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Eugine_Nier comments on Evolution, Sex, and Gender, Not to Mention Research - Less Wrong
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What do you mean by "equally promiscuous"? Do you mean that women and men have the same average number of sex partners? Than this follows from basic arithmetic and I don't see why this study is relevant. Do you mean that they have the same average desired number of partners? Than this study has nothing to say on the subject.
Yes, of course.
Why everybody keep saying this? It's true only if the group surveyed is closed under the "sexual partnership" relation, which is hardly the case in any study.
An extreme example: a population of 10 men and 10 women, in which all the women have sex with just one man. Then in any group not closed under sexual partnerhsip the average for women is always 1 and for men is always 0, correctly indicating that women are more promiscuous than men.
The average is trivially equal only if the group is extended to the whole population, but in that case the average is not a good indicator of promiscuity (see the above example).
The study is indeed interesting because there are bound to be asymmetries, and it shows that they are skewed towards women.
Unless the group surveyed is deliberately gerrymandered for that, I doubt that would make for a very large difference. If the difference is 10%, as in this study, I have no trouble believing that, especially considering this (though there probably are other sources of noise); but if someone finds nothing obviously wrong with the studies without a fake lie detector where the difference is a factor of 2, and when the arithmetic argument is pointed out to them they say that maybe the group surveyed wasn't closed under sexual partnership, I would call that clutching at straws.
And yet the previous studies found otherwise, and were interpreted as confirming that men are more promiscuous than women.