Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Make Way for the Sciences, Ladies

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April 19, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

18:34

Make Way for the Sciences, Ladies

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	Sargon seems to have gone on holiday, and was silly enough to leave the back gate to his ziggurat unlocked.
	So here I am, rearranging the books and DVDs, putting sugar in his salt cellars, and making sure he cannot find a thing when he gets back.
	Then again, one must forgive his kind certain lapses in concentration.
	He was no doubt keen to get away to whatever pleasure resort he was headed.
	As we speak, he is most likely draped across some divan, with buxom ladies feeding him grapes.
	That is how all YouTubers spend their holidays, is it not?
	Why do you think I have a channel?
	Anyway, time to talk about something more wholesome than Sargon's hedonistic outrages on some exotic island owned by the oligarchs of the patriarchy.
	Now you have all most likely heard of the fact that by now almost two-thirds of university places in Britain and America are by now occupied by the female of the species.
	You have most likely also heard that this proportion is in fact rising and has been rising for decades.
	Boys are falling behind.
	Girls are excelling.
	Huzzah!
	Of course, you cannot have failed to hear how incredibly unfair it is that women do not also dominate STEM subjects, and how the absence of such dominance is clear evidence of oppression by the patriarchy.
	After all, how could it be otherwise?
	Meanwhile, of course, observers like Christina Hoff Summers have long ago complained about the gerrymandering of the education system to favour girls.
	All authors would probably say this, but I actually believe that my book is probably more relevant now than it was when I wrote it, because things have become a lot worse for boys and young men.
	The college gap has grown.
	Intolerance for youthful male, you know, just liveliness is very high right now.
	We've seen a series of cases where little boys are suspended for school for playing cops and robbers or bang bang.
	So almost from the moment a child, a male child, enters school, he's there on sufferance, because a lot of teachers have gone, maybe they've gone through schools of education where they've learned some of these theories about toxic masculinity.
	Boys, we have pretty good evidence that teachers don't like them as much, and boys are graded down for their bad behavior.
	So you might have a child who you know is very smart and very interested in history, but he doesn't get a good grade.
	And this has been researched carefully.
	The teachers will mark a boy down academically for his comportment.
	So boys, there's probably grading bias against boys.
	I myself remember debates on the BBC programme Question Time, back in the 90s, when feminist politicians like Harriet Harmon were still demanding, and eventually receiving, further alterations to teaching processes in favour of girls at school.
	First off, we know that the sexes simply have different aptitudes.
	Females show much greater lingual ability.
	Males show greater capacity at maths and science.
	So right from the off, we have divergence of talent.
	I would be willing to bet that in that great tower of Babel, the Parliament of the European Union, where live translation must constantly be provided in the parliamentary chamber, as well as in committees and in other meetings, and there is also a constant need to publish all documents in various languages, the majority of translators will most likely be female.
	Why?
	Because linguistics heavily favours the female mind.
	Now for a little graph.
	Milo Yiannopoulos has already made hay of a version of this particular graph.
	It is the famous divergent bell curve.
	Women and men display roughly equal average intelligence, but women cluster more around the average.
	In practice, this means most women are of fairly reasonable intelligence, whereas men produce some abject idiots and utter geniuses.
	And that's the rub.
	The geniuses reside in the male sex.
	They reside here.
	The fact that history is cluttered with male inventors, discoverers and engineers, is not the result of oppression and patriarchy.
	No, it's aptitude.
	And it's the bell curve.
	As an aside, the so-called variability hypotheses applies to many different characteristics, not merely intelligence.
	The male is the more varied creature, both mentally and physically.
	Furthermore, this does not only apply to humans, but so too to other species.
	Darwin already commented on this.
	However, the greater variability of the male most likely grants him the greater diversity of aptitude, meaning that he is more likely to dominate the extremes of most given traits.
	Hence, the most outstanding prodigies are most likely always going to be male.
	Explaining how we arrived at Mozart, John Cleese, Michelangelo, and Maxime Wengeroff.
	Not due to patriarchy, but because the statistics simply favour the male.
	But back to intelligence.
	Here is a short extract from a speech by the philosopher Helena Cronin.
	I think you will find it enlightening.
	For all sex differences in all species, this is not just humans, all sex differences in all species, there's a difference in the shape of the tails.
