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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.
Her argument is falsifiable (although I doubt she'd accept it).
Of the hundreds of nations and cultural groups in the world, is there a single one where the female murder rate is higher than the male rate? No? Then male violence is mostly genetic, not learned.
I don't see what that's supposed to have to do with the question at hand, can you explain?
It seems like an answer to an entirely different question, and one that most all corners of progressive space would agree with.
I've interacted with plenty of progressives/woke people/whatever who think the overrepresentation of men in STEM in essentially every society on earth is evidence of nothing other than just how pervasive and inescapable the patriarchy's brainwashing is.
I wonder if you've actually met a lot of progressives who believe that, or if you've met a lot of progressives who were responding to people who claim is it purely genetic by claiming that culture also plays a role.
Anyway.
Propensity to violence is a very atomic personality trait that, of the type that genetics is known to affect.
'Participation in STEM fields' is a hugely contingent and complex social behavior that has nothing to do with our evolutionary environment. There are certainly genetic factors that contribute to it under a given cultural regime, but it can't be a simple and direct relationship because it's not even a fact about the person themself, it's a fact about the interaction between the person and their society.
I kind of frowned at your comment above, which is plausibly innocent in spite of the fact that it reads like thinly-veiled, low-effort bait. But leading your further response with a backhanded "hmm I wonder" seems like confirmation that your initial question was insincere, and you were just probing for an angle to sneer at. This is unnecessarily antagonistic (and arguably Bulverism, too). Engage honestly, or not at all, please. (In particular, speculating on the motives of your interlocutor is something that must be handled with effort and charity, and is often better never raised at all. And yes--I understand that is what I am doing here, but it is something moderation sometimes requires.)
This specific interaction with you seems to happen every time I comment about trans stuff. I'm not sure what to do about it as I was trying to be more cautious this time.
The first comment was sincere confusion. The second comment was genuinely trying to point out an alternative explanation for their observations (the two situations look very similar to the receiver) and see if they wanted to reflect and talk about the topic more (apparently not).
Blanket statements are almost always wrong, and assigning a blanket statement to your opponent's belief-state is especially fraught. That's what OP is doing by saying 'many of my opponents believe that the difference is 100% nothing other than patriarchy brainwashing,' a type of extreme and simplistic sentiment that very few people actually believe and that it's dangerous to casually assign to them.
I don't know if I just have to accept their premise because they're making a claim about their lived experience, that seems bad for debate. Or if I'm again just being asked to use more words to rule out specific types of hostile intent, which I was trying to do more of in my comments on this particular thread but failed to apply to this individual sentence. I can try to leave zero sentences under-caveated, it's just very tiring.
Interesting. I did not originally see that this was a thread about gender revisionism, however--only when I went back to check the context of the conversation.
Well, like I said, that doesn't strike me as totally implausible. But "I'm gonna ask a question that is non-specific, without even making any clearly charitable attempt at interpreting your position as written or expressing my own views in vulnerable detail" is often used as bait, by positioning one commenter as "just asking questions," placing the entire burden of carrying the discussion on the other as they explain their own position while getting increasingly frustrated with the refusal of the other party to engage. Of course--sometimes we are completely ignorant and the best we can manage is a "huh, say more please?" But often such noncommittal engagement is just insincere.
Part of charitable engagement is accepting evidence presented in the best possible light. Sometimes the evidence is sufficiently unlikely that a different approach is warranted, but when you re-describe someone's experiences you're engaged in a sort of mind-reading argument, rather than meeting them on their own terms. This is encapsulated in part in this rule:
Like, in our non-mod-hat interaction here, imagine if instead of just pointing out to you something you didn't know, I had responded
This is a strictly inferior response to the one I wrote. Instead of giving you (I assume) new information directly correcting your false belief (as my actual response did), this response assumes you are in fact wrong about your own experiences and skips straight to describing why you are wrong by insinuating, and not even very subtly, that you are just using arguments as soldiers, rather than possessing any real understanding of the world. Slapping an "I wonder" at the front to make it speculative rather than declarative softens it some, but comes across as passive-aggressive instead, on account of the Bulverism that follows.
Well, perhaps predictably, I actually like that comment a lot (although obviously your actual use of an example was very good too).
I feel like I would have taken this as a fair challenge to reflect on how I've interpreted things I've read in the past and wrack my memory more carefully. It might have been enlightening for me (it is somewhat as I'm thinking about it now). It actually is possible that I flag too many things as the result of hostile filter bubbles or toxoplasma or etc and apply 'no true scotsman' to them too regularly. That's a good possibility to point out and ask for reflection on.
Of course, the response might be 'Everyone should always be doing that type of self-reflection all the time before posting anything, so there shouldn't be anything to gain from challenging them like this', but I think that's not a realistic standard to expect from people in general. These wouldn't be cognitive biases if they didn't get regularly overlooked by the people making them. And if we were all in perfect self-reflective equilibrium on all our beliefs all teh time and all our disagreements were only due to different utility functions or disagreements about matters of fact, there would be no mutual benefit to talking about things here instead of just reading Wikipedia.
