I was perusing
http://www.andrewsullivan.com today as I am wont to do in the morning, and in addition to Andrew's justified outrage at Pope Benedict's new policy of banning homosexuals from seminaries, he also takes a jab at Armando for his recent post on Larry Summers (
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/21/101049/138 ) and evidence calling into question his assertion that there may possibly be genetic differences between men and women when it comes to math and science.
Sullivan's post can be found at this link:
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_09_18_dish_archive.html#1127397188863
04256
More beyond the jump.
Sullivan calls into question Armando's note at the end of his diary which asserts:
NOTE: Yeah I know Summers didn't say men were smarter than women, he just said they had greater aptitude in math and the sciences than women. Huge difference.
Andrew asserts that the since the transcript indicates that Summers said:
Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper - looked at the book, rather - looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those - they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth - but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation - and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways - you get five to one, at the high end.
That Summers was not in fact saying men are smarter than women in science on average, but rather that men might have a higher standard deviation, and thus more brilliant scientists and at the same time, more horrible scientists (That is, the male bell curve is more spread out than is the female curve).
However, in addition to calling into question Armando's interpretation of Summers's remarks, Sullivan goes a bit further and turns this into an issue of the credibility of the liberal (or as Andrew calls it, "leftist") blogosphere:
His (Summers's) point, as the Harvard Crimson summarized it was that, in math and the sciences, "there are more men who are at the top and more men who are utter failures." Armando is wrong; and he needs to correct the item. In fact, this is a good test of leftist blog credibility. Will he correct? I'll keep you posted.
Oh man, it looks like Andrew Sullivan is throwing down the gauntlet! Armando, I guess the ball's in your court now. What say you to this personal little attack from the Sully Monster?
(Note: the term Sully monster is a play on the Illinois state fossil, the Tully Monster, which you can read about here: http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/symbols/fossil.html )