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I'd been meeting these people in the wild since at least 2014. I remember, for example, when I mentioned this particular technological breakthrough which allowed people to reconstruct audio in a room from capturing vibrations in papery substances on video. I mentioned that the tech wasn't always good enough to be able to actually hear what was said, but was capable of being used for figuring out whether the speaker was male or female, and then I got yelled at from 5 different directions saying that some women have deeper voices than men, and you couldn't generalize about such things.
True. I've known some women with deep voices, and at least one guy who had a high, fluting voice
False. Yes, you can, because it's general. In general, women will have higher voices than men. Even a deep-voiced woman may not sound like a man's voice, or a high-pitched male voice like a woman's voice. Some women will sound like a man and some men will sound like a woman, but in general you can tell which is which.
I saw a shitpost the other day on 4chan in which some anon argued his litmus test for whether he was speaking to a stupid person or not.
Essentially, if he makes a statement like "Asians are shorter on average than Caucasians" and someone rebuts "but I know an Asian guy who's 6'2"", then he knows he's dealing with an unintelligent person.
It's staggering the number of people I've met - people with Master's degrees, people who've succeeded in their chosen fields - who seem completely unable to grasp the concept of averages and distributions. There are so many people who hear a statement like "on average, women have lower sex drives than men" and interpret it to mean "literally every woman is less horny than literally every man, there is not a single woman anywhere in the world who is hornier than a man". Like, the idea of outliers is built into the concept of a "distribution". The entire concept of an average presupposes that there are members within that set which fall above and below it.
It's incredible to me how so many people think that "but I know an Asian guy who's 6'2"" or "I'm a woman and my sex drive is way higher than my boyfriend's" is some kind of "gotcha".
There was no source for it I was able to hunt down, but I'd really love to find out that the half-recollected factoid about Piraha children being able to learn the arithmetic their parents never could (that I read here recently) turns out to really be true. The common first-world adult inability to grok distributions reminds me of nothing more than the typical Piraha adult inability to work with numbers, and yet if there's hope for their future generations then maybe there's hope for ours too.
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