> Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion.

Most people seem very capable of thinking statistically, but they don't communicate in distributions.

For two people communicating in good faith, the two statements (1) "Boys are taller than girls" and (2) "Anne is taller than Sean" don't prompt talk about how both can't be true at the same time, sexist. People communicate statistical differences as "absolutes", but when communicating in good faith, everybody knows what everybody means.

Look at stereotype research. Most stereotypes are statistically true. People communicate them "as if" absolute, but nobody's head explodes when individual examples don't "conform" to the stereotype. That's because people can think in distributions.

That's not surprising, it's how to survive in a stochastic environment.

This gap between thought and speech only becomes problematic ("makes it really hard to have any discussion") because we can rhetorically exploit the fact that most people can't explicitly communicate about distributions. Just tell them they're bigoted, and they don't know how to refute you. Yay, you win.

I am entirely capable of thinking in terms of distribution. It is people who suggest that small differences in biology would lead to large differences in outcomes that are incapable of that thinking and ignoring the large overlap between groups. Few people are protesting that marginal differences between sexes exist. It is just not relevant as a scientific explanation for gender distribution in e.g. CS.

In such discussions "most" is implied. Interpreting it as "all" is just a rhetoric trick to weaken the opponent's position.

Therein lie the dangers of categorical thinking, https://www.newyorker.com/business/james-surowiecki/categori.... Gender is probably the most loaded category there is (except for the other one). There is some movement on this front with acceptance of different gender identities but until society (in all its forms) can ditch categorical thinking and accept that all things in nature exist in distributions, I don't think there will be much progress on this - there's simply too capital to be made by perpetuating strict divisions which everybody must be crammed into in order to simplify the debate and upset everyone in the process.

Robert Sapolsky - we need you now more than ever, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky