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Is it sexism to make assumptions that are probabilistically correct? Consider the following procedure: 1) For a woman I don't know, I buy her frozen yogurt.

Is it sexism to make assumptions that are probabilistically correct? Consider the following procedure: 1) For a woman I don't know, I buy her frozen yogurt. 2) For a man I don't know, I buy him pizza. Now suppose my stereotypes are actually accurate - i.e., P(likes froyo > pizza|woman) > 0.5 and P(likes pizza > froyo | man) > 0.5. This procedure, based purely on stereotypes, will make everyone happier than flipping a coin. It's actually the best possible way to allocate pizza and frozen yogurt if the only information I have is gender. Are you really saying that to not be sexist, I need to ignore information and make worse decisions? (My supposition that stereotypes are accurate has actually been studied: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20of%20stereotypes.pdf http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20o... )

blowski 11y ago
> Is it sexism to make assumptions that are probabilistically correct? Yes it's sexist, because assuming something about somebody based purely on their gender is precisely what sexism is. However, sometimes, in the face of limited data and limited resources to gather more data, being sexist might be the best possible course of action. The problem with the stereotypes of gender is that you are dealing with huge numbers of people. Even if a well-conducted survey reveals that 99.9% of women prefer frozen yoghurt to pizza, then there's still around 3.5 million women in the world that prefer pizza to frozen yoghurt. So the best possible way to decide whether to buy pizza or frozen yoghurt for a woman is to ask her. However, if you had to make a snap decision then, yes, you should go with the statistically more likely option and if you get it wrong then she should understand why you did it.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  > ...assuming something about somebody based purely on their gender is precisely what sexism is. I'm going to challenge that definition. There are absolutely biological difference between men and women. When I offer to help a young woman carry her suitcase up stairs, am I being sexist because I assume she would appreciate the help? The definition of sexism needs to have room for some reality or the definition is useless or even harmful.
  - kaitai 11y ago
    Well, think about whether you'd help a young man or leave him in the lurch, and think about whether you'd help if the woman in question is 6'1" and 190 pounds of muscle, handling the suitcase quite easily. Agreed that the definition needs to have some room for reality.
    - sokoloff 11y ago
      It may be a little old-school (which itself might be code for something else nefarious), but I will almost always stop for a woman [or the elderly] with a broken down car or flat tire on the side of the road (and have often doubled back from an exit a few miles down the road, then past the exit behind me, then returned if I couldn't safely stop as I initially passed). I will virtually never stop for a male in the same situation. (I have done so only when it's been dangerously cold out and in a fairly rural area.) It comes up a couple times per year; more than half end in "I'm OK, AAA is on the way", the next most common is me changing a tire for them, and the rarest of all (nowadays) is them borrowing my phone to call for help. If that's sexism, it's a type of sexism that I have no intention of stopping nor apologizing for.
      - Retra 11y ago
        That is pretty clearly sexism. You don't have to apologize for it; people will just think you're an asshole.
        sokoloff 11y ago
        Given the rampant assholism in the world, I have to be unconcerned with those people who believe I'm an asshole for doing this.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
        Just to give you a hint: How would you feel if you didn't know how to help yourself with something, and someone refused to help you because(!) you happen to be male? You might not have realised it, but that's in essence what you said, and that's at least one reason why people have been telling you that that behaviour is sexist. It's not about you helping women, it's about you deciding who to help based on their gender.
pron 11y ago
I know you're just doing your normal schtick of incorrectly assuming that everyone else is stupid (obviously no one, including blowski, thinks "to not be sexist, you need to ignore information and make worse decisions"), but this time you have accidentally stumbled on an interesting point. I know you don't care one way or another, but for the sake of other readers, I'd like to point it out(and BTW, your specific example (taken from blowski) isn't really sexist as I don't quite see how it keeps women away from power, but that's beside the point): > I need to ignore information and make worse decisions? Ignoring information and making worse decisions are two different things. Or, more precisely, by not ignoring some statistical data you are ignoring other pieces of information, such as our understanding of social dynamics. Ignoring yesterday's information about the train's arrival time would only lead to a much better decision making if you want to get to the train on time and you know that the train runs on a different schedule on weekends and yesterday was a Sunday. A piece of data is mostly useless (and even misleading) if you don't know what model it samples. Statistical data on human behavior is usually very bad information because history shows us that preferences change all the time (except for obvious things, like that people want power and are afraid of death). In fact, if women preference for frozen yogurt over pizza stayed constant throughout the ages it would be the exception rather than the rule. If you base your decision only on statistical information of the kind you describe, you're creating a conservative feedback loop. We now know that people's assumptions about others' behavior may affect the other's behavior, and so behaving in accordance with past behavior (because that's what most of your information is really about) simply perpetuates the current condition. The information you shouldn't ignore is the deeper information that comes from the actual study of social dynamics. That information tells us that changing your behavior to not conform to past behavior would (and constantly does) change society's future state. This is where social dynamics diverge from physics and the train schedule. We can decide to affect them (not necessarily determine them, because it's very hard to predict the behavior of such a complex system, but our actions definitely change the dynamics; we know this for a fact). The only question is, which way do you want to direct society: do you want to keep it as it is for as long as possible, or change it according to your values?
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  I'll ignore your ad-hominem and your strange attempts to change the topic to your uncommon definition of sexism (as opposed to the original definition used by blowski, Pauline Leet, Caroline Bird, and everyone else here). You are correct that it is possible that by giving people snacks they prefer, I'm affecting their future preferences in some way. So what? All actions might possibly influence people's future preferences in some (probably unpredictable) manner. Why would I trade actual predictable present-day happiness for unpredictable changes in future behavior that might theoretically be somewhat better? (If you disagree with me that influence on future preferences is unpredictable, and think you can predict social dynamics better than random chance, offer me a basket of bets at favorable odds.)
washadjeffmad 11y ago
Whether or not they understand Bayes, some groups of people are more concerned about what their posteriors will become proportional to whether they choose pizza and/or froyo. In those cases, despite your information being generally probabilistically correct for your goal, the worst decision could be giving them something that they'll eat (and enjoy) or want to eat but can't. You're predicting for what to bring on a first encounter, and the best answer could be to bring nothing until you have better information.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  It's not always possible to gather better information - sometimes all we have is base rates. Furthermore, even when we do have other information, combining other information with base rates yields a superior result. If you don't agree, by all means write down a distribution and an objective function, and show me decision process that is better than the Bayes optimal decision rule. (Hint: you can't. http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~vittorio/BayesProof.pdf http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~vittorio/BayesProof.pdf Or for a simple example illustrating why, consider the first 20 slides of this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/webanalisten/chris-stuccio-data-science-conversion-hotel-2015 http://www.slideshare.net/webanalisten/chris-stuccio-data-sc... )
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Is it sexism to make assumptions that are probabilistically correct? Judging people based on group membership rather than individually on axis that are not essentially tied (even if they are correlated with) that group membership is prejudice; prejudiced based on sex is sexism. So, yes, making probabilistic assumptions based on sex and acting on them is, in many cases, sexism. > ) For a woman I don't know, I buy her frozen yogurt. 2) For a man I don't know, I buy him pizza. If you want to get people food that they want, you can just ask them. (And, in any case, context is probably more important than sex: IME, women are more likely to prefer pizza to froyo for a meal, and men are more likely to prefer froyo to pizza for a dessert; there're are very few contexts where "pizza" and "froyo" are comparable alternatives where sex would be the prime differentiator on how people would respond to them -- and elevating sex above more relevant decision criteria is a pretty strong indication of sexism.)
- microcolonel 11y ago
  yummyfajitas is using the Pizza and Froyo examples from the post they're replying to. I don't think it is fair to grill them on the technicalities of those specific examples.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    I wasn't grilling yummyfajitas over the choice of examples, I was supporting the point made in the post they were responding to (and rejected in their post) regarding the example.
kaitai 11y ago
Please, buy chocolate. Froyo is demeaning.

