The ongoing dispute about sexism in the secular community has been settled at last by one incredibly insightful post.
Atheism is a ‘guy thing,’ I would say, like needlepoint is a ‘girl thing.’
We don’t have to consider why the sexes fall (or are pushed) into these particular roles; they just are. And with that simple argument, we’re done. By golly, we ought to make the guy who said it some kind of leader of the atheist movement. We wouldn’t want to have him wasting his time on things like needlepoint, you know.
Emrysmyrddin:
I am extremely glad you clarified that comment. This is starting to compare to listening to an elementary school student play violin – yes they need to practice, but it does not have to be in earshot the entire time.
Amphiox@484
YES! That is an excellent point that hasn’t been brought out nearly enough. When I think of all that mathematical talent–how many Emmy Noethers did we miss out on?
Beatrice:
Oh no, of course not! I’ll just be over here changin’ diapers and makin’ sammiches ‘cos that’s about all my laydee brainz can handle. Tee hee!
I see our special little fella has left the premises. If he has training in methodology, he needs to go get his money back from the school. Or apologize to all his profs for wasting their time.
I go to bed, get up, and see a thread on sexism has exploded. And the only new thing I have to take away from all this is that I’m missing chances to use the word science more. I am going to make an effort to change that.
Based on my grading thus far I would suggest that the apology is to his profs is in order. Once someone that dense has decided something is true™ it is utter hell to try and wedge it back out again.
I offer as proof the stuff that comes out of my students mouths after we spend a few weeks talking about paleothermometry, current temperature trends, thickness of ice sheets, carbon dioxide measurements etc. etc. And they still answer questions with “I believe” or something about “the ozone hole.” It is like beating my head against a wall.
pHred: Oh yeah. I’ve been teaching Sociology classes. I spend all semester discussing major social movements in US history, and the minute we pass the 1980s, three quarters of the people in the class shut down.
And then I ask them questions about the relationship in the US between the Puritan work ethic and our collective scorn of welfare, and half the class can’t remember the lecture and another quarter remember the lecture and hate the ideas (and ain’t changing their mind for me.) Fortunately, this is a senior and junior level class, so I at least tend to get students who are a little better at reading comprehension.
But god help me when I introduce stats and methodology. I won’t even let them write papers anymore because of what happens when I get them.
They do take essay style exams, and those are bad enough.
I guess any time PZ calls out someone else in skeptiverse for their lazy thinking with regards to sexism*, he’s going to stir up the old boys club.
* Hay did you guise see that? I just called Shermer a misogynist because of ONE OFF THE CUFF REMARK HE MADE ONE TIME!!11
Besides, apparently maintenance on the troof is easier than trying to learn.
Rey Fox:
Baiting the pitters like that…good job!
@mouthyb
The very thought of giving essay exams to my intro class makes my mind go blank with fear. Some of them can’t even make a coherent sentence on a 3×5 card after you have presented the sentence to them in technicolor. Seriously – one of the questions on the exit slip the last week of class was “What is the date, time and location of the final exam?” – which was still written on the blackboard. Some of them still managed to get it wrong!
I’m sick to tears of all this pseudo-religious ahistorical libertarian Just World fallacy-based sexism. There’s no reason to act as though individuals exist outside of a culture with a long history of bigotry and violence against people who aren’t upper-class white Christian* men. If you honestly deal with cultural issues, you don’t fall into the ignorant notion that the way things are is the way things have to be. If you reject illogical libertarian dogma, you can grasp that the world doesn’t magically just put everyone and everything where it should be as long as no one interferes with the way things are.
“It’s a guy thing” doesn’t tell you anything, and is a profoundly stupid comment to make, let alone attempt to defend. The fact that people calling themselves skeptics, people who feel entitled to leadership positions no less, are incapable of forming an argument greater than one step away from “girls have cooties, and if you do girls stuff you’ll get girl cooties too!”? Yeah, there’s less and less reason to take the skeptical”movement” seriously every day.
if you’re going to be an ahole, at least be succinct.
http://www.amazon.com/Rosey-Griers-Needlepoint-Men-Grier/dp/0802704212
Rosie Grier, former member of the Los Angelos Ram’s “Fearsome Foursome”, would like a word with you…
pHred: I used to teach comp and make them hate me. (Their projects in class were to rewrite the same three essays until they resembled the standard for college writing.) The class was 2/3 beating down objections to having to edit and create college-worthy writing. And let me tell you, I’ve been called everything you can imagine in the classroom for it, to my face.
I’ve also been that student in early math classes, for which I’m really sorry. For me it was equal parts fear of catastrophic failure and mismatch between the knowledge I possessed and the knowledge the prof assumed I possessed.
Fortunately, my trig teacher told me that math wasn’t for me (or women.) I was so annoyed I took more math classes because no way was someone going to bar me from learning something. :D
But what about white dudes’ feeeeeeeeelings?
sharculese: They are delicate little flowers, aren’t they? The slightest hint of rejection can ruin a man for life, forcing them to hate all women and potentially go on killing sprees.
Any man who believes that to be true wouldn’t last a day as a woman.
*spits*
This latest crop of idjits seems constitutionally incapable of seeing beyond their own noses.
re rq @488;
I’m on my smartphone and since my testosterone poisoned word deficient man-brain hasn’t figured out how to do cut’n’paste in iOS, I can’t provide the exact link, but if you google “human computer” the Wikipedia article that comes up high on the search list is an enlightening place to start. You may notice that the profession started closed to women in the 17th century, then flipped to become dominated by women (paid at half the rate of men, of course) in the early 20th, then vanished once the electronic version arrived for the second half of the 20th. And yes, they were a big part of the WWII code breaking efforts.
Back in those halcyon days, computer, along with secretary, was one of the few socially acceptable vocations a young, intelligent, well educated woman could have during that formative period when it was acceptable for her to actually earn a wage, after leaving pappy and before landing hubby.
