Variety
Due to some rather marvellous results in maths (I believe it's called the central limit theorem? I don't know, it was about the only interesting thing I did in stats last year), many, many parameters in nature are distributed 'normally', the bell shaped curve where most entries are kind of average and fewer are at the extremes. The exact nature of the distribution can be defined by two numbers: a mean and a standard deviation. With most human characteristics - intelligence, height, hairiness, whatever - The mean value for men and women (an iq of 100 say [as an aside, I'm reminded of some important politician dismayed by the news that half his population had below average intelligence. What were they teaching in schools back then?]) is more or less exactly the same, but the standard deviation amongst men is significantly higher than amongst women. You don't get many super intelligent women, but you don't get many remedially thick ones either, hence the dominance of men both in cutting edge science and high art, and amongst the prison populations and in mental health wards.

The reason for this, I was told recently, and it makes considerable sense to me although I'm not a biologist so please correct me if I'm wrong, is that men have two different types of chromosome and so are more varied in every way than the more homogenous fairer sex. One woman is, on average, less dissimilar to another woman than a man is to another man because us gents have got a splendid y-chromosome.

While hopefully you will find that interesting, I doubt it will come as a huge shock to you upon a brief moment's thought. However, I definitely find that in one category, which for want of a better label we'll call 'loveliness', women are far, far more diverse than men. I can get along with most men, but seldom, if ever, have I found a man utterly enchanting and been bowled over by their warmth and grace. Not that there aren't many men I feel massive fondness towards; I'm lucky enough to to know some brilliant trouser-wearers, but I couldn't see myself ever falling in love with one. Neither am I frequently confronted with men who appall me on every level. Some women, though, simply astound me with the magnitude of their self-absorption and malevolence, whining spoiled bitches you can't quite believe are legally considered adults.

I guess what I'm trying to say, in an actually not-very-clear way, is that women's personailties are far more varied than your archetypal borderline-autistic hunter gatherer who's amused by flatulence. Or at least that's how it seems to me, maybe I'm guilty of not looking past my own prejudices and in-built programming. True objectivity seems to be to be nigh-on impossible, when you're only perception of the world is separated from it layers of flesh and organs.

Men: Responsible for Beethoven's ninth, calculus, the holocaust and Uwe Boll films
Women: some are harpies, some are angels, a lot seem to be able to shift at random between one and the other. All of them are bloody baffling, but I wouldn't half miss them if they were gone.

Sorry for rambling.
(WarneMarsh My priority for frivolity begets quality jollity, Tue 29 Dec 2009, 0:33, 3 replies)

IQ & stuff
I'm not disputing the standard variation stuff on IQ tests as that sounds genuinely interesting - but given that IQ tests have been measuring an industrial, western-centric concept of 'intelligence' for less than a century, given people can actually get better at IQ tests by practicing, and given that the allegedly thick half of the bell curve has been getting smarter since IQ tests were invented, then i'm not sure what it is that IQ actually measures but i very much doubt it's 'intelligence' in the way that most people fail to understand it ...

(also, the wider standard deviation among men in IQ tests in the last century *may* relate to the social roles that men and women have occupied in the 20th century in major western economies, which is 'blink and you'll miss it' in historical and geographic terms ...

that's not an assertion incidentally, just a thought ... it would be interesting to select women who parachuted into hitherto unfamiliar roles - like land girls, women in factories and the armed forces during WW2 – and see what their standard deviation thingie was ...

your loveliness observation meanwhile seems empirically based but on your own informal research (which might be biased by your apparent heterosexuality) and seems to throw in the conjecture that women's *personalities* have the higher standard deviation ... i have more trouble with this as i don't see why there shouldn't be as many dull or charismatic ("charming or lovely") men as women ...

better stop now ... i'd go out but it's snowing...
( writerblock ... embedding disabled by request on, Tue 29 Dec 2009, 10:08, closed)

^
I like both these very mathsy but interesting posts :0)
(Monkeystrumpet monkey. Monkey, MONKEY!!!, Tue 29 Dec 2009, 11:38, closed)

.
You're completely right about IQ tests, by and large I think they're bollocks and only a very rough guideline to intellectual capacity. They are the only device I know of, though, that gives a quantitive measure of intelligence and therefore useful for statistical analysis. Stats is very dodgy ground anyway, in my opinion, perfectly summed up by my favourite xkcd:



Just trying to give b3tans some food for thought as I do believe it's quite interesting.

The loveliness thing was an off the cuff observation, and probably complete bollocks. Part of me is tempted to invent a 'loveliness quotient' and conduct a large scale scientific double-blind study, but a) this would pretty much miss the entire point of love and b) I doubt the sort of person who would do that would ever get close to a woman again.
(WarneMarsh My priority for frivolity begets quality jollity, Tue 29 Dec 2009, 15:23, closed)