> "On AVERAGE it is probably true that the AVERAGE white person is in a position of greater power, than the average black person. So not all peoples are in an equivalent position to cause race related damage. "
I want to agree with the idea of looking for any kernal of truth in the arguments of an opponent.
> "On AVERAGE it is probably true that the AVERAGE white person is in a position of greater power, than the average black person. So not all peoples are in an equivalent position to cause race related damage. "
I want to agree with the idea of looking for any kernal of truth in the arguments of an opponent.
However, in this case I want to join Steve in pushing back against this framing. The second sentence reflects concepts which are ubiquitous and conventional today, but I believe it misleads the mind as way of modeling the world around us. It fosters the illusion that "population groups" (or as you call them "peoples") are the most salient entities, each with its own unitary collective will and agency.
Agency (and the target for interventions) resides at the individual level, not at the collective level (pending the arrival of hive minds).
If you change the actual real-world incomes of many people within a population group, that will automatically change and completely control the population-wide averages (and sums and medians and percentiles). The agency is at many individual levels, and the statistics are derivative. By contrast, society doesn't have a knob by which to turn up or down the average, and have the magically change the individual incomes. The averages do not control individual lives, but individual lives do control the averages.
The proper role of derived statistics is to help in deriving hypotheses about the mixtures of broad causative forces which may underpin some statistical differences influencing individuals - and to help in evaluating and assessing the relative validity of those hypotheses. Averages (and medians and distributions) are potentially useful simplifications of complex realities, from which to learn - but very carefully. A biased interpretation of partial statistics can very easily mislead, by accident or deliberation. So what you get is a potentially useful, and potentially misleading, simplification of overall reality - not a useful predictor (much less controller) of individual outcomes, income, or power.
So in terms of two individuals interacting, focusing on the AVERAGE (or median) of the groups to they may belong, is more of a matter of toxic stereotyping - assuming that group traits (whether based on high or low statistical validity) apply to any individual within that group.
Suppose we found that Asians (or whites to a lesser degree) tend to on average have more education than other groups; should that influence the jobs or the wages paid to a given person? Or should we look to individuals and their actual education, rather than group averages?
The unfortunate truth is that the average crime rate among some population groups is substantially higher. Should we treat that knowledge as telling us something important about each individual within that group, or treat each AS an individual (whether as a criminal or as a non-criminal)?
In what contexts is the derived group average useful and when is it misleading or unhelpful? We need a logical argument based on fuctionality, NOT an argument of convenience where we get to switch willy-nilly and without justification, between individuals and group averages depending just on what serves our argument in the moment.
The individuals with significant societal power are a small subset of every broad population group, and they do not today tend to reflect or answer to the rest of those population groups. So when you focus on "whites on average have more power than Blacks", that is implying that the proper focus is on broad and diverse groups and small differences between their averages, and avoiding the reality that to overwhelming degree the axis of differential power resides within each group (or just as relevantly, all groups together). Some people (within every broad population group) have many thousands of times more power than others, but instead we are supposed parse out relatively small and tractionless differences between broad "averages".
I maintain that this focus on the AVERAGE (as you put it) harms the validity of our mental models much more than it helps, and leads us to miss the larger causative factors in favor of smaller ones.
And a small note: my reading of the interchanges is that Steve's disagreeing with her would not be reasonably described as "gaslighting" her. If you think otherwise, please explain further. Let's not turn meaningful concepts into undifferentiated free-floating slurs.
> "On AVERAGE it is probably true that the AVERAGE white person is in a position of greater power, than the average black person. So not all peoples are in an equivalent position to cause race related damage. "
I want to agree with the idea of looking for any kernal of truth in the arguments of an opponent.
However, in this case I want to join Steve in pushing back against this framing. The second sentence reflects concepts which are ubiquitous and conventional today, but I believe it misleads the mind as way of modeling the world around us. It fosters the illusion that "population groups" (or as you call them "peoples") are the most salient entities, each with its own unitary collective will and agency.
Agency (and the target for interventions) resides at the individual level, not at the collective level (pending the arrival of hive minds).
If you change the actual real-world incomes of many people within a population group, that will automatically change and completely control the population-wide averages (and sums and medians and percentiles). The agency is at many individual levels, and the statistics are derivative. By contrast, society doesn't have a knob by which to turn up or down the average, and have the magically change the individual incomes. The averages do not control individual lives, but individual lives do control the averages.
The proper role of derived statistics is to help in deriving hypotheses about the mixtures of broad causative forces which may underpin some statistical differences influencing individuals - and to help in evaluating and assessing the relative validity of those hypotheses. Averages (and medians and distributions) are potentially useful simplifications of complex realities, from which to learn - but very carefully. A biased interpretation of partial statistics can very easily mislead, by accident or deliberation. So what you get is a potentially useful, and potentially misleading, simplification of overall reality - not a useful predictor (much less controller) of individual outcomes, income, or power.
So in terms of two individuals interacting, focusing on the AVERAGE (or median) of the groups to they may belong, is more of a matter of toxic stereotyping - assuming that group traits (whether based on high or low statistical validity) apply to any individual within that group.
Suppose we found that Asians (or whites to a lesser degree) tend to on average have more education than other groups; should that influence the jobs or the wages paid to a given person? Or should we look to individuals and their actual education, rather than group averages?
The unfortunate truth is that the average crime rate among some population groups is substantially higher. Should we treat that knowledge as telling us something important about each individual within that group, or treat each AS an individual (whether as a criminal or as a non-criminal)?
In what contexts is the derived group average useful and when is it misleading or unhelpful? We need a logical argument based on fuctionality, NOT an argument of convenience where we get to switch willy-nilly and without justification, between individuals and group averages depending just on what serves our argument in the moment.
The individuals with significant societal power are a small subset of every broad population group, and they do not today tend to reflect or answer to the rest of those population groups. So when you focus on "whites on average have more power than Blacks", that is implying that the proper focus is on broad and diverse groups and small differences between their averages, and avoiding the reality that to overwhelming degree the axis of differential power resides within each group (or just as relevantly, all groups together). Some people (within every broad population group) have many thousands of times more power than others, but instead we are supposed parse out relatively small and tractionless differences between broad "averages".
I maintain that this focus on the AVERAGE (as you put it) harms the validity of our mental models much more than it helps, and leads us to miss the larger causative factors in favor of smaller ones.
And a small note: my reading of the interchanges is that Steve's disagreeing with her would not be reasonably described as "gaslighting" her. If you think otherwise, please explain further. Let's not turn meaningful concepts into undifferentiated free-floating slurs.