Not sure if it’s in the right subcategory but in my intro to anthropology course we went over gene pools and comparing inhabitants of different continents one point that was made about biodiversity was the statement: there is more diversity within groups than between groups
But if they are different groups wouldn’t the two groups have more differences than the people w/in the groups have with each other?
Unless I’m remembering it wrong
In: Biology
Alice is a woman and Bob is a man. Who is taller?
You can guess Bob, and you’re not wrong to guess Bob if you have to pick one guess. Men are, on average, considerably taller than women. But hopefully you can see why there’s a very good chance you’d be wrong if you just said “Bob.”
Now if you get into a question like, who is better at math? The differences between men and women in math are much smaller than in height. Some studies show the advantage for women and some for men. So if you have to guess based on just the fact that Alice is a woman and Bob is a man, you’re not going to do much better than random chance. Let’s say men’s average score on a given math test is 74.2 points and women’s is 73.9 points — just guessing “Bob” is better at math is barely better than flipping the coin, because the differences between Einstein and Ralph Wiggum are much bigger than the difference between the average man and average woman.
Because of this, you shouldn’t use someone’s gender to predict their math ability, unless their gender is the only piece of information you have and you must make a decision now. That’s almost never true — if you want to know who’s better at math, instead of using a gender stereotype, just literally ask them one math question. Just ask them 13 times 23 and you have a vastly better data point to go from than their gender.
Take two groups of dice-rolls. The tribe of 2d6’s vs the tribe of 2d8s. The 2d6’s will range from 2-12 and will average at 7. The 2d8’s will range from 2-16 and will average at… 8?
2-12 is a range of 10. There’s a lot of diversity. The average of 7 vs the average of 8 is only 1, Not so diverse. When talking about the group of 2d6’s, you’re talking about their average.
There’s lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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