3 ms·

A major reason things like sex or (even worse) racial differences can't be rationally discussed is that human beings are so horrible at statistics. Averages do

by api 6y ago

A major reason things like sex or (even worse) racial differences can't be rationally discussed is that human beings are so horrible at statistics. Averages do not apply to the entire population unless the variance is literally zero. You could stamp that on a mallet and beat people with it for hours, and yet if you state an average people will continue to apply it to the entire population. "Women are on average more peripheral" instantly becomes "women are more peripheral period" and by extension "men are not peripheral period." Even very intelligent and educated people do this. Our collective insanity about statistics manifests in lots of other context too, like people being afraid of terrorists and mass shooters while they'll still ride around in cars or being phobic of vaccines while continuing to eat horrible artery-clogging fried food. If humanity were to fail as a species and someone in the afterlife asked me why, the fact that we are seemingly incapable of understanding statistics is something I'd cite as a major contributing factor. A second problem with open discussions of differences is that human beings seem hungry for reasons to denigrate other human beings. Any difference becomes a reason for some group of people to say they are "better" than another group of people. Last but not least is the fact that while just about everyone believes there are differences across virtually every axis, people are skeptical about the details. This skepticism isn't unreasonable. Psychometrics is an area of science with one of the worst replication records. Forgive me for becoming skeptical when really strong and specific claims from a science with a terrible replication record are used to try to push arguments that denigrate large groups of people or apologize for injustices against them.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
"Everyone is equal" is about equal rights and affording people basic dignity, not "everyone is equally good at everything". I don't think you'll find anyone who earnestly believes that all people are equally intelligent, or equally strong, or equally funny, or whatever.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  > I don't think you'll find anyone who earnestly believes that all people are equally intelligent, or equally strong, or equally funny, or whatever. What you'll have are people who argue that if people who aren't as intelligent, or as strong, or as funny just had access to the same set of circumstances as Intelligent Person X, Strong Person Y, and Funny Person Z, the "underperforming" - for lack of a better adjective - people would be just as good. That's simply not true and we know enough about the brain, about DNA and heritability, and about environment to know it's not true. But there's a section of people who don't want to admit that, because it'll shatter their worldview completely and they'll have to re-evaluate a lot of things... but really what it'll do is force them to think for themselves instead of just being told how they need to feel, and that's from where the real discomfort comes, because when you're forced to think for yourself - truly think for yourself, not cite some study... not cite some expert, but actually think and reason with only your own capabilities, you may find that 1) it's hard and 2) you come to some thoughts that clash with your feelings.
  - api 6y ago
    > What you'll have are people who argue that if people who aren't as intelligent, or as strong, or as funny just had access to the same set of circumstances as Intelligent Person X, Strong Person Y, and Funny Person Z, the "underperforming" - for lack of a better adjective - people would be just as good. No, that's not really what most of them are arguing. What most of them are arguing is that we should try to minimize the detrimental effect of the environment and maximize access to enrichment to maximize our "return" on whatever heritable potential we have. We know phenotype is always a mix of heritable traits and environment. Development is guided by genetics but it is an embodied process. If the environment is shitty, which it is for a great many people, then that's an obvious place to look if said group is under-performing. If a group of people are being constantly told they're inferior or treated worse than others, that's another obvious place to look... especially since we have research on "social self-limitation" that demonstrates that humans will to some extent perform to expectation whether the expectation is high or low. Improving the environment is the low-hanging fruit. Only then does it make sense to look at heritable traits. By then we might have a better understanding of our own genetics and more precise tools than CRISPR-CAS9.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Well, any argument about "most" is ultimately going to come down to how you define the reference class. If you're saying that it's not a common, influential view, I definitely don't agree; for example, my state published a school curriculum revision just yesterday which states "we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents". A lot of people really do work under the assumption that there's no such thing as non-environmental variation.
jbay808 6y ago
This is really key in these discussions and it can never be overemphasized, because it always seems to be forgotten immediately. The signal that population averages tell you about any one person is so little as to be almost meaningless, that it should be immediately overwhelmed by the signal you get from actually knowing and interacting with that person. And yet people still act as though they can learn something meaningful from population averages about their own friends, colleagues, and even spouses.
- api 6y ago
  Yes, absolutely. Another issue I forgot to mention is the converse problem: the use of this stuff to hand-wave away the impact of past social injustices and biases. "There are fewer women in advanced math... could that be related to gender differences in brain structure and cognition?" The answer is: yes it theoretically could, but it could also be due to the fact that until very recently (like 1-2 generations or less depending on where you are) women were strongly discouraged from pursuing such professions and in some cases were actually not allowed to study at the same institutions or in the same circles as men. That seems to me to be a more likely explanation. Most institutions have since liberalized their rules and have even engaged in recruitment efforts to bring more women into the field, but even with such changes and efforts it takes a long time for human societies to change. Large-scale human group behaviors, customs, and preferences are really sticky and changing them usually takes generations in the best case... unless there's some extreme forcing function like a war, pandemic, powerful state edict, depression, etc. There hasn't been an extreme forcing function pushing more women into advanced math. If women continued to be vastly under-represented at the top of mathematics after 100 more years of relative openness and cultural liberalism, I'd start to entertain the possibility that it's a result of gender differences in brain function.
quesera 6y ago
> Averages do not apply to the entire population unless the variance is literally zero. Very true! As an illustration: The "Average American"[0] is a 52-year old, white, woman with a Bachelor's degree, who works in "education and health services" and earns about $900/wk (2018 data). She is married, lives in a city with her spouse and together they own a (mortgaged) residence. She lives near Dallas TX and has a 26 minute commute. She is an evangelical Baptist, and considers herself politically independent, but tends to vote Democratic in presidential elections. ...Of course, this describes very few actual humans. [0] By one method of calculation, at least. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/13/this-is-what-the-average-american-looks-like-in-2018/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/13/t...

