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Subject: Re: Women and computer: the reason why...

Author: Peter Fendrich

Date: 09:48:11 04/22/98

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I just want to give some comments (my last in this issue).

It's common and dangerous to mix up the test itself with what it is
trying to meassure. Many of these references (I haven't read them all)
doesn't mix this up but often the readers do as well as all the guys
making money out of IQ test. IQ tests are trying to meassure
intellectual capacity with just one point (value) when it obviously is
multidimensional. That is just impossible!
A guy at MIT (Don't remeber his name but he is well known by
psycologists) has developed a completely new type of test which is
mathematically better in this respect. The classical IQ tests are
outdated.

So, it's very hard to make any useful conclusions from these one
dimensional values. The pitfalls are many...

Let's take an example from the sport arenas. We know that men in general
are running faster, jumping higher, hitting harder and so on, and so on.
Does this mean that men has better physical capacities than women?
No, as an example women lives longer and that is a completely different
dimension. Shouldn't that be included in the concept of physical
capacity? This is not possible with a one dimensional value.
The same story goes for intellectual capacity.

My comments here are not about philosophy, nor politics, feminism or
whatever. It's just application of plain statistics.

Peter



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