You make a fairly excellent point about the nature of debate and public opinion.
However, denial of scientific and historical fact is not something "anyone" can find instances of for "[insert party here]". Only on the right does that occur.
That's no longer true unfortunately. Denialism on the left about certain things is becoming rampant:
- Blacks commit far more crime than other racial groups. There are sociological explanations for this, but that is currently a fact, and one that people on the left do mental backflips to avoid acknowledging.
- Gender pay gap in most industries is small or non-existent once you adjust for experience and other factors. Not to say that there is no discrimination at all, but this is another thing people on the left can't or don't want to acknowledge.
Hmm. But what if you reframe the data? Instead of "Blacks commit more crimes than other racial groups", you're more likely to get on the path of finding constructive solutions by framing it as "People who grew up in predominantly black neighborhoods commit more crimes than those who grew up in predominantly non-black neighborhoods."
I mean, I think we've pretty well established that crime isn't genetic. It's environmental. So why frame it as if the opposite were true?
I haven't studied the demographic data at length recently, but fairly sure that your assertion does not hold for high income blacks.
I have no comment on the pay gap, I don't know much about it.
I think you're proving my point. Can you just state the fact? You can even add some qualifying statements like I did. But for christ's sake just say it first! No need to go out of your way to find a subset that is (no doubt) excepted from the average. It's politically inconvenient, yes. But it's also the truth, and one that might help explain why african americans are more likely to have interactions with police (a group I have no love for, tbh).
My own mother can't do this. She goes on about how the fbi crime statistics are probably "biased" in some way, though has no interest in finding out if or how that's the case. "It's obvious" she says. This greatly upsets me. How can we deal with problems if we can't look them straight in the face?
> I think you're proving my point. Can you just state the fact? You can even add some qualifying statements like I did. But for christ's sake just say it first! No need to go out of your way to find a subset that is (no doubt) excepted from the average. It's politically inconvenient, yes.
It's not just politically inconvenient, it's also lacking a lot of nuance. Native Americans commit crimes at an even higher rate than African Americans do. The two groups share a long history of violent disenfranchisement. Taking the statistics in isolation, yes Native Americans and African Americans do commit crime at higher than average rates. But ignoring structural issues is just as disingenuous as ignoring the data.
> But it's also the truth, and one that might help explain why african americans are more likely to have interactions with police (a group I have no love for, tbh).
Can you prove this cause and effect chain? The rate at which African Americans encounter the police is much greater than the rate at which violent crimes are committed. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I haven't seen any causality research here, but the way you've juxtaposed these claims implies that you believe there's causality here.
> I mean, I think we've pretty well established that crime isn't genetic. It's environmental.
In reality, twin studies and adoption studies have shown a large genetic component.
We don't even need twin studies to know this. It must be true unless you're a young-earth creationist. If there wasn't genetic variability in criminality, humans wouldn't have been capable of evolving to be so much less violent than other primates.
(And of course, disparities in male/female behavior is obviously biological.)
> I haven't studied the demographic data at length recently, but fairly sure that your assertion does not hold for high income blacks.
In fact, it does hold in higher income brackets too. And I'd bet whites are more violent than Asians after controlling for income, too.
The gender pay gap is a statistic that requires some nuance to evaluate and I think your analysis is reductive. Yes, if you add in controls it lessens, but why? Why do women as a population have systematically lower levels of work experience? The pay gap is an assessment of how well our society is structured to allow people of both genders economic opportunities.
Shouldn't choosing to raise a family account for the experience gap? Yes, this is an example of one way that we've structured society so that women tend to have fewer career opportunities. IMO, there is not a good reason men (as a demographic) shouldn't be spending an equal amount of time raising children.
> The gender pay gap is a statistic that requires some nuance to evaluate
If only nuance were present when politicians on the left make misleading or false statements like "women (are) paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men".
> Shouldn't choosing to raise a family account for the experience gap?
Edit: I think I misread your second paragraph. Choosing to raise a family likely does account for the existence of the experience gap, if that's what you mean; but raising a family isn't equivalent to on-the-job experience.
You are not going to find racial activists who deny the first fact. The second "fact" seems to fly over the whole "and other factors". That's the entire point of the statement.
Here are the major factors I've looked at: The previously mentioned (and most significant by far) years of experience (which for many women is affected by having children), hours spent at work, self-rated confidence, (personality trait) agreeableness, etc. etc.
