guesswho
2yr ago
Would you know if it does happen? How much time do you spend hanging out with trans activists, how sure are you that your media channels would promote examples of them being reasonable and moderate to your attention? Our media isn't designed for highlighting people being moderate and reasonable in full generality, let alone on adversarial culture war issues.
As someone who does hang out in those spaces some of the time, I can say that there is nothing like consensus among the trans community and trans activists on most of this stuff, denouncing others for making the cause look bad and being extreme/cringe is common, etc. It is true that this happens more within those like-minded spaces than in press releases, I suppose; in the middle of the culture war battle with bills on the ballot in many states, there is a lot of circling the wagons and presenting a unified front. I think Christians had a much more secure position from which to denounce their own members, and used it, which is good. But I don't think it's as completely one-sided as you may think.
guesswho
2yr ago
Feel free to make a counterargument. So far no one's got past misunderstanding the math or naked incredulity.
guesswho
2yr ago
I think you're having trouble following my argument, which is reasonable because it has a lot of steps and I don't know how well I explained it.
To clarify:
The populations I'm talking about are only all cis women and all trans women.
I am not talking about athletes as a separate populations. I'm saying that all athletes are outliers from teh two general populations I'm referring to.
My point is that, if the cis women population has more extreme outliers on athletic ability than the trans women population, then most of the cis athletes will be better than most of the trans athletes.
We have, to my knowledge, done a few studies on average performance among trans women on a few simple isolated measures and tasks (like sit-ups). We have not, to my knowledge, done measures of population variance in a way that lets us compare outliers between the groups, or have we measured athletic ability on a holistic way.
The claim is not that if trans women had an advantage, they would win every competition. The claim is that if they had an advantage, they would individually have better personal win/loss ratios (or whatever is the most relevant individual metric for a given sport) than average cis women in their league/division.
We can measure that right now, regardless of how many/few trans athletes there are.
I agree there are some anecdotes of trans women winning things. There are also anecdotes of cis women winning things, so that doesn't mean much without statistics. Nor are all anecdotes representative, that's why they're anecdotes; maybe something bad was happening in that handfull of famous cases that we want policy to avoid, but that wouldn't say much about the median case which we should be concerned with.
guesswho
2yr ago
Ok, and? I would expect trans women also to not beat those teams, and I just explained why.
do you genuinely believe that males do not have a substantial physical advantage over women,
read the rest of the comment
guesswho
2yr ago
Sure, I used the Westboro Baptist Church as a cudgel against Christians back in the day, I know the drill.
But, you know. I was like 20 at the time and didn't really understand how to argue honestly and fairly, but that was a scummy and dishonest tactic when I used it back then. It still is now.
guesswho
2yr ago
???
Dd you read the whole comment? The outliers being what matters was my point.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say there.
guesswho
2yr ago
The reasoning is similar to regulations in which adults are not permitted to enter public playgrounds unless they are the parent or guardian of a child: obviously a child molester can simply ignore the regulation, but the regulation is designed to make bad actors more obvious to bystanders.
More right than you know.
Missing children are overwhelmingly runaways, actual abductions are overwhelmingly the parents, non-parent cases are overwhelmingly someone else known to the child, actual stranger abductions are overwhelmingly of teens.
Young children being abducted from a playground doesn't happen literally never, but it's so close to never that spending time thinking about it, and letting it drive larger policy issues, is both insane and counter-productive.
We talk about it because it's emotionally valent and easy to imagine. Not because it's important, not because it happens.
Same thing here. You can clearly imagine this situation in your mind, but it doesn't really happen. Not enough that we can actually say that trans bathroom rights make it more likely, not enough that it's worth warping public policy over.
Also, you know, the whole claim is mistaken to begin with, because: if trans people must use the bathroom of their birth gender, then Buck Angel has to use the women's room.
If your worry is that seeing male-looking people go into the women's room will make life more dangerous for women, then you should be in favor of letting trans people use the right bathrooms. Because way more male-looking people will go into trans bathrooms if you force all trans men to use them, than if you don't.
Freddie continually insists that criticising policies intended to be trans-inclusive is functionally the same as criticising trans people as a group. This is precisely the same kind of facile reasoning he’s so elegantly skewered in other political domains - the notion that opposition to this or that policy necessarily implies hatred of black people, or the mentally ill, or what have you.
I'm just glad he's right half the time. That's progress.
