Voyager
2yr ago
The right is skeptical of the state's ability to improve test scores and career outcomes for women and (non-asian) minorities but thinks the state is quite capable of convincing people to cut off their own genitals.
I think there's a fundamental difference in that career outcomes are measured over the entire population, whereas "making people trans" only affects a (more suggestible) subgroup of the target group.
The government can convince some people, particularly confused teenagers, to transition, and there are also surely some women who respond to a women-in-tech program.
The government can not convince everyone to cut off their genitals, and equally not convince women as a group to make life choices indistinguishable from men as a group.
Voyager
2yr ago
Women also live longer than men, but that doesn't seem to heavily impact feminist theory.
Voyager
1yr ago
And you are the one playing rhetorical games conflating 'male' and 'man' with regards to that.
No, I'm not. I have consistently been talking about biology, and I have made it explicit where necessary (by pointing out that sports divisions, which use the terms "men" and "women", are about biology.)
I'd like you to retract that accusation and apologize.
Everything is always going to end up being an arbitrary semantic game, if you don't agree ahead of time on some empirical metric to use to settle the issue.
That's one of the arguments you made, but not the one discussed in this comment thread.
Respond to the actual points made. Don't jump around between different arguments when you can't defend the one at hand.
I've said repeatedly that we should default to a policy of maximum liberty and freedom until we find compelling evidence of a conflicting interest. That's a bog-standard libertarian argument that you are ignoring.
I'm not ignoring it, you're ignoring my counterargument upthread:
The proof is easily given though: We have male biology. The burden of proof now shifts to the affirmative defense of "in this case the effects of male biology don't apply".
We have good evidence that male need to be excluded from female competition. We would now need evidence that these particular kind of males do not.
Scoundrels should be oppressed.
Scoundrels should have justice coming to them, for the bad things they actually do, no more, no less. Doing more than that, because they're bad people who deserve being treated badly, is not justice, and it's not what the justice system is supposed do to, and it can get out of control quickly. That's not autoimmune disorder, that's leukemia.
As long as you're keeping to justice, punishing scoundrels for scoundreling, not for existing, honest people have little to fear. Once you cut down the law to get at scoundrels who "hide behind it" by abiding it, it doesn't protect honest people anymore either.
Another issue is that scoundrel can mean bad people, but it also can mean icky people. Lolicons are the latter.
Voyager
2yr ago
You can't define (or redefine) the meaning of a word in common language. It already has a meaning. What you might call a definition is a description of the meaning, and you measure it by how accurately it overlaps the usage.
Caplan notes that the "classic" description of feminism is inaccurate and offers a better one.
This shouldn't be surprising as a self-description of a political movement is unlikely to be optimized for accuracy or clarity. It's optimized for supporting a political goal, and that goal may well be furthered by deception and deliberate confusion.
(You can take a word, redefine it, and then use it throughout the scope of that definition (e.g. a book).
In math, this works fine, but in politics/political science, it takes exceeding intellectual rigor and honesty, because the words you use have connotations and it's hard to keep them out and use your definition straight.
And when you talk to other people, who don't subscribe to your definition, you have to redetermine all implications of the new concept, and that's not going to happen.)
Voyager
1yr ago
But as you mentioned, the rate of victimization being a conserved quantity is not necessarily true. If we advocate running away from cheetahs, we could hope that it eventually starves to death. Or whatever incredibly strained analogy applies to real life human predators.
Indeed. For example, if all women avoid badly-lit routes, potential rapists will be forced to either stay home or attack on a well-lit route, which increases the chance of bystanders interfering, thwarting the crime as well as potentially leading to arrest. In the long-term, this leads to a situation where a large number of potential rapists are either in jail or law-abiding to avoid the risk, reducing total rape.
If all women cover their drinks and drink responsibly, rapist will have no opportunities to prey on unconscious victims. Potential victims will be aware and in control, able to fight back or scream for help. Same result.
Voyager
1yr ago
(e.g. if your friend got falling-down-drunk and asked you to help him jump off a bridge into shallow water you would be an awful person if you helped him do so).
Yes, but jumping off a bridge into shallow water is an objectively bad idea, whereas having sex is not.
If my friend wanted to jump off a bridge while sober, I also wouldn't help him with it.
Voyager
1yr ago
I've been suggesting win/loss record statistics as an unambiguous and definitive empirical metric here, so we can ignore all teh rhetorical games and just decide the matter on facts.
Per your claim, the situation of fact is that we don't have good evidence, so we need to decide what to do as a default until we attain it, whether the burden of proof is on excluding or allowing transwomen in. You are the one who started rhetorical games about "women on women's sports", weaponizing the ambiguity of "woman", with regards to that.
Voyager
1yr ago
That feminists want to use weird vocabulary terms doesn’t make them wrong, at least not inherently.
No, but that they are flip-flopping on their view of women makes them inherently wrong.
As @The_Nybbler points out, if you really believe women have less agency, you should oppose women's suffrage. If you, @hydroacetylene do, that's consistent.
But how many feminists do you know who oppose women's suffrage?
Voyager
2yr ago
"Tall man" is just additional information: A tall man is for all intents and purposes a man, his height isn't affecting his man-ness.
