Letters to the Editor
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test results, if anyone's interested :)
Well, that was interesting.
I feel blechy right now (lupus headache) so I figured I would score badly across the board.
Instead I maxed out the angles test and the rotation test (which I thought I was doing poorly on, since it felt hard to me while I was doing it), and scored in the top range of the spot the differences test.
No surprises on the empathizing/sympathizing thing, since this is essentially the same measurement as Myers/Briggs Feeling/Thinking, and I score a solid X on that test. Identical scores on the two halves in this test, too, both somewhat higher than average.
On the other hand, I have girly fingers, a preference for extremely masculine faces, and good scores in the reading emotions and verbal fluency tests. (The verbal fluency test as a measure of masculine/feminine strikes me as very fucked up, since it's going to be extremely influenced by education.)
Now, I probably score highly on a lot of these tests because they directly measure things I do everyday - building 3d models of faces out of lines and shapes, for example, and writing dialogue for games. I'm not sure it's fair to test someone on something they practice regularly and compare it to the score of someone who never does this sort of task.
I'm gonna make my husband take it - he's far better at rotating things in real life than I am (since I ask him for help when I have problems with a model, I know this) and he has extremely masculine finger length. On the other hand, he's generally known as an extremely empathetic and not very male-oriented guy - the guy who prefers hanging around with the "Bitches Guild" to hanging out with other guys.
In response to the discussion about statistics: Yep, the danger with any statistic is that people try to misuse it. An average is not predictive of the characteristics of an individual, period. If you give people a concrete example, this becomes obvious. Let's say that men, on average, are taller than women. Bob is a man and Mary is a woman. Bob is therefore taller than Mary, right? Except Bob is 5'6" and Mary is 5'9"! No one with sense would use average height as a predictor of the height of a specific person, but for some reason, smart, educated people will use a 10% variation in average skill based on sex to make sweeping statements like "Men are not empathetic" or "Women are bad at spacial visualization."