MartianNight
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User ID: 1244
Can you break that statistic down into stepfathers and stepmothers?
(Ideally without including males in the category of “stepmother” but I realize that in our society that might be too much to ask.)
MartianNight
2mo ago
we've broadly agreed to define this phenomenon in terms of ratios of genetic variation within and between populations
But then I have to press you: what exactly is this ratio, and how is it computed? How can I calculate it for various subspecies and for humans in order to verify independently that indeed, native Scandinavians and Aboriginal Australians are more closely related than any pair of subspecies of Chimpanzee?
And I have to point out that “subspecies” is a social construct too, in that the definition of subspecies is determined by biologists, who could very well define it as “subspecies are any subpopulations that have greater genetic differences than any two human subpopulations”. It doesn't tell you how to calculate genetic similarly, but it's clear that, by definition, there cannot be subspecies of Homo Sapiens, so problem solved. But of course that creates two problems:
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That's hardly carving reality at the joints: it's plausible that there are relevant distinctions that are more fine-grained than you allow. If there really is no significant difference between human subpopulations, you have to show that from first principle, not simply assert it by definition.
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Is this standard really being consistently applied? Again, think about the Chimpanzee subspecies. Are they really more differentiated than some human races? If biologists aren't using their own definition to determine subspecies in the first place, then appealing to the definition to assert there are no subspecies within the human race is meaningless.
MartianNight
6mo ago
Switzerland
The Swiss federal elections occurred last Sunday. The biggest winner was the largest nationalist/populist Swiss People's Party (SVP/UDC), which rose from 53 to 62 seats out of 200 (a 17% gain). The losers were the Greens and Green Liberals, who went from a combined 44 to 33 seats (a 25% loss). The other left wing parties remained stable (the second-largest Socialist Party gained 2 seats, but the small Labour Party lost 2).
Apart from this shift to the right, in the center, the neo-liberal FDP (think: free market capitalism with gay rights and open borders) lost seats to the conservative Christian center party literally called “The Middle”. Overall, this election strikes me as a loss for liberal left and a win for the conservative right.
None of this directly affects the composition of the federal government, due to various quirks of the Swiss political system, but it's interesting to see that even in relatively conservative Switzerland, the European trend towards rightwing nationalism is clearly visible, despite the fact that Switzerland is objectively less affected by the factors that plague most other European countries, like influx of African/Middle Eastern refugees, rise in crime, and inflation.
Election results: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/elections-2023--projected-results/48897354
Objective discussion of the results: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/eight-takeaways-from-the-2023-federal-elections-in-switzerland/48915304
The commentary from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, arguably the most reputable newspaper of record in the country, and politically aligned with the neo-liberal center-right, strikes me as extremely salty. Archive link in German, but I'll copy/paste the Google translation (Google translate doesn't seem to work well with archive.is):
Citizens want more protection and more government - difficult times are approaching for liberals: wars, crises, high health insurance premiums. Parties that promise security won on Sunday - even if it is a false one.
The great shadow that has fallen on the world has also reached Switzerland. The war in Ukraine, inflation, geopolitical instability, refugee movements and the brutal attack on Israel are reflected in the voting results. People long for security, order and a strong state.
The Swiss People's Party promised security and won. It took her a long time to focus on the right topic. The SVP strategists tried city and country, neutrality and “gender gaga” – nothing worked. Only when they radically focused the election campaign on the issues of immigration and asylum policy did success become apparent. The first voter surveys already showed that the SVP was the only party that would make significant gains. The fact that she shamelessly mixed up the immigration of qualified specialists with asylum migration, that she scandalized a “Switzerland of ten million” as well as “foreign crime” did her no harm. On the contrary: with a voter share of almost 29 percent, it achieved the second-best result in its history.
And another party benefited on Sunday from the fact that citizens have different concerns than they did four years ago. The Social Democrats had already noticed during the pandemic that they had more success with concrete material demands than with post-material zeitgeist issues. Instead of gender equality, the SP increasingly focused on the issue of loss of purchasing power. It calls for lower rents, cheaper health insurance premiums, higher pensions, reduced daycare rates and promises simple solutions: “speculators” and the state should pay.
