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From: welsch@houxu.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Culture and AAP
Message-ID: <132@houxu.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 23-Jun-83 13:54:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: houxu.132
Posted: Thu Jun 23 13:54:43 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Jun-83 01:15:54 EDT
Lines: 43

Laura,

Your statement:

	I gather that your main gripe against culture is that it skews the
	distributions of people within a given career. Why is this so wrong?
	I am not talking about a caste system as they had (and to some extent
	still do have) in India and Pakistan where large groups of people were
	prevented from doing various jobs because of the nature of the class 
	of their birth -- ...

is close to the way feel, but not quite.

My main gripe against culture is when culture limits a person's
choices either by not letting the person know she has a choice
or by prejudicing the members of a culture such that it is
impossible for a person to make a particular choice. I know of
no means other than statistics to identify when a culture that
is limiting the choice.  

Simply skewing a distribution is not strong enough for me to
believe that culture is at fault. The skew should be profound as
in greater than two standard deviations. Two standard deviations
cover roughly 95% of all events, so an event not within two
standard deviations of the norm has a 5% chance of occurring. And
yes, I believe the norm is when the races/religions/sexes ... are
represented roughly in proportion.  Though, there, will always
be exceptions, like the number of male pregnancies, or Christian
Science doctors, ....

Yes it is part of my culture, upbringing, mindset, ... to
consider individuals to be more important than cultures. I
believe that to the extent that a particular culture aides
individuals to grow the culture is good. When a culture prevents
individuals from growing then it should be changed and improved.
The culture should grow. Culture is not a static well defined
object, but rather a growing, evolving set of ethics, values,
habits, rules, etc. I am advocating improvement for the
culture(s) that I am a member of, and I will work actively for
that improvement.

					Larry Welsch
					houxu!welsch