Why is this considered good / normal / expected, but s/men/blacks/g and s/women/whites/g (or asians, or muslims/christians) and it's discriminatory? (Statistically, both statements are justified. Morally, neither is, as we should treat people as individuals, not as members of X group.)
A common used data point is that men commit most violent crimes. Using the same data from Sweden one can also say that today Muslim are 20 times more likely per person to commit rape than Christians, and about similar likely per person to commit murder. Same numbers can also be used to replace Muslims and Christians with immigrants and natives, or Arab and Germanics. For social scientists that data wouldn't be hugely interesting, as they would look towards social economic status and war refugee status (i.e. things related to PTSD injuries). The conclusions would more likely be that there are a bigger tendency for anti-social behavior by people with minimal social connections and economical destitute, especially if they experience severe emotional trauma.
One fairly interesting statistics to me is that households with either man-woman, man-man, and woman-woman all have equal rate of violent behavior. Statistically that is to me much more interesting. If men inherently had more violent behavior and women less violent behavior, man-man and woman-woman household should show a difference in violence. It also a rather strange statistical phenomenon that if a bisexual woman go from a heterosexual relation into a homosexual relation, her statistical data for violent behavior increases by 200%. A man who does the same decrease his violent behavior by half. Why would that be if there existed a biological difference in violent behavior?
It might also be non-linear. A person who has half the strength of their partner might be significant less likely to be the attacker than if a person has just 10% less physical strength. It would be an interesting read.
It seems that the only thing that changes with gender is that when there is a conflict and it "eventually" develops into physical attacks, which is a strange concept in itself, the person who will be the attacker (or at least be found guilty in courts) will be significantly more likely to be a man if the relationship is heterosexual.
Come again? What's non-physical violence? Mental violence? Writing someone a mean letter?
It can be voluntary or not but dismissing it like that seems strange to me. It's not because it doesn't leave physical scars that it can't cause trauma.
So the Black homicide rate is 6.7x higher than the White+Hispanic rate, while the White+Hispanic homicide rate is 2.8x higher than the female (all races) rate.
Edit: A different source [4] gives different figures, but these are "age adjusted": 20.9 for non-Hispanic Blacks, and 2.6 for non-Hispanic Whites.
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-... - and using homicide instead of something as nebulous as "violence" because it is the statistic most difficult to distort, and is immune to over-policing.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
[3] The FBI counts Hispanics as White, and has a separate 'Ethnicity' category where they mark Hispanic or Latino. Assuming all Hispanics in that table were counted as White yields an even lower White homicide rate.
Of course, the likes of Brock Turner and Prince Andrew demonstrate that some demographic groups are relatively less punished or relatively more able to avoid punishment, so the prison population surely doesn't directly measure inherent tendencies.
...because the former holds true across correlations (and is difficult to confound anyway, since the group 'men' and the group 'women' are distributed in like proportion through correlated groups - rich and poor, white and black, around the world, etc), while the latter is very difficult to convincingly show because controlling for economic status alone eliminates more than half of the gap.
Men are genuinely, testably, provably, empirically more violent than women. It's hard to apply any numerate approach to the data which does not support this conclusion. The correlation between melanation and violence is murky and very plausibly non-existent except as artifacts of confounding factors.
Moreover, the definition of "violent behavior" for the purposes of essentially all major research on this topic excludes major wars. If you include projection of military force around the world, it seems likely that the violence perpetrated by white folks is likely to be proportionally greater.
> Morally, neither is, as we should treat people as individuals, not as members of X group.
I broadly agree with this statement, but I think we can still, eg, teach boys not to rape without running afoul of this standard.
This is in itself useful information, at least in principle. To take the political correct example, let's say that I am a bissexual man. A priori, the probability that I will be attacked will be greater when dating a man. Is this useful? I don't know. That will depend how strong the difference is in the first place and how fast I can update my estimation based on new information.
How can you be sure than men are intrinsically more violent than women anyway? Couldn't it just be because of the way men are raised (i.e. the patriarchy)?
It's widely known among researchers that women initiate domestic violence more frequently compared to men.
Example (1s on Google): https://aliesq.medium.com/extensive-research-women-initiate-...
I first learned about this from a famous feminist (woman) from the UK.
Well, since dimorphic means "occurring in or representing two distinct forms", I think you are likely 100% correct.
> The brain is not racially dimorphic at all.
