Voyager
1yr 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
2mo ago
But the disparate impact doctrine is much harder to defend without "all races are equal", so it makes sense as a first step.
Voyager
6mo 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
6mo 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
11mo 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
1yr 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
1yr 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.
Voyager
1yr ago
It hurts Germany because it stops them from trading with Russia. But it also distances Germany from Russia, and removes leverage Russia has over Germany.
The US isn't primarily interested in Germany's prosperity - only the political effect thereof. A weakened Germany that is firmly on the side of NATO is better for the US than a prosperous Germany that peacefully trades with Russia and doesn't do anything against them.
Voyager
1yr ago
Trans and hentai are niche genres, so you have to specifically search for them to get the desired result. Searches for ordinary straight porn are scattered over dozens of less specific search terms.
This. No one searches for "straight" or "live-action". People correctly assume it's what they're getting if not specifying something else.
Voyager
1yr ago
Do you think Bertrand Russell was "dishonest" for asking people to suspend their belief?
No, merely exceedingly rigorous. He set out to prove 1+1=2, then after a lot of tedious work, he indeed proved that 1+1=2 is in fact true, settling the debate confirming what everyone already knew. He didn't actually doubt it, he merely wanted to put it on a formal foundation, and he did.
He wasn't an engineer who was worried bridges would fall if everyone computed 1+1 incorrectly, he wasn't a politician who got challenged on his fiscal plan and needed to double-check his assumptions. He was a nerd who wanted clarity for its own sake, operating at the intersection between pure math and philosophy. That's the field where you would doubt 1+1=2, not because you actually doubt it, but because you expect insight from dispelling that doubt. It's the same level of abstraction as wondering whether you're actually a brain in a vat. In politics or engineering, you can't do that.
Voyager
1yr ago
Reason and logic aren't properties of our world: They are absolute. You could say they are necessary properties of any world, there is no possible world where 2+2=5. They aren't empirically derived, they are what empiricism itself is built on.
It's true that entities can attempt to push false reason to gain social power. The answer to this is actual, better reason.
I believe what you call social constructivism is to some degree such an attempt: Delegitimizing logic and replacing it with an inconsistent system that elevates the viewpoints of specific people.
Voyager
4mo 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.
Voyager
4mo 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
In our case, informations isn't just limited, but artificially limited, i.e. omitted. The information is indeed still available, just by deriving it from context. We both know monday after sunday is next week.
You're making an argument based on information you know is incomplete, and the missing information invalidates it. Don't do that.
Voyager
1yr ago
I don't think it's signaling so much as an actual difference in world-view. If you believe in the 'colorblindness' idea of justice, all races means all, and specifically mentioning certain races is sus. If you believe that non-whites are invisible and antiracism means specifically working to improve their lot and racism against whites is impossible, it's the other way around.
Voyager
1yr ago
It's true that with an unsympathetic audience you would want to lead with other arguments. But here on The Motte, we should be more concerned with finding the truth more than convincing the audience.
And a true argument being dismissed without consideration of the facts, worse, dismissing the person who brought it up, is an unacceptable state of being. At least here, we can do better than that.
Especially as this is a meta discussion - we're not arguing whether "HBD is true", but what it and discussing it implies. And for what it's worth, I seem to have convinced my audience - you. Your previous comment suggested that bringing up HBD implies bad motivations - you going back on that is a success.
Voyager
2mo ago
How do you think the Hausa or Fulani are likely to respond if an Igbo comes up to them and says that, actually, on account of his people’s average IQ being at least one standard deviation above the Nigerian average, they ought to be in charge of the country and occupy the majority of the top jobs in Lagos and Abuja and so on? How do antisemitic white nationalists respond if you tell them that actually it’s a good thing that Jews are disproportionately in positions of power because we are, in fact, significantly smarter than them on average and that effect is exacerbated in the long tail at IQ 160+ (so we deserve it really)?
But if HBD is true, the Igbo or Jews will disproportionately occupy higher positions, and you need to explain it.
Realistically, the alternative to "we deserve it because we're smarter" is "we don't actually deserve it, we're just oppressing you", which is clearly worse for racial relations.
HBD as a fact of nature is already leading to racial tensions via disparate outcomes. The Hausa or white supremacist are already angry because they don't have positions of power. Discussing that there's a good reason isn't the problem. Denying discussion of the good reason, leaving oppression on the table as the only potential explanation, makes it worse.
Sure, a politically color-blind world, where race is considered about as relevant as hair color and no one cares about racial distributions of anything, would be preferable in practical terms, but that's not the world we live in. And in such a world, HBD could simply be a nerdy niche topic that no one except a few scientists cares about. HBD isn't the problem here.
Voyager
1yr ago
I can imagine that there are situations where a comment could look like a bad comment out of context, but in context the comment is perfectly fine.
And the reverse, like a comment that seems sensible in itself, but actually egregiously strawmans its opposition.
Voyager
1yr ago
If the speaker who brought up 2+2=4 is using standard symbols, he's unambiguously correct, so that can't be what we're talking about.
Voyager
1yr ago
Not really. I can guarantee you that Russell used 1+1=2 when calculating his daily expenses even before he formally proved it. Had he failed at his attempt to prove it, he would have gone on believing and using it. I can guarantee you he didn't scold any colleagues for using 1+1=2 without proof.
He wanted a formal proof for itself, not because one was needed.
Voyager
1yr ago
In general? Yes. In this example? Absolutely the speaker's fault. If you're using non-standard symbols, you need to denote that.
Voyager
4mo 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
4mo 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.
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:
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