> If you know that the average adult woman is only half as strong as an average adult man, you don’t know that almost all women are weaker than almost all men unless you also know the standard deviations. If the standard deviation is high enough, then a significant minority of women can be stronger than the average man, and a significant minority of men can be weaker than the average woman.
As a matter of mathematical possibilities, you are correct; she cited studies sloppily; you get a point in debate club.
As a matter of reality, she's right. The distributions aren't even close to overlapping, for any measure of strength you care to name. You do know that, don't you? We don't need studies for this for the same reason we don't need RCTs on parachutes. (We have them anyway, though it's not worth my time to collate enough...)
I occasionally meet people who say something like "Oh, men are stronger on average but it's not a large difference!" Inevitably, I discover they've never played sports at any serious level (including high school), worked any physical job, or been involved in any serious violence. This says great things about society allowing people to live lives of words and the mind, and safety! But it says terrible things about the vision of reality our media surfaces.
I've played high school sports and I knew women on my water polo team who easily defeated the boys on the water polo team. My school's women's water polo team was extremely good-- not because of my contribution-- and my school's men's water polo team was pretty mediocre.
I also know quite a few athletic women who can beat their sedentary male friends at, say, arm wrestling.
Sure, at similar levels of fitness, a man is stronger than a woman. But my life experience suggests that there is a surprising amount of overlap, and some of the observable difference is cultural (for example, women are much less likely to lift weights).
Anyway, if something is true, that is even more reason not to be sloppy about it. If you're trying to prove false things, sure, you have to rely on fallacious reasoning. But if you're trying to prove true things, then proving them in a non-fallacious manner should be very easy! It speaks to whether you should trust Perry on any more complicated subject.
I looked it up and https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards/bench-press/lb suggests that a woman who's an intermediate powerlifter can be expected to outbench an untrained man, which basically matches my anecdotal observations-- most men are stronger than most women, but it's not at all uncommon to meet an unusually athletic woman who's stronger than the average man. (Of course, upper body strength is something men are particularly good at, and women who can, say, outrun men are more common.)
The vast majority of women are not intermediate powerlifters, and the ones who are are subject to strong selection effects I.e. the only women who are going to dedicate a meaningful amount of time on something that most women aren't at all interested in are going to disproportionately be the ones much stronger than average to begin with. You would have to take a random sample of women and put them on a powerlifting program, and see how many are stronger than untrained men after X months/years
Additionally, powerlifting is not a pure measure of strength. Technique plays a much larger role than most people imagine, and you are able to increase the maximum amount of weight you can lift fairly quickly without actually training with heavier weights just because you trained in that specific movement pattern.
A much more direct measure of strength is grip strength, and the differences are enormous. Even trained female athletes are equivalent to only the 25th percentile for men. And the gaps remain after controlling for lean body mass and hand size. And it's also something almost nobody trains for, certainly not enough to make even a slight dent in these numbers at all.
I haven't read the book, but I found this debate between Louise Perry and Aella (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEL9zZNkRRg) illuminating. It seems like Perry's case actually hinges more on differences in sex drive and sociosexuality than physical strength. Also, both differences would only need to be true for the majority of men and women, not universal, for Perry's conclusions to apply.
"Men who get women by beating up everyone else who wants to have sex with the women tend not to have much interest in whether the women would prefer an emaciated kpop star instead."
But women who are happy with those men tend to fare better in their company than those who resent them, so the former should be expected to be more reproductively successful than the latter. Therefore, there's a selection pressure for women to be attracted to such men.
"There is a slight of hand"
Should that be "sleight of hand"? Do you mean "an insult made with a hand"? Is that a deliberate typo to catch pedantic busybodies like me?
> If you know that the average adult woman is only half as strong as an average adult man, you don’t know that almost all women are weaker than almost all men unless you also know the standard deviations. If the standard deviation is high enough, then a significant minority of women can be stronger than the average man, and a significant minority of men can be weaker than the average woman.
As a matter of mathematical possibilities, you are correct; she cited studies sloppily; you get a point in debate club.
As a matter of reality, she's right. The distributions aren't even close to overlapping, for any measure of strength you care to name. You do know that, don't you? We don't need studies for this for the same reason we don't need RCTs on parachutes. (We have them anyway, though it's not worth my time to collate enough...)
I occasionally meet people who say something like "Oh, men are stronger on average but it's not a large difference!" Inevitably, I discover they've never played sports at any serious level (including high school), worked any physical job, or been involved in any serious violence. This says great things about society allowing people to live lives of words and the mind, and safety! But it says terrible things about the vision of reality our media surfaces.
I've played high school sports and I knew women on my water polo team who easily defeated the boys on the water polo team. My school's women's water polo team was extremely good-- not because of my contribution-- and my school's men's water polo team was pretty mediocre.
I also know quite a few athletic women who can beat their sedentary male friends at, say, arm wrestling.
Sure, at similar levels of fitness, a man is stronger than a woman. But my life experience suggests that there is a surprising amount of overlap, and some of the observable difference is cultural (for example, women are much less likely to lift weights).
Anyway, if something is true, that is even more reason not to be sloppy about it. If you're trying to prove false things, sure, you have to rely on fallacious reasoning. But if you're trying to prove true things, then proving them in a non-fallacious manner should be very easy! It speaks to whether you should trust Perry on any more complicated subject.
I looked it up and https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards/bench-press/lb suggests that a woman who's an intermediate powerlifter can be expected to outbench an untrained man, which basically matches my anecdotal observations-- most men are stronger than most women, but it's not at all uncommon to meet an unusually athletic woman who's stronger than the average man. (Of course, upper body strength is something men are particularly good at, and women who can, say, outrun men are more common.)
The vast majority of women are not intermediate powerlifters, and the ones who are are subject to strong selection effects I.e. the only women who are going to dedicate a meaningful amount of time on something that most women aren't at all interested in are going to disproportionately be the ones much stronger than average to begin with. You would have to take a random sample of women and put them on a powerlifting program, and see how many are stronger than untrained men after X months/years
Additionally, powerlifting is not a pure measure of strength. Technique plays a much larger role than most people imagine, and you are able to increase the maximum amount of weight you can lift fairly quickly without actually training with heavier weights just because you trained in that specific movement pattern.
A much more direct measure of strength is grip strength, and the differences are enormous. Even trained female athletes are equivalent to only the 25th percentile for men. And the gaps remain after controlling for lean body mass and hand size. And it's also something almost nobody trains for, certainly not enough to make even a slight dent in these numbers at all.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/#:~:text=Less%20expected%20was%20the%20gender,percentile%20of%20the%20male%20subjects.
I haven't read the book, but I found this debate between Louise Perry and Aella (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEL9zZNkRRg) illuminating. It seems like Perry's case actually hinges more on differences in sex drive and sociosexuality than physical strength. Also, both differences would only need to be true for the majority of men and women, not universal, for Perry's conclusions to apply.
"Men who get women by beating up everyone else who wants to have sex with the women tend not to have much interest in whether the women would prefer an emaciated kpop star instead."
But women who are happy with those men tend to fare better in their company than those who resent them, so the former should be expected to be more reproductively successful than the latter. Therefore, there's a selection pressure for women to be attracted to such men.
"There is a slight of hand"
Should that be "sleight of hand"? Do you mean "an insult made with a hand"? Is that a deliberate typo to catch pedantic busybodies like me?