6 ms·

> Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth I disagree. The statement

by muglug 5y ago

> Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth I disagree. The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either). By banning those sorts of statements you’re not banning the truth, you’re just quieting assholes.

pikma 5y ago
Is the reason it's sexist because it can be interpreted as "women are less capable than men"? You would say this other statement is false and sexist, correct?
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  I know you didn't ask me, but I just wanted to say that language is nothing without context. "Less capable" is very subjective and context-dependent, so without more specifics it can't really be "true" or "false" except very colloquially. As for "sexist" - in a void with no context, it's apparently sexist, but that doesn't mean the sentence can't exist in a non-sexist context.
- CrimsonCape 5y ago
  "Women are less capable than men" is sexist; "The majority of women are physically and mentally incapable of running a Fortune 500 company" is a neutral hypothesis that can be asserted with anecdotal evidence, sociological studies, and if modern corporate leadership wasn't silent on the issue, there would also likely be firsthand testimony. <--- heresy But on the other hand, you could likely present evidence to the contrary. The comparison of the opposing evidence, and the careful scrutiny of the facts that provide that evidence, is the most truthful approach to the question. For the record, the commenter above who casually states that "most women can't run Fortune 500 companies because most men can't either" <---THAT is sexist
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    Please try not to misquote people you disagree with. The GP did not say most women can't because most men can't - they said most women can't and most men can't. I.e. most women can't because most people can't, which seems uncontroversial. It's a very hard job. Unrelated: I don't understand what you mean by a "neutral" hypothesis. The hypothesis can be made for neutral or non-neutral goals, by a neutral or non-neutral person, but that's all true of any hypothesis.
  - sithadmin 5y ago
    You're giving too little attention to social context. The latter statement will rarely be interpreted neutrally when uttered in societies where statements denigrating females' capabilities has been (or continues to be) a cultural norm.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    > For the record, the commenter above who casually states that "most women can't run Fortune 500 companies because most men can't either" <---THAT is sexist I think you read your biases into that, too: > The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either). I read the "very few men are capable either" as "the problem is that running a F500 is hard, not being a women". There's also no "because" in there - they don't imply that women can't because men are mostly unable, they just say that it's similarly hard for men.
- jameshart 5y ago
  Human discourse does not consist of people stating neutral, truthful propositions in isolation. We are not Vulcans. When someone chooses to say a particular sentence is as much a part of communication as what that sentence says. So when someone says "very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively," they aren't merely blurting out a fact at random, they are trying to say something. And depending on the context, and who they are, and who they are speaking to, the thing they are trying to say can be different. In many cases, if someone brings up that particular fact in conversation, you would reasonably conclude that they are submitting it in support of the idea that it is unsurprising that few women are CEOs of F500 companies; that they believe that is natural and reasonable. But in other circumstances, say in a profile of a successful female F500 CEO, that same assertion could be being offered in support of the thesis that the subject of the profile is an exceptional individual, deserving of success. Or, as in muglug's comment to which you're replying, it could be being used to illustrate a point about the fact that very few people are capable of running a fortune 500. So this is the thing: a fact is neutral. But the facts that you introduce into a conversation are always selected to support a position. And a position can certainly be sexist.
  - me_again 5y ago
    > We are not Vulcans. Exactly. Graham gives the impression that he thinks conversations are a set of automata exchanging logical propositions. Rather makes me wonder if he's ever met a human.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > Human discourse does not consist of people stating neutral, truthful propositions in isolation. We are not Vulcans Yay. But also ... there's a sort of idiot's veto over language. If people who are racist say "X", and I also say "X", does that make me racist? Well, no. But as a participant in a society, as a participant in a conversation, I need to be aware of the context. If racist people are saying "X", I should probably take advantage of the insane level of linguistic flexibility in most human languages and find a different way to make the point I was trying to make. Some will protest that this "capitulation" ("I refuse to stop saying X just some bad people are saying it too") allows the bad people to control our language. I say that if you're not a bad person (whatever that might mean), you can almost certainly find alternative ways of speaking that avoid us wasting time debating whether you're a bad person.
Beltalowda 5y ago