That ranking is effectively arbitrary, and so the system is used mainly as a bludgeon of mobs who wish to silence and abuse others.
That’s why we’re seeing the kind of warped reasoning you’re alluding to.
Are BOTH statistically justified in ways that control for other, socioeconomic factors and such?
AI could be used to better understand these associations (e.g. why is there a correlation between Asians and academic performance) and maybe help social leverage advantages more equitably.
Consider one of the (largely liberal) discourses rising in the past few years that many vital social metrics and trends indicate men/boys are screwed and women/girls are outcompeting them and thriving much better in present era.
Per the FBI: "White individuals were arrested more often for violent crimes than individuals of any other race and accounted for 59.1 percent of those arrests."
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
So it is true and you're distorting the table.
In any case, the picture you're suggesting is itself distorted given that other correlating factors such as social class, are ignored.
>the picture you're suggesting is itself distorted given that other correlating factors such as social class, are ignored.
The picture I'm suggesting is that which the data shows, and you seem to be making some other leap to say something that I have not said.
In any case, the picture the data suggests is incomplete (because it is missing a crucial data point: social class), therefore the picture you're suggesting is also incomplete.
South Asian vs East asian is another group that often gets lumped together in demographic statistics as 'Asian'. Despite significant differences in geography/race/culture/etc.
Regardless, I'd also be curious to hear the real rational for the Latino one
Or does it only mean anglosaxon heritage? If so, why?
[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI125221
You raise some great points, but in the context of the discussion I don't see how any of the comments represent a failure of mathematical, verbal, and philosophical understanding.
> I think it's fair to point out that men commit most violent crimes. That's not good/normal/expected it's just a fact.
> Again, replace “men” with “African Americans” and you also have a statistically true statement (in America at least) that would be considered taboo.
Arrest statistics are also self-reported by police, both on an individual officer and department-to-FBI level, with no accountability for the accuracy or completeness thereof that I'm aware of.
Violent crimes also account for only a portion of the economic damage crime-in-general deals to society, if we want to get utilitarian. Wage theft dwarfs all types of robbery and burglary, and that's only one type of white-collar theft (perpetrated, in the US, overwhelmingly by white people).
Thank you for correcting this disinformation. It's something that gets trotted out regularly without acknowledgement of how ridiculously imperfect our law enforcement and justice systems are.
(Once you adjust for education level this disappears)
However you aren't allowed to say that for one group, but you are allowed for the other. So this has nothing to do about statistical accuracy, its just political pressure from one side.
You can't just substitute in random groups for another. In order to make a statement you need to know what you're talking about. And it seems like the HN crowd that so desperately wants to say blacks are more violent than whites, these people have no clue what they're talking about. If you go and look at history you'll quickly see how that statement is just ill-formed.
A statement of empirical observation cannot be "ill-formed" unless you have appointed yourself ultimate arbiter over why a person might care.
Also, your implied statement of "women, on average, have no traits that are unhelpful to the flourishing of human civilization", strikes me as terribly naive.
Please point to where I said this.
>"women, on average, have no traits that are unhelpful to the flourishing of human civilization"
We have different names for different things because they are different. They're not all just "groups of people", you're literally talking about different types. I.e. what generates a man is not what generates a black person
What can you point to that statistically justifies that "Black people have a bigger tendency for violent behavior than white people"?
Showing crime statistics isn't enough. You need to show that given all the details about a person being the same, a Black person is more likely to act violently than an identical white person. You basically need to correct for all the societal reasons that result in people committing violent crime.
We know that there is a large sentencing disparity among both women/men and white/black people who are convicted, even when controlling for everything imaginable. We know that there are significant differences in the social and cultural expectations that are usually placed on both women/men and white/black people, and we know that there are on average psychological differences between both women/men and white/black people. The base assumption and the analysis required to come to a conclusion should be the same. The conclusion may or may not be the same.
The assumption is that gender and crime aren't related. The burden of proof is on showing that two things are related IMO. Black history and criminalization are related so you need to give context for that relationship.
> black people have a bigger tendency for violent behavior than white people
It seems way easier to justify that first statement. Are there physiological differences between a black man and a white man that are as significant as the differences between testosterone and estrogen?
Should be as much of a reason to doubt it and brand such statements as bigotry as “blacks are more violent”, no?
I think you're conflating the questions of "which demographic group engages in higher rates of violence" and towards the question of "why do different demographic groups engage in different rates of violence".