blowski 11y ago

> Is it sexism to make assumptions that are probabilistically correct? Yes it's sexist, because assuming something about somebody based purely on their gender is precisely what sexism is. However, sometimes, in the face of limited data and limited resources to gather more data, being sexist might be the best possible course of action. The problem with the stereotypes of gender is that you are dealing with huge numbers of people. Even if a well-conducted survey reveals that 99.9% of women prefer frozen yoghurt to pizza, then there's still around 3.5 million women in the world that prefer pizza to frozen yoghurt. So the best possible way to decide whether to buy pizza or frozen yoghurt for a woman is to ask her. However, if you had to make a snap decision then, yes, you should go with the statistically more likely option and if you get it wrong then she should understand why you did it.

humanrebar 11y ago
> ...assuming something about somebody based purely on their gender is precisely what sexism is. I'm going to challenge that definition. There are absolutely biological difference between men and women. When I offer to help a young woman carry her suitcase up stairs, am I being sexist because I assume she would appreciate the help? The definition of sexism needs to have room for some reality or the definition is useless or even harmful.
- kaitai 11y ago
  Well, think about whether you'd help a young man or leave him in the lurch, and think about whether you'd help if the woman in question is 6'1" and 190 pounds of muscle, handling the suitcase quite easily. Agreed that the definition needs to have some room for reality.
  - sokoloff 11y ago
    It may be a little old-school (which itself might be code for something else nefarious), but I will almost always stop for a woman [or the elderly] with a broken down car or flat tire on the side of the road (and have often doubled back from an exit a few miles down the road, then past the exit behind me, then returned if I couldn't safely stop as I initially passed). I will virtually never stop for a male in the same situation. (I have done so only when it's been dangerously cold out and in a fairly rural area.) It comes up a couple times per year; more than half end in "I'm OK, AAA is on the way", the next most common is me changing a tire for them, and the rarest of all (nowadays) is them borrowing my phone to call for help. If that's sexism, it's a type of sexism that I have no intention of stopping nor apologizing for.
    - Retra 11y ago
      That is pretty clearly sexism. You don't have to apologize for it; people will just think you're an asshole.
      - sokoloff 11y ago
        Given the rampant assholism in the world, I have to be unconcerned with those people who believe I'm an asshole for doing this.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
        Just to give you a hint: How would you feel if you didn't know how to help yourself with something, and someone refused to help you because(!) you happen to be male? You might not have realised it, but that's in essence what you said, and that's at least one reason why people have been telling you that that behaviour is sexist. It's not about you helping women, it's about you deciding who to help based on their gender.

