Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
My kids are mixed race. Do they count as my race for purposes of power, or their mom's, or "mixed race", or the particular combination of races? Does it matter whether they're half-and-half or 1/32 and 31/32?
How do we define race objectively to begin with? Cluster analysis at least sounds like a good idea, if we could do it without any subjective or arbitrary assumptions, except that that turns out to be mathematically impossible.
Do all 72 genders get equal representation? That page seems like it'd have to be a parody, but it was the top 1 Google result for "how many genders are there"! This is a bit of a political hot topic already; imagine how much hotter it would be if a determination of "you folks are all the same gender" gives the subjects a tenth as much political power as "you folks can be divided into these ten genders".
In my country (and, I thought, most of them) we haven't had any titular nobility or legal castes for quite a while if ever, and right now our best definition of "class" is a set of arbitrary numbers that vary from location to location and from time period to time period, a subjective partitioning of continuous data into discrete subsets, each of which necessarily end up with members which are much more similar to members of neighboring sets than to their own sets' medians. There are no joints here to cleave at!
Sexual orientation has the same problem as gender in terms of definition (if I'm attracted to ciswomen but not transwomen, is that the same orientation as someone attracted to both? as someone attracted to only particular subsets of ciswomen?) and most of the same problems of verification (my wife is pretty good evidence I'm not gay, but am I bi? Root through my history long enough and you'll find I've never dated a man, but that's just evidence, not proof).
And how many angels do fit on the head of a pin anyway?
You’re asking for incredibly detailed objective answers to questions that largely don’t have answers yet at too fine grained a level of detail. Race for instance is difficult to define, but very clearly exists. Class is very different than money, and your average joe can tell a low-class lottery winner from an old-money upper class fellow at a glance. There are many more joints in between.
I get your point about gender divisions. Yes, you can sort of gerrymander groups here, but because power is zero-sum it doesn’t make the 10 people more powerful. It does, on a personal level, incentivize maximizing the number of low-power groups you personally are considered a member of. This is what creates the “oppression Olympics” and is a well-recognized issue by the Progs.
The answer to all of these is roughly “based on who they consider their group, and whether that group considers them a member.” We don’t have to hash any of these out mathematically because we already do so socially quite effectively.
I mean could you actually pass as an Amerindian gay underclass transman? Maybe. Are you going to? Probably not. It’s just not that serious of an issue.
We aren’t organizing members of society in a lab here. It can be worked out heuristically like every other part of society and system of societal ranking.
Again, I’m anti-prog but these just aren’t good points of opposition.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link