These kind of "x-ist" statements are fine for things that are overtly x-ist. The problems happen when things are more murky; for example when you start exploring the reasons why there are few women running Fortune-500 companies. If you start shutting down things with "it's x-ist!" then you may never find out the reasons (and by extension, how to do something about them!) "It's x-ist" is an assertion, as well as an accusations, and not an argument. It's usually much better replaced with "I think this will be bad for group x, because reason y". It has the same effect, and is actually constructive.
- muglug 5y ago
  Lots of people have studied the question of why women aren’t running Fortune 500 companies, and unsurprisingly the answers have a lot to do with sexism. The average age of a Fortune 500 CEI is 58. Talk to any female executive of that age and they’ll have many examples of opportunities they missed out on because of their gender. My mum was told explicitly that she wouldn’t have got the job she was in if they had known she had a baby at home, because it was a “high-pressure job”. They offered to reassign her, she refused, and she didn’t tell her colleagues about her husband or kids for another year, for fear of having similar opportunities denied.
happytoexplain 5y ago
Yeah, the quote is a very fundamental breakdown of logic. It's common among Facebook arguments, but very strange to see written by somebody at least ostensibly interested in rationality. I suppose he's playing a dishonest semantic game (I think he's smart enough to know that the world is more complex than that). "13/52" is, I think, one of the most outstanding examples of this fallacy ("13% of American are black but they commit 52% of murders [or violent crime? I forget]"). Assuming the numbers are true, it can be stated primarily for the purpose of information, as in an unbiased demographic analysis of crime; or it can be stated primarily for the purpose of expressing racial hatred, as in 99% (99.9%? 99.999%?) of cases on social media. The belief that something being true means it can not be used for evil (or even just in an unnecessarily provocative context) is categorically not rational. Even propaganda, which many people correlate with "lies", is actually often factually true, or at least subjectively true by argument. Cherry-picked truth is perhaps the most effective propaganda, because it invites people to feel justified in ignoring the big picture and embracing their negative emotions that are tangential to that "truth".
subjectsigma 5y ago
THIS is exactly what some are afraid of. People taking statements, interpreting them with their own mental models, and coming to the conclusion the person who made that statement is x-ist. Your own comment literally provides multiple interpretations of that statement and you chose the "sexist" one to be the default!?
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  "Implicitly sexist" does not mean "sexist by default". "Implicitly" is a reasonable qualifier here. You would essentially have to be a robot to make this statement without purposefully implying that women are less capable of running a Fortune 500 company. In English, "very few" implies "very much fewer than the alternative", but in strict logical construction, it does not, hence the parent's point and my remark about being a robot.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    > You would essentially have to be a robot to make this statement without purposefully implying that women are less capable of running a Fortune 500 company. I highly disagree. Imagine this statement in an example context: A: Most fortune 500 companies are lead by men, we need more women at the top. B: Very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively. B could either be sexist and imply that fewer women than men are capable, or they could simply state that selecting a random women to promote just because she's a women won't help the situation. The reading you have depends a lot on your biases, given that you have no information about B at all. If you need another example, you can replace "women" with any other subject in this sentence - even fortune 500 CEO's: > Very few Fortune 500 CEOs are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively. I bet you can still find people agreeing with that, but it reads a lot less like it implies that a random person not included in the subject group is more capable.
  - subjectsigma 5y ago
    > You would essentially have to be a robot to make this statement without purposefully implying that women are less capable of running a Fortune 500 company. It depends on context. You and I are not robots, so we see an individual sentence by itself and add context. But this isn't good. What if the follow is "And that needs to change. Which is why I'm proud to announce our first scholarship program for female entrepreneurs!" Do you still think the statement is sexist? Do you think the person making the statement is sexist?
koonsolo 5y ago
I guess the original article didn't take misleading statements into account. Because your statement might indeed be factually true, but very misleading. What about "Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true, when the statement is clear in its intentions and not misleading?". Would you agree with that?
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  An excellent point - see my reply to the parent about "13/52" for my personal opinion. Edit: Note that my post implies that racial hatred/propaganda is a subset of racism, which you may or may not agree with semantically.
Eli_Beeblebrox 5y ago

by muglug 5y ago

pikma 5y ago

Is the reason it's sexist because it can be interpreted as "women are less capable than men"? You would say this other statement is false and sexist, correct?

