A problem with this analogy is that height is easy to measure and accurately observe for lay ppl. Differences in personality traits are a lot harder to measure accurately for random ppl and is thus subject to lots of confirmation bias and other effects.
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Replying to @lessdismalsci @HPluckrose
And of course people modify their behavior based on social expectations but not their height, so personality traits have a high degree on endogeneity.
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Replying to @lessdismalsci
That's why height is easier to use to demonstrate the point, yes. No-one denies it or claims its subjective.
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Replying to @HPluckrose
It's an OK starting point, but it's really easy to jump from height to personality traits and get an overly strong sense of how much observed difference can be confidently attributed to nature. Humans aren't good at ambiguity and overweight known factors given the opportunity.
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Replying to @lessdismalsci
I'm not suggesting jumping or assuming. You'd need to go with the evidence of psychological difference which is getting updated all the time.
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Replying to @HPluckrose
I'm suggesting more as a daily heuristic that it makes sense to consciously underrate (though not ignore, of course) the extent to which individual differences are gender based in order to try and minimize the overall error in our attribution.
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Replying to @lessdismalsci
On a daily basis, go for individuality every time. On the level of understanding gender differences, go with the evidence on gender differences.
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Replying to @HPluckrose
I guess I'm less confident than you about how easy it is to disentangle the two.
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Replying to @lessdismalsci
I'm not confident of this at all. Hence having a thread about the problem of people having all or nothing takes on this rather than recognising that we are overlapping populations with trends. Where do you think we disagree?
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Replying to @HPluckrose
I think the evidence for differences is real but vastly overstated and that even when looking at group level differences it's far too easy to attribute stuff to biology. For example, at Google they aren't drawing from the population as a whole, they are drawing from the extreme
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I think some people overstate it and some understate or even deny it. That's what I'm talking about right now.
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