The _entire_ point is that maternity, preconceived biases on women's behavior in the workplace, and expectations of women to do housework are factors that are to be contemplated and analyzed in their systemic causes.
There's a reason why in European countries parental leave is split between both parents and there's effort to make it easier for men to be caretakers.
If women are statistically likely to need to take more time off work than men due to being a parent, then I would argue this is effectively a systemic pay gap. Whether or not that needs fixing is another question but it's totally bizarre to say "if you ignore all the reasons why women are often in positions where they receive less pay that men don't have to deal with, there isn't a gap".
(To be clear: whether or not this pay gap needs addressing is its own question entirely. It makes total sense to me that a woman needs time off to recover from giving birth or from health complications during pregnancy.)
EDIT: I'd ask for valid science showing a fetus isn't alive, doesn't feel pain, etc., but the science is clear here. The question isn't in the science but in the implications. Like it or not (here... apparently not), the conservative position on abortion had a lot of hard science to back it up.
I agree for hard science, but I see more wishful thinking about society on the "left". A lot of the rhetoric about social justice implicitly hinges on the Blank Slate theory, the assumption that all (groups of) people would, in a vacuum, have exactly the same statistical outcomes. Therefore, all deviations from the average must automatically be a sign of systemic discrimination. When you look at studies, the situation is rarely as clear-cut.
The same is true with the "diversity is strength" mantra, where everyone seems to cite that one feel-good McKinsey study as if that told the full story.
This kind of naivety is not as bad as burning the planet, but at the end of the day, it's still people looking at studies and saying "can't be true".
And I think left has the opposite problem of denial of science by taking it as gospel and trying the most extreme solution possible instead of actually looking at the tradeoffs (let's be clear that the right buries their head in the sand instead of looking at solutions and tradeoffs as well).
Ironic that you would acknowledge bias then commit it yourself. Is the right, or the left, pushing to reject biological science that says XX = female, XY = male?
Clearly it takes more than a dichotomy of chromosomal options to define one's gender. You're drastically oversimplifying "biological science" in order to put forth an example of the left denying scientific fact.
More importantly though, the left's "agenda" with regards to trans people isn't about rejecting medical or scientific consensus on gender. A trans woman's doctor is still going to give her advice tailored to her specific case of being born with a male body. It's about accepting people for who they want to be, and that doesn't clash with any category of facts or knowledge. Implying otherwise is disingenuous.
Depends on if you mean gender or sex. Both sides accept that as sex, but it's more common on the right to improperly accept that they mean the corresponding gender, and it's more common on the left to properly believe that gender is not sex.
I used to think about this in exactly the same way as you do, so despite the wall of text I hold no judgment against you at all. But you are mistaken, and I'll try to explain why (although I'm not sure I'll do the topic of "the epistemology of science" justice in a rambling forum post).
I think you have some misunderstandings about the term "definition", misunderstandings that I certainly used to have. We use this term both in mathematics and the sciences, but only mathematics has true definitions (as in, a logical statement which precisely determines a set). I can define a right angle as the angle that makes all four angles of an intersection of two straight lines equal. We can show that it's a unique value, exactly 90 degrees, and neither 40 degrees nor 89.8 degrees are right angles. Only 90 degrees _exactly_ is a right angle.
By contrast, in other sciences we usually only have categories with fuzzy borders. Take for instance the term "species". Wikipedia says "A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction." But as a definition, in the mathematical sense, this just doesn't work, at all. One obvious shortcoming is that every infertile individual forms a species by itself, by this definition.
But the main shortcoming is that on casual inspection, it looks like it's defining sets of organisms: the set of rabbits, the set of horses, etc. But it is not, because these sets don't exist. Let A0 be a rabbit. A0's parents are themselves rabbits, and the parents of those rabbits were themselves rabbits, and so on. But rabbits haven't existed forever, and at some point we reach an ancestor An of our initial rabbit that we would no longer consider a rabbit: species(An) /= species(A0) (where for all X: species(X) is a set). But this did not happen through some break in continuity: at any point, we would consider an organism and its offspring as belonging to the same species. But then this individual An must be of the same species as A0: species(An) = species(A{n-1}) = ... = species(A0). We have a contradiction.
So strictly logically speaking, this definition is useless. Nevertheless, the concept of species is clearly a useful concept that helps us communicate things about the real world. How do we explain this?