happytoexplain 5y ago
I know you didn't ask me, but I just wanted to say that language is nothing without context. "Less capable" is very subjective and context-dependent, so without more specifics it can't really be "true" or "false" except very colloquially. As for "sexist" - in a void with no context, it's apparently sexist, but that doesn't mean the sentence can't exist in a non-sexist context.
CrimsonCape 5y ago
"Women are less capable than men" is sexist; "The majority of women are physically and mentally incapable of running a Fortune 500 company" is a neutral hypothesis that can be asserted with anecdotal evidence, sociological studies, and if modern corporate leadership wasn't silent on the issue, there would also likely be firsthand testimony. <--- heresy But on the other hand, you could likely present evidence to the contrary. The comparison of the opposing evidence, and the careful scrutiny of the facts that provide that evidence, is the most truthful approach to the question. For the record, the commenter above who casually states that "most women can't run Fortune 500 companies because most men can't either" <---THAT is sexist
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  Please try not to misquote people you disagree with. The GP did not say most women can't because most men can't - they said most women can't and most men can't. I.e. most women can't because most people can't, which seems uncontroversial. It's a very hard job. Unrelated: I don't understand what you mean by a "neutral" hypothesis. The hypothesis can be made for neutral or non-neutral goals, by a neutral or non-neutral person, but that's all true of any hypothesis.
- sithadmin 5y ago
  You're giving too little attention to social context. The latter statement will rarely be interpreted neutrally when uttered in societies where statements denigrating females' capabilities has been (or continues to be) a cultural norm.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  > For the record, the commenter above who casually states that "most women can't run Fortune 500 companies because most men can't either" <---THAT is sexist I think you read your biases into that, too: > The statement “very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively” is factually true, but implicitly sexist (very few men are capable either). I read the "very few men are capable either" as "the problem is that running a F500 is hard, not being a women". There's also no "because" in there - they don't imply that women can't because men are mostly unable, they just say that it's similarly hard for men.
jameshart 5y ago
Human discourse does not consist of people stating neutral, truthful propositions in isolation. We are not Vulcans. When someone chooses to say a particular sentence is as much a part of communication as what that sentence says. So when someone says "very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively," they aren't merely blurting out a fact at random, they are trying to say something. And depending on the context, and who they are, and who they are speaking to, the thing they are trying to say can be different. In many cases, if someone brings up that particular fact in conversation, you would reasonably conclude that they are submitting it in support of the idea that it is unsurprising that few women are CEOs of F500 companies; that they believe that is natural and reasonable. But in other circumstances, say in a profile of a successful female F500 CEO, that same assertion could be being offered in support of the thesis that the subject of the profile is an exceptional individual, deserving of success. Or, as in muglug's comment to which you're replying, it could be being used to illustrate a point about the fact that very few people are capable of running a fortune 500. So this is the thing: a fact is neutral. But the facts that you introduce into a conversation are always selected to support a position. And a position can certainly be sexist.
- me_again 5y ago
  > We are not Vulcans. Exactly. Graham gives the impression that he thinks conversations are a set of automata exchanging logical propositions. Rather makes me wonder if he's ever met a human.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > Human discourse does not consist of people stating neutral, truthful propositions in isolation. We are not Vulcans Yay. But also ... there's a sort of idiot's veto over language. If people who are racist say "X", and I also say "X", does that make me racist? Well, no. But as a participant in a society, as a participant in a conversation, I need to be aware of the context. If racist people are saying "X", I should probably take advantage of the insane level of linguistic flexibility in most human languages and find a different way to make the point I was trying to make. Some will protest that this "capitulation" ("I refuse to stop saying X just some bad people are saying it too") allows the bad people to control our language. I say that if you're not a bad person (whatever that might mean), you can almost certainly find alternative ways of speaking that avoid us wasting time debating whether you're a bad person.

