Distributions and Essences

The notion of "essences" or "what a thing 'really' is" are a tremendous way to make sure that people are incapable of thinking straight about reality.

"Men are stronger than Women."
Possible true meanings (re: physical strength):

• Most men are stronger than most women
• The strongest men are stronger than the strongest women
• The average man is stronger than the average woman.
• If you pick a man and a woman at random, without looking, it's wise to bet that the man is stronger.

Possible false meanings:

• All men are stronger than all women
• The distributions of men's strengths and women's strengths is ALMOST disjoint.
• The weakest men are stronger than the weakest women (variance makes this likely false)

The correct way to think about it:

I have 2 categories in my head, and I categorize almost all humans into those 2 categories:  Male and Female.  By observation, people I inductively place in the Male category have both a larger mean and a larger standard deviation than people I inductively place in the Female category.  This gives me good first-order predictive power, when figuring out who to call to move my gun-safe.  Due to information economics constraints, I may choose to not delve past this category layer...even though it is obviously true that some of the women in my circle are stronger than some of the me.  More careful analysis would discover that my 2-category division of people is only sufficient for some purposes (figuring out who's posterior to watch as they walk by)...but that the biology appears to (in a small subsection of the population) be a LOT more complex than that.    

Stupid folks think this says something about the essence of men and women...and that idiocy is trapped in our language.  If we were to have conversations wherein people used words like mean and standard deviation...we could check accuracy, rather than having screaming matches.  Of course, it would also take 90% of the wind out of the sails of the culture-warriors on both sides: left- and right-.

Of course, if folks were to start talking that way...we'd have a new problem:  well-meaning nutjob utilitarians trying to run real moral calculus on this.