Hi, elena,

Sorry for dropping off on our last discussion (which I assume was at least in part the motivation for this thread)- real world obligations and whatnot.

I did manage to think on this for the last few days, and this is what I've come up with: I have no problem with aggregate statements pointing to gender differences. I like to think that I'm quite good at disengaging the specific from the aggregate. I can entertain the statement, "On the aggregate, men are more violent" without being personally offended. Aggregate statistics aren't pointing at me and saying, "You, phengineer, are a man, and therefore violent." That being said, there's a pretty sizable chunk of the population that IS doing exactly that. This is where your argument comes in. The original statement is not problematic to me. My belief (and postulate for the purposes of this discussion) is that it is accurate. What people do with that statement IS problematic. In my mind, then, this is a question of whether it's more important to obscure the truth to have a socially desirable outcome, or stomach the consequences of having the truth out in the open. I solidly subscribe to the latter, and my guess is that you would agree with the latter?

I also subscribe to the notion of men exhibiting greater variance in most metrics. This is readily observable in terms of height and weight. Height, for example, produces an excellent bell curve when plotted for a whole population. For men, the bell curve tends to be shorter and wider- there are more people at the extremes of the range. For physical characteristics, it is indisputable that men exhibit greater variance, across the board. It has been proposed that this is extensible to mental and behavioral characteristics as well. A first glance seems to support this notion- men comprise the overwhelming majority of the mentally retarded population, as well as the ultra-high IQ population. Sports that contain no physical strength aspect also tend to be dominated by men (chess, shooting, etc). My working hypothesis is that male variance is displayed behaviorally in addition to physically. It is my occam's razor conclusion, and has considerable evidence in support. Having said all of that, it means literally nothing for an individual person. 7' women, though much rarer than 7' men, exist and are taller than 99.9% of men. At one point the best shooter in the world was a woman. Anyone who tries to draw a conclusion about an individual person based on a population mean and variance is wrong, full stop.

The natural extension is then, "why do we even care about these aggregate measures?" They're useful for society-wide decisions. Men buy a different distribution in clothing sizes than women, for example. They can also explain otherwise problematic statistics. It is apparent to me that men tend to be over-sentenced for crime when compared to women. However, my benchmark for equality is not going to be that 50% of the jail time served in the country is done so by women, because I have information about aggregate behavior.

TL;DR I'm not offended by aggregate statistics and neither should you be. Anyone who thinks that an aggregate measure pertains to an individual is wrong should be corrected.