This calculation also worked out. While social democracy in Europe is in decline almost everywhere, the SP was able to make slight gains again. It's not much, and the gain is probably largely due to dissatisfied former voters of the Greens, but the SP is also benefiting from the trend of these elections: parties that addressed specific concerns and promised the population solutions were able to increase their share of voters .
This tendency is also clearly visible in the results from the center. Their mobilization strategy, enriched with all sorts of social-populist demands, failed. The party promises fair taxes and falling health insurance costs without explaining how such additional spending will be financed. And here too, the promise of concrete solutions worked its magic. The center only won slightly, but it won - and not only that. It achieved what had been apparent since the fall of the CS [Credit Suisse, a large Swiss bank that collapsed earlier this year]: it caught up with the liberals.
No impact on the composition of the Federal Council is expected any time soon, but elections have consequences. With two almost equally strong parties in the political center, the magic formula is coming under pressure. It states that the three largest parties should each hold two seats in the state government, while the fourth largest is entitled to one seat. But what if the third and fourth strongest parties are practically the same strength?
Under party president Thierry Burkart, the FDP [liberals] wanted to overtake the SP [socialist party], but nothing came of it. The party even lost a few tenths of a percentage point compared to 2019. In times of crisis, liberalism finds it difficult to assert itself against calls for state intervention and more law and order. The belief in free borders and free markets has suffered in recent months. This is evident in the immigration debate, in the asylum debate and in the discussion about how to deal with the defunct CS. The state also had to intervene when the big bank was taken over by competitors; the market alone couldn't fix it.
The FDP was able to more or less maintain its share of the vote, but the competition from the center and the dominance of the SVP hit the party hard. In the aftermath of the elections, party president Thierry Burkart will have to answer some critical questions: Did the party focus on the right issues and was it a match for the political parties in terms of campaigning?
Because something else has been shown in this election campaign: those who polarize win. This applies not only to the SVP and the SP, but also to the center. Gerhard Pfister copied a lot from Christoph Blocher and invented a third pole party.
The real losers in these elections, however, are the eco-parties. Although climate change remains one of the population's biggest concerns, the two parties apparently do not have the confidence to develop concrete solutions. Voters have determined that the Energy Strategy 2050 has failed. Progress in climate protection can only be achieved if compromises are sought across party lines and if green dogmas such as the ban on nuclear power plants are abandoned.
The gains of the SVP and the losses of the Greens are causing the party political majority in the National Council to move more to the right again. However, that does not automatically mean more bourgeois politics. Liberalism is emerging from these elections weakened, and personal responsibility counts less than ever. The world is burning and there is great uncertainty: parties that demand something from citizens are not in demand. Those who promise security win. Even if it's a wrong one.
MartianNight
8mo ago
The problem with your reframing however, is that fighting typically implies killing others, even if you are not at risk of getting killed yourself. So if you are a humanitarian, even if you "win", you lose. In other words, the correct choice is obvious only if you don't care about other people's lives.
Imagine a different version where an enemy army is about to attack your village, intending to kill all who stand in its way, but leaving others unharmed. But the enemy isn't reckless. If the village fields a large enough army in its defense, the attack will be too risky, and the enemy will call it off. In that case, the status quo is maintained without any bloodshed.
In that case, just like in the original scenario, it would make sense for you to join the defense if all of the following hold:
- You believe some people will choose to fight regardless of the odds.
- You care enough about those people to risk your own life to help save theirs.
- You believe it's likely your army will reach the critical size necessary to avoid bloodshed.
The rest is just squabbling about probabilities: how much of a risk would you be willing to assume for a chance to save someone else's life?
(By the way, I always hate it when people declare their own point of view as obvious. Even if you are right, you aren't obviously right. And before you say “well, it might not be obvious to a dunce like you, but it's obvious to me, a very intelligent person!”: in my experience there is little correlation between people who declare themselves to be highly intelligent and who are able to demonstrate their intelligence. For example, there are plenty of people who, at least at first, insist that in the Monty Hall problem it's “obviously” pointless to switch.)