The corollary to this of course is that electronic nerd culture was basically born shafting women and continues in that grand tradition to this day. (Ironic though it may be that the very first cohort of programmers were drawn from the pool of human computers and were almost all women, back to Babbage’s assistant Ada Lovelace.)
Dammit sharculese, thanks for reminding me!
*I says “There’s no reason to act as though individuals exist outside of a culture with a long history of bigotry and violence against people who aren’t upper-class white Christian* men” but I also note that upper-class white ATHEIST men have no problem recognizing and opposing Christian privilege… you know, the one kind they don’t have. Amazing though that all the other privileges are non-existent to them even when pointed out to them, the same way they at least pretend to understand that sexism is wrong when Christians and especially when Muslims do it.
Aphiox @484 & 513
That little factoid has made wading though this thread worthwhile. Thankyou
With gusto!
♪ FEE-FEES! nothing more than FEE-FEES! ♪
Getting back to the original Vaculous Remark™, I’m a woman person and teach a variety of Girly™ needlecraft. Of late, I have taught a whole lot more teenage boys than girls how to knit. Something about being able to have a socially acceptable fidget in classes, lectures, and other situations that require sitting still and one that yields hats and scarves (that can be given to girls – even better!). The gender-role transgression thing actually seems to be part of the appeal, particularly since I often give them some semi-rude, pre-formulated, and non-gendered insults with which to respond to gendered bullying.
The reason why I, as an atheist woman, don’t want to be more active in much of the secular/atheist movement is exemplified by Justin Vacula himself, as the type specimen for the bullying, gender-policing sorts who expend to much effort to shout women down and harrass them out of public roles in atheist organizations.
This. They can’t see the problem because they are the problem.
I don’t think the problem is in reading comprehension. it’s the next step up that seems to have a scratch, because the needle always jumps directly from “there’s still some difference in results, in some studies” to “women aren’t analytical”, completely missing all the steps that go between those two statements.
and he’s still not explained how holding speeches, writing books, and making tv appearances is supposed to require analytical thinking, rather than the stereotypically female verbal aptitude
Also, I think “Vaculous” is a great adjective.
Oh, Mattir, would you share those retorts with me? I would be so grateful.
Could I please get a definition of vaculous because I really want to work that into my everyday life
Mattir, as someone who has been a crafts teacher in the past and who has talked a few men (husbands and sons of my primary customers) into doing quilting, crochet, and even (since I personally hate it) cross-stitch… please also share your remarks with me! Thank you :)
It’s analytical thinking when a man does it, because men are analytical thinkers.
The insults generally involve some form of “I don’t know about you, dude, but my peen doesn’t fall off or grow back inside or start doing stuff it never did before just because I (knit)(grow my hair long)(other gender-policed activity).
Closely related to the line DaughterSpawn uses sometimes – “I don’t know about you, but they boys I want to date don’t think the fun parts of girls are nicely shaven calves.” (She doesn’t shave her legs, and it’s astonishing how upsetting this is for gender policing 16 year old Boy Scouts. The senior staff at her camp, on the other hand, once overheard such a comment and threatened to hang the gender policer up by his intestines if he made one more remark about her leg hair. )
Pepper thy anguses bishes, it’s rustle time!
FSM spare us from cupcakes who don’t know most of the internet isn’t 4chan
Is that English?
So, ahmet. Would you like to address why you thought those two studies that you linked to supported your position that “girls suck at math”?
Must be recess time in kindergarten.
Jadehawk: But if they pretend it’s all 4chan /b/ boards, they never have to think. Not thinking is very important to them.
How dare we rob them of their freeze peaches!
Also, in b4 stupid freeze peaches comments.
First a short reiteration:
Dependent variable (to be explained): why chicks don’t flock at the skeptic/nerd community
Independent variables that me and others invoked to explain the dependent variable:
1) girls have less analytical skills than men
2) girls are less argumentative and agressive than men
3) girls aren’t attracted to the nerd community
4) nerd community discriminates against girls
5!!) New argument, step right in folks: girls have less…ABSTRACT skills than men (in b4 feminists head explode of anger).
Most of you guys likened explanation 4. Me too, but since this phenomena is multi-determined, we need more independent variables. I liken them all as potentially possible. Most of you guys don’t like explanations 1-3 (and probably also would not like nr 5) because, lettuce be reality, truth hurts :)
Most of you guys reacted will ill founded arguments like: “herp derp i’m a gurll and I love math” ==> fail anecdotal evidence is fail.
#Deal with it
#Come at me bro
#bishes ain’t chit but hoes and tricks (okay, this is getting silly now, i’ll just stop with the nonsense and get with the real discussion)
oh that’s easy, they want to stay away from your useless bigot ass.
I was going to respond, but Illuminata wins everything.
Time to pack it in and go home, everyone.
ahmetduran,
STOP calling grown up women girls.
I’m going to page one now and respond to the guy/girl with the red avatar first. (and possibly others)
ahmetduran: I’m pretty sure that I speak for most of the thread when I say we’ve been waiting for you to stop being silly and have an actual discussion for the last 24 odd hours.
As far as evidence, help yourself to the feminism and social justice links in the right sidebar by PZed’s picture. Ain’t no one required to educate you.
STOP using any variant of the word “bitch”
lOl I can’t help but mock this useless bigot boy. He says bitches ain’t shit, and it’s true because . . . .. uh . . . . .his mom says he’s cool .
darling, you wouldn’t know truth if it spit in your face. none of the shit you pulled out of your ass has any actual evidence for existing, unlike sexism; you can only deduce it from the data you’re trying to explain, which is assuming your conclusions and using circular reasoning.
and in any case, even if there were any evidence for any of that shit, it would not be capable of explaining the specific pattern of gender variance we observe, whereas intersectional discrimination can.
you won’t, of course. you’ll continue pulling shit out of your ass instead showing how your assumptions are actually based on the data. your education has failed you, massively.
Important note: If I missed any responses, pls indicate which post nr to look at, I will look at them ASAP.
Okay, thx, live love laugh
ahmetduran,
You fool, you have nothing but anecdotes and stereotypes.
