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> men have a bigger tendency for violent behavior than women Why is this considered good / normal / expected, but s/men/blacks/g and s/women/whites/g (or asian

• debacle 4y ago
  I think it's fair to point out that men commit most violent crimes. That's not good/normal/expected it's just a fact. AI could be used to better understand these associations (e.g. why is there a correlation between Asians and academic performance) and maybe help social leverage advantages more equitably.
  • chitowneats 4y ago
    Is there anything we could point about women? Nothing as terrible as being violent as far as I know, but what about other things? I agree with your premise but I believe it follows we must speak clearly in all cases.
    • debacle 4y ago
      Women tend to be bad at salary negotiation, and less likely to change jobs. Middle aged women being taken advantage of in the corporate world is tragic.
      • chitowneats 4y ago
        How about behaviors that have detrimental effects to society at large? It seems like many in this thread can't think of any. I certainly can.
    • mxkopy 4y ago
      This 'men are violent, therefore women must also be bad in some way' rhetoric makes no sense. There's no purpose for it other than assuaging sore feelings.
      • Jensson 4y ago
        Women are bad at higher level math in the same way men are violent. Not all are, but its a trend. However you aren't allowed to say that for one group, but you are allowed for the other. So this has nothing to do about statistical accuracy, its just political pressure from one side.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • mxkopy 4y ago
          It's nothing to do with political pressure and more to do with ill-formed comparisons. You can't just substitute in random groups for another. In order to make a statement you need to know what you're talking about. And it seems like the HN crowd that so desperately wants to say blacks are more violent than whites, these people have no clue what they're talking about. If you go and look at history you'll quickly see how that statement is just ill-formed.
          • throwaway557211 4y ago
            A woman walking alone at night who encounters a stranger does not care what generative process led to a group disparity, she cares whether she is likely to be in danger. It is politically palatable in polite society for her to be afraid of an unknown man on the basis of his sex. But it is not acceptable for her to even consider that a statistical disparity may exist on the basis of race, or take precautions on that basis, unless it is in the context of condemning society as solely responsible for creating that disparity. A statement of empirical observation cannot be "ill-formed" unless you have appointed yourself ultimate arbiter over why a person might care.
      • chitowneats 4y ago
        I didn't say they must be bad. I asked if we could make any group-based observation at all. Also, your implied statement of "women, on average, have no traits that are unhelpful to the flourishing of human civilization", strikes me as terribly naive.
    • jfoief 4y ago
      Women are a protected group, so people have biases that prevent them from seeing the reality when it comes to this topic. As evolved beings made to maximize fitness, there were a lot of strategies that worked for women and shaped their psychology that noone dare point out. Also anyone coming too close to the truth will quickly get banned.
    • lmm 4y ago
      Women who never marry get paid more than men who never marry once you adjust for hours worked. (Once you adjust for education level this disappears)
  • jfoief 4y ago
    Parent's point was that it wouldn't be acceptable when done regarding some protected group (ex. blacks vs whites), so it shouldn't be acceptable when it comes to men vs women
    • elefanten 4y ago
      Especially when the world never stops turning and social change / idea propagation move orders of magnitude faster than they did for most of human history. Consider one of the (largely liberal) discourses rising in the past few years that many vital social metrics and trends indicate men/boys are screwed and women/girls are outcompeting them and thriving much better in present era.
    • gwright 4y ago
      There is no reason to think that interpretation of metric that compared "men" and "women" must be aligned with that same metric when men/women is substituted with some other populations. When you make the substitution you completly change the nature of the comparison. Whether either comparison is "acceptable" depends on the metric and the populations. There is no ethical rule that says all comparisons for group X must be acceptable or all comparisons for group Y must be unacceptable.
    • standardUser 4y ago
      Then that's a lazy point, because it should be immediately obvious that studies for gender can be conducted easily across time and space whereas most demographic splits being discussed in this thread cannot because they are highly dependent on time/space and have therefore have endless variables that cannot be controlled for.
  • edgyquant 4y ago
    Again, replace “men” with “African Americans” and you also have a statistically true statement (in America at least) that would be considered taboo.