MartianNight
10mo ago
I think it's also simple demographics: FtMs are mostly anxious/depressed teenage girls, while MtFs are a mix of terminally online losers and older men with successful careers (Kaitlin Jenner is a prime example of the latter, arguably Rachel Levine too).
So for someone like Joe Biden, if you want to promote an openly transgender but still qualified person, you probably have much more MtF than FtM options.
Also I've noticed that a lot of passing FtMs, like Buck Angel for example, actually seem critical of a lot of ideas the trans movement is pushing (e.g. Angel opposes giving MtFs free access to women's bathrooms, arguing for unisex toilets instead). It's probably because as women they understand that women don't want to compete against Lia Thomas, don't want to be locked in a cell with Karen White, don't want to wax Yessica Yaniv's balls, and don't want their six-year-old daughter exposed to male genitalia in a women-only spa.
It's probably quite hard to find mature FtMs who are willing to fight for the right of MtFs to invade women's spaces, and that's the front of the battle currently.
MartianNight
10mo ago
I really doubt that has much to do with it, since crime tends to concentrate in high-population areas.
For one obvious counter example, Canada's population density is 90% lower than the US, and they have 30% fewer cops than the US, yet crime rates are significantly lower. There are other factors involved too, obviously, but I don't think there is much evidence for the thesis that the need for police officers scales by area rather than population.
MartianNight
10mo ago
So at least one person on the left (cautiously) believes him enough to honour his request to be addressed by the relevant pronouns.
I don't think you can conclude that they believe he is sincere. It seems more likely that they are willing to humor an obvious troll to cement the rule that everyone's preferred pronouns must be respected. If they make an exception in his case, it becomes clear that the rule is not absolute, which raises the question: who gets to decide who is truly trans and therefore deserving of their personal pronouns? It's better for them to insist that the rule is set in stone and accept the occasional troll as the cost of doing business.
It also reminds me of how Black Lives Matters supported Jussie Smollett even after all the evidence came out that proved his story was a hoax: “In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom.”
Does the black professor writing this actually believe Smollet is the more credible party here? I doubt it. But throwing their support behind an obvious liar just because he's black reinforces their rule that all black people must be believed over the police all the time.
MartianNight
11mo ago
If IMDB has admitted they had to weight the score of The Little Mermaid to combat review bombing and rottentomatoes is releasing a 95% with no comment, I find it hard to believe.
Again, it's not “with no comment”, RT explicitly tells you they are only including verified viewers, so that cuts out the review bombers just like on IMDB, and probably limits votes to American audiences (which are probably more supportive of race-swapping and other woke nonsense).
What I typically do when looking up ratings on IMDB is check out the distribution of votes (which I believe is not censored), ignore the highest and lowest scores, and then look at where the bulk of the histogram is. This doesn't work for movies that are extremely good or extremely bad (e.g., The Godfather, or The Room) but those are exceptions. It works great for controversial films, e.g. Cuties has an average rating of 3.6/10, and 70% of voters gave it 1/10, but the bulk is around 7/10 which I think is a fair grade.
Using the same metric, take a look at The Little Mermaid and the other remakes you mentioned:
You can see that audiences legitimately rated this one higher than all those other remakes (the bulk of the histogram is at 7/10 but 8/10 is really close with 6000 vs 5600 votes). Aladdin comes closest but cannot exactly match it. And yes, the score on IMDB is lower than on RT but that's partially because IMDB tends to be more critical overall, and because the calculation is different. Again, Aladdin has 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.9/10 on IMDB. Unless you believe RT fixed Aladdin's score too, it's fair to say that IMDB voting patterns support the fact that audiences liked The Little Mermaid at least as much as Aladdin.
MartianNight
2mo ago
That is from Wikipedia which is by default unreliable on social topics (and the cited sources seem no better at first glance, though I don't have access to the full contents) so I can't help but wonder: how much of that apparent connection is just due to the fact that wokeists like to LARP as both LGBTQ+ and autistic?
Is there any study that doesn't just rely on self-identification, and explicitly acknowledges the difference between “I'm a male who has had penetrative sex with multiple other males” and “I identify as pansexual online because heterosexuals aren't cool anymore and to be fair I do occasionally jerk off to femboy porn though all my crushes are on girls”? And the difference between nonverbal autists and people who claim to have Aspergers after scoring 17/20 on a test they found on tumblr?