How convenient for you
it’s guy/gal, and girl/boy. learn to fucking English, it’s not that hard.
yes, amazingly, it’s quite “convenient” for me that reality supports my argument.
1) The studies you’ve linked to directly refute your assumption that women have less math skills* than men, so you actually haven’t proven anything.
2) You haven’t backed this up with anything but your stupid ass opinion.
3) Which nerd community?
4) Which nerd community?
5) How do you know women have less “abstract” skills than men? What exactly are these “abstract” skills?
Care to try again?
*Math skills =/= analytical skills, but whatevs. Not surprised that you use the two terms interchangeably.
Translation: Yep, ahmetduran is a pants-pissing coward who can’t come up with a single shred of evidence that supports his bigotry. So he’ll just keep on with the painfully unfunny, unclever puns.
Does anyone else feel a sudden rush of pity for those poor TAs/professors that had to grade this slob’s papers?
at this point, I feel worse for any poor undergrads stuck with this defect for a TA/tutor
ahmetduran,
English isn’t your first language, fine. It’s not mine either. Or second, for that matter. So when people advise you about something language related do take notice.
Don’t call grown women girls. I’m right now giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that you are not doing it to be a dismissive asshole but from ignorance. Correct it.
Fair enough, I’ll change my wording:
It’s a given(aka well established fact) that females, as opposed to males, fail at math by a small degree.
Good enough ?
(and this in turn explains, only in part, potentially, why females don’t flock to the skeptic society since the society, assuming, has at least an analytical root (if not, this argument flies out the window)
6) ahmetduran
Let’s just agree to feel bad for everyone involved in this asshole’s education.
Audley: I’m having sympathy pains right now.
There’s a peculiar thing among MRAs where they all have this urge to be linguistic and rhetorical tryhards with an almost pathological hostility to plain speech.
See e.g. anything written by johntheother.
LOLwut?
Your argument is that women are slightly worse at math than men, therefore we avoid everything with an “analytical root”? DOES NOT FOLLOW.
And, frankly, atheist groups do NOT typically have analytic roots. There are any number of people attracted to atheism because they think it allows them to look down on the religious, not because they’ve engaged in a process of serious self-reflection and consistent analysis.
sharculese: It’s whut cause big wurds sound smrt.
It’s not important whether I call it girls, females, chicks, sloots, bishes. or men, boys, male, alpha, etc.
If particular concepts are irrelevant, i’ll just use my own wording. (instead of ‘fail’ at math, I use ‘suck’. They are simply synonyms, euphemisms and pejoratives. I really really really (yeah really!) prefer to use my own wordings, so no deal!
Ask politely and maybe I’ll reconsider
For fuck’s sake. Are you 12?
Werll, at least all the crayon doodles covering the page would be funny.
Well heck, I didn’t swear at this jackass *enough*.
I posted an article here where there was a causual links between analytical thinking and atheism.
The guy/girl with red avatar also responded on that, so I’ll show you and him/her simultaneously that they ARE linked.
But indeed, if it’s the case that atheist groups are not by any means analytical in one way or another, than obviously my argument of ‘girls = less analytical’ doesn’t hold anymore.
Throw yourself off a really high building. but don’t use safety equipment – that shit’s for weak silly chicks. is that nice enough, useless bigot?
Seriously, that was probably the politest comment that shithead got on this page.
Ahmetduran: Dear tentac’ly overlord, man! If I were you, I’d be mortified to be known as this ass ignorant to a community of academics.
So women are less involved in atheist communities because they are less analytical than men, and we know that they are less analytical than men because they are less involved in atheist communities.
Seems sound.
ahmetduran: I should say that my personal criteria for analytical types requires them critically examine not just things outside themselves, but things inside them selves. It also entails a strong drive to be accurate and equitable.
Also because, according to you at least, “girls” do better at verbal reasoning. So, of course, math must be the salient measure.
I don’t quite follow this reasoning.
Girls are indeed better at verbal ability (i’m sorry, it was not verbal reasoning, but verbal ability) as opposed to boys. (suddenly nobody asks for a study to back this up, they happily accept it :) )
Math is indeed the salient measure BECAUSE we are talking about analytical stuff. Math is a part of that. Verbal ability is, to my knowledge, not an index of analytical skills.
‘Verbal ability’ is typically measured in the psychological literature as in: name up every word that begins with ‘a’. Females fare better at this kind of tasks than boys do.
I don’t know how I would interpret these findings and relate it to explain the dependent variable.
It is telling once again, that duranahmet, when deciding to present an alternative to his deliberate use of the value-laden term “suck”, should choose, of his own free will, the value-laden term “fail”.
It is also telling that he recognizes that a term can be a pejorative, but when presented with the option of thinking of an alternative to a perjorative, he willfully chooses ANOTHER PEJORATIVE.
I say again. Peyton Manning is 5-8 head to head against Tom Brady. If someone willfully chooses to use describe Peyton Manning as “failing” at being a quarterback, and cites this statistic as a reason, what that does tell us about what kind of football fan that person is?
I guess it is a demonstration fo duranahmet’s testosterone addled language-deficient man-brain that he apparently does not comprehend that CHOICE OF SYNONYM MATTERS, because synonyms have overlapping BUT NOT EXACTLY MATCHING meanings and connotations. There is nothing “simple” about the choice of synonyms to use.
Nope.
more like:
Women less involved because they are less analytical.
We know they are less analytical because 1) they don’t do science 2) no philosophy 3) no math
No circular reasoning ;)
Why are you ignoring, you bedwetting bigot? I thought you wanted proof that women are aggressive!
oh wait – that would mean you were capable of analytical thinking, which you are clearly not
you’re a chick, aren’t you!
Stop saying ‘girl’ that way.
@red avatar person: pls use a another sport as example, i’m not familiar with american football(?). Soccer will do.
