His stated point is about telling things that everybody is supposed to know.
No, that was absolutely not his point. I don’t understand how you could have come away thinking that- literally the entire next paragraph directly stated the exact opposite:
Graduate students in anthropology generally don’t know those facts about average brain volume in different populations. Some of those students stumbled onto claims about such differences and emailed a physical anthropologist I know, asking if those differences really exist. He tells them ‘yep’ – I’m not sure what happens next. Most likely they keep their mouths shut. Ain’t it great, living in a free country?
More generally, that was not a tightly reasoned book/paper about brainsize. That line was a throwaway point in support of a minor example (“For example, average brain size is not the same in all human populations”) on a short blog post. Arguments about the number of significant figures presented, when you don’t even disagree about the overall example or the conclusion, are about as good an example of bad disagreement as I can imagine.
No, that was absolutely not his point. I don’t understand how you could have come away thinking that- literally the entire next paragraph directly stated the exact opposite:
I don’t think that the following classes are the same: (1) Facts everyone should know. (2) Facts everyone knows.
I think the author claims that this is a (1) fact but not a (2) fact.
(a) Everybody knew that different ethnicities had different brain sizes
(b) It was an uncomfortable fact, so nobody talked about it
(c) Now nobody knows that different ethnicities have different brain sizes
No, that was absolutely not his point. I don’t understand how you could have come away thinking that- literally the entire next paragraph directly stated the exact opposite:
More generally, that was not a tightly reasoned book/paper about brainsize. That line was a throwaway point in support of a minor example (“For example, average brain size is not the same in all human populations”) on a short blog post. Arguments about the number of significant figures presented, when you don’t even disagree about the overall example or the conclusion, are about as good an example of bad disagreement as I can imagine.
I don’t think that the following classes are the same:
(1) Facts everyone should know.
(2) Facts everyone knows.
I think the author claims that this is a (1) fact but not a (2) fact.
His claim was:
(a) Everybody knew that different ethnicities had different brain sizes (b) It was an uncomfortable fact, so nobody talked about it (c) Now nobody knows that different ethnicities have different brain sizes