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In the trans debate, I encountered an argument the other day which to me reads like a textbook example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis. I would like to run it by you good people to see if there's something I'm missing.
My woke, far-left sister was complaining about a male person she knows who claims to be non-binary, and yet behaves in a manner entirely consistent with certain negative stereotypes about masculinity, specifically "mansplaining", the tendency of certain men to condescendingly talk down to women, even if the women in question are more knowledgeable about the topic in question than the man himself is. She said it was abundantly obvious from his demeanour that this person was a man, not something intermediate between male and female.
I thought to myself "wow, my sister's gotten redpilled somewhere along the way" and enthusiastically agreed with her, arguing that I think the concept of "gender identity" has essentially zero predictive power, and that self-declared trans people almost invariably behave in a manner more consistent with their natal sex then their claimed gender identity. The specific example I gave was that trans women are 6 times more likely than cis women to be convicted of a crime, and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime. Which is exactly what you'd expect on the basis of their sex, not their gender identity. If trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, why do they commit crimes at the same rates as men?
My sister's rebuttal was that, even though trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, they were still socialised to be male prior to their coming out as trans, which compels them to behave in a manner consistent with the masculine norm.
This strikes me as a perfect example of the adage "if a theory explains everything, it explains nothing". If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a female person to behave, that demonstrates that she's really a woman. If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a male person to behave, that demonstrates that she was socialised into behaving like a male person against her will. Under this framing, there is literally nothing a trans woman can do which can ever point away from her "really" being a woman.
What would it take to falsify this hypothesis? Is there some piece of the puzzle that I'm missing here? I'm sincerely looking for a steelman.
While I'm just as guilty of using "true" and "false" in a colloquial manner as anyone else, at the end of the day the issue lies in the fact that Popperian notions of falsifiability simply don't work.
It's all Bayesian, you start with a prior and update on incoming evidence that either privileges or disprivileges the hypothesis, hoping that enough evidence is available to sway someone who didn't initialize with malignant priors like 1 or 0 who are literally immune to evidence.
Popper was half right in claiming things can't be proved, only disproved, the truth is that nothing can be truly either to the platonic ideal unless you adopt them as axiomatic.
I think the burden of evidence is overwhelming in this case, and thus the most likely explanation is that she's been mind-killed and won't update until the blackbox processes behind human cognition do their thing, usually by such opinions becoming unfashionable in the wider community.
As much as we can hope that sufficient evidence can sway anyone to our side, that's simply not true in observation, would that we were perfect Bayesians to whom the Aumann Agreement Theorem applied. The existence of this community is an existence proof of this assertion, a lot of well reasoned arguments with mustered evidence, and it's still usually surprising when everyone comes to an agreement at the end, and shocking when it lasts.
You're right that true and false are not binary (pun intended), but falsification absolutely does "work" in the sense that data which contradicts a theory should generally lead to a much stronger updating of priors than data which agrees with a theory.
Depends on the theory and what you mean by 'contradict'.
For theories about simple systems with a small number of axioms and moving parts, where the predictions of a model are very binary and precise, yes, it's easy to heavily contradict a theory. Put two spheres of a certain mass a certain distance form each other in an endless void, and your theory of gravity will very precisely state how quickly they should move towards each other; observe anything other than that, and with a complete absence of plausible alternative explanations for the observation, you've got a very strong update against your theory.
But in much more complex systems with millions of moving parts and interacting effects, such as a person or a society or an economy or etc., models tend to make much broader and more stochastic predictions, and there tend to be lots more plausible explanations for divergences from those predictions. And thus the updates from both affirming and 'contradictory' evidence tend to be much weaker, and more symmetric.
Of course, that's why a lot of people tend to get frustrated about studies of complex systems, and call that all 'soft science' and sneer at it. but this always seems like a type of cowardice to me; yes, studying those systems is a lot more difficult, but that doesn't mean that truths don't exist or can't ever be found, and they are often very very very important!
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Hmm, I was going to dispute this, but on reflection I think you're right, even if my exhausted brain isn't processing things very well.
The reason this works is because it's much easier to come up with a false theory that agrees with existing data than it is to come up with a true theory that appears to contradict existing data, so contradiction provides much more useful information for updating priors that confirmation does. And if your theory is consistent with all conceivable data (i.e. is unfalsifiable), then the theory doesn't have any predictive value because it is consistent with all possible outcomes.
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