Yes we do. Also, math is science.
not even. again: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-136-1-103.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038941
there it is again, the skipping to the conclusions that simply don’t follow. (and I notice that now it’s “skeptical society”; not atheism, and not secularism.) even if there were a significant, consistent difference in math scores, it wouldn’t follow that this difference is skill based (see: stereotype threat); even if there were an actual skill-based difference in math, if wouldn’t follow that this would translate to more broader, non-numerical forms of analytical thinking. even if math were the same as analytical thinking, it wouldn’t follow that this would have anything to do with atheism/skepticism, since there is a broad range of skills, abilities, and social determinants that correlate with atheism/skepticism, and that are useful in being/becoming a skeptic/atheist.
incorrect. learn to communicate like a non-sexist.
your wording is incorrect English, and sexist.
then don’t be surprised if you’re considered a subliterate sexist idiot for it.
ahmetduran,
Do you acknowledge that you are using girl as a pejorative?
Wut? I don’t believe that you’ve ever taking a psych course. You should really stop lying on your facebook page.
And, no, no one agrees with your “verbal reasoning” statement, they were going along with you for the sake of argument– Jadehawk asked MANY MANY times why someone with higher verbal reasoning skills would be prevented from writing books and making speeches.
You can’t even keep your opinions consistent.
Okay, well I have to leave the conversation to go take graduate statistics final (soon to be done with the first year and a half of graduate statistics). I’ll check by later this afternoon for response.
ahmetduran: So which is it: trying to float between points of view to avoid having to own any errors or just so damn bad at reading for comprehension that you don’t know you’re all over the place?
My money is on a mix of the two. Protip: if you want to have a discussion, you also have to be open to changing your mind in the presence of better information.
You’ve been given an excess of evidence and pointed to even more, you intellectual coward.
Please refer to your post.
I certainly have no interest in joining in a community that is composed of guys who are convinced that women, on average, “fail” or “suck” at math, and therefore they are less capable/interested in analytical thinking, and therefore that’s why there aren’t very many women around in the first place. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Life’s too short to waste hanging out with jokers who aren’t as smart as they think they are, and compensate for their intellectual shortcomings by inventing elaborate fantasies about why at least men are better, on average, than women, at least, at math.
Don’t think he cares.
Dude, do a search for my name. I’ll help you out: the relevant posts are on the first page.
Rev.
But it’s so nice to get “yes, I’m an unrepentant asshole” in writing and signed.
ahmetduran@571
You’ve got to be shitting me. You’ve been making my head spin since your first post
Pls refer to her post!
I’ll try to explain to this supposedly discrepancy.
Women have higher verbal abilities. That’s nice. What do they do with it ? No, they don’t discuss endlessly about god. More like what make up to wear, what to cook, if their newly bought dresses look nice and discuss their time of the month.
You understand what i’m getting at ?
Verbal ability isn’t a precondition for: i’m good at speaking, so I can speak for whatever stuff. What kind of bullchit reasoning is this, lmao. This reasoning did came from a women, so THATS very telling :D
ahmetduran,
Why don’t you take yourself and your sexist jokes and fuck off?
Arguments: zero
Again:
womennot involved because less analytical
Less analytical evidence: women fail at math
Pls refer the circular reasoning.
Lol, I’ve been called a lot of things here (chewing cupcake of whatever), but it’s only sexist when men do it I suppose.
ahmetduran,
We have read tons of bullshit from you and not one of use came to the conclusion “ahmetduran is talking shit, he’s a man, men are incapable of talking anything but shit”.
You take a comment by a woman, interpret it wrongly but whatever, and suddenly it’s got something to do with all women!? And you say you are not basing all your opinions on this on stereotypes?
I like that ahmetduran is *such* a coward. Nothing screams “My misogyny is the direct result of my low self-esteem” louder than cowardice.
Bah.
Post number 367 from the first page:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/12/13/welp-im-all-convinced-and-stuff-now/comment-page-1/#comment-512254
And 370:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/12/13/welp-im-all-convinced-and-stuff-now/comment-page-1/#comment-512258
Narrow it down broskie. Lots of posts there
ahmetduran,
Cupcake or whatever is sexist now? Fuck off.
I can’t find the post of the red avatar girl that critiqued the experimental paradigm that linked analytical thinking with disbelief in god :( feelsbadman
Stop telling people to do work for you.
LOl wow you are an extreme dipshit, aren’t you. You’ve done nothing but puke sexism all over this thread. And, while everyone is mocking your cowardly, unintelligent, bigotted ass, NO ONE has said anything to you remotely sexist towards men.
You’re a disgusting liar, a pathetic bigot and a ridiculous coward. I’m starting to pity you.
Yes. You have never actually met a real woman and had a conversation with her.
(No, your Real Doll doesn’t count.)
I did narrow it down asshole. I know you’re extremely fucking stupid, but do try to keep up.
Also, there are only men on the internet, amIright?
yes, i’m very much offended by don’t. [skepchick]Girls, pls don’t do that.[/skepchick]
Btw, what about my totally new explanations, you guys seem to be ignoring that
Men are better at abstract stuff then women.
Suggestive evidence: philosophy, math, hard science don’t attract females.
She’s got a puncture anyway.
Narrow it down means post nr, not page 1 ya white knight phaggot
Stop using ‘girls’ that way
Wait, do you not know how to do an search on the page you’re looking at, ahmet?
LOLLOLLOL!
Poor dumbass cupcake doesn’t understand what the word “evidence” means! that’s the problem here.
Dumbass cupcake thinks it means ‘whatever i personally feel like is true’.
Poor thing!
your reading comprehension sucks.
ahmetduran:
Would you consider writing something intelligent?
Why is your anecdote evidence, but mine is shit?
Signed,
an applied mathematician
…You’re on a blog network full of atheist bloggers and commenters who blog and comment about atheism, and many of them are women. FFS.
Pls google what ‘averages’ mean and then come back.
I don’t claim no single girl discuss endlessly about god, I claim that girls discuss far less about god than men do.
Anecdotal evidence is weak as phuck. Seriously, do you even science ?
