In a reductionist universe, nothing can be said to matter except with respect to someone who cares about it. Why are you reading a frivolous site like this, when you could be catching up on the latest news about Brooke Shields’s mother? Why are the people reading about Brooke Shields’s mother doing that, when they could be sorting pebbles into correct heaps?
You really can’t think of any application, for good or ill, for information about systematic variation in human psychological traits? When you’re looking for a husband, it seems like it would be awfully useful to know what men are like. When you see racial gaps on the MCAT, if seems like it would be awfully useful to know if your test is simply biased (in which case you would want to immediately try to fix it) or if there’s actually a true difference in ability (for whatever reason).
Good points. But I still maintain that those aren’t the main reasons why people care about these issues. If we could remove the main reasons, that would be good.
In a reductionist universe, nothing can be said to matter except with respect to someone who cares about it. Why are you reading a frivolous site like this, when you could be catching up on the latest news about Brooke Shields’s mother? Why are the people reading about Brooke Shields’s mother doing that, when they could be sorting pebbles into correct heaps?
Something can be said to “matter” if caring about it is useful for reasons other than it being intrinsically interesting.
You really can’t think of any application, for good or ill, for information about systematic variation in human psychological traits? When you’re looking for a husband, it seems like it would be awfully useful to know what men are like. When you see racial gaps on the MCAT, if seems like it would be awfully useful to know if your test is simply biased (in which case you would want to immediately try to fix it) or if there’s actually a true difference in ability (for whatever reason).
Good points. But I still maintain that those aren’t the main reasons why people care about these issues. If we could remove the main reasons, that would be good.