    • jonathanlb 4y ago
      That is a falsehood. Per the FBI: "White individuals were arrested more often for violent crimes than individuals of any other race and accounted for 59.1 percent of those arrests." https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-43 https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
      • antihipocrat 4y ago
        Relative propensity to commit violent crimes is the key metric here, not overall volumes.
        • jonathanlb 4y ago
          No it is not. > I think it's fair to point out that men commit most violent crimes. That's not good/normal/expected it's just a fact. > Again, replace “men” with “African Americans” and you also have a statistically true statement (in America at least) that would be considered taboo.
          • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
            It makes sense for someone to say "most" in the dichotomy of man / woman more so than it does in the polychotomy of white / black / hispanic or latino / etc. This argument relies on that phrasing to Dwight Schrute them on a technicality rather than arguing related points.
          • antihipocrat 4y ago
            Men and women are split almost 50/50 in the population, using volumes is completely sound in this case.
  • 735892568 4y ago
    Nothing is just a fact. If it's fair to point out that men are charged/arrested/convicted at a higher rate, it's also fair to point out that black people are charged/arrested/convicted at a higher rate. Neither of those statistics are "just a fact". They are complex phenomena that we don't fully understand the cause of and should avoid drawing unsupported conclusions from.
• jMyles 4y ago
  > Why is this considered good / normal / expected, but s/men/blacks/g and s/women/whites/g ...because the former holds true across correlations (and is difficult to confound anyway, since the group 'men' and the group 'women' are distributed in like proportion through correlated groups - rich and poor, white and black, around the world, etc), while the latter is very difficult to convincingly show because controlling for economic status alone eliminates more than half of the gap. Men are genuinely, testably, provably, empirically more violent than women. It's hard to apply any numerate approach to the data which does not support this conclusion. The correlation between melanation and violence is murky and very plausibly non-existent except as artifacts of confounding factors. Moreover, the definition of "violent behavior" for the purposes of essentially all major research on this topic excludes major wars. If you include projection of military force around the world, it seems likely that the violence perpetrated by white folks is likely to be proportionally greater. > Morally, neither is, as we should treat people as individuals, not as members of X group. I broadly agree with this statement, but I think we can still, eg, teach boys not to rape without running afoul of this standard.
  • sterlind 4y ago
    It also makes a lot more sense biologically. Testosterone and estrogen have strong mental effects, and alter brain development. The brain is sexually dimorphic in complex ways, borne out by many studies. The brain is not racially dimorphic at all.
    • dotancohen 4y ago
      > The brain is not racially dimorphic at all. It does not need to be. Culture differences are a reasonable enough explanation.
    • erichocean 4y ago
      > The brain is not racially dimorphic at all. Well, since dimorphic means "occurring in or representing two distinct forms", I think you are likely 100% correct.
  • cataphract 4y ago
• camdenlock 4y ago
  A popular belief system insists that people be treated as members of X group before all else, and all such groups must be ranked by their oppressive power. That ranking is effectively arbitrary, and so the system is used mainly as a bludgeon of mobs who wish to silence and abuse others. That’s why we’re seeing the kind of warped reasoning you’re alluding to.
• oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  These statistics you're referring to, how comparable are the relative differences? Do they show that men are 4 times more violent than women and black people are 1.1 more violent than white people, for example? What are these figures?
  • michaelt 4y ago
    Presumably prison/jail population statistics - there are certainly more males imprisoned for violent crimes than women, it's like a 10:1 ratio. Of course, the likes of Brock Turner and Prince Andrew demonstrate that some demographic groups are relatively less punished or relatively more able to avoid punishment, so the prison population surely doesn't directly measure inherent tendencies.
  • gwright 4y ago
    I'm not an expert in this area at all but my understanding is that the differences are not all like 4X more violent but due to the nature of distributions, a small difference in the median of a distribution can lead to an enormous difference in the tails of the distribution.
