Oh do get it right for once
Update. Oh never mind – don’t bother reading this. I’d take it down except that there are already comments. As Rowan pointed out, this is an old news item, and (worse) I’ve commented on it before. Well I never said I wasn’t predictable…
More from the inexplicably bad clumsy journalism file. The ruining your own story simply by wording the basic point badly file. The don’t you have any decent editors? file. The I’ve told you this before, do I have to keep pointing it out year after year? file.
‘Men cleverer than women’ claim. Academics in the UK claim their research shows that men are more intelligent than women. A study to be published later this year in the British Journal of Psychology says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests.
On average. ‘On average’ doesn’t translate to ‘men are cleverer than women’ – obviously. As the article makes perfectly clear, it does translate to ‘there are more men with higher scores’ but that is decidedly not the same thing. As I’ve said before (so excuse the repetition if you remember the previous eye-roll) it takes only a few seconds’ thought to realize that ‘men are cleverer than women’ can’t possibly be right since it means that all men are cleverer than all women which means that the least clever man is cleverer than the cleverest woman, and that is obviously not the case.
It seems such a basic point, yet they keep getting it wrong. That’s not very clever of them.
Along not quite the same lines…
http://tinyurl.com/39foxn
Now economist Marco Daniele Paserman has discovered a new twist to this tale of lost nerves: many more women players than men stumble in this way. When it comes to dealing with nerves, the male is steadier than the female – and not just in sport, but in business as well, says Paserman, who works for the Centre for Economic Research.
Bad generalisations from narrow research by the original researcher, which the article does balance by having someone point out one of its logical short comings.
PS. I was going to use the word ‘Bollocks’ in this posting, is that considered bad form on B&W?
I read a report on an IQ study some time back that said that men and women were on average of about the same level of intelligence, but that the bell curve for women was steeper, with more of them closer to the mean. The curve for men was flatter, with many more of them at the extremes. So men tend to be both smarter *and* dumber than women.
‘Bollocks’ not considered bad form at all here. I’d use it more often myself if I didn’t feel affected using a UK-ism – but I prefer it to most alternatives.
“So men tend to be both smarter *and* dumber than women.”
But that’s the same wording the BBC used, and I just do think everyone should avoid it, because it’s so misleading.
The flatter curve you’re talking about is what Summers was talking about – and as I said here at the time, Andrew Marr paraphrased that as (of course) ‘Summers said men are smarter than women’; Steve Pinker corrected him (‘that’s not what he said’) but no one took any notice.
Never mind the bollocks, here’s BJN.
(Is it bad form to make lame jokes?)
I thought by using “tend,” the statement makes it clear that we’re talking about individual variation.
I really do hate to point this out, OB, but that article is from August 2005 (and you commented on it at the time) so the article is perhaps not evidence that it’s a mistake people keep making (although no doubt they do….)
Stating that men tend to be both smarter and dumber than women possibly implies that there are two distributions for men, one at the higher end of the scale and one at the lower, whereas women are all clumped in the middle. That’s not true either, of course….
Oh, pox, so it is – how embarrassing. What’s more, I think I noticed that when I saw the story on Friday, then forgot it in the meantime. What a dork.
Well what do they stick two year old stories on their main page for?! They’re trying to make me crazy…it’s in revenge…
OB, I think your criticism is unfair. I always assume that a brief comparative statement of the kind ‘Group X is richer/healthier etc than Group Y’ is a statement of averages rather than for all members of a group and think this kind of oversimplification is quite reasonable in headlines and lead sentences. I guess most of your readers do the same.
Kiwi: but the problem is that it is NOT taken like this in a cultural atmosphere where very many people would like to believe, frivolously or not, that their group is, in toto, better/smarter/sexier/whatever than another group. Witness all discussions of ‘bell curve’ race issues. The problem is not that there may be a few points difference in averages, but that the immediate implication is one of whole-group superiority/inferiority.
Interesting understanding of statistics there, OB. Or should it be semantics…