Anyway, yes, 'I have no problem with group X, I'm just really worried about (blood libel against group X), why can't we talk about that?' can be a frustrating thing for the few people who actually mean it. The problem is that 99% of the people who want to talk about the blood libel against group X don't mean that, they just want to destroy group X by any means necessary, and the antibodies society has formed against them on that basis are right and correct. It sucks if you get caught up in the inflammatory response unfairly, but, that's immune systems for you.
But, anyway: the reason that we don't talk about that stuff is because it happens once or twice across the whole nation, or it's already flatly illegal and there are already policies in place to correct it, or the other side already agrees with simple policies to address it, or it has nothing to do with the topic at hand in the first place.
If bathroom policies come up, and one side says trans women should use the women's room, and the other side says 'it should be illegal for cis men to go into the women's room', then congratulations! Both sides agree 100% on what should happen, and can start talking about optimal policies to accomplish it.
But the side that says they're worried about cis men entering women's bathrooms never sounds like they're 100% in agreement with the trans activists and ready to work together on policy proposals, funnily enough. They say they're just against something that teh trans activists are also against, but it sounds like they're trying to oppose trans women using women's restrooms at all. That's certainly what the laws they propose and pass say!
Same for the rest of it. If your point were to agree with trans-activist policies on what happens to trans women, and just wanted to shore up the edges to guard against bad cis actors, there'd be no disagreement. In reality, the people bringing up these issues are trying to curtail rights for trans women, that's why they're bothering to mention it whenever the topic of trans rights comes up. Society is not wrong to notice this coincidence, and group them on that side of the issue.
[And if you insist that Freddie needs a principled reason to treat trans discussion differently from HBD discussions along this axis, the answer is incentives. There's currently a ton of policy leverage, votes from republicans, and money for pundits in anti-trans rhetoric; there's currently very little money//power available for people making HBD claims. That's because society considers the latter a generally-closed issue, and the former is central to right-now-today culture war fights and political campaigns. So the incentive for a grifter to pretend 'I have no problem with trans rights, I just worry about males rapists' is many orders of magnitude stronger than for a grifter to pretend 'I have no problem with black people, I just worry about meritocracy being preserved' or w/e. Along with the orders of magnitude stronger incentive for anti-trans grifters making that argument dishonestly come the orders of magnitude more people actually doing it, which is why the prior probability on someone saying those things being a grifter you should ignore or condemn is also orders of magnitude higher.]
How can such a policy possibly be justified without ignoring the indisputable biological reality, consistent across time and space, that the average male person is stronger, faster and more resilient than 99% of female people?
Neither the average male nor the average female is competing in/winning at high-level sporting competitions.
Alright, let do this again:
The actual observed evidence, unless anyone can show me otherwise, is that trans women have no competitive advantage. Competitive advantage means winning more often, and if you win more often that shows up in stats. Sports stats are among the most obsessively collected and analyzed numbers in our society, no one has ever been able to show me a simple t-test showing that trans women win more often than cis women. No matter how many anecdotes you have and how strong your intuitions are, there's a straightforward statistical definition that's easy to test, and it doesn't support the idea of an advantage.
How is that possible in the face of your strong intuitions about the average man and the average woman? Well, you need to be able to picture population distributions in your head. Like this:
Take the population distribution of males and the population distribution of females, you'll see the mean for males is higher wrt most types of athletic performance. Ok.
Now:
-
Make a new distribution by picking out the ~.2% of the male population that are trans women.
-Does this population have the same mean athletic ability? I would guess not, there's plenty written on innate brain differences between cis men and trans women, no surprise if those affect the body and maturation as well. Also if you believe in social contagion, boys who are already 'soft' and not 'winning' at masculinity are more likely to fall to being trans as a good alternative. Also today lots of trans teens are taking puberty blockers and not going through the average male puberty in the first place. Strong correlation with autism which has a strong correlation with being an indoor kid. Etc. etc. etc. -Does this population have the same variance in athletic ability? Absolutely not, it's 500x smaller and has a strong selector on the people in it being similar to each other, both of which are going to shrim the variance and reduce the extremity of the outliers.
-
Now, put that population on HRT for 2+ years, which is the minimum many professional sports organizations require. Does this shrink all the bones in a way that completely reverses teh effect of male puberty? No. Does it atrophy muscles and do lots of other shit that moves the population average on athletic ability downward? Fuck yes it does. Does it also further decrease variance? Probably, since it's a huge biological intervention that moves everyone in the same direction.
