whose dumb fucking idea was it anyway to not trust ourselves to defend the idea that individuals shouldn't be treated as if group tendencies were absolutes since individual variation swamps them, so we have to pretend that group tendencies don't exist, destroying all credibility
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Replying to @chaosprime
The persuasive alternative I've heard is that of course there are variations: any two arbitrary subsets of a population are going to have different means and medians for some measure or another. 5% of them will even exceed the 95% confidence interval. But that's not causative.
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Replying to @rhdaly @chaosprime
Alternatively, the baby to bathwater ratio is pretty low. Ignoring small population effects in the face of large personal variation and huge confounding factors in vivo seems wise with a signal this noisy. Would you ever trust that you'd measured a group tendency correctly?
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Replying to @rhdaly
and if there's anything that kind of nuanced epistemic caution calls for, it's treating the act of being caught thinking that a group tendency exists as a mortal sin that calls for somebody to be drummed out of public life
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Replying to @chaosprime
It's an immune response. It targets a pathogen known to be virulent and deadly. It also causes severe allergies in some circumstances and rheumatoid arthritis in some others. Today's problems will always be yesterday's solutions. :/
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Replying to @rhdaly @chaosprime
But this seems contradictory to me, the notion of excommunicating someone for exhibiting a behavior that’s an indicator of membership in an outgroup, where the taboo behavior itself was belief in such indicators.
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Replying to @asphyxiac @rhdaly
that's what makes doublethink such an important skill
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otherwise how would we get phenomena like "Asian" not counting as "minority"
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