Overall I suspect that the most prominent members of the LGBTQ+ community are only mildly autistic at best, if for no other reason than that it's still a social community.
In any case, I think it's a mistake to assume that the woke are natural allies to autists. Look at how much criticism an organization like Autism Speaks gets from the woke left for (very sensibly imo) saying it would be nice if autism could be cured. To the woke, the idea that autistic people might struggle in social situations is an unfair prejudice that ”neurotypicals” hold about autistic people.
And I think this tendency towards self-identification as fashion among the woke leads to less understanding, because it creates a false impression of how debilitating these conditions can be.
You say it's unfair that the police arrest you because you didn't realize the woman you met on the bus was deeply uncomfortable while you were talking at length about your favorite anime? Well, that sounds like a load of crap. My friend Ayden is a transman who suffers from self-diagnosed autism, dyslexia and OCD, and yet shhe has never been arrested for something like that, so it sounds to me like you are using your autism as an excuse for your toxic male behavior.
MartianNight
4mo ago
Nice writeup. Unfortunately not a lot of discussion yet so let me add some random comments:
And since all of the problems are novel the solutions can't come from overfitting.
Depends on what you call “novel”. A lot of the problems are based on well-known algorithms like path finding, Josephus problems, etc. And there is quite a bit of repetition of concepts between years as well. So I think LLMs and humans alike benefit from being having the previous problems in their data set.
There is also something that makes Advent of Code relatively harder for LLMs (and new competitors): on some days, the stated problem is generally much harder than the actual input file. In that case, careful inspection of the input data is required to figure out what the problem is actually asking, which I assume ChatGPT has no way of doing or even asking for.
(This year's Day 8 was an example of this, but this has happened pretty much every year.)
ChatGPT never did this: its debugging skills are completely non-existent. If it encounters an error it will simply rewrite entire functions, or more often the entire program, from scratch.
True, and it's consistent with it being a language model. It mostly sees completed code snippets (of varying quality) written by humans. How could it know how humans construct solutions like this?
It's probably the same reason why ChatGPT does so poorly at writing longform fiction. It has no idea how to construct an overarching narrative because the planning, rewriting and editing necessary is invisible to ChatGPT; it only sees the finished output.
I think coding assistants (like GitHub Copilot) will be able to fill this gap by observing how humans actually develop code.
Difficulty is very hard to gauge objectively. There's scatter plots for leaderboard fill-up time but time-to-complete isn't necessarily equivalent difficulty and the difference between this year and last year isn't big anyway (note: the scatter plots aren't to scale unfortunately).
True, and I agree with your subjective assessment that the problems aren't any harder this year, but I'd add also that the leaderboard is not really representative of the overall participant base. People on the leaderboard are the top 1% of all solvers (let alone participants), and they have their own specific strengths and weaknesses. For example, a problem that requires dynamic programming is easy for them (but hard for most casual programmers), while the top 1% still need more time on problems that require lots of of careful reading, convoluted input parsing, tricky edge cases, etc.
I don't pay for ChatGPT Plus, I only have a paid API key so I used instead a command line client, chatgpt-cli and manually ran the output programs.
Please explain the logic here because this is baffling to me. You were willing to invest the time to solve every single AoC problem this year with ChatGPT and you wrote up this summary of it, which together must have taken hours, but you couldn't fork over the $20 needed for a month-long pro subscription, which would make your results an order of magnitude more interesting? How do you value your time such that this makes sense?
MartianNight
11mo ago
This sounds like what might actually happen today if the races were swapped
Huh? You're saying if a white man murdered two black men that raped and tortured a white girl, an all-black jury would let the murderer off the hook entirely?
MartianNight
11mo ago
I think the analogy is more like maybe this is the meteor that kills the dinosaurs so the mammals can thrive.
MartianNight
6mo ago
For people unfamiliar with Dutch politics, it might be interesting to compare these polls with the political compass (the horizontal axis denotes economic left/right policy, vertical axis socially progressive/conservative policy).
(For the logos: the butterfly represents the Animal Rights Party (PvdD), the seagul Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (PVV), and the Greek building Thierry Baudet's Forum for Democracy (FvD)).
