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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

Please keep in mind that if really true, it is not a binary thing. It’s a distribution. There are going to be plenty of women who are more interested in things than the median man, and there are plenty of men who are more interested in people than the median woman.

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There are going to be plenty of women who are more interested in things than the median man

Probably. Distributions don't necessarily have a huge amount of overlap. For example, upper body strength is also a distribution but the overlap is so small that 95% of men have stronger arms than 95% of women. With something as general as aptitude for things vs people the overlap is probably much greater than that but not certain without more data.

You're not strictly contradicting GP. "5 % of women" is still "plenty of women".

95/95 does not mean 5% of women are stronger than the median man. The group of women stronger than the median man is tiny fractions of a percent.

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-51a4b98a4975f1bc2e68c...

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c76c62e97e58fe9a64a83...

Oops, my bad. Yes, you're right, of course.

This cannot be the case. More than 5% of the male population is old, weak, and/or disabled that it can't possibly be true that 95% of all men have stronger arms than 95% of women. And if you include children I don't see how this could possibly be true. Unless you mean something else?

And if you include children I don't see how this could possibly be true.

There are female children too.

More than 5% of the male population is old, weak, and/or disabled

There are old, weak, and disabled women as well. Additionally, if you think old men are weak I suspect you have never had to wrestle an eighty year old with dementia out of a bath tub. They are remarkably, irritatingly strong.

Why would anyone include children in a grownup adult study? Children don't feature any noticeable differences before puberty - that's well understood.

I would argue that one should discern strength when actually caring or not caring to injure someone else in the process.

I don't know what you're saying here.

I think parent is saying something like "rather than measuring strength by wrestling old men out of bathtubs, we should measure it in a way that doesn't get different results based on how much one cares about not hurting another person."

I agree, of course, but I believe the wrestling comment did not refer to the methodology used in the research.

That an old man with dementia who feel he has to defend himself will use full force while the people who the nurse/caregiver will consciently and inconsciently restrain themselves in order to not break any bones or harm the person they are taking care of.

How does this relate to my anecdote about old men having more strength than you might expect?

When talking about populations, this should be implicitly assumed - just like that the experiment took place on Earth and the participants were breathing air. I don't know why this isn't burned into peoples brains with a big flashing neon sign, and why someone inevitably comes up with a counterargument of 'but not all X' when these things are discussed.

Because they don't want it to be true and will come up with any argument, no matter how stupid, to counter this observation.

I think that's being too cynical. Most people simply don't think in terms of integrals over probability density functions.

We organize our understanding into categories and reason about them using propositions that are either true or false.

Yes, yes, standard "not all".

However I think the last sentence isn't as true as you make it out to be. I remember seeing statistic couple years back about this very subject and in that data woman had to be in the top 10% of "women who prefer working with things to people" to be as likely to work with things than "men who prefer to work with things to people" and it was pretty much same vice-versa.

Wish people would keep this in mind for everything.

I don't think anyone arguing in good faith would state otherwise. This is too obvious

I think it's more of a platitude, hidden behind the vagueness of the word plenty. Is plenty 5%? 10%? 20%? 50%? The linked article doesn't provide the data. In the context of e.g. STEM education, 20% isn't plenty.

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