Comment on Don't Get Offended

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 02:10:43 GMT

Yes and yes. We live in a world where people disregard qualifiers, so if you say "on tests of mathematical ability, men have higher variance in test scores, so the most talented mathematicians are disproportionately men" people will hear "men are better at math" and assume that average men are better than average women at math (this might also be true, but is not what you said). Basically, some people don't distinguish between "most a are b" and "most b are a", so you end up with people drawing conclusions that hurt other people with no real benefit. So as a general rule, we pretend that there are no between-group differences because if we don't, people have a tendency to focus exclusively on between group differences and ignore within-group differences, which is worse.

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