-
Now, compare this tiny modified population to the population of all females.
-Is the mean for the trans women population on athletics still higher than for the female population? Who the fuck knows. We've never really measured it precisely enough to say, we know it's not the same as for the larger male population anymore.
But who cares? The average person isn't winning professional athletic competitions, the most extreme outliers in the whole population are winning them. So:
-Is the most extreme outlier for the trans women population higher than the most extreme outlier for the female population? Keep in mind that the female population is 500x larger, leading to the most extreme outliers being many standard deviations further out for the female population than the trans women population. And wherever the mean for the trans women population might be, it probably has a lower variance as well for the reasons we talked about.
So there's a lot of strong reasons why the strongest outliers in the female population would be better than the strongest outliers in the trans women population. It's pretty straightforward stuff if you think in terms of population distributions, and most importantly, the male average vs the female average tells you almost nothing useful about this question.
Now, is it still possible, after all that, that the trans woman outliers are better than the female outliers? Sure, anything's possible.
And if that were true, we'd expect one of the 20 billion anti-trans pundits to have done a simple t-test on win/loss records showing that advantage, and publicized it at some point in the last 15 years we've been arguing about this.
Absent such a test and in the face of all the reasons to expect otherwise, my money is on 'no advantage' until someone shows something more persuasive than an anecdote and intuition.
Anyway: you use this sports stuff as evidence taht trans activists are inherently claiming there's no difference between men and women, because they're claiming trans women don't have an advantage over cis women in sports. But it should be blindingly obvious that these two facts are only logically related if you assume that there's no difference between trans women and men. Which you may believe, but the activists don't! For the good reasons I've shown here, and more!
So there's really nothing to this part of your claim.
guesswho
2yr ago
Worth pointing out that there's a difference between having a term in your utility function for wanting someone to suffer, vs a term for carrying out implied social threats in order to confirm their initial validity.
Which is to say, a lot of people do things that seem irrational when they are in bad situations, because those behaviors are either evolved or socially engineered (or generally, both) as credible threats intended to avoid those bad situations in the first place. The reason we get so jealous and angry at being cheated on that we might just kill you (or otherwise cause huge harms) is not because the jealous reaction makes sense, it's a threat to avoid cheating in the first place. Same thing for lots of suicide threats/attempts, many types of vengeance and respect-based posturing, etc.
guesswho
2yr ago
I disagree with the proposed consensus.
Maybe you could argue that if a random marriage were forced to be broken up, that would on average tend to hurt the wife more.
But I would expect that the worst marriages in the country tend to hurt the wife more on average, so allowing the market to choose which marriages get broken up in the normal fashion should help wives more on average.
Going back to the "ideological turing test" point, I do think your views are more nuanced than many others who would take a no innate IQ gap stance, so I don't think that he failed as badly as you seemed to be saying.
I would hope that anyone on this board has more nuanced views than 'many others' on their side.
Not just because we're supposed to be smart and thoughtful, but because 'many others' is such an inane standard in the modern world. It could refer to a collection of a few dozen tweets from anonymous posters, it could refer to some clickbait article writer being provocative for pageviews, it could refer to some idiot politician with no knowledge of the subject repeating slogans for votes, etc.
I think if we accept those weakman versions of our opponent's arguments as the correct thing to engage with and argue against, or especially as in this case if we assign those weakman views to the entire other 'side', we're both committing an intellectual sin, and making any possibility of discussion and learning impossible and pointless.
Also, more to the point: OP wasn't just saying 'some people in the world exist who believe this', they were using that as a framing to make an empirical argument that their beliefs were correct and the other side's were wrong.
If you just want to sneer at the other side or describe why you hate them, pointing at their weakmen and how annoying/dangerous they are is fine.
If you want to argue that your beliefs are right and theirs are wrong, then you absolutely have to engage with the strongest possible arguments in favor of their beliefs, or else you've demonstrated nothing at all.
I assume many of these could be tested. (e.g. see here).
Linked article is hilarious in that it says blood lead levels haven't been higher for black people in the last ten years... so throughout the infancy and childhood of the black people currently taking IQ tests.
The fact that they take this as refuting the lead example is a pretty on-the-nose example of how competent/honest I expect the HBD side to be in citing statistics, no offense.
At any rate, yes, lead exposure in poor blacks has been falling for decades, and the IQ gap has been dropping for decades. We'll see what it looks like in another decade or two when the tested population mostly consists of people he's claiming have no differential in childhood lead exposure (though again, that's just one of many possible factors, chosen as a random example).
