Sure, it can't hurt to check his basic numbers either, but I suspect the
numbers are correct and the explanations are interesting and worthy of
study. Just shouting "bigot" because you don't like his result plays
right into his hands, because it shows a refusal to deal with the issue.
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