If someone updated towards the “autism is extreme maleness” theory after reading an abstract based on your hypothetical maleness test, you could probably argue them out of that belief by explaining the specific methodology of the test, because it’s obviously dumb. If you instead had to do a bunch of math to show why it was flawed, then it would be much harder to convince people because some wouldn’t be interested in reading a bunch of math, some wouldn’t be able to follow it, and some would have complicated technical nitpicks about how if you run these numbers slightly differently you get a different result.
Separate from the “Is that your true rejection?” question, I think the value of making this argument depends heavily on how simple you can make the explanation. No matter how bulletproof it is, a counterargument that takes 10000 words to make will convince fewer people than one that can be made in 100 words.
Maybe it would help if the explanation also had a simplified story and then an in-depth description of how one arrived at the simplified story?
Like the simplified story for how the EQ is wrong is “The EQ conflates two different things, ‘not caring about people’ and ‘not knowing how to interact with people’. The former is male while the latter is autistic.”
I don’t know for sure what the issue with the SQ is, but I suspect it’s going to be something like “The SQ conflates five different things, ‘being interested in technology’, ‘being interested in politics’, ‘being interested in nature’, ‘orderliness’ and ‘artistic creativity’. The former two are male while ?some unknown subset? are autistic.”
The noteworthy bit is that one can detect these sorts of conflations from the statistics of the scales.
If someone updated towards the “autism is extreme maleness” theory after reading an abstract based on your hypothetical maleness test, you could probably argue them out of that belief by explaining the specific methodology of the test, because it’s obviously dumb. If you instead had to do a bunch of math to show why it was flawed, then it would be much harder to convince people because some wouldn’t be interested in reading a bunch of math, some wouldn’t be able to follow it, and some would have complicated technical nitpicks about how if you run these numbers slightly differently you get a different result.
Separate from the “Is that your true rejection?” question, I think the value of making this argument depends heavily on how simple you can make the explanation. No matter how bulletproof it is, a counterargument that takes 10000 words to make will convince fewer people than one that can be made in 100 words.
Maybe it would help if the explanation also had a simplified story and then an in-depth description of how one arrived at the simplified story?
Like the simplified story for how the EQ is wrong is “The EQ conflates two different things, ‘not caring about people’ and ‘not knowing how to interact with people’. The former is male while the latter is autistic.”
I don’t know for sure what the issue with the SQ is, but I suspect it’s going to be something like “The SQ conflates five different things, ‘being interested in technology’, ‘being interested in politics’, ‘being interested in nature’, ‘orderliness’ and ‘artistic creativity’. The former two are male while ?some unknown subset? are autistic.”
The noteworthy bit is that one can detect these sorts of conflations from the statistics of the scales.