NancyLebovitz comments on Problems in evolutionary psychology - Less Wrong

55 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 13 August 2010 06:57PM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 14 August 2010 09:29:13AM 6 points [-]

Agreed. I'm very tired of articles which say "Hey look! There's a difference" without getting into the amount of individual difference or group overlap.

Comment author: HughRistik 16 August 2010 04:51:53AM 6 points [-]

I agree. I'm also tired of "Hey look! There's overlap between the distributions, so let's pretend the difference doesn't matter!"

Comment author: Violet 16 August 2010 09:08:12AM 8 points [-]

A simple example is height. On average men are taller than women.

But most of the time making a men=tall, women=short simplification does not make sense. It makes more sense to provide multiple sizes for both women and men.

And if providing only a very limited selection of sizes (e.g. hospital clothing) it makes sense to provide different unisex sizes rather than one for men and one for women.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 16 August 2010 08:34:20AM 5 points [-]

And while we're busy being tired, I'm really tired of no research by anybody (so far as I know) about keeping reactions to ideas one has about group differences in proportion to what one actually knows instead of exaggerating the size or extent of the differences.

It took rather a lot of hammering to get to the idea of atypical women.