The current elections are interesting because a large number of party leaders stepped down before the elections and have been replaced with “fresh” faces. Meanwhile, the political landscape has not shifted all that much.
As you mentioned, the historically important Christian Democrat party, which was in decline for a while, has now been almost completely replaced by two new parties: New Social Contract (NSC) lead by Pieter Omtzigt (himself a former Christian Democrat) and the Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB) lead by political outsider Caroline van der Plas (whose party was at one time leading in the polls, but has gradually declined almost to insignificance for reasons that aren't quite clear to me).
Meanwhile, the Labour party (PvdA) and Green party (GL) have merged into a single moderately progressive/leftwing party (uninspiringly named PvdA/GL) lead by former Labour-party Foreign Affairs Minister and European Commissioner Frans Timmermans.
The key to understanding current Dutch politics lies with the VVD, the quintessential (neo)liberal party that supports globalism, open borders, low taxes, minimal environmental protections and less regulations for businesses. Their voters consist mainly of the “haves“ in society: wealthy people, high earners, business owners, home owners, pensioners; people who are happy with their lives, do not favor income or wealth distribution, and do not feel especially threatened by globalization or immigration.
The VVD has been part of the government for the past 13 years. The main reason for this is that despite being economically right-wing, they are quite flexible when it comes to social issues, which has allowed the party to form coalitions both with conservative Christians and with progressive liberal parties.
In terms of coalition building, based on the current polls, there is an obvious three-party coalition of PvdA/GL + NSC + VVD. While these parties cover a broad part of the spectrum, the combination isn't as far-fetched as it might seem: PvdA and VVD have governed together in the not-too-distant past (two cabinets between 1994 and 2002). Adding a third party would seem to complicate things, but on paper, Omtzigt's NSC is ideologically somewhere in between the two, so it feels like it should be possible to include them as well, though much depends on how flexible Omtzigt turns out to be: if Omtzigt insists on social conservatism, and the VVD insists on economic rightwing policy, then together they have nothing to offer PvdA/GL: the VVD's past success has hinged on yielding progressive topics to their left-wing coalition partner to secure the economic right-wing policy they really care about.
It's worth noting that historically, a coalition between PvdA and VVD has hurt PvdA much more than VVD. So it's unclear if they will dare to go for it again this time.
No other coalition seems immediately viable. It's probably best to wait for the election to see where the chips fall.
MartianNight
8mo ago
The point is that to a utilitarian rationalist who optimizes for expected utility, the mechanism shouldn't matter, only the (expected) outcome.
MartianNight
11mo ago
If she's intersex, she is definitely not a woman.
In reality, Caster Semenya is a male with 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (I had to google this), which very woke and pro-trans Wikipedia defines as (emphasis mine):
5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (5αR2D) is an autosomal recessive condition caused by a mutation in SRD5A2, a gene encoding the enzyme 5α-reductase type 2 (5αR2). The condition is rare, affects only genetic males, and has a broad spectrum.
5αR2 is expressed in specific tissues and catalyzes the transformation of testosterone (T) to 5α-dihydrotestosterone (DHT). DHT plays a key role in the process of sexual differentiation in the external genitalia and prostate during development of the male fetus. 5αR2D is a result of impaired 5αR2 activity resulting in decreased DHT levels. This defect results in a spectrum of phenotypes including overt genital ambiguity, hypospadias, and micropenis. Affected males still develop typical masculine features at puberty (deep voice, facial hair, muscle bulk) since most aspects of pubertal virilization are driven by testosterone, not DHT.
So in every way that matters for the purpose of participating in sports, Semenya is male. I don't think it's reasonable to say that a male with a disorder of sexual development becomes eligible to compete with women. It might be different for people with disorders like CAIS, but obviously Semenya is a genetic male with a male-typical body and male-typical levels of testosterone. She has never acknowledged any of those facts, and neither have you.
Semenya identifies as a woman despite being genetically and phenotypically male. That makes her transgender, by definition.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Okay, I see what you mean here, and I agree that you can become a member of a group by virtue of being recognized as such by your peers. After all, words have meaning only by virtue of people using them to refer to things; if everyone agrees you are a woman you pretty much by definition are one.
