One can't help but notice that no one was interested in banning people from competing in sports due to biological advantage until the discussion was about trans women.
No, it only appears like it to you because previously there was a consensus matching the status quo, so no one talked about it.
Banning men from women's sports was accepted wisdom, and no one felt any need to disagree, until trans women came around.
You don't see anyone interested in banning teachers from murdering students - because it's already illegal. If Catholic Teachers For Murderism suddenly started arguing they should be allowed to kill students, there would certainly be a lot of disagreement, and not because they're catholic.
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
3mo ago
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.
I disagree. The situation is that normally ineligible people are demanding special allowance, on the basis of arguing that they have a way to nullify the impact of the property that makes them ineligible. The onus is on them to prove that it's really nullified. If we don't know either way, we play it safe.
If they win every contest they ever go to and no one can compete with them, that's probably unfair.
Doesn't need to. If the transwoman only makes 3rd place, then the woman in 4th lost the bronze medal. If that's due to an unfair advantage, that's bad and she was treated unfairly.
There are a trillion local and regional sports records for a trillion things, records get broken literally every day by cis athletes.
But not by mediocre cis athletes.
Hubbard and Thomas perform better than before, by a lot. This shows that transition gave them an advantage.
If we took away entire demographics rights because of 2 anecdotes, we'd be in a lot of trouble as a society.
This isn't a rights issue, there is no right to compete in the women's division with a male body. Cis men don't get to, and no one has a problem with it. The question is whether transwomen should get a special allowance.
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
3mo ago
I'm not sure if averages will necessarily be enlightening, because we can easily imagine a multimodal distribution. On one hand, transition doesn't necessarily lead to removal of all biological sex differences, on the other it's a medical procedure that can have negative health effects impacting athletic performance. Both seem very plausible.
If, as an exaggerated toy model, transition half of the time does nothing, half of the time completely cripples the patient, we'd observe it averaging out, but half of transwomen would easily dominate.
We don't need to look at averages when we can look at individuals. If we take a specific individual and compare their relative performance before and after, that tells us what transition did in their case. If Lia Thomas or Laurel Hubbard go from average in the male division to record-breaking in the female division, then clearly transition doesn't guarantee to nullify the sex advantage, and therefore shouldn't allow competing in the female division. It doesn't matter if even 90% of transwomen are average and some have health issues - the women competing against Thomas or Hubbard still got robbed.
Not at all. The situation is that women want to play on women's teams.
Sports divisions are based on biology, and the people in question aren't biologically female. I don't want to play semantics games about what "woman" means, that's missing the point.
Typically the onus is on the person wanting to penalize or exclude someone to provide proof, that's the concept behind 'innocent until proven guilty' and the like.
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.
I'm talking about 'unfair' in terms of 'not possible to compete against'.
You're talking about some kind of metaphysical 'fairness' where you have decided that being good at something because you were born male and then transitioned is 'unfair', but being born female and really talented at it is 'fair'.
No, fairness is a function of the game, and if the premise of the game is that male advantages aren't allowed, then any kind of male advantage is unfair. It wouldn't automatically be unfair for a male to compete against a female as long as it's in the open division, however.
They're not mediocre cis athletes. They're exceptional trans athletes.
If they were mediocre trans athletes, then the exceptional trans athletes would have broken their records by even more!
They were mediocre athletes, then they transitioned and became exceptional. This proves that they have an advantage from transition, because they're mediocre on their own talent. This is not just "personal intuition". It improved their ranking, so it gave them an advantage.
Exceptional trans athletes would be exceptional athletes who are trans, like Caitlyn Jenner.
It doesn't affect whether the women's division is a fair and competitive environment, and there's no obvious reason why we should care about it
Allowing certain mediocre athletes to perform exceptionally based on advantages that the division is supposed to exclude is not fair. Competitive is a separate matter.
And the reason we care about excluding it is the same we have women's divisions to begin with.
or, more importantly, why we should restrict people's rights based on it.
Like I told you, there are no rights being restricted, and if you disagree, you should explain which rights are restricted how, not just assert it.
Voyager
3mo ago
"That sounds like a you problem" is also the obvious rebuttal to trans people wanting different pronouns used for them. If (general) you don't respect my psychological comfort, why should I respect yours?
Voyager
7mo ago
If the chief of police responds to questions about a rise in sexual assault rates in the city and says 'women should be covering their drinks at bars' and then does nothing else to address the problem through their office, they are blaming victims instead of doing their job.
