Are some guestions that make comparison largely illogical?
When a question comes up comparing people or groups, like who drives worse, old people or Asians; who are better cooks, the French or the Italians; who can parent better, men or women; who are more intelligent, science people or faith people, isn’t pretty dumb when one will never have enough evidence to totally prove or disprove the claim? Doesn’t that make any answer pretty much speculation and conjecture? You can try to compare who drives worse out of ‘A’ and ‘Z’, but what if ‘H’ actually had more accidents but because they didn’t want to pay the deductable as a group 70% never reported the accident as oppose to 65% of group ‘Z’ that does. The only evidence you have is what was reported and the actual numbers or amounts you will never know leaves your belief inaccurate. So in the end unless it is something you can control 100% of the time and you control all the elements or conditions 100% your answer is the one you most want to believe, right?
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9 Answers
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Most generalizations are based on a small misconstrued truth. If there were never any truth behind generalizations, how would insurance companies determine a premium? That being said, the truth is usually misconstrued to promote a hateful agenda. Bigots like to take cultural differences or problems caused by poverty and pretend they’re innately caused deficiencies.It’s a very ignorant attitude to take.
Some are just are asking for opinions some.
It invites generalizations about groups of people, which are usually just not true.
Definitely candidates for “under the orange tree.”
This is why any statistics offered up should be checked for quality before being bought into or quoted.
It’s similar to the current trend of filling in the corresponding bubble. They give you 4 or 5 choices, none of which might fit you, but you are forcedFORCEDforced to pick one from the list before you can go one. It’s not just on Q&A sites, but all over the internet and universities, corporates and anyone who is doing surveys online are all shifting to these types of questions: here are your choices based on what I think you should think, here… pick!
Then, even worse, they take the forced results to the administration or whatever money entity they are appealing to, and saying, “These are our very valid results with n=1000,” and making new policies and far-reaching decisions based on those results. Skewed and scary if you ask me.
I know this is a social/fun question but it does concern me that so many official decisions are being made on the same principle—“pick from my choices.”
well I think we can agree that old Asian ladies are the worst when it comes to driving, yes mom, that’d be you.
We will never have enough evidence to totally prove or disprove any claim to the satisfaction of all people. Still, that doesn’t mean we should give up on ever saying or doing anything. If a car appeared to be hurtling down a road toward you, I don’t think you’d stop to consider whether or not you could be sure your senses were not deceiving you, whether or not there really was a car coming at you, or whether or not your belief that the car hitting you would be seriously painful/injurious/deadly before leaping out of the way. So long as we remain open to the possibility that new information will overturn our old convictions, the lack of universal certainty is nothing to fear.
As for questions asking for comparisons, many begin with some piece of data and ask for opinions regarding its accuracy. They are of the form “I’ve read this, but I don’t know whether or not to trust it—can you help?” Since the uncertainty is put right up front in those questions, I don’t see how they are illogical. They’re just asking for reasons for and/or against the piece of data at issue.
And others, of course, are just meant to be silly.
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