Maximum_Publius
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User ID: 780
Maximum_Publius
9mo ago
This all seems right. Well said and thanks for the post.
Maximum_Publius
10mo ago
I'm not sure I see what you're getting at here. I don't see why having a model that classifies people on the basis of their biology in some way conflicts with the fact that people sometimes present in a way that makes them appear to be the sex they are not.
There's no meaningful epistemological issue here. Yes, people can dress and generally display themselves in ways that will deceive others as to what their biological sex is, or just look relatively androgenous. As you say, this means that maybe 2% of the time, we are wrong about the sex of people we see on the street. But in the vast, vast majority of those cases, we could figure out their biological sex if we really needed to (say, to determine whether or not to allow someone into a sports competition limited to people of the female sex) relatively easily.
Is the implication of your model that if a biological man lets his hair grow out, such that some percentage of people confuse him for a woman, even if he hasn't actually changed what he "identifies" as, he "is" a woman in those interactions?
Maximum_Publius
11mo ago
Yeah, I certainly agree about the confusion. I'd add that it doesn't seem totally unbelievable to me that the US military would want to keep potentially powerful military tech secret given that a good chunk of those 80 years occurred during the Cold War.
Maximum_Publius
11mo ago
Yeah, I agree with this for the most part. Hoping the fact that the article claims he has been reporting to Congress means that they will get their hands on some documents/hard evidence soon.
Maximum_Publius
11mo ago
I don't think crime rate is separate from questions of "culture." I'd argue that in fact the crime rate is a reflection of culture. How often a given group of people commit crimes is a behavioral fact about that group of people just as much as any other behavioral fact that we consider "cultural" (like a tendency to listen to certain types of music, adhere to certain religions, etc.). To the extent that some group enters a society and increases that society's crime rate, I'd argue they are changing that society's culture.
As to the statistics you cite, it does seem as though I may be indulging in a bit of hysteria here, so thanks for the context.
Maximum_Publius
11mo ago
While agreeing with ymeskhout’s response, I also think part of the issue here is that there’s a whole set of truth statements which depend for their accuracy on the beliefs of a given group. “Defund the Police is a harmful movement because they want to totally remove police officers” is either true or false (assuming a given set of morals), and that in turn depends on what the DTP movement actually believes.
Maximum_Publius
11mo ago
I think your approach is clearly the right one when engaged in a particular debate with a particular person, and OP says as much. But I think ymeskhout’s post is directed more to the scenario where someone is writing about a movement or argument in general instead of engaging with a particular person. In such cases the weakmanning concern is more real.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Yeah, I think, especially with the rise of what I think are more transitioners due to cultural contagion, that the 2-5% detransition number is quite likely a severe undercount (and as far as I know, some of the low detransition numbers were collected from studies that had serious flaws).
The empirical landscape here is really complicated, both because it's a relatively new phenomenon and because the political stakes are so high for any given study that it can be hard to trust the results/interpretation from either side. So I don't think either of us will be able to convince the other by throwing studies/etc. at each other. I will mention that some European countries are pulling back from the affirming care model as more evidence comes out that the mental health gains claimed for transitioning are less certain than was claimed. See, e.g., here.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Yes, this seems like a useful distinction. Also highlights how unspecific terms like "homophobia" and "transphobia" are. People tend to use them to cover both social and metaphysical phobias, which confuses these issues. I guess most activists would argue, 1., most people who hold "metaphysical" transphobia tend to have "socally" transphobic ideas as well (probably true), and then also, 2., even if someone only holds metaphysically transphobic ideas, the expression of those ideas will lead to more hate crimes and more "social" transphobia.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
Look at the case of Paul Clement (widely considered the greatest Supreme Court advocate of our generation), who left his firm after it decided to stop taking 2nd Amendment cases after he won the Bruen case. The top firms definitely make political choices about who to represent.
Maximum_Publius
1yr ago
This seems right on one dimension. I agree that it does feel like older-style forums, without voting, seemed to have better discussions. But when I read sites like SSC that purposely hide comment scores, I find it annoying not to be able to sort by "best" and find myself missing upvotes, without really feeling the conversation is all that better without them. Maybe this is just a function of the internet getting worse in general...
Well in my ideal world you'd be able to sort by top - quality and top - agreement, but if they wanted to keep it simple they could just use the quality metric. I think that's what LessWrong does.
Completely agree about the complexity angle.
Why wouldn't it work as well here? People would downvote political enemies to suppress their ideas?
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