I guess part of it is just that I really like the Socratic Method, and underestimate how much of a high-trust game that is and how hostile initiating it can look if that trust doesn't exist. I like the conversational style of a long series of short interactive back-and-forth questions and challenges a lot more than two people chucking a couple of walls of text at each other, I think it has a lot more chance of two people actually coming to know and understand each other rather than just representing themselves.
But, again, fair enough, I'll try to watch my affinity for this type of interaction and make sure I'm making myself clear and being respectful.
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Yes I have, and I don't like your implication that I'm lying.
I'm wondering if you're mistaken in your belief, and if having this possibility pointed out to you might cause you to reflect on it and re-evaluate.
The point is that these two situations (hearing someone talk about the influence of patriarchy who believes it is one piece of the causal network vs hearing someone talk about the influence of the patriarchy who believes it is the only casual factor in existence) are very similar to the listener and very easy to confuse with each other, especially if one of them happens to fit with a narrative you're already familiar with.
Very few people actually hold beliefs of the type 'this entire gigantic complex social phenomenon is 100% the result of sinister conspiratorial brainwashing across every country it appears in and has zero other causal factors affecting it'.
People are dumb, but few are that dumb.
It's much more common to believe your opponents believe something like that, than for them to actually believe it.
But it sounds like maybe I'm not allowed to question your lived experiences or whatever, regardless of the type of claim you're making about other people, so, ok.
I'm not mistaken. I'm thinking specifically of a conversation I had with a friend of mine. This friend works in software design for one of the largest public bodies in Europe and has a master's degree in physics - not an idiot. Nevertheless, when I had this conversation with him, he asserted that the idea that there were differences between male and female brains which could impact upon their career choices was "pseudoscience". When I pointed out that, if culture was the deciding factor, we would expect vastly different rates of female employment in STEM between, say, the US and Sweden - he countered that the US and Sweden were functionally indistinguishable from a cultural perspective. It's been well over a year and I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one (different language, completely different demographics, vastly different rates of religious observance, different climate, different core industries - in short, everything that you might call "culture").
I've lost count of how many times I've been called a misogynist (either in person or online) for even suggesting that the differences between male and female brains might influence men's and women's career choices, or even pointing out that these differences exist. This assertion is routinely rounded off to "oh, so you're saying men are smarter than women?", which I've never claimed, never said anything with even a passing resemblance to that claim.
None of the above should come as a surprise to you if you're familiar with the controversy surrounding James Damore's Google memo. When a well-qualified employee in one of the five biggest tech companies in the world can lose his job simply for (correctly!) asserting that there are differences between male and female brains which impact upon their career choices, I think we're far past the point where you can plausibly claim "oh no, of course woke people recognise the differences between male and female brains, they're just saying culture matters too".
How do you know? Have you conducted a poll? Conspiratorial thinking is all the rage on the left. Most woke people believe that Trump and Putin conspired to steal the 2016 election, or that the number of unarmed black Americans shot dead by the police in a calendar year is 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than the real figure. I'm not "strawmanning" or "weakmanning" when I point out that a large proportion of woke people believe that American police officers collectively kill 20 unarmed black men a week, I'm just honestly reporting their professed beliefs. The claim that it's sexist to claim that there are real differences between male and female brains is prominent enough to have its own Wikipedia page, and it's not listed anywhere on their list of topics characterised as pseudoscience. Based on all of the above and my own personal experience of frequently interacting with woke people, I wouldn't be even a little surprised if a large proportion of woke people literally uncritically endorse the exaggerated strawman narrative you outlined above. I think you're sanewashing a batch of extremely conspiratorial and unscientific beliefs sincerely held by millions of Westerners. I think this is a big motte-and-bailey argument in which the bailey is "male and female brains are exactly alike and any observed differences are solely the result of cultural conditioning" and the motte is "of course we're not denying that there are differences between male and female brains, we're just saying that culture plays a big role too".
? Maybe you meant USA and Sweden?
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Societies are different from each other. If violence were purely socialized we'd expect some to see some societies where women are more violent then men.
However, this is not what we see. In ALL societies men are more violent than women. Therefore, it must be hereditary. The chances of thousands of societies all ending up the same way by chance are essentially zero.
So, basically every trait has both both a hereditary component and an environmental component. These are not at all exclusive.
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According to the standard narrative of the patriarchy, this is merely evidence that patriarchy is that entrenched and so ubiquitous in our society that very disparate societies with very different customs and ways in very different environments all were influenced such that boys were socialized to be more violent than girls. Clearly this means that the rot goes in even deeper than even our most extreme activists were stating, and is an indication that we must double down on pushing even harder with the progress that our side believes in.
This is a highly malleable narrative too, able to easily adapt to even genetics if needed. If it turns out that there's some undeniably genetic element that influences men to be more violent than women on average and at the extremes, then that is proof of how far back the patriarchy goes, that it was able to influence our evolution to such an extent that it has left its imprint in our genes. This is not a commonly stated belief, but it certainly is a standard part of the standard patriarchy narrative, which, in practice, provides the optionality to support the notion that every pattern of difference, even genetic ones, between men and women is socialized.
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