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Do you believe false things?
You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?
Not ordinary mistaken trivia knowledge, for example when you are unsure whether US has 50 or 51 states, or on what continent is New Guinea, but when facts about the world that serve as bedrock of your beliefs that happen to be totally delusionary, at catastrophical odds to reality. Can it happen to you?
It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.
For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"
Well, it can happen not only to "brainwashed libtards" or "dumb Ayrabs".
It happened to credentialed rationalist and one of Yud's disciples.
The short xeet that went viral:
Until I was 38 I thought Men's World Cup team vs Women's World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn't figure out why they didn't just play each other
And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened:
How To Believe False Things - by request, this is an explanation of how I got 38 years old believing a match of World Cup men's team vs World Cup women's would be fair.
TL;DR: EB learned about relative strength of men and women as we all learn all things we know. From his own experience, from media, from experts. EB trusted them all, without considering that his experiences could be extremely unrepresentative, media could be completely fictional and experts could just plain lie to his face.
I'm sure we all believe false things but tbh, to have reached this conclusion, this guy must be quite underdeveloped in certain aspects of intelligence, curiosity, and yes, even rationality. I think he comes across as blaming the world for giving him a false impression and thinks the world should change to fit his neurotype, whereas he might consider holding all his beliefs more lightly and questioning his assumptions a lot more. His argument might go a bit better if he gave examples of 'experts lying to his face'; rather, all his examples are Marvel-type movies and video games, which he should never have expected to map the real world in the first place.
More that he has built his life in a way where the maximum required level of strength for any task he performs is within the range of a reasonably athletic woman. My wife is in great shape, we can move furniture together in most Craigslist pickup cases. If "moving a couch" was the most strength I ever expected to display in life, I wouldn't really have much of a test to prove one way or the other how strong my wife is relative to me. I don't know that I would even call this author to help me move, so he might be below that level of maximum displayed strength. Jean ValJean never reveals himself if he never sees that cart in the street.
Certainly if this man is as wildly unathletic as he purports himself to be, he would experience hearing from PMC women in his circle about athletic feats they've performed that he would be unable to perform, with very little context for what he might be capable of. Hell, I know a half dozen women who have qualified for the NYC Marathon which in my age range is a 3:13 Marathon, and I sure can't do that. If I never looked up the qualifying times for men, I'd just hear that they ran a marathon in three hours and change, which would also be a pretty good time for a hobbyist man, and assume that if women tried they are just as good. Similarly in rock climbing, I know lots of women who could smash everyone in this forum by grade.
Your point about marathons supports a belief I have about womens' sport leagues. I am not sure how many others share it.
Competitions are mainly about status and the purpose of sex-segregated sports is not to keep the league fair per se. It is really because society intuitively understands that regardless of the differences between men and women, female athletes should not be penalized in status. The same is true for disabled athletes, which is why we have the special olympics and other sporting events like that.
That we don't have a competitive league for unathletic men like Brodski reveals that league segregation is not really about fair play. Arguments about "not putting in the same amount of effort" are essentially my point -- Brodski's weakness is low-status but an athletic woman's weakness is high-status. It is even difficult to say it in English. We still call them "athletic women" because all the words we will use for this concept (like "weak" and "athletic") are status-laden and graded-on-a-curve.
Because the way we talk about athletes (of all sexes) uses fuzzy terms instead of objective ranks, someone like Brodski can hear about women qualifying for marathons and being strong and he will continue to be blind to physical reality.
Contrast in Chess, where the definition of Grandmaster is actually the same for men and women. However, there is a different title called Woman Grandmaster which has fewer requirements. Presumably, being a woman is also a requirement to hold the title, but I am not sure. Maybe a man who can't quite make GM can call himself a WGM. It would be an unconventional for sure. But, nobody can deny that the purpose of the WGM title is the same as any other title, which is to assign status.
This reminds me of a serious argument I've seen someone make in the ultimate Frisbee community, for why transwomen ought to play with women despite admitting that transwomen, especially ones who haven't done any sort of medical transitioning, have a physical advantage: that transwomen suffer so much bigotry in their everyday lives that we just ought to accommodate them in this one thing. It doesn't make sense from a fair sports play perspective, but from the perspective of just seeing this as a question of status, it kinda does.
Someone on the anti-trans side -- who wants trans women to play in mens leagues -- is still thinking in terms of status when it comes to competitions. For them, it's stolen valor for a trans woman to play with real women.
I admit I have trouble understanding the pro-trans mind on this issue. If I had to guess, they are biting a bullet, and sacrificing womens sports on the altar of the greater good of tolerance. The womens sports issue is just one piece of a mass-deception designed to convince society that a transwomen share the same characteristics as ciswomen. This is the only way to effect the desired change, which is to make society treat transwomen as-if they are ciswomen.
Yes, this is more or less right. I've certainly encountered endorsement of something like this in left spaces. "It kinda sucks, but the right decided to make women's sports a battlefield of the greater societal conflict about What A Woman Is. Making sure they don't win that fight is of existential importance and takes precedence over concerns about the short-tem fairness of competitive sports". Personally I wish we'd settled on advocating for "let's rename them XX League and XY League". It seems more principled. Harder to turn into a slogan, though.
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