  • nhchris 4y ago
    That's a fair question. According to FBI homicide statistics for 2018 [1] and US demographics [2], the Black homicide rate per 100k is 7.9, while the White+Hispanic rate [3] is 1.2. The female (of all races) homicide rate is 0.42. So the Black homicide rate is 6.7x higher than the White+Hispanic rate, while the White+Hispanic homicide rate is 2.8x higher than the female (all races) rate. Edit: A different source [4] gives different figures, but these are "age adjusted": 20.9 for non-Hispanic Blacks, and 2.6 for non-Hispanic Whites. [1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-... - and using homicide instead of something as nebulous as "violence" because it is the statistic most difficult to distort, and is immune to over-policing. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... [3] The FBI counts Hispanics as White, and has a separate 'Ethnicity' category where they mark Hispanic or Latino. Assuming all Hispanics in that table were counted as White yields an even lower White homicide rate. [4] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6631a9.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6631a9.htm
• mxkopy 4y ago
  Because men are not blacks and women are not whites, I feel like this is basic comprehension We have different names for different things because they are different. They're not all just "groups of people", you're literally talking about different types. I.e. what generates a man is not what generates a black person
• slg 4y ago
  >Statistically, both statements are justified. What can you point to that statistically justifies that "Black people have a bigger tendency for violent behavior than white people"? Showing crime statistics isn't enough. You need to show that given all the details about a person being the same, a Black person is more likely to act violently than an identical white person. You basically need to correct for all the societal reasons that result in people committing violent crime.
  • 735892568 4y ago
    The same thing applies when the statement is applied to men or any of the other demographic groups that it's applied to from time to time.
    • mxkopy 4y ago
      What's your justification for "the thing that applies to black people should be equally applicable to men"? That's what this argument boils down to
      • 735892568 4y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean. Everything in the comment I responded to apply to the same extent to women/men and white/black. Both the question in the first paragraph and the statement about crime statistics not being enough. It seems to me that the burden of providing a justification is with whoever wants to treat them differently. Why isn't the question just as applicable to gender? Why are crime statistics enough to come to a conclusion about gender but not race? We know that there is a large sentencing disparity among both women/men and white/black people who are convicted, even when controlling for everything imaginable. We know that there are significant differences in the social and cultural expectations that are usually placed on both women/men and white/black people, and we know that there are on average psychological differences between both women/men and white/black people. The base assumption and the analysis required to come to a conclusion should be the same. The conclusion may or may not be the same.
• belorn 4y ago
  It is culture. Actually science on violence and aggression tend to show a bit different picture, and also why such statistics is of such a low value. Good research tend to explore the null hypothesis and alternative explanation for statistical results. A common used data point is that men commit most violent crimes. Using the same data from Sweden one can also say that today Muslim are 20 times more likely per person to commit rape than Christians, and about similar likely per person to commit murder. Same numbers can also be used to replace Muslims and Christians with immigrants and natives, or Arab and Germanics. For social scientists that data wouldn't be hugely interesting, as they would look towards social economic status and war refugee status (i.e. things related to PTSD injuries). The conclusions would more likely be that there are a bigger tendency for anti-social behavior by people with minimal social connections and economical destitute, especially if they experience severe emotional trauma. One fairly interesting statistics to me is that households with either man-woman, man-man, and woman-woman all have equal rate of violent behavior. Statistically that is to me much more interesting. If men inherently had more violent behavior and women less violent behavior, man-man and woman-woman household should show a difference in violence. It also a rather strange statistical phenomenon that if a bisexual woman go from a heterosexual relation into a homosexual relation, her statistical data for violent behavior increases by 200%. A man who does the same decrease his violent behavior by half. Why would that be if there existed a biological difference in violent behavior?
  • Llamamoe 4y ago
    One claim I've seen is that men commit more violent crime because it's more common for a man to be physically stronger than another person, while the rates of non-physial violence are much closer across gender boundaries.
    • xp84 4y ago
      > non-physial violence Come again? What's non-physical violence? Mental violence? Writing someone a mean letter?
      • DaveExeter 4y ago
• barbazoo 4y ago
  > Why is this considered good / normal / expected, but s/men/blacks/g and s/women/whites/g (or asians, or muslims/christians) and it's discriminatory? (Statistically, both statements are justified. Are BOTH statistically justified in ways that control for other, socioeconomic factors and such?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• broast 4y ago
  I think it is because one is a historically disadvantaged minority group and the other is not.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• canadianfella 4y ago
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