5 ms·

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" ca

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.

dnissley 6y ago
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. Those are just two among many.
- aerovistae 6y ago
  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.
  - dnissley 6y ago
    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?
    - Karrot_Kream 6y ago
      > 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.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      I can acknowledge the statistics. Can you acknowledge that they're often misappropriated and decontextualized for the purposes of propaganda[1]? [1] https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/1352-1390 https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/1352-1...
      - dnissley 6y ago
        Absolutely. F* those people.
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    > 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.
    - aerovistae 6y ago
      I'll just say this comment screams "deceptive reasoning" / "flawed use of sources" to me. Triggers my sensors from a mile away.
      - SamReidHughes 6y ago
        Like, there is tons of research on this. This isn't up for dispute, except for people who ignore the science.
- Daishiman 6y ago
  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.
  - dnissley 6y ago
    Not sure of your point? 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.
    - Daishiman 6y ago
      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.
    - KittenInABox 6y ago
      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.)
- humanrebar 6y ago
  A fetus is a human life. 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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- wdevanny 6y ago
  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.
  - Niten 6y ago
    > 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". https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jun/21/barack-obama/barack-obama-ad-says-women-are-paid-77-cents-dolla/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jun/21/barack-oba... > 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.
gurkendoktor 6y ago
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".
listenallyall 6y ago
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?
- aerovistae 6y ago
  Hmm. My knee-jerk response is that the example you give is not in any way denialism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_X_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_X_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrasomy_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrasomy_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentasomy_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentasomy_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome 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.
- tunesmith 6y ago
  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.
- ookdatnog 6y ago
  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 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 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?
bylfdsa 6y ago
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).

dnissley 6y ago

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. Those are just two among many.

aerovistae 6y ago
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.
- dnissley 6y ago
  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?
  - Karrot_Kream 6y ago
    > 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.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    I can acknowledge the statistics. Can you acknowledge that they're often misappropriated and decontextualized for the purposes of propaganda[1]? [1] https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/1352-1390 https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/1352-1...
    - dnissley 6y ago
      Absolutely. F* those people.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  > 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.
  - aerovistae 6y ago
    I'll just say this comment screams "deceptive reasoning" / "flawed use of sources" to me. Triggers my sensors from a mile away.
    - SamReidHughes 6y ago
      Like, there is tons of research on this. This isn't up for dispute, except for people who ignore the science.
Daishiman 6y ago
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.
- dnissley 6y ago
  Not sure of your point? 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.
  - Daishiman 6y ago
    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.
  - KittenInABox 6y ago
    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.)
humanrebar 6y ago
A fetus is a human life. 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
wdevanny 6y ago
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.
- Niten 6y ago
  > 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". https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jun/21/barack-obama/barack-obama-ad-says-women-are-paid-77-cents-dolla/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jun/21/barack-oba... > 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.

gurkendoktor 6y ago

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".

listenallyall 6y ago

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?

aerovistae 6y ago
Hmm. My knee-jerk response is that the example you give is not in any way denialism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_X_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_X_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrasomy_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrasomy_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentasomy_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentasomy_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome 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.
tunesmith 6y ago
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.
ookdatnog 6y ago
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 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 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?

bylfdsa 6y ago

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).