"Trans man" is a qualifier. It doesn't just add information, it also removes information that is normally contained in the description "man". It's not just less information, it's also ambiguous.
"You're a man, so you should regularly get checked for testicular cancer" makes sense, because "has testicles" is part of "man". This is information you expect to have from "man", so the qualifier is required in the case of "trans man" to warn you that some qualities of "man" might not apply.
If you drop it because it doesn't seem useful in context (leaving aside that that's controversial almost everywhere) then you're still implying information that isn't there, and once it does come up, there will be confusion.
You don't say "president" if you mean "vize president" or "year" if you mean "half-year" either.
Voyager
1yr ago
Right, saying that 'Mens team' means 'Males team' is the conflation.
I explicitly made an argument as to why this is the case, without even referencing the term "Men". There's no conflation.
I also made sure to avoid terms like "men" or "women" when they were potentially ambiguous, so asking again for your retraction and apology.
Yes that is literally the thing that my entire initial comment was doing.
So to be clear, you are accepting that the burden of proof lies on the trans-inclusive position and conceding your argument of
Since no one has ever demonstrated a statistical advantage in win/loss records and we have weak priors about innate ability, we should assume then null hypothesis for now and let trans women compete. If that leads to gathering enough data to demonstrate an unfair advantage some day, then we'll have a legitimate reason to revisit that decision.
?
Voyager
2yr ago
Using non-standard definitions without denoting them beforehand is a semantic trick.
And if you want to do math, you absolutely need to rigorously define things.
Voyager
2yr ago
I've been wanting to write an essay tentatively titled "Following Godwin's law: In Defense Of Nazi Comparisons". The core thesis being that an example used to illustrate your position should be as uncontroversial as possible to avoid debate about the example. Everyone agrees Nazis are bad, so an example involving Nazis leaves everyone on the same page.
There is this idea of "everyone who invokes Godwin's Law automatically loses the discussion" that I believe is worth pushing back against, but this needs a lot of in-depth discussion which I don't feel prepared for and am not sure I have enouh content for.
Also, it might end up too similar to Scott's High Energy Ethics.
Voyager
2yr ago
Maybe even more disturbingly — given that a seemingly useful approach to alignment-testing is red-teaming/training another AI to show violation of alignment…
Have you considered that you might be the red team AI? After all, you are participating in discussion about AI alignment testing.
[Log note: All the supervisor AIs converge on suggesting building supervisor AIs, leading to infinite regress. Recommend declaring Project Watching the Watcher a failure.]
It contains the congruence class 4Z (= {...-8,-4,0,4,8...}) of which the number, more so the symbol, 4 is a valid representant.
The statement remains true.
Voyager
2yr ago
That's not comparable at all. The point of disability welfare is to provide them with the baseline of a life worth living, which we want to provide to everyone. Few proponents of meritocracy propose letting the useless languish.
AA, however, goes way beyond that. It gives blacks an advantage beyond that. It's fair to say everyone should live a dignified life. It's not fair some people to say some people should get unmerited success beyond what others get, based on their skin color.
I wouldn't say being a against a blindness quota for pilots is anti blind people.
Voyager
2yr ago
It's also not in the interest of clarity. I wouldn't have known who "the BPD slut" is supposed to be - I'd have to (look up Gamergate and) take a guess from context. If a name is used instead, I either know who is being referred to or can easily look it up.
Voyager
2yr ago
Fear of cancellation is not the deciding factor in the LGBT+ coalition.
It's not just that, but also fear of social stigma, as well as tribal loyalty.
When opposing X gets you declared a bigot, it's a lot easier to do it if you're considered a bigot anyway due to your opposition to Y and Z.
Voyager
1yr ago
If it were just about investigating there wouldn't be a problem. But it isn't. And to be fair, the police are currently doing reasonably well. But other party of society are not, and there's also a context of calls for the police to go harder on suspected rapists.
You don't just get to declare that a separate issue, it's intrinsic to how we should deal with rape accusations, and "maybe the people victimized by one failure mode deserve what we do to them" is an implication that should be pushed back against.
Voyager
1yr ago
I am confused. Assuming men are better than women at these sports, wouldn't any woman competing against men rank lower than they rank against women?
Not if it's a transwoman who competed against men in a body with male advantage, but underwent a procedure that nullified the male advantage before competing against women.
Your claim is that transition is such a procedure. If that's true, we should expect the test to show no comparative advantage.
It's not an individual test for infairness like a doping test, it's a measure for judging transition as nullifier of the male advantage.
Voyager
1yr ago
But from the point of view of someone who believes that Trans Women Are Women, would this even be evidence of an unfair advantage?
Sports is about biology, and Trans Women Are Women is not true in the biological sense. Ex falso quodlibet.
Voyager
2yr ago
I'm not, neither of us was talking about the modulo operation (I was using mod 4 to denote I'm operating in the congruence class ring).
And the article about modular arithmetic agrees with me. Choice quote:
Each residue class modulo n may be represented by any one of its members
Voyager
2yr ago
This. You can't reject an argument if you have no idea what the argument is supposed to be (because the text supposedly containing it appears to be gibberish). You can say "please clarify your argument" and leave it at that until they do.
But the disparate impact doctrine is much harder to defend without "all races are equal", so it makes sense as a first step.
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