I would think a broader answer to some of these questions would be to look beyond America. National IQs do some of that, but not entirely (as subsaharan Africa is not exactly known for being the most functional).
Yes, but note that it was international tests that had the biggest defects in teh original Murray citations. Note how we said that China was way ahead of us on education for decades, because they tested their smartest kids and we tested everyone. Note how doing these tests in Apartheid Africa or something would have given a big white/black IQ gap, but again with pretty obvious environmental confounds. Every country has a unique history of confounds and a unique testing environment, Africa has been a target of colonialism from all sides for a long time, anyone who's not a real expert in local matters is going to have a hard time interpreting results.
guesswho
2yr ago
Racial pressures have clearly had fairly substantial effects on our society, including putting people where they are not qualified to be, even in relatively essential positions.
I do not accede to this consensus.
This is the conclusion pushed by a decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push, the opposite side of an equal decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push proclaiming the strength of diversity and so forth. Neither of the simple stories told by either side is even nuanced and complex enough to be 'true' in an empirical sense.
Has a black woman ever been promoted into a job she's incompetent at? Sure.
Has a white man ever been promoted into a job he's incompetent at? Oh FUCK yes.
We can start that list with 'every person I've ever worked for, and most presidents' and expand it from there.
Like evolution, capitalism is powerful force towards progress in the aggregate, but incredibly dumb and random at the individual level. Meritocracy is a nice idea, but it doesn't actually explain how the economy works beyond a small macro-scale correlation. The rhetorical picture painted that every hiring decision is 100% meritocratic and optimal, such that applying any new pressure on the selection process is necessarily a step away from optimality, is a pipe dream.
Has a black woman ever gotten a diversity nod when they weren't the strongest candidate on paper? Sure.
Would they have actually hired the best candidate on paper, or would they have hired someone that goes to the same yacht club as the CEO, or is tall with a firm handshake? Networking and presentation are very real things in this arena.
And I do actually believe the 'if two runners have the same speed but one has bad form, recruit the one with bad form' argument, and the 'diversity in backgrounds leads to broader problem solving across the team' argument. I expect a properly-calibrated push for diversity to lead to stronger teams.
That may certainly be countered by improperly-calibrated pushes for diversity driving things down, but I'm not convinced the hiring process in general is well-calibrated enough for that to matter, and certainly no one ever offers statistical data showing a national downward trend (or w/e) when making this argument.
guesswho
2yr ago
Progressives would say something more that variation between IQ scores and life outcomes between groups are both due to the differences in how they are treated.
In more detail:
-
The correlation between IQ and income is real, but IQ and wealth are pretty much uncorrelated. Meritocracy-enjoyers like to focus on income alone, but wealth is generally the better indicator of quality of life and economic influence and political power and etc.
-
The correlation between IQ and income is strong; according to first google result, IQ explains 21% of the variance in income. That is actually a big correlation for a social science paper, but it still leaves 79% of the variance to be explained by other things. Structural racism being one of the hundreds of those things. (probably someone can find a paper with a higher correlation than that, but it's not going to be 1. There's huge variance over other factors).
-
Yes, IQ scores are an outcome of a system that involves both heredity and environment.
I'm pretty sure this is a thing that is not infrequently believed. Look at all the talk of racist tests. Do I think everyone believes this? Certainly not, Asians have a reputation for being smart in the general population, I think. But I'm pretty sure that this is true of some people, and it is not uncommon to think that there is no IQ difference between groups.
So the charge here is an attempt to conflate different arguments in order to muddy the waters.
The first argument, where people say the tests themselves are biased, is often a reference to a historical argument. A bunch of the figures Murray cites to show blacks being dumb are from older studies that were very definitely biased against blacks in a bunch of ways, including subject selection and other basic methodological stuff; people can look up those debunkings if they want details.
The second argument, where people say that IQ tests are not neutrally measuring innate potential with 100% accuracy and this is probably affecting blacks more than other groups, is not necessarily based on current testing instruments having the same documented problems with language and cultural context and etc. that old ones have. It doesn't rule that out as a factor, but it's not all the claim is based on; lots of other factors, from worries about childhood lead exposure in black neighborhoods to an intergenerational history of being excluded from academia plus underfunded or just bad schools plus etc leading to poor test-taking skills or low enthusiasm/effort for testing to questions about methodology and subject selection to etc. etc.
