Whomever she was, I'm sure she was good, not great....... unless it was a "He", then he was better than he would have been as a "She".

Two things my momma used to say:
"Don't throw rocks when you live in a glass house"
"Don't give it if you can't take it"
Magicfish you seem to be taking extraordinary offense to basically the same thing you have been dishing out.

Opinion and fact are not the same thing, opinions do not create fact even though we'd really like to think so at times. The idea of "Better than" or "Best" is based on opinion and cannot be proven without the "I think it is, therefore it must be" argument, which is argumentative although not a good argument.

I have now stepped down from the soapbox (My wife needs to wash the clothes, woman's work you know)

Precisely my point. All areas of magic indeed.

Comedy? Tomsoni, Ballantine, Cooper. Cards? Vernon, Miller, Marlo etc. Manip? Cardini, Pollock, Burton. Close up? Slydini, Goshman, Alan.

Whit, you really think that Princess Tenko is one of the greats ever? yikes.
Don't get me wrong; she's quite entertaining, but one of the greats? hmmm. very debatable to say the least.

fish

Comedy. Pam Hays AKA Pamela Thompson. Even Johnny would tell you that.

Okay. The famous hanging straitjacket in the Astrodome was performed by Lea Geeslin. AKA Nadera from Taras and Nadera.

I doubt that anyone would ever remember her as one of the greats, but she did do a darn good hanging straitjacket escape.

And if I'm not mistaken, it was momentarily in the Guinness book.

As Lea was hanging upside down from her umbilical cord she thought, 'I should have children before I do something this crazy again.' Not realizing the err in her logic.

Princess Tenko has been extraordinarily successful--a great self-promoter--with television specials, cartoon shows, etc. More people have seen her than Houdini.

I believe that women have every bit the same potential at magic that men have, and that the prominence of men, and the domination of the form by men is the result of societal pressures and nothing else. I believe that as women come into magic at an increasingly high rate, you will find women will be not only equal in footing with men, but there will be as many women as men considered among the best.

magicfish: You say that can never happen. That women will never be as good as men. To what do you attribute that? Are you saying that women are genetically not as gifted in the skills that one needs to be a magician?

Your arguments sound to me just like those who said women could not be great doctors, or great chefs, or leaders of a country.

It is simply very poor thinking to assume the things you seem to take as incontrovertible fact. Just because you have never seen a woman who you believe is as good a magician as a man, you assume that there aren't any. That is just reasoning from too small a sample. You haven't seen all the women, you can't make that sort of statement with any assurance.

Secondly, you haven't stated any particular type of magic, or skill in magic that you don't think men have the edge in. Manipulation skill, holding a crowd, self-promotion, comedy, invention--you seem to believe that men have a natural genetic edge in all of these things. I find that to be unlikely.

As far as I can tell, you are saying that women, regardless of societal conditions, will always be one-down to men in all categories and measurements of ability with men. This is something that you "believe" with your heart, but I don't see any evidence for in any of your arguments.

Research based on IQ tests given to 80,000 people and a further study of 20,000 students proved men are smarter than women by about 5 points on average. Which is small but the gap gets wider among the smartest men and women.
If magic is an intellectual pursuit then men will do better.
The history of magic speaks for itself and so it will in the future.

Like life, I guess. You're good, kid, but as long as I'm around you're second best. You might as well learn to live with it.

Good going tommy, you demonstraged that our IQ tests have gender bias.

Sure, more men have read Goethe's Faust and more women have read the Brote works. So what?

As to the history of magic, look back a little bit and remember Astarte et al. And the corn god. And then perhaps offer a prayer of hope that more folks continue to sleep and forget the past and let sleeping gods lie in the deep.

Nothing to do with world leaders or anything other than magic, Whit.

I disagree with your "societal pressures" theory all together.

I am an avid angler. When I walk by a family with my rod under my arm and a flashy spinnerbait tied to my line, it is invariably the boy who almost breaks his neck looking at my new lure. The girl usually is interested in something different. I don't think this is because the boy has already been exposed to fishing by a male role model or it wouldn't happen so often.

Growing up my sister and I were trapped in a car with my mom and dad on camping trips fishing outings...we did everything together for about 15 years. I naturally leaned toward fishing and camping and cars and chopping wood and building things and juggling and magic. My sister{ for some reason } tended to lean toward hop scotch, skipping, pussy willows, and dressing up dolls; and believe me, she was under no pressure to do so.

I'd like to go way, way way out on a limb here and bet 8 zillion dollars that more boys ask for magic sets than girls next year... and the next and for the next oh I don't know 700 years?

So too will they ask for more dinky cars and building blocks.

Men and women most certainly should be treated as equals, but in no way are they the same. Nature made it that way.

Look through a modern intelligence test and explain what the bias is and where it is to be found.

Some of us have looked at the tests over the years. And even though I did my research work on the MMPI scores over time I did look at the WAIS and other tests administered.

Here is a link with some discussions that look suitable for most folks to read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence

And yes, "who wrote Faust" is a question on the test. Funny thing to ask.

That's an interesting statistic. Care to tell us where you got this pearl of wisdom? Must be from that noted bigot Professor Lynn.

