That "leptokurtic" really is important

Grumble, grumble.  In my attempts yesterday to explain why the distribution of female IQ is narrower than for males, I approached it from the wrong angle.  I followed Ted Hill's approach and tried to explain the male distribution rather than the female distribution.  That was crazy and I want to point out why.

The normal or Gaussian distribution is a mathematical construct which shows most instances of anything as being clustered around the mean (average).  A remarkable thing about it, however, is that most natural phenomena tend to scatter in that pattern.  The normal distribution really is normal!

A normal distribution is however rather "fat".  It covers a fair range.  There is a pic of one below



And male IQ follows that pattern fairly closely.  The female IQ does not quite follow that pattern, however.  It is leptokurtic, meaning narrower.  It is not so spread out. See the example below:



So we don't have to explain the male distribution.  It is normal.  What we have to explain is why the female distribution is narrower. And that seems fairly easy to me.  No algebra is required! As I said yesterday, men are very uniform in what they like in a woman.  A lot of it is physical: Long legs, a slim figure, some bosom, long hair etc. If a lady with those characteristics is kind to a man he will be in love! And high IQ in a woman is not a big priority for men. It may even be a negative for some.

So women have evolved to maximize the fairly narrow range of things that men like, with other characteristics falling by the wayside -- including IQ.  Men have made women less varied.  Won't the feminists like to hear that!

So how does male selectivity explain the low frequency of really dumb women?  That is pretty straightforward.  Men require some minimal level of IQ in order to find a woman attractive.  So women below that level will not mate and not reproduce.  Men have also set the lower bound of female intelligence

So how do we account for the fact that dumb men seem to proliferate without restriction?  Should not the general female preference for high IQ cause such men to die out? I dealt with that yesterday but I think I should repeat my remarks here for the sake of convenience. 

The fact that low IQ women are often FAT comes into it a lot in our society but the handicaps that low IQ women have will of course vary from society to society.

In summary, I think we have to conclude that quite dumb men can still be of some use to some women. How?  In all mate selection, what you will overlook as well as what you get is important. And some women will apparently overlook low IQ.  I suspect that it is a simple case of similarities attracting.  Low IQ women will be attracted to low IQ men even if the IQ levels are not exactly the same.  Low IQ women take what they can get in order to reproduce and low IQ men get some acceptance that way.  The very strong female urge to have babies drowns out other considerations. And that is in fact one thing we do clearly know about low IQ women:  They do have lots of babies.  And it is their babies that pump up the low IQ male population

So we have to look not only at what men and women like but also what they will do without.   I remember a related phenomenon well.  I have done a lot of things in my life and I once ran a large boarding house in a poor area.  It was very instructive in a number of ways, not all of them bad. 

And one thing I remember is the partnerships I observed among my clientele and their friends.  In particular, I observed that even pumpkin-shaped women had partners.  Fat is a huge social handicap so how did they manage that?  By being very tolerant, by overlooking a lot.  Their partner might be a boozy, smoky, scrawny loser but he was a male -- and the pair did seem to be reasonably supportive of one-another most of the time.  Both were aware of their low level of attractiveness and felt glad to have someone, anyone, in their lives of the opposite sex. -- JR

UPDATE

A reader offers another explanation:  "I believe the simple explanation for the narrower range of females in general is to do with the XX chromosomes they have. There are relatively less genes on the male Y chromosome than the X.  In many cases this means men have nothing to balance any bad genes on the X Chromosome they get from their mother. Basically this means men get to throw one die whereas women get to throw two.  The distribution reflects this"





Catholic Bishop: 'The Vast Majority of the Abusers are Homosexuals'

Contrary to the spin by the liberal media, the overwhelming majority of sexual abusers in the Catholic Church are homosexual priests, said Catholic Bishop Marian Eleganti in a recent statement.

Eleganti is the auxiliary bishop of Chur, Switzerland, and he posted his statement about the ongoing scandal in the Church on his Facebook page on Sept. 5. It is translated there and an English translation was also published by LifeSiteNews.com.

