Even when you consider only members of an elite group like the top percentile of the seventh graders on the SAT math test, someone at the 99.9 level is more likely than someone at the 99.1 level to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university.
This sentence is very important to the point he is trying to make but I can't find it in the research that he quotes earlier and I have no idea where it comes from. Moreover it is contradicted by my own personal experience; anybody who thinks the ability to obtain a doctorate is so tightly correlated with such fine variations in intelligence has not spent much time around PhDs.
Getting a PhD in science (or anything else really), has very little to do with being intelligent and everything to do with really really wanting it and being willing to put in the hard work. I know several very intelligent people who failed to get their PhD because they found it more work than they where willing to do, and I know several people with fairly mediocre grades who got PhDs because it was what they really wanted and they where willing to do the work and not give up.
Agree. As far as the tenure debate, becoming a candidate for being science professor at a top university requires INCREDIBLE single-minded focus, from college through Ph.D. through postdoc. And for that, you get a chance at an academic job, because only a handful are up for grabs in any given year. It's an incredibly high-risk proposition, with a lot of opportunity cost. Your chances are helped immensely if you're not interested in any other activities beyond working in your field. It's a monotonous life in many ways. Not many people would want it to begin with - that's why the Aspbergers types are often the only ones who make it through the filter.
In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the very highest percentiles of the maths SAT tests is more of test for Aspbergers like single-mindedness and less of test for actually mathematical aptitude. I doubt someone in the 97th percentile is on the whole a significantly dumber or in any way a worse (potential) mathematician than someone in the 99.7th percentile, but they probably don't have the same single-minded zeal.
Yeah, I have trouble believing that there is good research supporting this assertion.
I think that the author meant to distinguish between someone who is 1 in 100 and someone who is 1 in 10,000.
My problem here is that I suspect that it's stupid to use 7th grade SAT math scores to make this distinction. In fact, I doubt that any standardized test can make that distinction - I suspect that they top out around the 99%ile (actually, an 800/800 on the GRE math was only about 96%ile when I took it).
When a test is tedious, irritating, and consists primarily of solving simple geometry and algebra problems and choosing answers from a multiple choice menu, and when the difference between 99.9%ile and 98.7%ile is a couple of missed answers, I suspect you're measuring noise.n I'm not saying the tests are useless, they're probably pretty good. But to identify why the few great mathematical minds come from one group or another? Seriously?
The only real way to measure this kind of talent is to provide opportunities to learn, step back, wait 20 years, and see what they've done.
As for the gender question, well I guess I'm just begging the question with my "opportunity to learn" statement, because the whole question is whether this imbalance is in itself strong evidence of differing opportunities for men and women.
How do you measure something that is obscure and present in only a miniscule fraction of the population? Our indicators can tell us who is 1/100, maybe kinda. This whole approach is fubar.
Indeed tenure at a top university is much harder, and therefore small number statistics, and so I would be even more surprised to see it linked to a sub-one percentile spread in seventh grade scores.
In the bottom quartile of the SMPY cohort (99 percentile) less than 0.5% received tenure at a top 50 school. Of the top quartile, it was a bit over 3%.
---
A throughout read of the SMPY literature should be required reading for discussions of this nature online. Also a good read:
"Cross-Cultural Analysis of Students with Exceptional Talent in Mathematical Problem Solving."
This sentence is very important to the point he is trying to make but I can't find it in the research that he quotes earlier and I have no idea where it comes from. Moreover it is contradicted by my own personal experience; anybody who thinks the ability to obtain a doctorate is so tightly correlated with such fine variations in intelligence has not spent much time around PhDs.