> men have a bigger tendency for violent behavior than women
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.)
It is culture. Actually science on violence and aggression tend to show a bit different picture, and also why such statistics is of such a low value. Good research tend to explore the null hypothesis and alternative explanation for statistical results.
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?
One claim I've seen is that men commit more violent crime because it's more common for a man to be physically stronger than another person, while the rates of non-physial violence are much closer across gender boundaries.
That is one theory I also suspect but I have yet to see a study that look at physically strength during conflicts between people. If it is true then among homosexual relationships the person with less physical strength should be detectable when looking at who is the attacker and who is the victim.
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.
I think things change a lot when a dynamic is already established, and involves boundaries being pushed and probed, rather than being "crimes of opportunity" so to call them.
Based on the data it seems that the rate of conflict is a human constant. Two women living together will have a lower average absolute strength than two men living together, but from the data the rate of domestic abuse is identical. Similar, the strength difference in a heterosexual relationship is going to be greater than homosexual, and yet again the rate of domestic abuse is again identical to homosexual relationships.
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.
You can inflict extreme pain on someone by just talking without raising a finger nor your voice. Especially if this person cares about you.
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.
These statistics you're referring to, how comparable are the relative differences? Do they show that men are 4 times more violent than women and black people are 1.1 more violent than white people, for example? What are these figures?
That's a fair question. According to FBI homicide statistics for 2018 [1] and US demographics [2], the Black homicide rate per 100k is 7.9, while the White+Hispanic rate [3] is 1.2. The female (of all races) homicide rate is 0.42.
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.
[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.
Presumably prison/jail population statistics - there are certainly more males imprisoned for violent crimes than women, it's like a 10:1 ratio.
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.
I'm not an expert in this area at all but my understanding is that the differences are not all like 4X more violent but due to the nature of distributions, a small difference in the median of a distribution can lead to an enormous difference in the tails of the distribution.
> Why is this considered good / normal / expected, but s/men/blacks/g and s/women/whites/g
...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.
Your standard for saying A is more X than B is a bit strange. For me, all it means is roughly that when picking two individuals from A and B the one from A is more likely to have greater X (assuming here the distributions are not weird).
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 also makes a lot more sense biologically. Testosterone and estrogen have strong mental effects, and alter brain development. The brain is sexually dimorphic in complex ways, borne out by many studies. The brain is not racially dimorphic at all.
A popular belief system insists that people be treated as members of X group before all else, and all such groups must be ranked by their oppressive power.
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.
> 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.
Are BOTH statistically justified in ways that control for other, socioeconomic factors and such?
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.
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.
Parent's point was that it wouldn't be acceptable when done regarding some protected group (ex. blacks vs whites), so it shouldn't be acceptable when it comes to men vs women
Especially when the world never stops turning and social change / idea propagation move orders of magnitude faster than they did for most of human history.
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.
There is no reason to think that interpretation of metric that compared "men" and "women" must be aligned with that same metric when men/women is substituted with some other populations. When you make the substitution you completly change the nature of the comparison. Whether either comparison is "acceptable" depends on the metric and the populations. There is no ethical rule that says all comparisons for group X must be acceptable or all comparisons for group Y must be unacceptable.
Then that's a lazy point, because it should be immediately obvious that studies for gender can be conducted easily across time and space whereas most demographic splits being discussed in this thread cannot because they are highly dependent on time/space and have therefore have endless variables that cannot be controlled for.
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."
Whites are 60% of the population though, so they're being arrested in proportion with their representation. They also do not separate white-latino and white-non-latino, so the colloquial "white" is being lumped in with another ethnicity. Also, in 2019, blacks were just under 13% of the population, yet they are represented 2x-4x over in virtually ever crime category in that table.
You're responsible for the truthfulness of the statements that you make, especially when the data is right there on the page for you to verify for yourself. "Oh I'm just parroting someone else's distortion as fact" is not a defense.
>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.
But I'm repeating what the actual purveyors of the data said about their own data? They analyzed their data and came to the conclusion you seem to have an issue with- that whites account for 59.1% of violent crimes.
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.
So if 100 people in group A average a total of 10 crimes, and 5 people in group B average a total of 9 crimes, you think you are being intellectually honest when you say "group A commits more crimes" in the context of comparing the crime levels of those two groups?
the thing that's always confused me is why would this category of white lumping together latino even be a thing in the first place? Just seems like a really harebrained idea. That association always confuses many hispanics I know during each census. Was there a rationale for this lumping? I never understood it, just seemed to beg for fuzzy/blurred/confusing metrics.
Maybe it's something that made sense at some point in the past and now it's too difficult to change because it will mess up historical analysis/trends? Not to mention motives will immediately be questioned by anyone who tries to fix it and who really wants to die on that hill in the current political climate?
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
yah I'm fuzzy on what white is too precisely. I was going to say caucasian but I don't even know what caucasian means exactly. I guess going by today's landscape I think most people would assume European, but that's a pretty broad swath too with lots of variation in it.
they certainly do. You know I wonder if the mixing of the category was a reflection of what the majority of latinos presented as in some region in the US at the point in time the category was developed. Most of the latinos in the US dating around the time of the genesis of the white category were European phenotype looking. Who knows.