But from the fact that there doesn't need to be a rigorous definition of “woman” to be recognized as such, it doesn't follow that any definition will work, and that self-identification is enough. There is practically no noun where you can become that noun simply by self-identification. Am I an artist if I say I am? Am I a genius if I say I am? Am I a greengrocer if I say I am? Am I a nice guy just because I say I am? Am I a black person just because I say I am? Am I an American just because I say I am? All of these things come with some expectations, and although you can quibble about the details, pure self-identification doesn't work (I can't be a Chinese person born in China to Chinese parents that hasn't been in America in my life and meaningfully claim to be American).
In short, even if you cannot define what a woman is, exactly, it's clear that “anyone who identifies as a woman” isn't it.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Before I respond to the content of this comment, have you found a place where Caster Semenya admits to being male, or do you take back your earlier claim that all transwomen recognize that they are male and therefore different from ciswomen?
MartianNight
11mo ago
I guess my overall point here is that “woman” isn’t some mysterious reified category. Like many words for humans, it includes three facets: biological, behavioral, and relational.
I don't think I follow you. Yes, there is a biological definition for both "woman" and "mother", that is clear. Genderists reject biological definitions of women, though.
Then it comes to behavior: it's clear there is some behavioral definition of "mother", or rather "parent", where "mother" refers to a parent that's also a woman. What's the behavioral definition of "woman", though?
Finally, relational: I have no clue what you mean by that, neither in reference to mothers nor to women.
So please, define these terms.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Fair enough, but those aren't really appropriate dress in a lot of situations, for example if you work in any kind of office environment.
MartianNight
4mo ago
It's likely that I misunderstood something; I'm not very familiar with the various offerings. I was going by OP's own admission that they didn't pay for the top model and their version was only able to solve 7 (sub)problems vs 13(ish) for “Chat GPT Plus” which seemed to imply that the latter is a stronger problem solver.
MartianNight
5mo ago
I will likely continue to provide updates here until the chips have fallen.
Keep in mind that the previous formation period lasted over nine months. There probably won't be exciting news every week.
MartianNight
11mo ago
But that is not how I defined a woman. I said, "Suppose I had a rule that says that men must open doors for women." That rule requires men to open doors for all women, regardless of whether they want the door opened for them or not.
If being a dorble is defined only as identifying as such, and the only consequence of that identification is that non-dorbles must open doors for you, then yes, I think people would identify as dorbles only based on whether they want doors to be held open (or whether they don't want to open doors for others, of course). After all, what else could feeling like a dorble mean? If identifying as a dorble comes with no duties or privileges, it's meaningless.
What is your dorble identity anyway? How did you determine it if not by thinking about doors being held open?
So no matter how you squirm, you have defined dorble as "someone who prefers to have doors held open for them, rather than hold doors open for others", because someone of the opposite preference wouldn't identify as a dorble!
It's the same with genderism. Transwomen want to be seen as women because women are viewed and treated differently in society. What's the point of identifying as a woman if nobody treats you like one?
I am extremely skeptical that that is the reason that a dedication to logical consistency is the reason that they don't like genderism.
It's not "logical consistency", it's the erasure of biological sex as a real thing and the root cause of women's oppression.
"I also understand that simply wishing you were a (cis)woman doesn't make you a (cis)woman." No transgernder person makes that claim, because it is impossible by definition
Oh sweet summer child! I agree it's a logical contradiction, but the whole trans movement is illogical. Go read/watch some interviews with Caster Semenya and find me a single instance where she will admit to being male. It's all "everyone is different, I just happen to have high testosterone", which makes me want to scream: you have high testosterone because you are male, or rather: you don't have high testosterone levels, they are perfectly normal for a male. But again, go find me one interview where this biologically male transwoman admits to being male and/or trans. I'll wait.
Then when you can't find it, please retract your statement and admit that I was right that some transwomen refuse to admit they are not ciswomen. (It's not only Semenya, by the way, but it's a high-profile example.) This is the erasure of biological sex I was talking about.