What does it mean to "do nothing else to address the problem"? What if the police is already doing (or is in the process of starting to do) everything they believe they can reasonably do given the available resources? Should they just sit it out to avoid "victim blaming" when they could give useful advice that helps them do their job and solve the problem? I mean, isn't educating people about safety part of the police's job?
Unless he's facing specific criticism and trying to deflect blame, "here's what you can do to help/protect yourself" doesn't strike me as unreasonable.
OP might be speaking from a german perspective. Germany has recently gained a large population of arab/muslim immigrants, whose views on Israel (open celebration of the Hamas attacks) have now opened a new conversation on "do we really want people like that in our country?" The issue has given a clear example of what can be bad about unrestricted immigration, disqualfying unrestricted immigration optimism and validating the points of the right.
It being about antisemitism also means that the normal oppression hierarchy doesn't apply, and that it's harder to dismiss the critics as Nazis, which helps the topic along.
Voyager
11mo ago
Unlike stabbing, choking is a continuous action. If you choke someone out, the expectation is that they will start to recover once they're released. "Choking someone to death" is generally expected to mean holding the choke until they're dead.
So if Penny choked Neely out, but released him before he died, that makes the excessive force and negligence claims much weaker. It certainly sinks any accusations of intent.
If he had punched him out, then he hit his head on the ground when falling and died, "beat him to death" could be said to be technically true, but wouldn't exactly give an audience an accurate picture of what happened.
Voyager
2mo ago
More resentment than shouting from the rooftops that it's oppression? That seems unlikely to me.
Will it immediately fix race relations? Certainly not. But I don't think it will make things worse either.
Voyager
3mo 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
3mo 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
6mo ago
Sure, there’s a difference, but is it really in anyone’s interest to have a society where official organs are first and foremost about sympathy with people who make bad decisions?
No, but even less should they be about further victimizing people who were harmed as a result of foolishly putting themselves into dangerous situations.
Grizzly man will still get first aid after being mauled, possibly while getting chewed out for his stupidity, and if there's triage, he might be last. He will not get a police dog sicced on him "because he deserves it for being dumb about dangerous animals".
A rape victim with a short skirt will not get raped again by the police (or if she does, it would be a scandal of the highest order.)
A man who was falsely accused of rape, however, will have the weight of the law come down on him. This is the proper consequence for a crime, but certainly not for foolishly putting yourself into a dangerous situation.
Voyager
2mo ago
Yes, both of these are arguments against meritocracy in practice. The former is refuted by HBD, and while the latter is not, it's also weaker, because it relies on a moral axiom that is harder to defend and less shared in the mainstream.
Hence, HBD weakens the case.
Voyager
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
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
7mo 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
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
11mo ago
Strangling is continuous, choking isn't (from a wrestling perspective).
A choke has a defined end; which is a tap, unconsciousness, or death.
No, a choke ends when it's released, which can be at any time. What happens afterwards isn't part of the choke.
A choke leads to unconsciousness somewhere between 5 and 15 seconds
That clearly didn't happen here though. Neely was fighting back for much longer.
Holding a choke for 10 minutes isn't excessive if the target is still fighting back at 9:50, just like shooting someone 14 times isn't excessive if the first 13 miss.
Voyager
3mo ago
Again, no, that wasn't my argument.
Fair enough, but I take it you understand now how @SSCReader's unfairness test measures comparative advantage, you just think comparative advantage isn't relevant?
Voyager
1yr ago
Even on this forum, I don't often see people mentioning that IQ differences shouldn't imply differences in moral worth -- which suggests to me that many people here do actually have an unarticulated, possibly subconscious, belief that this is the case.
Or perhaps people don't mention it often simply because they consider it uncontroversial, and therefore see no need to repeat it.
It's certainly the case for me - why would I waste time with repeatedly stating it, instead of getting to the meat of the discussion and the actual disagreements? These statements only added if you're worried about being misunderstood otherwise.
In general, it seems fraught to assume that if people don't talk about a certain topic, they must hold a specific position on it - especially a position that is the opposite of a societywide consensus. I rarely see people in here mention that the earth orbits the sun - this hardly suggests they secretly believe in geocentrism.
HBD isn't a policy tool. It's merely an observation about the world. Standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting are all compatible with HBD, it merely predicts that the results will be racially "disparate".
And since the disparate impact is one of the main arguments against merit-based policies, HBD is relevant as a defense thereof.
More options
Context Copy link