9 ms·

1% of the world's 7 billion people[1] is 70 million people. That's a little less than the population of Congo, a little more than the population of France. [2]

1% of the world's 7 billion people[1] is 70 million people. That's a little less than the population of Congo, a little more than the population of France. [2] I'll admit that what you're willing to call a "highly accurate approximation" is pretty arbitrary. There are some systems where I would call an approximation with a 1% margin of error a highly accurate approximation. But it's a pointless argument to make when your 1% margin of error includes 70 million people. I think we can all agree that issues which affect 70 million people are not negligible. [1] http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

coldtea 12y ago
>But it's a pointless argument to make when your 1% margin of error includes 70 million people. You say that like it's some huge number. 70 million or not, it's still 1%. Numbers get their significance relatively, not in themselves.
- kaonashi 12y ago
  Nice try, Stalin.
- copsarebastards 12y ago
  > You say that like it's some huge number. 70 million or not, it's still 1%. Numbers get their significance relatively, not in themselves. Relative to what? I can't believe I'm having this conversation. 70 million people is more than the number of people killed in both world wars. 70 million people is more than the population of the UK or Canada. Are you claiming that the world wars caused negligible deaths, or that the populations of the UK or Canada are negligible? You can't just say 1% is a negligible amount without context. Whether 1% is a negligible margin of error is entirely dependent on context. 1% blood alcohol will probably kill you, 1% error on your taxes, if intentional, is enough to put you in jail, 1% error in floating point arithmetic is the difference between a missile that hits its target and a missile that lands in a civilian residence. But numbers get their significance relatively, right? 70 million people is a lot of people.
  - esrauch 12y ago
    > 70 million people is more than the number of people killed in both world wars Not that I necessarily disagree with your sentiment, but the world population was lower when those wars happened, so the the same number of people dying was far more than 1% at the time. Looks like WW2 alone was 3-4% of the global population. The world wars were also important for reasons other than number of deaths anyway.
    - copsarebastards 12y ago
      That's a fair point on the change in population since WW2. However, I think that the atypically-sexed population is important for reasons other than numbers, too.
      - coldtea 12y ago
        Sure, but that's a totally different argument.
        copsarebastards 12y ago
        It's the argument esrauch was making.
  - threatofrain 12y ago
    Yes, but so what? How do you link this argument back? 70 million is a lot of people in MORAL terms. What about scientifically? We aren't talking about killing 70 million people. We're talking about the strength of constructs in terms of scientific utility. This is also the problem with huge numbers. It's very hard to process and we are intuitively intimidated by the largeness, such as with numbers from the state budget. $70 billion? Oh my god. How am I supposed to process that number? Also note that 1% is a figure arising from the most inclusive definitions.
    - panzagl 12y ago
      People are reading too much into this article- it's more like "1% of the population has this interesting genetic condition that may have impacts under some conditions" not "1% of the population is being discriminated against"
- GauntletWizard 12y ago
  Numbers are perfectly significant in being themselves large. 70 million is a great market for a set of niche clothing lines, self-help books, sex toys, etc. It's just not enough of a market for governments to spend an extraordinary amount of effort on dealing with the specifics. This is a long-tail number, too; 'Male', 'Female', and 'Other' probably makes sense if you expect 1% of respondents to select other. However, 1% don't select other; They get offended that you don't have Facebook's 72-pronoun list, and even if you do, that doesn't cover their particular favorite.
  - copsarebastards 12y ago
    > However, 1% don't select other; They get offended that you don't have Facebook's 72-pronoun list, and even if you do, that doesn't cover their particular favorite. Keep in mind that social media generally exemplifies the dregs of humanity. The people who make a fuss about "Other" on the internet are not representative of the everyone in that 1%. I'm pretty sure you don't have enough information to make the statement you did above.
    - notahacker 12y ago
