resist microstructural oppression
apparently people think math competitions for girls are sexist because they “stigmatize girls as being less talented”
like, if you take away international girls’ math competitions, what will happen is that girls will mostly not qualify for international math competitions. but I’m sure they will feel very encouraged sitting at home, watching their male peers win medals, and knowing that we as a society have taken a firm stance on gender equality
anecdotally, i had terrible spatial reasoning for *years* and then got way better at it after learning how to solve a rubik’s cube
Cool, good to know! I’ve always meant to learn how to solve a Rubik’s cube but never gotten around to it.
Anonymous asked:
I am probably not the person to ask as (despite my low 2D:4D ratio) my spatial skills are pretty bad.
That said, here have this website. I’ve never used it and don’t have any particular reason to trust it but video games to train spatial skills do seem to have good evidence behind them in general and these seem like fine video games. (If you can find better video games, do that I guess.)
Anonymous asked:
I’m glad someone else is defensive of that Barbie too! People getting upset over it seems similar to the thing where people get upset that female characters have flaws, especially flaws that are stereotypically feminine. Which (as a girl who cries a lot, gets lost if I ever don’t have my phone, etc.) I’m not a fan of.
(Background: this post)
1) Are the NCLB scores surprising?
I don’t think so; I think the difference between NCLB and SAT can be entirely explained by greater male variability and selection effects. The male:female ratio at the 99th percentile of NCLB data is 2.06. If around the top half of high schoolers take the SAT, that corresponds to 98th percentile on the SAT, which has a gender ratio of around 1.9. Similarly the 90th percentile of SAT scores has a gender ratio around 1.5, corresponding the 95th percentile of NCLB with a ratio of 1.45.
(based on this website)
(As I look back at the blog post I notice that these numbers are for whites. I have no idea what to make of the numbers on Asians. I guess I would say anecdotally that Asian girls are more overrepresented relative to white girls in math contests than Asian guys relative to white guys.)
I think that PhD programs in engineering probably require higher than 99th percentile math ability, so it shouldn’t seem that weird that they’re only 15% women. The gender ratio is like 4 for people scoring >100 on the AMC I think, and it only shoots up from there.
2) If it’s all variability, why don’t we see the same results on the verbal SAT as on the math?
I’m not really up on the intelligence research; I read a bunch of Wikipedia while writing this post and came away with the impression “people disagree with each other.” My model of the world is generally “men and women have the same average general intelligence, women have higher verbal intelligence, men higher mathematical, and men have higher variability” and this model rarely leads to my being too confused by the world around me. We know men are better than women at mental rotation, but I don’t know how well this correlates with what we think of as “being good at math.”
Why are the average scores on NCLB math tests the same if men are better at math? Idk. One thing is that NCLB tests, unlike the SAT, don’t actually count for anything and thus students have no incentive to try to do well on them. And in my experience they have a lot of stupid questions that ask you to, like, write a paragraph on the steps you took to add 12 and 15. I always tried to do a good job on those questions, I guess because I’m a girl. But anyway these tests aren’t just testing math ability, they’re also testing ability to explain your work and caring enough to do a good job, neither of which boys are that great at. (Source: interactions with teenage boys. Also, girls do better on the writing SAT than guys despite doing worse on the other two sections.)
Sometimes I feel like I’m not really a “math person,” like I don’t fit in with math culture. But today there was this math discussion where I felt like I did fit in, and I think part of that is that there are really two math cultures, one of people who did math contests and one of people who didn’t, and they’re pretty different.
People who never did math contests talk a lot about how math is “fun” and “awesome” and “beautiful.” They think math is their friend, and deep down they alieve that they are good at math. People who did math contests don’t see math as our friend. It’s more like outer space: looks pretty in pictures but will kill you if you get too close. And deep down we alieve that we are bad at it. There’s this thing math contest people do where they all say, all the time, “I suck at math.” And what I love about it is that there’s no irony, no winking, no “see it’s funny because I’m not really bad at math, I was just talking about being in Blue MOP,” it’s said with utter sincerity in a way that seems … appropriately respectful of math.
Incidentally, this is why I’m sort of irrationally defensive of that Barbie. Math is hard.
Hey, if this unsubstantiated claim in your proof were actually true it would warrant another whole paper! You could title it ‘The Riemann Hypothesis is Trivial.’
The great mathematician, Herman Minkowski, once told his students that the 4-Color Conjecture had not been settled because only third-rate mathematicians had concerned themselves with it. “I believe I can prove it,” he declared. After a long period, he admitted, “Heaven is angered by my arrogance; my proof is also defective.”
See? In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing. I can’t show you how deep it goes.
Some days ago I noticed a brilliant bumper sticker, saying “I ♥ topology” where the heart was replaced by a topologically homeomorphic disk (●). Amused by the idea, I tried to work out some related versions for other mathematical subjects. Here they are:
What do you guys think? I’m still thinking about a heart for genuine algebra, linear algebra, number theory, combinatorics and mathematical logic. Please share any remarks, ideas, subjects?
