3 ms·

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

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?
- gcc_programmer 6y ago
  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.
  - ookdatnog 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?

gcc_programmer 6y ago
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.
- ookdatnog 6y ago