Beltalowda 5y ago

These kind of "x-ist" statements are fine for things that are overtly x-ist. The problems happen when things are more murky; for example when you start exploring the reasons why there are few women running Fortune-500 companies. If you start shutting down things with "it's x-ist!" then you may never find out the reasons (and by extension, how to do something about them!) "It's x-ist" is an assertion, as well as an accusations, and not an argument. It's usually much better replaced with "I think this will be bad for group x, because reason y". It has the same effect, and is actually constructive.

muglug 5y ago
Lots of people have studied the question of why women aren’t running Fortune 500 companies, and unsurprisingly the answers have a lot to do with sexism. The average age of a Fortune 500 CEI is 58. Talk to any female executive of that age and they’ll have many examples of opportunities they missed out on because of their gender. My mum was told explicitly that she wouldn’t have got the job she was in if they had known she had a baby at home, because it was a “high-pressure job”. They offered to reassign her, she refused, and she didn’t tell her colleagues about her husband or kids for another year, for fear of having similar opportunities denied.

happytoexplain 5y ago

Yeah, the quote is a very fundamental breakdown of logic. It's common among Facebook arguments, but very strange to see written by somebody at least ostensibly interested in rationality. I suppose he's playing a dishonest semantic game (I think he's smart enough to know that the world is more complex than that). "13/52" is, I think, one of the most outstanding examples of this fallacy ("13% of American are black but they commit 52% of murders [or violent crime? I forget]"). Assuming the numbers are true, it can be stated primarily for the purpose of information, as in an unbiased demographic analysis of crime; or it can be stated primarily for the purpose of expressing racial hatred, as in 99% (99.9%? 99.999%?) of cases on social media. The belief that something being true means it can not be used for evil (or even just in an unnecessarily provocative context) is categorically not rational. Even propaganda, which many people correlate with "lies", is actually often factually true, or at least subjectively true by argument. Cherry-picked truth is perhaps the most effective propaganda, because it invites people to feel justified in ignoring the big picture and embracing their negative emotions that are tangential to that "truth".

subjectsigma 5y ago

THIS is exactly what some are afraid of. People taking statements, interpreting them with their own mental models, and coming to the conclusion the person who made that statement is x-ist. Your own comment literally provides multiple interpretations of that statement and you chose the "sexist" one to be the default!?

happytoexplain 5y ago
"Implicitly sexist" does not mean "sexist by default". "Implicitly" is a reasonable qualifier here. You would essentially have to be a robot to make this statement without purposefully implying that women are less capable of running a Fortune 500 company. In English, "very few" implies "very much fewer than the alternative", but in strict logical construction, it does not, hence the parent's point and my remark about being a robot.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  > You would essentially have to be a robot to make this statement without purposefully implying that women are less capable of running a Fortune 500 company. I highly disagree. Imagine this statement in an example context: A: Most fortune 500 companies are lead by men, we need more women at the top. B: Very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively. B could either be sexist and imply that fewer women than men are capable, or they could simply state that selecting a random women to promote just because she's a women won't help the situation. The reading you have depends a lot on your biases, given that you have no information about B at all. If you need another example, you can replace "women" with any other subject in this sentence - even fortune 500 CEO's: > Very few Fortune 500 CEOs are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively. I bet you can still find people agreeing with that, but it reads a lot less like it implies that a random person not included in the subject group is more capable.
- subjectsigma 5y ago
  > You would essentially have to be a robot to make this statement without purposefully implying that women are less capable of running a Fortune 500 company. It depends on context. You and I are not robots, so we see an individual sentence by itself and add context. But this isn't good. What if the follow is "And that needs to change. Which is why I'm proud to announce our first scholarship program for female entrepreneurs!" Do you still think the statement is sexist? Do you think the person making the statement is sexist?

koonsolo 5y ago

I guess the original article didn't take misleading statements into account. Because your statement might indeed be factually true, but very misleading. What about "Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true, when the statement is clear in its intentions and not misleading?". Would you agree with that?

happytoexplain 5y ago
An excellent point - see my reply to the parent about "13/52" for my personal opinion. Edit: Note that my post implies that racial hatred/propaganda is a subset of racism, which you may or may not agree with semantically.

Eli_Beeblebrox 5y ago