And, I’ve been called a “faggot”. You really have no shame, do you, ahmet?
Here’s a clue: scroll the fuck up to 592– I copy and pasted everything for you, you useless crusty asshole.
This comment
makes me think that ahmetduran is just an internet troll wasting out time. Nobody can be this clueless for real, can they? This sounds like he never even met an actual woman in real life.
Stop using ‘girls’ that way.
Lol another one that don’t know what ‘on average’ means
Dat dere american education I presume.
Get a brain morans!
After a scholastic re-reading of your posts, I’ll agree: you aren’t making a circular argument, you’re just begging the question.
Maybe red avatar girl will help you look.
And back the fuck off with variations of “faggot” RIGHT FUCKING NOW DOUCHE.
All you gave us are anecdotes and stereotypes.
Seriously, you tell people that they don’t know science, while your genius explanation is “yo bro, everyone knows chicks don’t dig math”
Apparently ahmetduran’s great and powerful analytical abilities can’t distinguish between “none” and “less than”.
ahmetduran thinks he’s the only European who managed to figure out how internet works. Shame he still hasn’t figured out words and the fact that they have meanings.
A misogynist AND a homophobe. Almost a trifeca bigot. C’mon Dumbass cupcake, bust out the racism now. Go for the Useless Sack of Rotten Fetid Monkey Vomit Award for today!
Correction: he can’t distinguish between “none”, “less than”, “average”, and “statistically insignificant”.
Ugh – it’s clearly rabid. Can’t read, can’t write, can’t reason, can’t use HTML and thinks average means the most common things I find in my basement hideout.
Pteryxx,
None, less than, all … the words all refer to quantity so it’s all more or less the same, right? He chooses whichever word he feels like using in a particular sentence.
ahmetduran @ 589;
How is the term ‘cupcake’, in the context of an insult, sexist all of a sudden? It was created to be a specifically non-gendered term of contempt, so I would be very interested to learn how it has suddenly acquired a sexist connotation.
Also, accusing other people of sexism when you have written such things as the following @ 586;
Is rather ridiculous – here you make grossly patronising assumptions about what ‘women’ as a generalised group talk about that seem to have been imported directly from the most misogynistic phase of the 1950s. Where is your basis for this belittling attitude toward womens’ capacity for conversation? I somehow doubt there are many scientifically credible studies purporting to demonstrate that ‘most’ women like to talk about cookery, fashion, make up and their menstrual cycles to the exclusion of more ‘analytical’ topics, so I wonder where you get this belief from, other than your own confirmation bias about the supposed intellectual inferiority of women.
And there is a term for an attitude that assumes that women are less capable based solely upon their gender. Now what was it…
Oh yes – sexism.
You need to be more specific and relate it to mr post nr.
ahmetduran,
STOP using any variation of the word faggot, you homophobic shitbag.
You need to shut your fucking mouth, ahmet.
“they” don’t, actually. fucking earn to read for comprehension.
evidence or it didn’t happen.
if “that” is supposed to be atheism and/or skepticism, I want to see the mathematical formula one needs to master to deconvert, disbelieve in UFOs or bigfoot, etc.
I pity anyone who’s ever had to grade a paper of yours, then.
yeah, that’s evident.
superdense.
you don’t know any such thing, you infer it from the data you’re trying to explain. that’s circular, since the logic goes “lower scores in math/philosophy/science are explained because women have lesser analytical ability; the evidence that women have have less analytical skill is that they have lower scores in math/philosophy/science”
using that sort of logic, I could show that it’s actually because boys are telepathic and can read professor’s minds. the evidence for that is in the scores, you know. [/sarc]
your unsubstantiated prejudices are not a valid argument
irrelevant, since that’s not what makes something sexist.
your failure to read does not constitute ignoring of your arguments on our part.
more assumption of conclusions.
Itt: arguments are deflected under the rug of sexism.
Feminists gonna feminists.
@gregory greenwood: I explain what I meant in that post of mine, just see a couple of posts up (now I understand why people don’t refer to numbers, it’s a tedious job to scroll back and forth)
ahmetduran,
If you don’t want to be accused of sexism stop using every sexist argument in the book.
Yo, shitbag. Comment 592. Chop chop.
indeed. whatever coherence d00d might have ever possessed has disintegrated, and I doubt he’d be any more coherent in dutch
I have suggestive evidence that any person that spends an inordinately large proportion of their time on the subset of the internet associated loosely with the *chans (such as 4ch/MISC/reddit) end up as blathering, meme-spouting sexist idiots.
<blockquoteevidence or it didn’t happen.
You want evidence for the claim that ‘math = analytical’.
You just went full retard
Lol, is that how you perceive the link between analytical and disbelief in god ? My god, you females and math are something.
Let me try to explain. Math is an index for analytical skills. This means that if you score high on any particular math test implicates that you have an highly analytical brain (compared to people who score low on math tests and thus are presumed to have a low analytical brain). Now, we also happen to know that an analytical brain is more likely to disbelief in god. Magic word is MORE LIKELY. (so pls don’t say: herp derp newton was analytical and believed in god derp)
At least thank you for responding rationally on the subject, you at least try :)
liar, or dumber than a bag of rocks? or simply in denial of the fact that his “arguments” have been deconstructed in their pathetic, measily entirety?
Just for fun, I will also point out now that mathematics is a form of language, and that written language is a form of mathematical code, and that the parsing of written language is an exercise in the analysis of informational code.
Therefore, IF it is true that females are superior at verbal reasoning, while males are superior at say, visuo-spatial reasoning, it does not follow from any of that that the potential of female performance in math should necessarily be precluded from ever being equal to or superior to, that of males.
As with most complex behaviors, math does not constitute a single cognitive skill of domain of function, but of several. Perhaps it will turn out that females on average do math “differently” with a different weighting to the varying cognitive domains that make up math, than males on average. It does not follow from that that one gender or the other is biologically or even sociologically predetermined to do better than the other.
There is more than one way to skin a cat. Or read a map. Or write a sonnet. Or derive a proof.
