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.
Voyager
1yr ago
That's not how modular arithmetic works: 2+2=4 is still true, it's just that 4=0 mod 4, so 2+2=0 is also true.
Even if your example were true, that would just be notation confusion: The statement commonly meant by 2+2=4 is always true. So if I say 2+2=4 is always true, I'm correct, and if you say 2+2=? and the answer isn't 4 you're just communicating badly by omitting relevant information about the problem statement. In honest conversation this doesn't change anything.
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.
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.
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
2mo ago
Second, many better tools already exist (standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting). HBD is a worse substitute than existing policy frameworks.
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.
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.
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
1yr 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
Women also live longer than men, but that doesn't seem to heavily impact feminist theory.
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.
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.
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
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
1yr 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.]
Voyager
1yr 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
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
11mo 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.
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
1yr ago
It’s a thoroughly uninteresting topic, unless when used to provide flimsy justifications for racist practices.
Close. It's a thoroughly uninteresting topic, unless when used to refute flimsy justifications for racist practices.
I don’t care whether or not Blacks have better or worse IQ than Whites on average — I’m dealing with people, not with averages.
Which is commendable, but only as long as you're actually dealing with people, not averages. When one is collecting statistics about racial outcomes, averages matter. If one is concluding racist discrimination from unequal outcomes while denying alternate explanations of average differences, they're likely wrong, and HBD might explain the mistake, so bringing it up corrects a mistake. HBD is only one of several possible confounders, mind, but if you actually want to make sure you're right, you need to consider all the ways you could be wrong.
And if one falsely concludes one racial group is discriminated against, and installs practices like, for example, Affirmative Action quotas while getting the target number wrong due to failing to consider average differences, that is racial discrimination, and that's why HBD can be important to prevent racial discrimination.
(And to be clear, racial discrimination is still a possibility, but you can't know that from just the statistics. You need to either ignore racial outcome statistics, or, among other confounders, consider HBD. Only when you're eliminated all possible confounders (or use an entirely differend method) you can actually conclude discrimination.)
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
10mo 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
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
But that is the point: most people make assumptions.
Assumptions about the meaning of symbols, namely that symbols carry their conventional meaning unless denoted otherwise.
This is a necessary prerequisite of communication, and messing with it is merely a failure to communicate.
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.
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