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Arm Wrestling Machine Recalled for Breaking Arms
Lucas123 writes "After three players broke their arms while wrestling with a Japanese arcade machine, the manufacturer promised to remove all 150 of the mechanized appendages. Said game maker Atlus' spokeswoman: "The machine isn't that strong, much less so than a muscular man. Even women should be able to beat it.""
another tro0bled eulo6ies to BSD's
Its called "Slapstick" and is funny for the same reason everyone laughed at you in high school when that girl flirted with you before planting her knee in your balls.
It seems like you care more about the fact that the strongest men are stronger than the strongest women than you do about honestly considering the distribution of the sample space.
"Likewise, if it's been shown that on average men are stronger than women, and you pick a random woman and a random man, odds are that the man is physically stronger than the woman. That's not discrimination, it's statistics. Anyone telling you different is wrong."
This just isn't true.
Suppose that ten percent of women suffer from a gender-linked disease that makes them too weak to walk or lift a book. Suppose further that the other ninety percent of women are quite strong, with a distribution comparable to the entire male population. The extremely weak women could throw the whole average off. Discounting the ill weaklings, women might be stronger on average than men, but including the weaklings women could be weaker on average. It would depend on the actual distribution.
A man who is ten times richer than the modal man affects the median as much as ten modal men! The wealth of the few billionaires in the US significantly affects the apparent average wealth of americans.
My hypothetical is actually a pretty good approximation of the real gender situation in our society. A minority of women have so bought into the idea that women are so weak they never do anything physically difficult. All the single mothers who end up having to do their own roofing and gardening are counterbalanced by the housewives who just send their husbands out to do whatever is "guy work." Although the average woman is weaker than the average man, the average independent woman is not [I]that[/I] much weaker than the average independent man. Neither will have the time to work out nor the freedom to avoid exertion.
It's worth noting here that strength varies in different environments. Women tend to have higher pain thresholds than men, different exhaustion patterns, and cope with temperature variation more easily.
In the end, it's far better to stick with "typical" in place of "average" for conversation. "Typical" implies that the sample is "everyone I know about," which is more honest. Average is a subtle enough concept that saying "the average X is this way" verges on meaningless, but implies mathematical certainty.
You also *really* ought to review distribution... You can't necessarily assume a standard distribution, especially in situations which depend on societal variations and self-reinforcing behaviours. The kind of "average" you're defending absolutely depends on the distributions of the two populations matching well. The most you can do to get around this requirement is choose a convenient level of granularity to examine.