by api 6y ago

TulliusCicero 6y ago

"Everyone is equal" is about equal rights and affording people basic dignity, not "everyone is equally good at everything". I don't think you'll find anyone who earnestly believes that all people are equally intelligent, or equally strong, or equally funny, or whatever.

cbozeman 6y ago
> I don't think you'll find anyone who earnestly believes that all people are equally intelligent, or equally strong, or equally funny, or whatever. What you'll have are people who argue that if people who aren't as intelligent, or as strong, or as funny just had access to the same set of circumstances as Intelligent Person X, Strong Person Y, and Funny Person Z, the "underperforming" - for lack of a better adjective - people would be just as good. That's simply not true and we know enough about the brain, about DNA and heritability, and about environment to know it's not true. But there's a section of people who don't want to admit that, because it'll shatter their worldview completely and they'll have to re-evaluate a lot of things... but really what it'll do is force them to think for themselves instead of just being told how they need to feel, and that's from where the real discomfort comes, because when you're forced to think for yourself - truly think for yourself, not cite some study... not cite some expert, but actually think and reason with only your own capabilities, you may find that 1) it's hard and 2) you come to some thoughts that clash with your feelings.
- api 6y ago
  > What you'll have are people who argue that if people who aren't as intelligent, or as strong, or as funny just had access to the same set of circumstances as Intelligent Person X, Strong Person Y, and Funny Person Z, the "underperforming" - for lack of a better adjective - people would be just as good. No, that's not really what most of them are arguing. What most of them are arguing is that we should try to minimize the detrimental effect of the environment and maximize access to enrichment to maximize our "return" on whatever heritable potential we have. We know phenotype is always a mix of heritable traits and environment. Development is guided by genetics but it is an embodied process. If the environment is shitty, which it is for a great many people, then that's an obvious place to look if said group is under-performing. If a group of people are being constantly told they're inferior or treated worse than others, that's another obvious place to look... especially since we have research on "social self-limitation" that demonstrates that humans will to some extent perform to expectation whether the expectation is high or low. Improving the environment is the low-hanging fruit. Only then does it make sense to look at heritable traits. By then we might have a better understanding of our own genetics and more precise tools than CRISPR-CAS9.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Well, any argument about "most" is ultimately going to come down to how you define the reference class. If you're saying that it's not a common, influential view, I definitely don't agree; for example, my state published a school curriculum revision just yesterday which states "we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents". A lot of people really do work under the assumption that there's no such thing as non-environmental variation.

jbay808 6y ago

This is really key in these discussions and it can never be overemphasized, because it always seems to be forgotten immediately. The signal that population averages tell you about any one person is so little as to be almost meaningless, that it should be immediately overwhelmed by the signal you get from actually knowing and interacting with that person. And yet people still act as though they can learn something meaningful from population averages about their own friends, colleagues, and even spouses.

api 6y ago
Yes, absolutely. Another issue I forgot to mention is the converse problem: the use of this stuff to hand-wave away the impact of past social injustices and biases. "There are fewer women in advanced math... could that be related to gender differences in brain structure and cognition?" The answer is: yes it theoretically could, but it could also be due to the fact that until very recently (like 1-2 generations or less depending on where you are) women were strongly discouraged from pursuing such professions and in some cases were actually not allowed to study at the same institutions or in the same circles as men. That seems to me to be a more likely explanation. Most institutions have since liberalized their rules and have even engaged in recruitment efforts to bring more women into the field, but even with such changes and efforts it takes a long time for human societies to change. Large-scale human group behaviors, customs, and preferences are really sticky and changing them usually takes generations in the best case... unless there's some extreme forcing function like a war, pandemic, powerful state edict, depression, etc. There hasn't been an extreme forcing function pushing more women into advanced math. If women continued to be vastly under-represented at the top of mathematics after 100 more years of relative openness and cultural liberalism, I'd start to entertain the possibility that it's a result of gender differences in brain function.

quesera 6y ago

> Averages do not apply to the entire population unless the variance is literally zero. Very true! As an illustration: The "Average American"[0] is a 52-year old, white, woman with a Bachelor's degree, who works in "education and health services" and earns about $900/wk (2018 data). She is married, lives in a city with her spouse and together they own a (mortgaged) residence. She lives near Dallas TX and has a 26 minute commute. She is an evangelical Baptist, and considers herself politically independent, but tends to vote Democratic in presidential elections. ...Of course, this describes very few actual humans. [0] By one method of calculation, at least. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/13/this-is-what-the-average-american-looks-like-in-2018/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/13/t...