I think ahmetduran is a computational linguist’s lab project which escaped into the wild.
Let me know when you people are all done shredding ahmetduran. Now that he’s throwing around bigoted insults, I’m ready to ban him any time.
But if you’re having fun ripping him up, I don’t want to ruin the game.
(My head will be down in papers for a while…I’ll check back when I come up for air.)
ahmetduran,
STOP using ableist remarks.
Shithead is going through the list of everything that is unacceptable here. I doubt it’s coincidental. He’s deliberately trolling.
Is spouting stupid reddit memes a bannable offense?
If not, shouldn’t it be?
no darling, that’s what the link between math and disbelief would have to be.
the fact that analytical thinking is the main correlation with atheism is the next step in the chain of your fractal wrongness.
based on what evidence?
incorrect. scoring higher on a test measures your ability to score higher on that test. only after eliminating other variables can such a test measure actual skills.
we don’t, actually. we have a correlation, which is actually far more likely to be caused by class differences and differences in educational status rather than “analytical brain” BS. also, your silly essentialism is noted.
Ah yed, can’t back up an argument so it was all for the lulz. How original.
Hehe, reminds me of the episode of the simpsons were Lisa get’s a female friendly version of math. Good times.
That’s pretty much the feminist strategy indeed. When girls fail at math, they just want to change the math.
When females don’t get selected for a business environment, they’ll just change the environment and fit right in that way.
Still doing the reversal fallacy I see. You do realize, duranahmet, don’t you, that verbal REASONING is ALSO an “index” for analytical skills?
Yes, I follow genderstudies (aka women studies), so I know a thing or two about vagina shenanigans
go ahead. he’s worthless, but SIWOTI is interfering with the project I absolutely must finish by 5pm.
So, cupcake, how do you account for official atheist groups like (gasp) SecularWoman or conferences like Women in Skepticism or social network groups like Atheist and Agnostic Crafters (Ravelry, a huge group) or Crafting without Religion (FB, way way smaller).
For that matter, how do you account for the perception that knitting, crochet, needlepoint, weaving, and the like are female-gendered activities in our culture, despite the fact that they are chock full of (gasp) mathematics? (Indeed, crochet can be used to model hyperbolic geometry despite the fact that mathematicians used to say that accurate construction of hyperbolic models was impossible.)
Even as skeptical a sciencey-man-man as Richard Feynman recognized this in a 1966 speech to science teachers. (Dated language, but excellent analysis of the importance of the vocabulary we use to describe mathematical and scientific concepts.)
At least the association between you and sexism is directly observable and not in question. Your “theories”, not so much.
She attends her first-period math class, taught by the new principal, but instead of usual number-crunching, she starts speaking about feelings and smell in math. While the other girls enjoy it, Lisa asks whether they will get down to doing problems, to which the principal replies that problems are how boys look at math.
If you don’t know this episode, then you haven’t lived life
He’s boring, PZ. Ban away.
So what? If such a change results in females doing better at math, thus DOUBLING the potential pool of mathematical skill that humanity can draw upon to solve its collective problems, or performing better in the business environment, thus DOUBLING the potential pool of economic ability for humanity to draw upon, how is this not anything but a good thing?
Is it not the RESULT that matters? You babble on and on about differences between average math scores between men and women, but what about the AGGREGATE AVERAGE math scores for all humans? Don’t you want to RAISE it? Doesn’t everyone win when it goes up?
a what now? god, this d00d is a toxic bag of bigoted shit; ableism, sexism, homophobia, toxic masculinity. pretty much the only things missing are transphobia and racism
Don’t worry, I’m sure those are next on the list.
and this is the fuckweasel who’s been whining about “anecdotes” for 2 pages now?
Give him time, Jadehawk.
So, cupcake, how do you account for official atheist groups like (gasp) SecularWoman or conferences like Women in Skepticism or social network groups like Atheist and Agnostic Crafters (Ravelry, a huge group) or Crafting without Religion (FB, way way smaller).
Lol, dumb post is dumb. It’s already hotly debated why there aren’t much females in the nerd community.
Even tough females have those kind of groups (who says they didn’t), the RATIO between females in those communities and POTENTIAL females is weak.
You guys are dumb as chit, srs.
Okay, i’m out for now.
Don’t hate me cause you girls were born ugly. It’s in my nature to select for attractive girls.
Y’all mad ?
like a creationist. it’s almost as if I hadn’t linked to one large study and a meta-study debunking the “girls suck at math” BS, and it’s as if I hadn’t deconstructed his faulty reasoning. st00pid cupcake
Poor, poor duranahmet.
His description of that classic episode is a stunning indicator of he completely missed the point of the joke in that episode.
A human being so deficient in verbal reasoning skills that he cannot properly comprehend and thus properly enjoy the humor of The Simpsons is a man who leads a dull, bleak life, and who doesn’t even have the cognitive werewithal to realize what he is missing.
Damn that Y chromosome!
lol. boy is such a failure. “oh YEAH?! well, you’re ugly” is totes brilliant argumentation
The best argumentation we can get from ahmetduran.
Low quality trolling.
Select away, douchebag – anything that keeps you away from the women here is a good thing. For that matter, I bet we could make a fortune if we could bottle and sell some of that keep-away potion to women who don’t trigger your feminist-low-value-ugly detection system…
I’m with Jadehawk – please ban him – this has disintegrated exactly like he is working through a checklist to see what he can get away with. There is no merit now. This is just ugly and smelling up the joint.
Besides, I should be grading not watching this mess. : )
Ahmetduran has been sent to that place where all worn-out squeaky toys end their days.
duranahmet, expert at backwards logic, apparently thinks that it is an appropriately analytical thing to do to make judgments on the physical appearance of people it knows only through words.
My name is Talky Tina, and I think I could even hate ahmet.
ahmetduran is a chew toy with the squeaker gone, go ahead and ban his rancid ass anytime PZ.
