Science Results Are Telling

Sorry, I'm late... sick child and all that. :( Anyhoo, I've told you before that I always look for confirmation of social trends in places other than direct studies. Basically, a study that asks "Are you stupid" won't give you a realistic answer because people tell you what they think you want to hear, but something like sales figures for a book titled "How To Hide Your Inner Stupid" will give us a better picture. Well, I ran into an interesting one this weekend which confirms several things we've discussed before. Observe.

The thingermerbob in question was a simple test given to 3,200 Americans. (You can take it here: LINK.) It asked a series of basic science questions from different fields. The end result was the average was a C. And that's been the headline everyone ran with, as if Americans are science illiterate. Oh brother. Look, yeah, people didn't do well, but these questions were essentially trivia as none of the information contained therein is useful to 99.999% of people. Nor do we have results for smug Euros, lazy South Americans, or sneaky Japs to compare us to. So how this can be a basis for condemning Americans is beyond me. Whatevs.

Anyways, the genuinely interesting information is the stuff the media won't touch. Consider these:

● Men scored one point higher than women. Why is this interesting? For the longest time now, we have been told by feminists that there is something wrong with the world because women do so much better in school than men (more go to college, more graduate, more get better grades) and yet men continue to hold the vast majority of management positions and continue to make more money. Must be sexism, right? Wrong.

The problem is that while women do indeed do better in school, it is clear that school grades do not translate directly into knowledge or ability as the feminists want them too. Indeed, we see that here. If school performance were a predictor of ability, then women should have beaten men handily. But they didn't. They got beat by a full point (8.3%). How can that happen? Well, I would suggest that this test measures the ability of men and women to remember what they were taught long ago AND/OR to work out a problem with which they are presented and about which they have limited knowledge. Hence, what this test result tells us is that while women are better students while they are in school, men retain their knowledge better and have better practical skills which let them work out problems. In other words, women are better at education-based skills like repeating lessons, but men are better at remembering the things they learn long term and at using their knowledge to solve problems outside of what they've been taught. That makes women better students, but men better employees. That would explain part of the gender gap in pay verses the reverse gender gap in education.

The other thing this highlights is that the gender gap is the result of choices men and women make. Indeed, the gender gap on this test goes away in biological science, which means that this is the one area of science where women are equal to men. That suggests the gender gap is about interest rather than ability. In other words, women find biological science more interesting or the jobs they choose keep those skills more fresh in their minds. Hence, they do better than they do in physical sciences, which don't interest women. What this means is that women are picking and choosing the skills they want to have, which is the real cause of the gender gap. Hence, there really is no gap in the sense of a lack of potential ability, there is a gender choice gap. This is confirmed in the real world where women flock to fields like K-12 education, counseling, and nursing, while men go into science, math, management and other more demanding and better paid fields.

● Whites again beat blacks and Hispanics. Why this matters is that once again, it shows that there really are two Americas. When you look at whites only, everything from the crime rate to infant mortality to education results reflect a society that exceeds even the best Europe has to offer. It is only when you add minorities that American results get dragged down to the middle of the European pack. As a policy wonk, this should tell us that our goal should be to raise minorities to the same level as whites and we should be looking for the causes of this race/ethnic difference. Unfortunately, that is considered "racist," so policy types are stuck recommending broad-based solutions for all races simultaneously when they should be targeting specific solutions to those who need it most.

● Democrats proved to be half a point stupider than Republicans. That's no surprise seeing as how the Democrats truly are the anti-science party. To tehm, science is a goodie box that can deliver magic on demand when demanded by people pure of heart and without a profit motive. Interestingly, the experts they consulted for the article are trying to dismiss this as being the result of minorities inhabiting the Democratic party... a point that would be racist if made about education or other statistic.

● Westerners scored highest, and Southerners did the worst. That doesn't surprise me in the least either. The West is very modern and packed with science companies. We're also pretty obsessed with education. The South is a mix of agrarian and manufacturing culture and has the worst schools in the country. It also suggests that places like New York and Massachusetts, which think of themselves as smarter than the rest of us may be fooling themselves.

● People with college degrees smoked high school grads, and people with postgraduate degrees did even better - they were the only group to score an A. I suspect this shows that those people value the collection and retention of information better than other groups and it shows that they have better problem solving abilities. All of that shows why those people tend to lose their jobs less often and get new jobs much quicker than people without education even though there are a great many more jobs for unskilled labor out there. Said differently, retaining education pays.

● Finally, the smartest group age-wise was people between 30 and 49. This makes sense too as that is the age group that has the strongest combination of (1) needing to use their brains every day so they can earn a living, (2) being fresh from their education years, but adding in some real world years, and (3) going through K-12 again as they raise kids. I wouldn't make much about that except to point out that this idea the Boomers seem to have of the rest of us as morons compared to their genius selves is again proven wrong. Boomers did the worst.

Thoughts?