pron 11y ago

I know you're just doing your normal schtick of incorrectly assuming that everyone else is stupid (obviously no one, including blowski, thinks "to not be sexist, you need to ignore information and make worse decisions"), but this time you have accidentally stumbled on an interesting point. I know you don't care one way or another, but for the sake of other readers, I'd like to point it out(and BTW, your specific example (taken from blowski) isn't really sexist as I don't quite see how it keeps women away from power, but that's beside the point): > I need to ignore information and make worse decisions? Ignoring information and making worse decisions are two different things. Or, more precisely, by not ignoring some statistical data you are ignoring other pieces of information, such as our understanding of social dynamics. Ignoring yesterday's information about the train's arrival time would only lead to a much better decision making if you want to get to the train on time and you know that the train runs on a different schedule on weekends and yesterday was a Sunday. A piece of data is mostly useless (and even misleading) if you don't know what model it samples. Statistical data on human behavior is usually very bad information because history shows us that preferences change all the time (except for obvious things, like that people want power and are afraid of death). In fact, if women preference for frozen yogurt over pizza stayed constant throughout the ages it would be the exception rather than the rule. If you base your decision only on statistical information of the kind you describe, you're creating a conservative feedback loop. We now know that people's assumptions about others' behavior may affect the other's behavior, and so behaving in accordance with past behavior (because that's what most of your information is really about) simply perpetuates the current condition. The information you shouldn't ignore is the deeper information that comes from the actual study of social dynamics. That information tells us that changing your behavior to not conform to past behavior would (and constantly does) change society's future state. This is where social dynamics diverge from physics and the train schedule. We can decide to affect them (not necessarily determine them, because it's very hard to predict the behavior of such a complex system, but our actions definitely change the dynamics; we know this for a fact). The only question is, which way do you want to direct society: do you want to keep it as it is for as long as possible, or change it according to your values?

yummyfajitas 11y ago
I'll ignore your ad-hominem and your strange attempts to change the topic to your uncommon definition of sexism (as opposed to the original definition used by blowski, Pauline Leet, Caroline Bird, and everyone else here). You are correct that it is possible that by giving people snacks they prefer, I'm affecting their future preferences in some way. So what? All actions might possibly influence people's future preferences in some (probably unpredictable) manner. Why would I trade actual predictable present-day happiness for unpredictable changes in future behavior that might theoretically be somewhat better? (If you disagree with me that influence on future preferences is unpredictable, and think you can predict social dynamics better than random chance, offer me a basket of bets at favorable odds.)

washadjeffmad 11y ago

Whether or not they understand Bayes, some groups of people are more concerned about what their posteriors will become proportional to whether they choose pizza and/or froyo. In those cases, despite your information being generally probabilistically correct for your goal, the worst decision could be giving them something that they'll eat (and enjoy) or want to eat but can't. You're predicting for what to bring on a first encounter, and the best answer could be to bring nothing until you have better information.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
It's not always possible to gather better information - sometimes all we have is base rates. Furthermore, even when we do have other information, combining other information with base rates yields a superior result. If you don't agree, by all means write down a distribution and an objective function, and show me decision process that is better than the Bayes optimal decision rule. (Hint: you can't. http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~vittorio/BayesProof.pdf http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~vittorio/BayesProof.pdf Or for a simple example illustrating why, consider the first 20 slides of this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/webanalisten/chris-stuccio-data-science-conversion-hotel-2015 http://www.slideshare.net/webanalisten/chris-stuccio-data-sc... )

dragonwriter 11y ago

> Is it sexism to make assumptions that are probabilistically correct? Judging people based on group membership rather than individually on axis that are not essentially tied (even if they are correlated with) that group membership is prejudice; prejudiced based on sex is sexism. So, yes, making probabilistic assumptions based on sex and acting on them is, in many cases, sexism. > ) For a woman I don't know, I buy her frozen yogurt. 2) For a man I don't know, I buy him pizza. If you want to get people food that they want, you can just ask them. (And, in any case, context is probably more important than sex: IME, women are more likely to prefer pizza to froyo for a meal, and men are more likely to prefer froyo to pizza for a dessert; there're are very few contexts where "pizza" and "froyo" are comparable alternatives where sex would be the prime differentiator on how people would respond to them -- and elevating sex above more relevant decision criteria is a pretty strong indication of sexism.)

microcolonel 11y ago
yummyfajitas is using the Pizza and Froyo examples from the post they're replying to. I don't think it is fair to grill them on the technicalities of those specific examples.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  I wasn't grilling yummyfajitas over the choice of examples, I was supporting the point made in the post they were responding to (and rejected in their post) regarding the example.

kaitai 11y ago

Please, buy chocolate. Froyo is demeaning.