Mattir
And who discovered that you can model hyperbolic space with crochet? :gasp: A woman named Daina Taimina
So from this example it is easy to deduce that when women are not prevented from working in areas that are traditionallly male, huge scientific gains are made by looking at a problem with a new perspective.
/checkmate sexist assholes
More writeups on Kane and Mertz, 2011, from the American Mathematical Society: (full pdf linked from Starts with a Bang):
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/01/06/surprise-surprise-gender-equal/
It gets better:
Quoted from a writeup in i09: http://io9.com/5867401/
Good riddance.
I think I totally called on the recess at kindergarten. He can’t spell, can’t type a coherent sentence, uses passe interent memes and is scraping the bottom of the barrell, bigotrywise.
its also pretty clear that he’s delighting in so much female attention. Must be pretty starved for it IRL, though I just *can’t* imagine why.
Ban the bigot, plz.
And Pteryxx does in one comment what the hilariously incompetent bigot couldn’t do in many – evidence.
*holds up Bigot Smasher crown for Pteryxx *
oooh, I can’t resist anymore. Especially now that the chewtoy distraction is gone.
I’m going to present my own crazy ridiculous conspiracy theory concerning the dearth of females in the skeptic/atheist movement.
See people, it is because, contrary to popular belief, the skeptic/atheist movement isn’t about rational thinking. Not at all. Actually, at its base and heart, it is an expression of male primate dominance behavior. (And hyperskepticism the more primal, distilled, extreme version of the same)
Humans are social creatures, who exchange information between each other. Judging the reliability of said exchanged information is an intellectual exercise, when done in private and in one’s own mind, with a view towards using that information for one’s own purposes.
That, however, is not actually what the skeptic/atheist movement is about. The movement is actually about publicly communicating skepticism of popular claims.
See, when an individual makes a fact claim in public, that individual is in fact making a claim of authority on that subject, and through that authority is attempting to secure status within the community to which the communication is made. To accept that claim is to accept that authority, to acquiese to that status, to submit.
To reject that claim is instead a challenge to that authority, and an attempt to take the status associated with that authority for oneself.
Gorillas beat their chests and hoot. Humans make blog posts and youtube videos.
And that is why these so-called skeptics are so adverse to letting a woman have a forum, and to shutting up and listening to her. To them the act of listening is an act of submission. And these prancing male primates simply cannot bear to even appear to admit to having a lower social status than a female of the same species.
Which is also why there are so many males and so few females in the movement. Because the movement is a forum for male dominance behaviour, and female primates on average are more biologically inclined to watch such displays from the sidelines than to get into the arena themselves.
What are the chances that the boy ends up teaching? How many women are going to have to deal with that boy in an academic or professional situation? How many women is this boy going to help to discourage?
The boy is a disgusting large shitstain.
It’s funny how it’s always the men who have nothing going for them intellectually that will obsess over these slight statistical differences, isn’t it? And always only the categories where men as a class have been found to have an edge, and always with an insistence that the results can’t mean anything other than “men are better than women” and a refusal to acknowledge counter-data, even if it comes from the same studies they cite. It’s a very mysterious phenomenon. As a simple woman, I can only conclude that it must have something to do with how great at “analytical reasoning” they are.
@Amphiox
Oh lordy – I suddenly have an image in my head from a conference I presented at a few months ago where some guy was trying to get into an argument with me about Rietveld refinement of a crystalline lattice structure, which I had already explained was not relevant to the question at hand (he was actually agreeing with me, but from some reason was doing it belligerently and at the top of his lungs)
And now – bam – I see him suddenly as a Gorilla throwing leaves over his head and beating his chest. Thanks – now it is going to be all I can do not to burst out laughing at this ilk at the next meeting.
BTW – I am female, look younger than my actual age (which is a serious disadvantage!) and have long strawberry red hair. Wrong tribe for these guys completely.
Thanks, Illuminata. *sits in crown like a nest*
pHred:
Reminds me of what Joan Roughgarden recounts (the MTF biologist who challenged Darwinian sexual selection):
http://www.theage.com.au/national/how-the-sex-bias-prevails-20100514-v4mv.html
Wow. ahmetduran started out looking merely (very) obtuse; now he’s really got his eyes on the prize – does he win Most Pathetic or Most Likely to Compare Unfavourably With Something I Scraped off the Sole of my Shoe?
Come on, ahmetduran, let’s have your opinions on race and socio-economic status. You already demonstrated that you are sexist and a homophobe, so you haven’t got far to go to complete the set. Hey, why are there fewer poor people than well-off people prominent in the atheist and secularist movements? Guess poor people just suck at maths, amirite? And why are most of the big-name atheists white? Guess non-whites just suck at analytical thinking, yeah?
What a beautiful story! Here, let me tell one as well.
It starts with: “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton…”
I have a hard time believing any of his claimed credentials were true. He put on the façade of an educated educator in a desperate attempt to give his misogynistic horseshit the façade of credibility.
And, when that completely and utterly failed, (ignorance + incompetence = failure) his true colors came out – straight up bigot trolling.
At best, he’s a highschooler on xmas break.
@Pteryxx:
Is Joan Roughgarden’s science any good? I’ve read Evolution’s Rainbow (my brother had it from a philosophy of science course) and I thought it was interesting, but I’m not qualified to judge the quality of her arguments.
Actually, child, it’s been you who has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn’t understand “on average”. I note that you still haven’t responded to my first post in this thread that demonstrates how ridiculous your claim that something has happened because of average differences is. So here, instead, I’ll explain it in more concrete terms and with less snark. Judging by your attempts at humor, you’re not actually very good with snark.
I will assume, only for the sake of argument and despite the fact that tests of reasoning do in fact contain verbal components, that math is exactly equal to analysis. I will also assume, only for the sake of argument, that we are dealing with a population in which there is a slight difference between men and women in average ability at math. I will finally assume, only for the sake of argument, that there is a precise relationship between analysis (as captured by math performance) and atheism or skepticism or whatever topic you want to change it to when other people point out that your assumptions are full of shit.