	Among males, the variance, that's the difference between the best and the worst, and the most and the least, or whatever it is, tallest and shortest, is far greater than among females.
	Females tend to cluster round the mean, that curve there, in the middle.
	Females tend to cluster round the mean.
	The tails are far less far apart, but among males, the variance can be great, huge.
	So males are almost bound to be over-represented both at the bottom and at the top.
	I think of this, I hasten to say metaphorically, as more dumbbells, but more nobles.
	An extreme example of the right-hand tail, which even the scientist who found it said in the paper staggering.
	For the ability in mechanical reasoning, in the top 0.1%, that's admittedly a very rarefied atmosphere.
	Try and guess what the male-female ratio is.
	It's 236 to 1.
	That's how far the Nobels-Dumbbells effect can push the difference between males and females.
	So that is indeed quite a figure.
	Let us repeat this, shall we?
	At the top 0.1% of human ability in mechanical reasoning, the ratio between male and female is believed to be a staggering 236 to 1.
	I wonder, is there anyone who thinks this discrepancy is still within the margin of error?
	Anyhow, make of that what you will.
	But for all the male brilliance, things have not been going well as of late.
	Economists are habitually telling us that our Western societies no longer produce disruptive technologies at the same rate as they have in the past.
	This is worrying, not least as it has been the Western societies who have produced all the progress for the past 500 years or more.
	If we are to wait for Africa, Latin America, Arabia, India and China to invent the next great thing, we might be waiting a very long time.
	The reason economists are particularly agitated by our innovation slowdown is because it poses a major problem.
	The overall economy loses a given percentage of jobs every year simply due to efficiency gains.
	In every field of industry, management is everlastingly looking to produce more with fewer employees.
	This, together with small incremental gains in existing technology, steadily erodes away the employment base.
	Therefore, our societies require a constant stream of new technologies to emerge in order to create new jobs in fields which previously did not exist.
	Simply put, technological progress and economic growth are a necessity.
	Turn off either of those two taps, and you are in dire trouble.
	Stagnation follows, and mass unemployment.
	It may be that some of the slowdown is caused by our having picked the scientific low-hanging fruit, and that progress is hence becoming harder.
	That, however, is only a stronger argument for our making a greater effort in science.
	Now, back to our graph.
	The geniuses all reside in the high tail end of the male spectrum of intelligence.
	I'm sorry, ladies, it is what it is.
	Males get a chance in the lottery of life to be the next Einstein.
	Women do not.
	Those of us who are not geniuses must simply come to terms with it.
	After all, we must come to terms with many things.
	Just take those unfortunate Americans.
	They everlastingly wave flags and sing their national anthem at every conceivable occasion in a desperate attempt to make up for the fact that they are not British.
	As said, if one does not win the lottery of life, one has to come to terms with it in some other way.
	Poor souls.
	I feel perfectly at ease to talk about genius.
	I am not one of those tail-enders.
	I would like to be.
	But there is reality.
	Physics and mathematics never were my sphere to any great degree, nor am I the next Mozart.
	I have met a handful of people in my lifetime in whom I saw the spark of genius.
	They are a particular breed.
	Awkward, more often than not shy, but devilishly clever.
	Do not however think that they all reside as fellows at universities.
	Life does not work out that way.
	What hence our societies, out of sheer necessity, must contrive to do is to increase our chances of getting those boffins into university.
	We simply need to find the geniuses.
	They may not be that easily identifiable at school or college, because some might not even particularly excel at school.
	They will most likely do reasonably well, but your resident genius might not be the best in class.
	He needs to be discovered.
	I know of what I speak.
	I know an individual who for years worked in a book warehouse, and yet was a marvel at astronomy and all things space.
	The man even appeared on the national broadcaster of his respective country one day in order to explain the phenomenon of the Shoemaker-Levy Comet crashing into Jupiter.
	And we are not talking amateur hour, but the main national news.
	He never went to university.
	He has since excelled at accountancy.
	If you knew him, you would know he belongs at a space agency.
	Yes, indeed.
	What a waste.
	This is what we must prevent from happening.
	It is paramount we get the genius peak of the male intelligence into university, because we need our geniuses where they can achieve most.
	We need to maximise our society's ability to discover these Turings, Faradays, and Bessemers.
	The greater the number of males we pack in, the more likely we are to succeed in getting the Einsteins, Newtons, Edisons, Stevensons, and Brunels in there.
	They are the fuel upon which our civilization truly runs.
	They are, not petroleum.
	With our rate of progress slowing, could our prioritizing the female of the species have something to do with the slowdown?