As the bishop explains, "The John Jay Report of 2010 concerning the sexual abuse in the Church in the U.S. shows that, in the time range of the last 60 years, 81% of the victims were male. Therefore, the vast majority of the abusers are homosexuals. The Final Report of the [Australian] Royal Commission of the year 2017 has come to similar results."

"These are facts which may not be discussed in public, they are a taboo to which many leaders in the Church now bow down, pointing instead to clericalism as the root problem of the phenomenon," said Bishop Eleganti.  "No one denies that clericalism plays a role, but nevertheless it is in the Church proven that the abusers are mainly homosexual."

"The silencing of this fact is an additional form of cover-up which unfortunately is being committed also by Church representatives in Switzerland," he said.  "Whoever speaks about this fact in public, is being defamed and psycho-pathologized as being a homophobe."

He continued, "In a document published in 2016, Pope Francis maintains not to accept into the seminaries practicing homosexuals, men with deep-seated homosexual tendencies, nor those who support the so-called 'homosexual culture.' This instruction had already been established in 2005 by Pope Benedict."

"I expect that those responsible in the Church will follow this instruction and take actions accordingly," said the bishop.  "Part of it is the public admittance that in the clergy of the Church, we have been dealing for decades now with mainly homosexual criminals."

"With all respect toward people with a homosexual inclination who do not commit any sexual assaults, it does not help to close the eyes in front of the facts when dealing with sexual assaults," he said.  "Without full transparency and truthfulness, there will be no credible investigation, nor any effective prevention."

That the homosexual subculture in the Catholic Church is the fundamental source of the abuse problems is well documented. Numerous bishops and lay person have commented on this fact but it is a politically incorrect phenomenon that the leftist media and the homosexuals in the Church do not want to discuss.

SOURCE






Pennsylvania Agency Goes Around Legislature to Impose Gender Ideology

A Pennsylvania agency has made an end run around citizens to impose gender ideology.

Last month, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission released new guidance reinterpreting the category of “sex” in state anti-discrimination law to include “sex assigned at birth, sexual orientation, transgender identity, gender transition, and/or gender expression.”

The commission circumvented the state Legislature, which never added categories like sexual orientation and gender identity into law, thereby circumventing voters as well.

This new policy could significantly curtail the First Amendment rights of citizens, as a similar policy has already done in Philadelphia.

But what does this change in policy mean for the average Pennsylvanian?

Look no further than what is happening to adoption agencies in Philadelphia.

Back in March, Philadelphia put out an urgent call for 300 families to provide foster care to help the flood of children coming into the system due to the opioid crisis. Just a few days later, the city halted the child placements of Catholic Social Services.

The reason? To investigate whether Catholic Social Services had violated the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance, a policy that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity—categories that the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission now considers to be “built in” to the definition of sex in state anti-discrimination law.

Catholic Social Services, like many other religious adoption agencies, opts to place children in homes with both a mother and a father in accord with their religious convictions.

Now, the city is effectively shutting down Catholic Social Services for its beliefs about marriage and the family. As a result, several hundred children will be displaced and the city will have one less agency available to meet the dire needs of the city’s children.

In response to concerns that similar incidents of hostility toward religion might happen across the state, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission argued that citizens would have recourse to Pennsylvania’s Religious Freedom Protection Act.

Yet given the situation in Philadelphia, the commission should not be so confident that the religious rights of citizens will be respected by the government.

The agency shutdown in Philadelphia gets at the heart of why expanding anti-discrimination law to include categories like sexual orientation and gender identity so often poses a threat to citizens’ First Amendment rights. Oftentimes, these laws conflate disagreements over sexuality and marriage with discrimination, and stigmatize traditional beliefs as bigoted.

The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission committed this very fallacy when it responded to the concerns of citizens who were concerned about free exercise.

The commission described their concerns thus: “Commenters who believe their religion gives them the right to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals and/or believe businesses should be able to discriminate in hiring and service based on the owner’s religious beliefs.”

The very phrasing of this text presumes that what is at stake in these conflicts is a “right to discriminate.”

However, as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion for Obergefell v. Hodges, many people who uphold the traditional view of marriage do so “based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises.”