So, picture to yourself two nearly overlapping normal distributions, with the center of each to either side of a score of 100. Since we’re assuming that analysis equals math, we might as well they both equal IQ, and besides, people know what that distribution looks like. The center of one (for the men) is about five points to the right of the center of the other (for women).
Now you draw a vertical line toward the right of that set of distributions, set so that to the right of it is 8% of the overall population from both distributions combined. On this distribution, that score is right about 122.
This means that on the right of this line are your atheists, as determined by their math scores. Note that about 6% of the women in your sample are still in this group. More men than that, yes, but women are still about a third of the people in that 8%.
Even granting you every single one of your dubious claims, if you understand averages, you understand that there still should have been one woman out of three on that stage. On average.
@Pteryxx
I don’t know whether to thank you for that link or just start banging my head on the table. It is so pervasive too. This reminds me of the “service trap” too that female academic get sucked into as well. Pre-tenure (and post-tenure too if they make it) they get stuck with all sorts of scut work (act as meeting secretary, type up final reports, serve on this pointless committee, blah, blah … ) because clearly that is something women do – the men have more important research to be working on.
ARGH! HULK SMASH!!!!
I have to do my grading !!!!
Amphiox, can I play too?
Contrary to popular belief, the skeptic/atheist movement isn’t about rational thinking. Not at all. At its heart it is a kissing cousin to the Republican political “southern strategy,” but broadened and applied more towards social status and class hierarchy. It is a way for upper-class educated white men, and the chill girls who manage to sneak through, to maintain their feeling of superiority over the people over whom they have always enjoyed higher status… while usually staying off the radar of a culture that increasingly rejects their regressive ideals. It is no coincidence that so much of the skeptic/atheist movement labels itself as libertarian.
Here’s probably the most famous quote about the southern strategy, from Lee Atwater:
In a very similar way, skeptics/atheists can go after people who they used to call “poor white trash” by saying “fundamentalist evangelical Christians.” They don’t need to say “camel jockey” when “Muslim extremists” is socially acceptable. They can claim the superiority of “equity feminism” when what they mean is “bitches ain’t shit.” Satan help you if you disagree with them and don’t have 17 doctorates, because only people with advanced degrees are allowed to have opinions on any subject. And so on, for every situation where maintaining both the privilege and esteem-boosting effects of being an upper-class educated white man lording it over others is on the schedule.
They don’t care why women and non-whites and working-class people aren’t a higher percentage of their movement, because they don’t WANT any of “those sort of people” around in the first place. Well, maybe a couple of them to set up chairs and make the coffee and clean up afterwards, but you only need a few at each meeting, right?
Amphiox @513
Thank you very much for that information/heads up. It has, as was mentioned, made this thread worthwhile (or at least, as much of it as I have read).
Funny these cultural shifts. One gets the distinct feeling that we have, in fact, been moving somewhat backwards, rather than forwards, in the field of women’s rights.
An image just popped into my mind from yeeeaars ago. Sitting at a meeting discussing business stuff and one woman was crocheting/knitting strange little thingies. Turns out she’d found this was the best way to give her students understandable DNA models. Too long ago now to remember any details – basically my mind was overwhelmed at the size of the task making all these little gadgets for a whole year 12 biology group.
Umm…, I’m a girl atheist, but I don’t do needlepoint.
she lost the plot years ago, but her original work on endosymbiosis was seminal.
seriously, you can very safely ignore her proclamations regarding evolutionary theory.
that, right there, is why nobody should have ever bothered with this shitstain to begin with; it was patently obvious from early on that he is mostly informed by what he views as “popular culture”, in this case, the Simpsons.
I agree with those thinking it a high school student. at best.
*pinches self to remember not to waste time on morons*
I see our chew toy has been banned. Done with the last exam.
And now for the drinking. I’ve enjoyed watching the flensing, as always. Thank you all.
a misunderstanding of the Simpsons, no less.
would mean his facebook site is fake, too. not unheard of of course, but it seems more parsimonious that he’s simply Belgium’s answer to creationists with PhDs
Ichthyic:
I tend to stay away from such assumptions, given the amount of times they have been made about many of us. It’s hardly a rarity for an adult to display such immaturity.
Good. Needlepoint is basically the lowest form of textile art.
/trolling
Nah. That would be hooking rugs.
Amphiox (#638)
Indeed. I’d love to know* how the Belgian waffler figures verbal ability requires less analytical competence than math does. Because I’m pretty sure spending last quarter in Classical Japanese using two languages to parse out and determine the meaning of an essay in a third, dead language took a hell of a lot of analysis, even though the only math involved was converting dates between calendar systems. But what do I know?
………
*not really
Ahmet made it clear to me how easy it’d be to come up with a Reddit/4chan version of an Eliza-style chat bot. And like Ahmet, it would repeatedly fail he Turing test.
… Hooking rugs doesn’t even count as a textile art!
*grumpy to be outdone*
Rooking hugs.
For the record, this was the part where I just started laughing:
Oh, really. So why is the stereotype that women are nagging harpies who pick fights with their menfolk all the time?
True, I need to nuance it a bit more. Men argue endlessly about analytic subjects, women argue endlesly about ….non-analytic subjects.
Because when it’s pointed out to him that the two stereotypes he’s pushing as Science Truth (women are bitchy shrews vs. women are passive dolts) are mutually exclusive, of course, of course he can’t pick just one, so he twists himself into knots trying to find a magical way for both to be true. It’s like when creationists decided Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs.
What is it with misogynists and calling women “females”? That’s like the number-one misogynist tell.
Those of you ‘dissing rug hooking better be joking/trolling. My grandmother was a hooker — out and proud. Took it up at age 50 and did it for another 50 years. If you have a problem with hooking I think you’d better have a word with xmas-tree cat here: protecting the rug at all costs
Dontpanic
I too was a hooker in my misguided childhood, but I got better. :-p
shaenongarrity,
Indeed.
(A close second is using ‘women’ when they mean ‘woman’)