It would be perfectly fine with me if we used "dorble", but that is not really germane to the underlying issue. because we already have a different term for people who feel that they are women, yet are not born as a member the sex able to bear children: It is "transwoman"!
Except that we also already have a word that means "adult human female" and it's "woman". So instead of relabeling "woman" to "ciswoman" why don't we keep "woman" (sex based) and "dorble" (identity based) and invent a new term for the superset, let's say "worbles"? That seems much less confusing: Caster Semenya is a dorble and a worble but not a woman.
Of course, the conflation of terms is very much intentional. By saying "transwomen are women" trans-activists intend to claim privileges are conferred to ciswomen on the basis of biological sex.
Or if you really want to use the term "woman" to include both males and females, how would you feel if, as a one-time concession, we replaced the words "woman" and "man" with "female" and "male" in all laws and rules written before 2010 we would replace man and woman with male and female? Men's bathrooms would be male bathrooms, women's sports would be female sports, women's prison wards would be female wards, your passport would contain your biological sex again (maybe next to your chosen gender identity), and so on. In this framework I would recognize that I'm male but I wouldn't identify as a man or a woman since the term is meaningless to me.
Then we can discuss whether female bathrooms should be changed to women's bathrooms, and so on. Do you think that would be acceptable to trans activists? Or do you agree it's likely they would fight tooth and nail to get male women recognized as "females" so they can claim all the female privileges by default?
I hire an alien to be the head of Women's Services at my university. [..]
To summarize, what you're arguing for here is to use different definitions of "woman" in different contexts. This is similar to my proposal of separating male/female from man/woman except you make the meaning of the word variable instead of using separate words.
I'm not philosophically opposed to this (many words have different meanings depending on context) but I would start from the assumption that "woman" means "female" and any case to include males would have to be made separately. So no males in women's sports or women's spa's just because those males self-identify as women.
Finally, we provide a safe space for "women" to contemplate the oppressions of the patriarchy. Because of the nature of that patriarchy, for the purposes of admission to that space, we define "woman" thusly: "a 'woman' is anyone who identifies as a woman."
This safe space of course already exists: it's every single college campus in America.
In this model, will there also be a safe space for females who want to contemplate their oppression at the hands of males, which is actually much more common than gender-based oppression? Or do they get banned, harassed and assaulted everywhere they go, as is the case for TERFs today?
Are females allowed to have female only spaces such as spas?
Are lesbian females allowed to have female-only dating apps?
Unless the answer is yes, you are just advocating for more oppression of the female sex.
Would have to disclose/prove to the people involved that he is indeed Satoshi, which is hard to do.
On the contrary, Bitcoin makes proving ownership trivial: Satoshi only needs to disclose his public key (which can be verified using public information in the blockchain) and then sign a random challenge string provided by the lenders to prove that he has the corresponding private key. This proves that he has the ability to spend those coins.
(Technically, this doesn't prove he is Satoshi, original author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, per se, but rather that he has the cryptographic keys needed to spend millions worth of Bitcoin, but the latter is what the lender really cares about anyway.)
MartianNight
10mo ago
Your use of the word "luddite" suggests that you have a negative emotional valence towards the Actors' Guild strike.
It's unfortunate that Luddite has a negative connotation, but it seems useful to have a term to refer to people who are concerned about AI taking their jobs, to the point that they're willing to go on strike to enact a ban on AI. Can you suggest a more neutral term you would prefer?
So when is Florida banning jelly beans? And calorie-rich sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup? And sugary breakfast cereals? And cancer-inducing smoked meats? Tobacco? Alcohol?
Why should all those foods that we know are unhealthy and that consumers actually do overindulge in to the detriment of their health be allowed, but a meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier and is not even widely available needs to be banned?
I don't think “probably” is right; which nutrients and vitamins are essential is pretty well known, so the chance that lab-grown meat is unhealthy in some unpredictable way is pretty low. Especially since nobody suggests you switch to a meat-only diet; the idea is that you eat this in moderation, along with fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables, just like the recommendation is for real meat.
Still, if you personally don't want to take the risk, you would still be welcome to stuff your face with jellybeans, vodka and tobacco because you believe that's the healthier alternative. That's hardly an argument for a ban.
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