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My contention is because there is a non-zero number of funny women, and a non-zero number of non-funny men, we can’t draw any reliable generalizations about population averages. I would predict that there is a decent chance the woman will be taller than the man, because, despite population averages are what they are, I believe inter-state travel and urban sprawl allow for such a variance in something like the people who will enter a bar that it is possible to win your bet that the woman will be taller. Look, I know a lot more guys that are shorter than me than not and I'm not that tall. And yet, men on average tend to be taller than women. What gives? How did I manage to land in a random pool of short men? Additionally, I think I'm funnier and smarter than most of the men I have known and do know IRL. What gives there? Do I prove women are smarter than men because I outrank, like, 50+ men? The variance is just too much to make such sure decisions such as "your friend who is a theoretical physicist is going to be male because on average there are more males in that field".
So, this dovetails nicely with one of my pet theories, which is that people who are progressive — and if you weren’t aware, I am someone who was very firmly in that category for a long time — just genuinely live in a bubble wherein the sexes are less dimorphic.
Like, I am a short (5’7”ish) and not particularly strong man. My personality traits tend toward the feminine along a number of vectors. It was very easy for me to believe that men and women are not all that different on average, because I’m personally not that different from the average woman, at least not one of comparable intelligence and cultural background. And from an early age in school, I surrounded myself socially with people who are fairly similar to me. The guys I hung out with were mostly pretty nerdy and not especially masculine or alpha. And the girls whom I actually got to know reasonably well, because they were in the same advanced-placement classes and nerdy extracurricular that I was, were not extremely different psychologically from me.
So, when I started being exposed to all this data about the very large aggregate differences between men and women — not merely physical, but also in terms of personality — it was difficult to square that with my anecdotal experience. Because I had been ensconced within a filter bubble bringing together males and females within a relatively limited band of personality traits and interests! And this is true to some extent even today!
Sometimes I’ll be talking to my male friends who are significantly more masculine-brained than I am, and who spend a lot more time among significantly more feminine-minded women than I do, and they’ll make some claim about how inscrutable women are and how they act a certain way. And it’s tough for me to really participate because that has not been all that true of most of the women with whom I’ve had close personal relationships! However, that is more a reflection of the subset of women I spend time with than it is a reflection of what the unfiltered global population is actually like.
Like if I went to a chess club right now and talked to both the men and the (comparatively very few) women, I’m sure I could pick out some aggregate personality differences, but they would mostly be pretty similar along a number of axes. I’d expect pretty autistic- or autistic-adjacent personalities, systematizing styles of intelligence, etc. However, this wouldn’t actually help me draw accurate generalizations about the populace, because the vast majority of women would have zero interest in being part of a chess club! And look, to be clear, neither would the vast majority of men, although the reasons why the average man would find chess boring likely differ substantially from the reasons why the average woman would find chess boring.
Ultimately my move toward internalizing the significance of population-level differences, and actually changing my ideological outlook as a result of coming to grips with what those differences mean, required me to accept that while the lessons of that data still leave plenty of room for both outliers and considerable overlap, in order to develop workable theories for how all of humanity should operate, we need to be able to nail down a reliable understanding of probabilities. Learning that women are on average less likely to be geniuses than men — and that, for example, people of African ancestry are far less likely to be geniuses than people of Eurasian ancestry — helps me make better sense of real-world population outcomes. It doesn’t keep me from being able to appreciate the outliers I personally know, and it still requires me to think hard about how to apply that understanding to my own life, as someone who is also one of those outliers.
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