"Have you noticed the way genders are mixing and vanishing? It's difficult to know who are male and female sometimes."

[Lacewing]

Whole point of a new thread was to avoid you.

Guess that didn't work. Not very bright of you. Don't you think that if you use my words, I'll take notice?

Might have been better if you'd just titled the topic "Henry sucks cock". I might have left that alone.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Yeah, well why don't you buzz like a fly around somebody else's shit and leave me be?

Whole point of a new thread was to avoid you.

How rude. I was agreeing with you earlier. (And writing a thread isn't the most efficient way of avoiding others).

[henry quirk]

Veg,

Do I seem to you to give a shit what folks here think?

And that response was about avoiding Lace, not you.

Read the subject line.

[Lacewing]

Yeah, well why don't you buzz like a fly around somebody else's shit and leave me be?

Whole point of a new thread was to avoid you.

How rude. I was agreeing with you earlier. (And writing a thread isn't the most efficient way of avoiding others).

I think he was talking to me Veggie. That's the thing... he keeps talking to me and telling me about his personal habits which I just don't care about.

[henry quirk]

Time, don't lecture, read and understand.

"all you know about Joe is his chromosome pair"

Yes, and from that I know Joe will exhibit a range of behaviors. These behaviors are, in one language, assigned the placeholder 'male' (man). The placeholder may differ from place to place, time to time, but the cloud of behaviors any of those placeholders are hung on remain the same (cuz xy always results in that cloud of behaviors, just as xx always results in another cloud of behaviors).

Back later...got sumthin' to do.

[TimeSeeker]

Time, don't lecture, read and understand.

"all you know about Joe is his chromosome pair"

Yes, and from that I know Joe will exhibit a range of behaviors. These behaviors are, in one language, assigned the placeholder 'male' (man). The placeholder may differ from place to place, time to time, but the cloud of behaviors any of those placeholders are hung on remain the same (cuz xy always results in that cloud of behaviors, just as xx always results in another cloud of behaviors).

Back later...got sumthin' to do.

Yes. You are using Joe's gender to make predictions about his behavior. Fine. Deduction. Going from the general to the particular. We all do it.

You can use race to make predictions too! Asians are statistically much shorter than caucasians. And yet if Yao Ming is standing right in front of me I am not going to predict he is shorter than me! The fucker is 7 feet tall! I can SEE that he is 7 foot tall. I have all the information I need to tell that he ISN'T short! I don't need to make any deductions.

And so if Joe is waving his wrist. Wearing a skirt, has a pair of tits greater than my girlfriend's - NOTHING about Joe's behavior is typical to that of a man! So your "predictions" about Joe's behavior are clearly failing!

I understand you AND i am lecturing you. You are making an error in reasoning. You are using deduction instead of just observing. That IS how stereotyping works...

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Time, don't lecture, read and understand.

"all you know about Joe is his chromosome pair"

Yes, and from that I know Joe will exhibit a range of behaviors. These behaviors are, in one language, assigned the placeholder 'male' (man). The placeholder may differ from place to place, time to time, but the cloud of behaviors any of those placeholders are hung on remain the same (cuz xy always results in that cloud of behaviors, just as xx always results in another cloud of behaviors).

Back later...got sumthin' to do.

Yes. You are using Joe's gender to make predictions about his behavior. Fine. Deduction. Going from the general to the particular. We all do it. It is easy and we are all too lazy to think.

You can use race to make predictions too! Asians are statistically much shorter than caucasians. And yet if Yao Ming is standing right in front of me I am not going to predict he is shorter than me! The fucker is 7 feet tall! I can SEE that he is 7 foot tall. I have all the information I need to tell that he ISN'T short! I don't need to make any deductions.

And so if Joe is waving his wrist. Wearing a skirt, has a pair of tits greater than my girlfriend's - NOTHING about Joe's behavior is typical to that of a man! So your "predictions" about Joe's behavior are clearly failing!

Nothing about his behavioUr is typical of many women either

[TimeSeeker]

Nothing about his behavioUr is typical of many women either

You've gone from one end of the pendulum to the other.

If you want to PREDICT anything about Joe based on his gender you are already making an error in reasoning.

You don't need to predict. Joe is right in front of you. OBSERVE. Size Joe up!

You can't assume everybody's IQ is 100 because the typical human IQ is 100. You are regressing to the mean!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regressio ... d_the_mean

[Greta]

Ah, now Henry seems much more calm about it all.

[TimeSeeker]

Nothing about his behavioUr is typical of many women either

The word 'typical' when applied to a group/cohort necessarily implies the median of a statistical distribution, but distributions have variance!

You can't determine where on the continuum an individual is. My IQ could be 5 or 195. But if you HAD to place a bet without knowing anything else about me - your money is safest on 100! The population average.

You aren't making any bets on Joe's behaviour - so you shouldn't care?

This is Statistics 101 stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution

[vegetariantaxidermy]

You can do anything with statistics, which is why I take them with a grain of salt

[TimeSeeker]

You can do anything with statistics, which is why I take them with a grain of salt

Yeah. No

It is just a tool. If you understand its limits you know exactly what you can and can't do with it. And you can tell exactly who is stretching statistics a liiiitle too far and blowing smoke up your ass. Cheap parlour tricks!

But you are doing exactly the same thing to statistics as you are doing to Joe. You don't understand it so you are throwing the baby out with the bath water. You are erring on the side of caution and you are scoring an own goal.

Reality is far too complex to understand without a basic grasp of statistics and mathematics.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

You can do anything with statistics, which is why I take them with a grain of salt

Yeah. No

It is just a tool. If you understand its limits you know exactly what you can and can't do with it. And you can tell exactly who is stretching statistics a liiiitle too far to suit their agenda. Cheap parlour tricks!

But you are doing exactly the same thing to statistics as you are doing to Joe. You don't understand it so you are throwing the baby out with the bath water. You are erring on the side of caution and you are scoring an own goal.

Reality is far too complex to understand without a basic grasp of statistics and mathematics.

So many cliches in one post. What is the statistical probability of that?

[TimeSeeker]

So many cliches in one post. What is the statistical probability of that?

Considering i am trying to convey the value of statistics in simple English, and hence avoiding jargon.

It's not probabilistic. It's deterministic.

I intended every single cliche.

[henry quirk]

"You are using Joe's gender to make predictions about his behavior."

No, I'm stating facts about Joe's behavior as it extends out of his base biology.

#

"Going from the general to the particular."

Just the opposite: I'm going from the particular (xy) to the general (his behavior, his psyche).

#

"so if Joe is waving his wrist. Wearing a skirt, has a pair of tits greater than my girlfriend's - NOTHING about Joe's behavior is typical to that of a man!"

Indicating a disorder of his thinking, or a genetic aberration (not a benign 'life choice').

#

"i am lecturing you."

Then you can go pound sand.