There are lots of reasons a social science measure may get confounded by other variables, conservatives agree with that point so hard that they want to throw out social science altogether half the time, except the HBD narrative requires this one single measure is 100% accurate and measures only the one specific thing they want it to measure and no other factors. Basically, no to that, there's still the normal room for confounds and plenty of reason to think black people would be uniquely confounded on this measure for environmental and cultural reasons.
'Believing there's no IQ difference between groups' is an uncharitable framing. The real belief is more like 'Does not believe current levels of evidence are sufficient to confidently conclude there is an innate genetic difference in IQ between groups', plus the assumption that until that is proven the utilitarian-optimal policy is to assume the null and look for other factors behind unequal outcomes.
Gotta go make breakfast, I'll see if there's time to do more later
guesswho
2yr ago
If someone though is sincerely accusing you of being an infidel or heretic and you confirm their accusation you are accepting their frame of reference.
Yeah, that's how communication works.
Words have meaning, and have meaning in context. Just because you disagree with an opponent's worldview doesn't mean that words within the context of that worldview stop having discrete and coherent meanings.
There's a strict empirical definition of what it means to be a heretic to Christians even if I don't believe in Christianity, and there's a literally true answer to that empirical question. There's a strict empirical definition of what it means to be (for example) a racist under the utilitarian definition of racism, even if you reject the empirical racism as a politically meaningful concept, and there's a literally true answer to that empirical question.
It makes sense that you would want to 'reject the frame' if you think you can evade social sanctions thereby. That's a pretty normal thing to do, especially if you think the social sanctions are unjust.
But my point is,. just acknowledge the fact that by doing so, you are running from the truth and trying to muddy the waters. There's a true matter of fact that you're denying because you think people will react to hearing it badly/unjustly.
guesswho
2yr ago
Are those better things 'things that correlate with race so closely that my actual effects on the world are indistinguishable from a racist', by any chance?
guesswho
2yr ago
Right, that was the point of my last paragraph.
People who meet society's current definition of racist just want society to change its beliefs or norms so that they're not punished. The idea that 'racist' is an incoherent or meaningless category is primarily a rationalization to justify that effort.
Saying that the social sanctions for being racist are too extreme and should be mollified is a real position that can be argued.
Saying that people are using 'the worst argument in the world' or 'labels as superweapons' to apply those sanctions to people who don't actually deserve them under the original purpose and intent of those sanctions is a real position that can be argued.
I don't think 'that word doesn't mean anything because I don't want it to' is a real argument, here. I think it's mostly a rationalization to try to dodge the issue, and society won't accept it.
guesswho
2yr ago
I kind of feel like if someone says 'these are the stupid and absurd things you believe', 'No I don't' should be an acceptable answer, even if it's low effort.
But yes, I could have just said 'Wrong' simply instead of using more words and getting more heated. So, sorry about that.
guesswho
2yr ago
A note of advice, when I write comments like this I say 'I'm fine with calling him, you, and myself that; after all, isn't everyone?'
It gives a bit more plausible deniability.
guesswho
2yr ago
I think you're doing a huge disservice to Liberalism and Western Civilization here.
Those are real things with real, important accomplishments.
However, those accomplishments have become so universally accepted and adopted that they're now just common sense, and what we still argue about in relation to those things are the controversial parts, the parts that many people either reject or have moved past onto new projects.
Because those are the only parts of Liberalism and Western Civilization that we still talk about, you're pretending like those parts are what those movements were about, entirely.
You're correct that this sentiment is a shining beacon for those small parts we still fight about today, and a nice rallying phrase for the people who still want to die on the hill of those parts alone.
But that's not fair to those movements, which were about a lot more than that, and had real acomplishments.
guesswho
2yr ago
There are weapons below superweapon.
Calling someone a murderer if they're a murderer isn't a superweapon, it's a normal weapon.
Calling someone a murderer if they're gotten an abortion is a superweapon.
Similarly, if people are racist, calling them racist isn't a superweapon. It's a superweapon when you try to apply it to non-racists, but that doesn't mean the original term doesn't have a true and important context.
Yeah, I don't really care about gun control, I agree that people use school shootings for rhetorical purposes more than on logical grounds.
I think we waste too much time and energy and social capital on low-frequency high-salience events like this, enough so that we make things actively worse in total. Sure there are some common-sense things we should do, mostly just staying alert, but the scare mongering and warping of everyday life to accommodate the media-driven panics around these issues are really bad for our society and the people in it.
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