[beccasanchez]

Modern statistics and statistically modelling are actually just confirming the validity of the majority of widely held stereotypes.

As statistics in the academy become more common and advanced, more and more old stereotypes are just confirmed to be accurate. This is considered a crisis right now in social psychology, for instance, because there are almost no stereotypes that research has debunked. Again and again, research confirms stereotypes, and shows that humans in the aggregate are very good at creating accurate inferences.

Stereotypes create injustice when they lead to prejudice--failing to give an individual a chance because they belong to a stereotyped group--but prejudice is wrong because outliers deserve a chance, not because stereotypes are incorrect.

How can liberalism persist in the face of so much science that dismantles its most sacred beliefs?

[nommm-nommm]

>there are almost no stereotypes that research has debunked. Again and again, research confirms stereotypes, and shows that humans in the aggregate are very good at creating accurate inferences.

I'm calling BS on this unless you give some specific examples.

Not only this but confirming stereotypes does not mean that "humans in the aggregate are very good at creating accurate inferences."

For example if (group) have the stereotype of being dumb that doesn't mean that others are good at making accurate inferences, it may just mean that others are good at denying (group) access to education and the same standard of living.

[beccasanchez]

The only catch is that when attributes of the stereotyped population change over time, the stereotype can lag behind the change for awhile, but the stereotypes eventually catch up to fit the new situation. All cultures stereotype and all cultures are quite good at it. Stereotypes are a pragmatic and democratic form of knowledge-making that all human cultures use[1].

This bullet proof research came out of various well-funded attempts to debunk stereotypes during the last 30 years. You know that science is working when sincere and hopeful attempts to debunk common knowledge end up confirming it very strongly!

[1]:Heine, Steven J., Cultural Psychology. 3rd edition. W.W. Norton, 2016. ISBN: 9780393263985.

[nommm-nommm]

You gave no specific examples so I'm still calling BS.

[beccasanchez]

"Calling BS" does not seem very substantive and it doesn't feel very civil either. I don't see who made you the authority here.

There are too many examples to list, but the citation I gave contains dozens and dozens[1]. For instance, it turns out that North Asians really are better at math than people of European ancestry. Ashkenazi Jews really are better at learning languages and have larger vocabularies and superior grammatical understanding and usage. Cultural psychologists have tabulated voluminous data on all the ethnic stereotypes throughout the world--hundreds of stereotypes that different Asians have of each other for instance--and again and again they are found to be more true than not.

The big mistake would be to then have prejudice--to prejudge an individual on the basis of their group affiliation. While it's a scientific fact that North Asians (Korea, China, Japan) are better at math than other populations, there are plenty of people in those groups that are worse than the global average. So it would be a mistake to assume that just because someone you meet is North Asian they are better than average at math.

[1]: Heine, Steven J., Cultural Psychology. 3rd edition. W.W. Norton, 2016. ISBN: 9780393263985.

[Pyxl101]

No one would deny that there are substantial physical differences between men and women, not just in form but in function, such as athletic performance. Men hold the majority of individual performance world records, consistent with stereotype. But there are also cognitive and intelligence differences [0]. Men have an IQ distribution with greater variance than women, which suggests statistically that there are more men than women per capita in the top percentiles of intelligence, as well as the bottom [1] - one study placed twice as many men as women in the top 2% [1], while Down syndrome and other learning disabilities are also more common in males. Some studies find that men have slightly (a few points) higher average IQ [2] and perform better on reasoning tests [3]. (There is controversy of opinion about some of these results and I don't know how to summarize their standing in the scientific community.)

Anatomical differences in the brain are well known, with males having larger brains, and using their hemispheres differently than females. A 2013 study reported, "Sex differences in human behavior show adaptive complementarity: Males have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills. [...] Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes." [4]

Another example is that female babies are more interested in faces and social situations, while males are more interested in mechanical objects. This difference even begins days after birth, too soon to be influenced by culture [5], meaning that the difference is innate.

Some of these studies could be seen to be confirming stereotypes, e.g., males having a proportionately greater attraction to mechanical objects could be an inclination that leads to more men than women self-selecting into engineering disciplines. More men having top percentile intelligence could correspond to historical geniuses being stereotypically male (Newton, Einstein, Ramanujan, etc.) - and there being more men in the bottom percentiles could explain why more men are homeless and have mental illness (bag man or hobo stereotype). My understanding is that IQ differences by race also tend to align with stereotypes, with Asians and Ashkenazi Jews as you mentioned having top average intelligence.

I try to understand as much research as I can, since I view it as the most effective objective way to learn about the world. Scientific results don't / wouldn't alter my view that humans all deserve to be treated with fairness, equality, compassion, and judged on their individual behavior and merit, and not by membership in some group.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intellige...

[1] Deary, Ian J.; Irwing, Paul; Der, Geoff; Bates, Timothy C. (2007). "Brother–sister differences in the g factor in intelligence: Analysis of full, opposite-sex siblings from the NLSY1979

> Here we use a novel design, comparing 1292 pairs of opposite-sex siblings who participated in the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY1979) [...]. Males have only a marginal advantage in mean levels of g (less than 7% of a standard deviation) from the ASVAB and AFQT, but substantially greater variance. Among the top 2% AFQT scores, there were almost twice as many males as females. These differences could provide a partial basis for sex differences in intellectual eminence.

[2] Allik, J., Must, O., & Lynn, R. (1999). Sex differences in general intelligence among high school graduates: Some results from Estonia. Personality and Individual Differences, 16, 1137-1141. [3] Lynn, Richard (1994). "Sex differences in intelligence and brain size: A paradox resolved". Personality and Individual Differences 17 (2): 257–71

> Yet the consensus view is that there is no sex difference in general intelligence. An examination of the literature shows that the consensus view is wrong. Among adults, males have slightly higher verbal and reasoning abilities than females and a more pronounced superiority on spatial abilities. If the three abilities are combined to form general intelligence, the mean for males is 4 IQ points higher than the mean for females.

[4] Ingalhalikar M, Smith A, Parker D, et al. (January 2014). "Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111 (2): 823–8.

[5] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638300...

> Sexual dimorphism in sociability has been documented in humans. The present study aimed to ascertain whether the sexual dimorphism is a result of biological or socio-cultural differences between the two sexes. 102 human neonates, who by definition have not yet been influenced by social and cultural factors, were tested to see if there was a difference in looking time at a face (social object) and a mobile (physical-mechanical object). Results showed that the male infants showed a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical mobile while the female infants showed a stronger interest in the face. The results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin