Sex-Based Cognitive Differences: Why The Dust-Up?

The thing that puzzles me most about the recent dust-up over Lawrence Summers's suggestions about sex-based cognitive differences is...well, why the dust-up? That is, why all the anger?

This is not an attempt to poo-poo the anger, I'm really interested.

I remember when The Bell Curve came out. My reaction was twofold:

(a) so what?
and
(b) wonder whether it's true?

What puzzled me was why any given individual should care whether members of his/her group are, on average, better or worse than the members of some other group. For example, let's say that tomorrow we get ironclad evidence that Asians tend to be smarter than...er, what's the PC term? Whites? Caucasians? Oh, hell, let's say that we find out that Asians tend to be smarter--for biological reasons--than white farm boys from Missouri.

Does this bother me? No, it does not. What do I care about the relative averages of the two groups? None of it makes me any smarter or dumber. I'm still however smart I actually am. It matters not a whit to me whether most people who share my biology or upbringing are smarter or dumber than most people of some other group.

It has been suggested to me that the reason that this doesn't matter to me is that my IQ is going to be significantly higher than average for any identifiable biological group, and that if I had an average or below-average IQ I might feel differently. I agree that I might, but I assert that I shouldn't, by the same reasoning discussed above. If I had a low IQ I'd be bummed because I had a low IQ...not because of differential group averages.

Perhaps what's making people mad is that they think that, if we acknowledge some intellectual difference between two groups, then we are committed to endorsing differential treatment for those groups, but that isn't so. Even if Summers is right, it in no way means that it's o.k. to start discriminating against females, math-wise. Individual talent is still all that should matter in admission and employment decisions.

(And, interestingly, even if the flatter-male-intelligence-curve hypothesis is true, and even if this did entail the appropriateness of discrimination, it would seem to entail an equal amount of discrimination against males and females since there will be more males at both the good and the bad ends of the curve.)

Anyway, here's another reason why such things shouldn't bother you even if true: the difference between the number of people in your own biological group who are smarter than you and the number of people in any other group who are smarter than you will be negligible even if the most pessimistic of the reasonably hypotheses are true. If 499 people out of 1000 in your own group are smarter than you are, then it probably shouldn't worry you that much that 500 [changed numbers-- ed.] people out of 1000 in some other group are smarter than you. (Wait...that's another way of putting one of the points above...but for some reason my browser isn't letting me cut and paste. So deal with it.)

Incidentally, I usually avoid saying the following out of stubbornness and irritation at the irrationality that this topic provokes, but: no, I do not think that males are smarter than females. I don't even hope they are. In fact, I'd be really, really happy if it turned out that females were actually smarter than males on average. That would seem like a fitting end (?) to thousands of years of oppression of women. And it would really piss off the right wing and the fundamentalists (Christian, Jewish, Islamic, etc.) and the (as they used to say) male sexist pigs. And women are still underdogs in the world, and I can't help rooting for the underdog.

But, even given all that, I still don't see anything wrong with what Summers said. Er...or seems to have said...or may or may not have said...or is alleged to have thought...or might have suggested... Hmm... Guess this really is kinda pointless given that we really don't know the facts in the case... So I'm shutting up now.