When we'd program a video game which has rabbits in it, we'd probably neatly define some data structure or class named "Rabbit" which simulates the rabbit. But this is not how reality works: we just have a bunch of particles that are interacting which eachother. Crucially, from these particle interactions emerge certain patterns which we can observe. Our concept of "rabbit" is not imposed on the universe from the top down, on the contrary: our brains pick up on recurring patterns in the particle soup around us, and giving these recurring patterns names helps us communicate, and therefore, survive (this is what we call abstraction; I have another long rant on this forum about abstraction, if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24429749). But no two instances of such a pattern are identical, and exactly where one pattern ends and the next begins is somewhat arbitrary. Any strict definition of "rabbit" is doomed to fail.
Think of it as neural net classification: each object in the universe has some "rabbitness" value. The keyboard I'm typing this on has very low rabbitness. A fox has significantly higher rabbitness (it breathes, has four legs, two ears, etc) but still not very high rabbitness. Crucially, rabbitness is completely determined by some distance metric from earlier examples. So rabbitness is determined by _relative_ distance to earlier examples, not by anything absolute. We draw lines, somewhat arbitrarely, in this space and name them to help us communicate (such as: anything over .95 rabbitness is a rabbit). But these names are but tools and different names or different borders can be used in different contexts.
So back to sex/gender. Within the particle soup around us, we recognise the pattern "human" (or any sexually reproducing animal). We notice another pattern in these humans: they seem to fall apart into two categories based on their role in reproduction and physical appearance. We name these categories "male" and "female". But again, the borders are fuzzy and no hard definition can be found. Not all men have penises, there are women with beards, etc. Eventually, we discover DNA and find out that men tend to have XY chromosomes and women XX chromosomes. So do we have our hard definition of gender/sex now? Not at all. Not every person has either XX or XY. There are also "male-presenting" people with XX chromosomes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome).
So attempting to define sex based on chromosomes falls flat, and leads to absurdities. Suppose you become friends with a male-presenting XX, who does not know he has XX chromosomes. He has male genitalia, has identified as male his entire life, and has been addressed as he/him his entire life. Then he gets tested for infertility and finds out he has XX chromosomes, and tells you this. Will you now insist to your friend that he is a woman? Will you insist on adressing him with female pronouns? Does he have to change his gender on his passport?
I would find it absurd, not to mention cruel, to do so. We're in a situation here where it seems more productive to accept that we use overloaded terms to mean different things at different levels of abstraction. Sure, on a genetic level he's "female". But he's male in how society interfaces with him, which is much more relevant to him in most situations. So why not just say "he is male", and only discuss his genetic makeup if and when that is pertinent?
I read your wall of text. You make some interesting points. But I will be honest with you: I also used to think like you, in these long convoluted ways where I was trying to explain everything I saw via programming and all sorts of mathematical extrapolations, and I for a time I believed my own bit. But then I realised: it was all cp and youthful arrogance.
In a nutshell, you are nitpicking. You can always define an arbitrary scale at which nothing matters: you used time in your rabbit example very effectively to discount the usefulness of the "rabbit category". Or you used these XX males as a counter example to a rigid definition of gender. You even yourself realise that this way of thinking is completely useless as you yourself say that the category of species is extremely useful:
> So strictly logically speaking, this definition is useless. Nevertheless, the concept of species is clearly a useful concept that helps us communicate things about the real world. How do we explain this?
I can explain this for you: you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught. It is not: life is... continuous! Like the integral: each point has measure 0 but when you "add" a transfinite amount of 0 measure points you get... non-zero area! This resolves your rabbit paradox: each generation of rabbit is a point with measure 0 since its "difference" is so small with the generation before and after that it we can model it as 0...
Or second model: Rabbit_n = 0.9999 * Rabbit_{n+1}
After 100 generations: similarity is already 0.99
After 1000 generations: similarity is 0.90
After 10000 generations: similarity is 0.36
Tadaa: problem solved. So don't think so hard about this, use your common sense and realise that most people are men and most people are women and a few edge cases do not matter for practical purposes. And this is the crux of the matter: we need to make decisions. Hence we do what you very well describe: we categorise the particle soup around us and we act. So the usefulness of categories/abstractions CAN ONLY EVER BE MEASURED BY THEIR USEFULNESS FOR DECISION MAKING (sorry for caps I but want to emphasize). When I say decision making I mean almost everything: from deciding what sandwich to eat to deciding on how to prove Fermat's last theorem. If categories help you to do things, they are useful. End of story (for me, you can go write a book about this, make sure to send me a free copy).
Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.
> you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught.
Perhaps I did not express myself clearly, but my point is _the exact opposite_! Life is indeed not logical and discreet, as witnessed by the fact that vaguely defined categories are clearly tremendously useful. But these categories become misleading when one makes the mistake of identifying them with logically defined sets (ie when one thinks in logically reductive ways, the style of thinking you attribute to me). This is the mistake that I claim to identify in listenallyall's post.
They make the claim that XX _equals_ female and XY _equals_ male. To be clear, I don't actually think that the statement "men have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes" is wrong or must be qualified every time. It's "mostly right", in the same sense that Newtonian physics is "mostly right", and adequate for most discussions where you're not looking at the edge cases of sex or gender, which is most such discussions.
But when talking about transgender people (it has not been explicitly stated that this is the subject of our discussion, but given the context I think it's fair to assume that it is), we are arguing _exactly about the edge cases_ of the gender categories. listenallyall's argument boils down to: the "male" set and the "female" set are clearly, logically defined by sex chromosomes, therefore there are no edge cases, and (speculating a bit from here on about what their point is) trans people just have to suck it up and stop claiming they are what they are not.
This is an argument based on the assumption that life is logical and discreet, that the universe has some obligation to provide you with neatly defined sets to help you understand the world. My way of showing that this is wrong is by making two arguments:
1) Life is not logical and discreet, as I tried to illustrate with the rabbit example (and I think you and I are making exactly the same point there),
2) If you go along with this discreet, "logical" reasoning, you end up with absurdities (the XX-presenting male example). I think this is where my post perhaps got a bit confusing: I am _not_ arguing for this style of thinking, but I'm going along with it to show that it is unproductive. It is undeniable that if you accept listenallyall's argument, you must either insist that a male-presenting XX is actually a woman, or be logically inconsistent.
A far more useful way to see gender is like the rabbit example. You have a bunch of sex-related characteristics which are bimodally distributed, and from that you can have a "maleness" and "femaleness" value for every person. How you weight individual variables (like "broadness of shoulders") is a bit arbitrary. Sex chromosomes are just one variable among many in this equation, with no special status. In fact, they are for most discussions probably one of the least relevant factors, as evidenced by the fact that we got by with our "male" and "female" categories for millennia without even knowing about chromosomes, and in everyday life our views of sex and gender don't seem to be particularly informed by chromosomes. We can then move on and treat gender as a "duck typed" property: if someone presents as a certain gender, refers to themselves as a certain gender, etc, they are that gender.
In conservative circles, statements like "gender is a social construct" are basically a meme, a clear proof that progressives are detached from reality. To be clear, I'm not sure I fully agree with that statement either. But for _decision making_, this is clearly a more productive view than "gender = chromosomes". I have XY chromosomes (I think) and a penis, but this is for most practical purposes much less relevant than the fact that I interact with society through the "male" interface (although I appreciate that I can use urinals). Why should I be not be free to choose which interface to interact through?
The progressive argument to treat transgender people as their preferred gender is the stronger argument for any sort of practical decision making: to refuse to do so causes needless suffering in people who have done no wrong. Insisting that a trans woman is actually a man, should be treated as a man, should be referred to with male pronouns, etc, makes the lives of these people significantly worse, and makes no one else's life better. It is also no different than insisting a male-presenting XX is a woman, which I think is also obviously cruel.
The only conservative argument I've ever heard against this is based on precisely the reductive thinking you attribute to me: to insist that one variable (chromosomes) out of many is not just more heavily weighted than what is justifiable for any practical purpose, but actually _strictly defines_ gender, ignoring _all other factors_. They then throw themselves up as champions of science and reason, because clearly progressives are detached from reality. This style of thinking is both wrong (as in, it leads to inconsistencies and is based on a high school level understanding of science and epistemology) and unproductive (you don't gain anything in terms of practical decision making).
> Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.
No worries, I enjoy these kinds of discussion, otherwise I wouldn't spend any time on it. But I can't help but take it somewhat seriously too. The outcome of this debate doesn't affect me very much, but there are people whose lives will be worse if "my side" loses the debate.
However, denial of scientific and historical fact is not something "anyone" can find instances of for "[insert party here]". Only on the right does that occur.