While researching, I came across this photo of the 1911 Psychanalitic Congress, and of course immediately thought of the 1927 Solvay Conference photo:
Middle Row: P. Debye, M. Knudsen, W.L. Bragg, H.A. Kramers, P.A.M. Dirac, A.H. Compton, L. de Broglie, M. Born, N. Bohr;
Front Row: I. Langmuir, M. Planck, M. Curie, H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, P. Langevin, Ch.-E. Guye, C.T.R. Wilson, O.W. Richardson
And then I was sad.
Dammit, I don’t want percentage of women in a field to be an effective proxy for intellectual rigor.
(But I do really want a copy of the Solvay photo for my living room wall.)
It makes me wonder. Surely women like yourself are up there in intellectual rigor? Or perhaps you represent the top 1% of women, but the top 1% of men are still a standard deviation higher or something. I wonder. Or perhaps good and insightful blog writing is not a proxy for extremely high end intelligence.
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Top 1% of women are plenty impressive, but I think something like the Solvay conference requires being in the top 0.1% or perhaps 0.001% of people.
I’m not Solvay material, but thankfully I’m not Psychoanalitic material, either😛
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I don’t want percentage of women in a field to be an effective proxy for intellectual rigor.
What is, is. If women are not as smart as men (probable), and/or men’s intelligence has a higher standard deviation (certain), then in general it’s gonna be true.
I am curious why you don’t want it to be true.
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On an emotional level, I would prefer to live in a world where there are no differences in average group performance.
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The nature of the sexes is such that men either lose big or win big while women stay in the comfortable mean. Hence a greater % of men indicates greater intellectual rigor.
But consider also the enormous amount of mentally impaired men that is just as prevalent. The amount of battle deaths and men dying because of stupidity is also much higher.
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[…] Psychoanalytic Congress vs. 1927 Solvay Congress – spot the difference in the two […]
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