Maybe I'm not looking at the right number[0] (there is a 59.3% lower on the page which appears to be a more specific response: "White alone, not Hispanic or Latino") but it looks like 59.1% of arrests are against 75.8% of the population. Inversely, 40.9% of arrests are against 24.2% of the population.
This is a failure of mathematical (and, frankly, verbal and philosophical) understanding. If you have 10 arrests shared between 7 white men and 3 black, with 1 black man having allegedly offended 5 times and 5 white men having allegedly offended once, where do your resources go? Or the opposite, 1 white guy with 5 arrests, 5 split between 2 black men? Howsabout in a country with presumed innocence? In a country - in individual police jurisdictions - with a history, in living memory, of frivolous arrests made for economic purposes? In a country whose only peers in incarceration are dysfunctional, systemic human rights abusers?
Yep, the data was counting arrests, not individuals.
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.
Comment inspired me to ask it about rape stats in men women. Fist prompt was calling my information incorrect. Second prompt I told it to include prisons, said I was right and then contradicted itself. Go figure.
It makes sense for someone to say "most" in the dichotomy of man / woman more so than it does in the polychotomy of white / black / hispanic or latino / etc. This argument relies on that phrasing to Dwight Schrute them on a technicality rather than arguing related points.
People of color are also more likely to be arrested without having committed a crime.
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.
Is there anything we could point about women? Nothing as terrible as being violent as far as I know, but what about other things? I agree with your premise but I believe it follows we must speak clearly in all cases.
Women are a protected group, so people have biases that prevent them from seeing the reality when it comes to this topic. As evolved beings made to maximize fitness, there were a lot of strategies that worked for women and shaped their psychology that noone dare point out. Also anyone coming too close to the truth will quickly get banned.
Women tend to be bad at salary negotiation, and less likely to change jobs. Middle aged women being taken advantage of in the corporate world is tragic.
This 'men are violent, therefore women must also be bad in some way' rhetoric makes no sense. There's no purpose for it other than assuaging sore feelings.
Women are bad at higher level math in the same way men are violent. Not all are, but its a trend.
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.
It's nothing to do with political pressure and more to do with ill-formed comparisons.
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 woman walking alone at night who encounters a stranger does not care what generative process led to a group disparity, she cares whether she is likely to be in danger. It is politically palatable in polite society for her to be afraid of an unknown man on the basis of his sex. But it is not acceptable for her to even consider that a statistical disparity may exist on the basis of race, or take precautions on that basis, unless it is in the context of condemning society as solely responsible for creating that disparity.
A statement of empirical observation cannot be "ill-formed" unless you have appointed yourself ultimate arbiter over why a person might care.
I didn't say they must be bad. I asked if we could make any group-based observation at all.
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.
You should look up the definition of the word "imply" if you're confused about it. Arguments have implications. Disagree with that rather than lazily claiming I'm misquoting you when I didn't quote you.
Then I would agree with you that women don't have those traits just because men do. But they do have them. We're all human. I wasn't trying to argue the former. Your original response to my comment was disrespectful and uncharitable which is why I responded in kind, despite that generally being an inferior strategy.
Nothing is just a fact. If it's fair to point out that men are charged/arrested/convicted at a higher rate, it's also fair to point out that black people are charged/arrested/convicted at a higher rate. Neither of those statistics are "just a fact". They are complex phenomena that we don't fully understand the cause of and should avoid drawing unsupported conclusions from.
Because men are not blacks and women are not whites, I feel like this is basic comprehension
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.
I'm not sure what you mean. Everything in the comment I responded to apply to the same extent to women/men and white/black. Both the question in the first paragraph and the statement about crime statistics not being enough. It seems to me that the burden of providing a justification is with whoever wants to treat them differently. Why isn't the question just as applicable to gender? Why are crime statistics enough to come to a conclusion about gender but not race?
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.
> Why isn't the question just as applicable to gender?
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.
Why would that be the assumption? If Black history is the reason for the disparity between white and black people (in the US, presumably), why can't the history of treating women as delicate quasi-children without agency be the reason for the disparity between women and men? Or perhaps the history of mass sacrificing men as expendable soldiers? Or any other past or present practice that no doubt has an effect on current cultural norms?
Show me how the precession of Mercury affects violent crime rates and I'll bite. Until then, I'd say the assumption is that two arbitrary things aren't related
> men have a bigger tendency for violent behavior than women
> 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?
That may be true, but we should still avoid false equivalencies. There is scientific evidence for a casual relationship between testosterone and violence. Even if that is debated and there is no full consensus, there is still more evidence for it than there is for the idea that a person's race has a casual relationship on their propensity for violence all else being equal.
Your second statement doesn’t logically follow the first. It suggests that there is a similar claim of a cause for the statement that black people are more violent which is as strong (however weak and disputed) as the claim of this cause of testosterone.
> 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.
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".
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.)