Women, likewise, are not hormonal balls of emotion and unreasonableness, and black people have, on occasion, produced civilizations,and these days many of them have even integrated into white society. None of this is news. People are people everywhere, and your enemies are not monsters.
I agree that obviously someone who goes around saying “Blacks are savages; women are incapable of reason” is a vile racist and sexist who should be shunned, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence: the fact that some people use alleged group differences as a pretext for their awful agendas, doesn’t mean that we can’t have a nuanced, evidence-focused, statistically-savvy discussion of which human traits correlate with other traits, and to what extent, and why. It’s certainly true that people are people everywhere, but it’s not very specific; as seekers of a detailed model of reality, we can do better.
For example, with math: Cohen’s d is a common measure of effect-size. It’s the difference in the means (averages) of two groups of things, divided by the pooled standard deviation (a measure of how spread out the data is): essentially, how many standard deviations apart the two group means are. This is an important idea because it means we have a quantitative measure of what it means for two groups to be different. In the absence of data and concepts for talking about data, it’s hard to make intellectual progress: one person might say, “Men are taller than women,” and someone else might say, “No way; there are plenty of tall women,” and they could go on arguing indefinitely. But if you actually have data, there’s no need to argue: you can just note that in this case d is observed to be about 1.41 (source), and that’s all there is to say; the data speaks for itself.
Of course, height is much easier to measure than something more abstract like “aggression” or “intelligence,” and I haven’t said anything about how we might determine what causes statistical group differences in height or anything else, but you see the general principle here: facts about humans can be investigated empirically. When someone like Nyan Sandwich says that they think there is an effect (between some human characteristic like ancestry or sex, and some other human trait), and that they’d like to see a study, they’re not necessarily doubting that people are people everywhere, nor expressing contempt for people different from them; they’re making a falsifiable prediction that, if you did the science, you’d observe that d is not near zero (although exactly what numbers are “near zero” is something that you’d want to ask them to clarify).
Of course. I was merely clarifying as to what I meant by the phrase “all humans are ultimately the same”. When nyan—who is currently trying to ironman racism, or something—questioned the claim that the beliefs I described were “really” wrong, I expounded my claim a little further. I am in no way claiming that we should ignore variations in intelligence, violence etc. I am claiming that it is more useful to assume that the minor differences between individuals do not add up to stereotypes, especially since humans have a well-documented bias towards assuming superficial attitudes are somehow inherent, especially with regards to negatively connotative ones of our political enemies.
TL:DR: a) please read the parents and b) you’re technically correct, but only nominally so, and due to bias it is more effective to ignore this.
I agree that obviously someone who goes around saying “Blacks are savages; women are incapable of reason” is a vile racist and sexist who should be shunned, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence: the fact that some people use alleged group differences as a pretext for their awful agendas, doesn’t mean that we can’t have a nuanced, evidence-focused, statistically-savvy discussion of which human traits correlate with other traits, and to what extent, and why. It’s certainly true that people are people everywhere, but it’s not very specific; as seekers of a detailed model of reality, we can do better.
For example, with math: Cohen’s d is a common measure of effect-size. It’s the difference in the means (averages) of two groups of things, divided by the pooled standard deviation (a measure of how spread out the data is): essentially, how many standard deviations apart the two group means are. This is an important idea because it means we have a quantitative measure of what it means for two groups to be different. In the absence of data and concepts for talking about data, it’s hard to make intellectual progress: one person might say, “Men are taller than women,” and someone else might say, “No way; there are plenty of tall women,” and they could go on arguing indefinitely. But if you actually have data, there’s no need to argue: you can just note that in this case d is observed to be about 1.41 (source), and that’s all there is to say; the data speaks for itself.
Of course, height is much easier to measure than something more abstract like “aggression” or “intelligence,” and I haven’t said anything about how we might determine what causes statistical group differences in height or anything else, but you see the general principle here: facts about humans can be investigated empirically. When someone like Nyan Sandwich says that they think there is an effect (between some human characteristic like ancestry or sex, and some other human trait), and that they’d like to see a study, they’re not necessarily doubting that people are people everywhere, nor expressing contempt for people different from them; they’re making a falsifiable prediction that, if you did the science, you’d observe that d is not near zero (although exactly what numbers are “near zero” is something that you’d want to ask them to clarify).
Of course. I was merely clarifying as to what I meant by the phrase “all humans are ultimately the same”. When nyan—who is currently trying to ironman racism, or something—questioned the claim that the beliefs I described were “really” wrong, I expounded my claim a little further. I am in no way claiming that we should ignore variations in intelligence, violence etc. I am claiming that it is more useful to assume that the minor differences between individuals do not add up to stereotypes, especially since humans have a well-documented bias towards assuming superficial attitudes are somehow inherent, especially with regards to negatively connotative ones of our political enemies.
TL:DR: a) please read the parents and b) you’re technically correct, but only nominally so, and due to bias it is more effective to ignore this.