Not every disagreement over controversial issues like marriage and gender identity is discrimination. In most of these disputes, at stake is citizens’ First Amendment right not to be compelled to communicate messages that violate their religious or moral beliefs.

As LGBT advocate Andrew Koppelman notes, blanket denial of service for LGBT people is rare. He states:

Hardly any of these cases have occurred: a handful in a country of 300 million people. In all of them, the people who objected to the law were asked directly to facilitate same-sex relationships, by providing wedding, adoption, or artificial insemination services, counseling, or rental of bedrooms. There have been no claims of a right to simply refuse to deal with gay people.

The commission is wrong to assume that religious concerns deal with a “right to discriminate.”

The commission is also wrong to assume the government will apply these laws in a neutral, unbiased manner. Look at what is happening to Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado.

Phillips just scored a major win for religious liberty at the Supreme Court, which found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had shown manifest hostility toward his Christian beliefs about marriage when it ordered him to create custom cakes for same-sex weddings.

However, Phillips is now in court again, this time for declining to create a cake celebrating an individual’s gender transition.

“The state is doubling down on its hostility against my beliefs, even though that’s what the Supreme Court said they couldn’t do,” Phillips said. “It seems I’m the only person in the state of Colorado who can’t live out my beliefs.”

All of this controversy is entirely unnecessary. Anti-discrimination laws can and should be interpreted in a way that protects people from unfair discrimination on the basis of their identity. They should not be used instead as a weapon to target people for their beliefs.

That is what is happening to Catholic Charities and Phillips—and now might become a part of the political landscape across Pennsylvania.

This new guidance in Pennsylvania simultaneously undermines the role of state legislators by robbing them of the power to legislate on such matters and threatens the rights of average Pennsylvanians.

Lawmakers should continue to oppose the legislative counterparts to this new guidance—House Bill 1410 and Senate Bill 613—and citizens should make their voices heard when it comes to the dangers of this kind of policy.

Until formal changes can take place, the commission should maintain the distinction between disagreements and discrimination when applying state anti-discrimination law.

Pennsylvanians must remain free to disagree on controversial topics like marriage and human sexuality. It is the responsibility of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission to respect that freedom.

SOURCE







No basis to bias science

I have been pointing to the invalidity of the IAT for years

News that the Australian Taxation Office has been running unconscious bias training (UBT) courses raises the question: why are taxpayers footing the bill for a potentially flawed psychological test?

The course uses the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT), which employs image and word association to determine the level of ‘unconscious bias’ an individual has towards those of a different race, sex, and so on. My colleague Dr Jeremy Sammut highlighted the socially destructive nature of this test, but the origins themselves are equally disturbing.

The IAT was introduced into the scientific literature in 1998 by researchers Anthony Greenwald, Debbie McGhee and Jordan Schwartz. However, not only does the test suffer a replicability problem — meaning that some of the results have not been successfully replicated — a number of psychologists have come out and challenged its efficacy.

A 2009 report by psychology professor Hart Blanton demonstrates the evidence between IAT scores and real world behaviour is virtually non-existent. A Kirwan Institute Study on implicit bias found such tests can be damaging because the range of responses are limited. And a paper published by Gregory Mitchell and Philip Tetlock argue the claims made by proponents of the IAT are exaggerated, and the test fails to consider alternative factors that could influence an individual’s responses.

After the IAT was introduced in 1998, many private companies such as McDonalds and Google started teaching their employees about unconscious bias. But now, in the era of diversity bureaucracy, the adoption of pseudo-scientific programs that place feelings over facts has sadly also become the new norm for taxpayer funded institutions.

The Australian Public Service Commission dedicates a page to ‘unconscious bias.’ The Queensland Government claims the IAT can be used to bring awareness to organisational and individual biases. And many more government agencies now cite ‘unconscious bias’ in their diversity programs.

The idea that a government agency would want to test the unconscious thoughts of its employees and try to change them, is disturbing enough. But when a test is this flawed, it is also an egregious waste of taxpayer money.

SOURCE
 
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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