	Might our progressiveness ironically be hindering progress?
	So with the best will in the world, ladies, it will not be you.
	It will not be your daughters, it will not be your granddaughters, but it might be your brother, it might be your son, or your grandson.
	The kind of genius of which I speak resides in the male, in a particular kind of male, who is very close to autism.
	So how do we improve our chances of finding this type?
	There is a simple, ruthless way of increasing our chances.
	More males at university.
	Preferably more males in proportion to females, with a heavy weighting toward hard science.
	In the end, it is a numbers game.
	The more Y chromosomes we have at science departments at university, the more likely we find that one chap who can create the next big thing, the likes of the steam engine, automobile, airplane, computer, the next industry which will employ millions for a century.
	I am sorry, that is more important than feminism.
	It is more important than social studies.
	If we are honest, the next Beethoven or Rembrandt is not really going to be female either, is he?
	After all, he was never in the past.
	But I digress.
	We have increasingly failed to prioritise finding the male science genius, and have paid the price for it.
	I say enough is enough.
	Get out of the universities, ladies.
	By all means, have the best among you do degrees.
	The rest of you take to careers in industry and commerce if you want.
	Become prime ministers.
	But leave the lion's share of the university space to the sciences and the males, where we can try and find the future generations of epoch makers.
	Now, before people complain, of course I acknowledge the need for other subjects than science at university.
	These institutions do not solely exist to foster the next engineering miracles, but so too do they educate and train the intellectual elite, be they male or female.
	Just as we need science, so do we need the humanities.
	But with two-thirds of the universities being female, most of whom cluster around the humanities departments, it is time we acknowledge that there is a problem.
	Society has limited resources.
	One single Edison is worth the equivalent of ten million media studies graduates, be they male or female.
	And no, that is not a rhetorical exaggeration.
	And let us not forget that Edison was male.
	They were all male, by one or two examples.
	And waving those exceptions in our face changes nothing.
	For decades now, any claim of academic discrimination against the female is moot, not least when she makes up the majority of the student body.
	Yet science remains resolutely male, and the female has not stepped up to fill the vacancy caused by the diminished proportion of male students.
	Therefore, we ought to stop kidding ourselves.
	This is not selfishness on my part.
	After all, what benefit would I derive from this?
	I am well past university age.
	This is a simple statement regarding the common good.
	What is selfishness is for the female of the species to grab ever more university space and resource for herself when it is plainly obvious that it is to the detriment of society, because it most likely condemns yet more brainiacs to some book depository, where they shunt cardboard boxes around all day prior to becoming accountants.
	So, do I want more women in STEM subjects?
	No, I say clear them out.
	Double, treble, quadruple the STEM subject places at universities, utilising the budgets of non-STEM faculty to do this.
	Then shovel in young men at the rate of knots.
	We could start by abolishing gender studies and other semantic nonsense, and handing over those budgets to the sciences.
	In short, take what finances Dr. Christie Winters and hand it to Thunderfoot.
	Prioritise young boys' interest in maths and science at a young age and raise generations of engineers, scientists and inventors.
	And if Jermaine Greer does not like it, send her back to Australia whence she came.
	Let Bering deal with her.
	Our rate of technological progress has slowed.
	What price we are paying for this we do not even know, for we do not know what technologies we have so far missed out on due to this folly.
	If we keep on prioritising the fair sex at university, it is likely that the rate of progress will slow even further.
	Mass unemployment, falling national budgets, increased national debt, mass poverty.
	Huzzah!
	It is high time we crank that handle and get the motor revving again.
	What we need is Sheldon Cooper, not Penny with a sociology degree.
	Right, that should be all from the Britisher for now.
	Sargon is by now most likely onto his fourteenth Harem girl, whilst partaking in afternoon tea with Razorfist and Count Dankula.
	I meanwhile have deadheaded all the neighbours' petunias and left a trail of heavy footprints to Sargon's front door.
	I will see whether there is anything else I can still misplace in his abode before leaving a box of milk tray and a note that reads Kind regards, Jess Phillips.
	It was an honour and a privilege to speak to such august an audience as that of mighty Sargon.
	Please be aware of how much we YouTube content makers appreciate you all.
	For as long as you lot are out there watching and listening, there is some hope for us forlorn souls who keep railing against the madness of it all.
	Thanks for having me, Mr. Of Akad.
	That is all from the Cyberpass for now.
	Thank you very much, and Goodbye.

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