There’s a kerfluffle on the ‘net over Susan Walsh’s inept critique of Rollo Tomassi’s infamous male/female SMV vs time graph.
Vox has a pretty good take, and his commenters drive the nail home:
“George Potapov said…
Please. This “mathematician” is so clueless you shouldn’t even argue with her. From not so subtle clues I see that this “statistician” just confused the graphs for a gaussian bell curve distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_distribution.
Because if those graphs really were the gaussian distributions then
– the areas below them indeed had to be the same
– the male graph, being wider, indeed should have been lowerAnd honestly I couldn’t invent how one could interpret those data as distributions. If the X-axis is age, then Y-axis should have been quantity. But it’s not. Any other ideas?
I suppose the so called scientist hasn’t even read what the axes were marked.”
Rollo’s graph shows the impact of age as a factor on m/f SMV. Not normalized attractiveness. To demonstrate this, Imagine that age had no impact on male attractiveness. E.g., men are immortal with a zero birth rate, and all the same age. Then the male graph is 100% over the whole span, because age has no impact. Thus the female statistician’s argument that the areas under both curves must be the same is wrong – yet another demonstration of the disutility of female participation in higher education.
Here is another curve, one the feminists might have better cited to support the feminine imperative:
Of course, the last thing a feminist actually wants is more daylight shed on the sexual marketplace. It’s either obfuscate or pro-woman – ideally both.
The masculinist response to the above graph is, “Sure. Now let’s graph willingness to commit.”