His study is in direct conflict with others.

Interestingly, the person generally regarded as having the highest IQ in the US is Marilyn Vos Savant, who writes a syndicated column in Parade magazine.

I'd be curious as to how the tests were administered, by whom, and under what circumstances. Even the venerable Sanford-Bidet, er, Sanford-Benet has been proven to have racial, class, ethnic and gender bias.

Hi,

I can't believe this has gone on for 13 pages! Men were able to pursue any vocation of their choice, while it is only recently in our history that woman have been allowed the same choices. Given that, they have come a long way in such a short time, entering professions which as recently as only 30-40 years ago was closed off to them. The same can be said regarding people of various ethenicities.
When given the freedom to pursue their dreams, people of all races, genders, ect can achieve a lot. Lets resume this conversation in 100 years or so to prove our points, shall we? :O)

Chrystal
>>waves to Vinnie

In societies where there is no bias due to ethnicity, and there are some, the deviation of IQ scores among races is so slight as to be statistically insignificant. I learned this when I took a psychology course in college. This was at the same time that B.F. Skinner was proposing that the opposite was true.

The interesting part about this was that our prof was very careful to point this out during class. He said, "This question will be on your next exam. Remember, in IQ tests in (name of location deleted) there was such a small deviation between the test results between the various ethnicities as to be statistically insignificant.

On the next exam, the question read "Intelligence tests in (name of city) proved conclusively that _____________ have lower intelligence than -------------." About half of the students missed the answer.

And this was a university that required a reasonably high IQ score to get in, and prided itself on academic excellence. Needless to say, the prof raked the class over the coals the next session.

IQ is often a measure of wit, unfortunately it doesn't exempt nit-wits.

Bill, did that test question require a True or False answer?

Also, can you tell us where the unbiased society was that your professor spoke of? Your post seemed to indicate you did not desire to mention the location, but I thought I would ask in order to be sure.

Does the university you mentioned often serve rice?

It was a true/false question. Anyone who understands "testmanship" would know that the answer would have had to be false, because of the word "conclusively."

But true/false and multiple choice tests were not the norm at Rice. The answer was a knee-jerk one.

The tests were administered in Canada. It was interesting. I got to visit Canada at a later date -- I worked there for three weeks -- and the only biases I experienced were one against Americans (who had come up dodging the draft, because they had done so much damage to Canadian society) and the English-French problem.

Bill

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4183166.stm


“Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University.
His co-author Richard Lynn's previous work on the genetic and environmental influences on intelligence and race has proved controversial.
Prof Lynn, an emeritus professor at the University of Ulster, has argued that people of east Asian origin have higher IQs on average than Europeans, or that those from sub-Saharan Africa have lower IQs than African Americans.”

I see what you mean about Prof Lynn being a noted bigot. I am not sure if I agree, as it seems like shooting the messenger. The message it’s self, if this what you refer to, does seem like bigotry at first sight but to be fair to him, he is a white European arguing that “east Asian origin have higher IQs on average than Europeans”. I don’t know if that is a bigot? And as for what he says about “sub-Saharan Africa have lower IQs than African Americans.” Whether he is a bigot or not would depend on what he makes of the information, which I assume has been based on IQ tests. If he thinks, lets say, it is something to do with people staving in Africa and people eating well in America and diet might have something to do with IQs then would you say that that was bigotry? I don’t know.

My personal view on IQ tests is that they are hogwash. I at the age of 24 sat a test for MENSA and was accepted. Now here is the interesting stat I got a score IQ of 154! Which puts me to “Genius Professors” level and just below “Genius Nobel Prize Winners!
As you know I am a guy who can hardly string together a sentence here, without making a mistake. I know myself and I know I am in truth, a guy of average intelligence, at best, despite what MENSA say. I can’t do crossword puzzles or anything to do with words, and I can hardly spell.

“Intelligence Interval Cognitive Designation Common Possessors*
85 - 114 Average Pupils at junior high school
115 - 124 Above average Pupils at senior high school
125 - 134 Gifted University graduates
135 - 144 Highly gifted Intellectuals
145 - 154 Genius Professors
155 - 164 Genius Nobel Prize Winners
165 - 179 High genius
180 - 200 Highest genius
>200 "Unmeasurable" genius.


Getting back to the topic. I think everyone and everything is different in nature and we are all unique individuals. Equality does not mean that we are all the same. Each person should be taken as we find them without regard to sex colour or religion or anything like that. Being smarter or richer or anything does not make us superior. I look at it like this: I am not superior or inferior to a grain of sand but me and the grain of sand are just different.
I like seeing things that are different and would love to see a black women become the worlds most famous magician. I would not like it however, if she then said, we black women are superior and I have proved it by becoming the worlds most famous magician. She has not proved that black women are superior by becoming the worlds most famous magician, only that “she” is a great magician, not others. Likewise great men magicians of the past have not proved that men are superior magicians to women.

All I have to say is what is,,,, LIFE Without a WIFE....................

So much fun from a guy who measured intellect in terms of ability to fool his daughters.

100 means you can fool one of the two

200 means you can fool them both reliably.

Now you know why the scale goes to 200.

But do you feel smarter?

Is this about princess Tenko?