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So, wishful thinking, but rebranded via the wishful-thinking of "surely it's just a female problem"? The irony is delicious.
Two days ago was the anniversary of the phrase "is it logical, is it truly logical that we really have a system that has to be 53 degrees to fly?", uttered by the manager of NASA's Solid Rocket Booster program, a month after an SRB failure at low temperatures had destroyed Challenger, two weeks after Feynman had demonstrated O-ring material becoming inflexible when chilled ... and maybe the commission was just giving Mulloy rope to hang himself, but nobody in the room full of men even stopped him to point out the logical fallacy!
Yes, I am very strongly convinced that women have a stronger predisposition to wishful thinking, though of course men are not safe from it either, as my text implies («even less interested in object-level constraints than men»). It's based on repeatedly encountered cases like this, though I admit not having any systematic evidence at hand in favor.
From the thread: "(...) there’s more variation within sexes than between sexes. Plenty of women are taller than plenty of men. Plenty of women are stronger than plenty of men. Plenty of women have vampire teeth. Plenty of men have nubbins."
How in the world has this come to pass as a valid argument? Among people who style themselves as scientists, no less? All you can deduce from "More variation of trait P within X than between X" is that X is a bad a priori proxy for P, not that the differences between types of X are negligible at the population level.
This line of reasoning which should probably be classified as a fallacy by now is mostly used when debating against HBD of the racial variety. But to a statistically illiterate "scientist" forget about statistically illiterate commentators, the urge to use that hammer is just too strong in any and all suggestion of group differences. Just shoddy pattern matching on their part.
To steelman them, it's a good enough retort to 'all X is more Y than all Z' [call this arg_P] claims, even though it doesn't address that claim centrally. This shoddy pattern matching completely falls on its face when you are dealing with any argument more sophisticated than arg_P.
E: Correction, There is a name for it, Lewontin's fallacy with T&C.
I agree with this nosology; she's a science communication major, a trained disinformation expert, so can probably recite her Boaz (and Gould, and Lewontin...) if woken in the dead of night.
But to be clear, her retort in the context of specific metrics mentioned in her tweet is plainly false, and would fail even against arg_P so long as it's prefixed with «almost». There isn't more variation within sexes than between sexes in terms of strength, as pointed out in comments and QTs. Racial IQ diffs have nothing on intersexual strength diffs. Effectively all men are stronger than effectively all women of the same age, or indeed of any age. Height difference is also greater than within-sex variance. This is obvious from everyday life, stuff like walking through a crowd, or reaching for a pickle jar and opening it for your mom/sis/gf/wife, and in my opinion shouldn't require citing any PrOoFs to be trusted; buy Razib Khan, in a now-deleted thread, says modern biologists are surprised and incredulous when they encounter this notion. I suppose gorillas are even more dimorphic than humans, and in more ways, including some neat features of cranial morphology (appreciated by anthropologists who work with bones so much, they sometimes forget about the rest of organism), but that's neither here nor there. Some sympathetic commenters squeal about «bone nerd stuff» being fascinating; in my opinion this willful ignorance of the context isn't cute, this is turning science into worse than stamp collecting, into playing house, and one more reason to be critical of female participation in traditionally male occupations like biological research. This cheeky girls-playing-house stuff is killing the whole field. I've known many competent female researchers and lab heads, and they are able to compete with men without any crutches, not particularly tolerant of such profanation, nor fond of science popularizers who have flunked out of academia. It feels like in the West it's much more tolerated.
But I digress. Lewontin's argument/fallacy does not really point at any phenotypic evidence, it amounts to saying that since genetic variance is (ostensibly) distributed in the claimed manner within and between races, it is facile to classify people by race as if that were a natural unit. It is bad in its own ways, but not so obviously stupid and false.
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To be fair, I looked for systematic evidence one way or another and couldn't find any either, just a few studies with small self-selected samples, nothing I'd have said was definitive even if I had never heard the phrase "replication crisis". Most of the really extreme cases of wishful thinking I can think of come from men (how will communism work, exactly? let's just finish up the revolution and then the dialectic says things will all sort themselves out!) but that's the product of even more egregious selection bias. You'd think this would be low-hanging fruit to study, but I don't blame any psychologists who would rather find a less fraught question.
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