      Given a free and unlimited choice, I'd happily bet the vast majority of this 1% would happily and wholeheartedly select either "male" or "female". Moreover they'd probably be quite offended if you suggested they didn't belong in those categories, even if the wonders of medical science revealed they had certain abnormalities they might not even have been aware of or otherwise might have attempted to surgically "correct". Men with low sperm counts, men that discover they have a womb in their late seventies after fathering several children and even intersex people who had an operation a very long time ago are probably happier being bracketed as "men" than "somewhere fairly close to male on the gender spectrum", and the same goes for the women not wanting to be considered "further away from female on the gender spectrum" than their sisters because of polycystic ovaries. From this perspective we don't want to redefine gender as a spectrum so much as to accept that our definitions of "male" and "female" need to be sufficiently broad to encompass small quantities of genetic material transferred across umbilical cords and even the odd phenotypical abnormality. Frankly, arguments against the gender binary are much better rooted in cultural phenomenon like South East Asian Katoeeys and Samoan Fa'afafine who openly define themselves as a third gender rather than medical abnormalities which for the most part people prefer to overlook or even medically "correct" to align themselves with a binary gender identity they feel mentally comfortable with.
threatofrain 12y ago
I would still take issue with the usage of spectrum. A spectrum is a scale with escalating/deescalating and predictable variation. As you go "up" and "down" the spectrum, I don't think you can say how you're supposed to interpret that. In my opinion, we should be supporting or phasing out concepts depending on its usefulness as a predictive instrument. I don't think the "spectrum" lens offers any power over "two major sexes with many small discrete bins". But the spectrum view does seem forced, as if the intended effect is a more inclusive "we". Better would be to say that there are two major sexes, as well as some rather rare cases (MOST inclusive definition ~1%). They each belong in their discrete bins as domain-specific studies. I also think you are letting your concern for humanity cloud your constructs. You seem to be very concerned about exclusion from normal. 70 million sounds like a big number if you were living in Europe at the time of the Bubonic plague. But this is the same problem with large numbers when we hear about state budgets. We hear titanic numbers, but it's hard to grasp how big or small it really is. How big is $100 billion to the state? Medium? A lot? A little? What if I said, hypothetically, that it was marginally less than 1% of the state budget? Are you going to say to me, "Well, think about how even Bill Gates doesn't have $100 billion. Think about how much that would mean to you." ? If I brought it down to an intimate level, I would never be able to talk about huge numbers because it hits my intuition too hard.
- Retric 12y ago
  Testosterone is a good example where just because there is a M/F differences does not mean that all M have more Testosterone than all F. So, within the Male designation there is a range of how Male someone is.
  - threatofrain 12y ago
    You see, "high" and "low" testosterone does make sense on a continuum. It is plausible to think that incremental jumps on this scale could mean incrementally different predictions. I could see how there could be some noisiness and complication, but that doesn't mean the construct lacks competitive utility. However, I don't think the researchers would accept testosterone as an adequate spectrum to contain human sex. So what spectrum is proposed, then? I have difficulty imagining, because I think having a spectrum of Maleness vs Femaleness would be antithetical to what the researchers want.
DiffEq 12y ago
Not being mean here, but purely looked at, these "atypical sexes" are deformities. I don't think it is accurate to call them anything else.

coldtea 12y ago

>But it's a pointless argument to make when your 1% margin of error includes 70 million people. You say that like it's some huge number. 70 million or not, it's still 1%. Numbers get their significance relatively, not in themselves.

kaonashi 12y ago
Nice try, Stalin.
copsarebastards 12y ago
> You say that like it's some huge number. 70 million or not, it's still 1%. Numbers get their significance relatively, not in themselves. Relative to what? I can't believe I'm having this conversation. 70 million people is more than the number of people killed in both world wars. 70 million people is more than the population of the UK or Canada. Are you claiming that the world wars caused negligible deaths, or that the populations of the UK or Canada are negligible? You can't just say 1% is a negligible amount without context. Whether 1% is a negligible margin of error is entirely dependent on context. 1% blood alcohol will probably kill you, 1% error on your taxes, if intentional, is enough to put you in jail, 1% error in floating point arithmetic is the difference between a missile that hits its target and a missile that lands in a civilian residence. But numbers get their significance relatively, right? 70 million people is a lot of people.
- esrauch 12y ago
  > 70 million people is more than the number of people killed in both world wars Not that I necessarily disagree with your sentiment, but the world population was lower when those wars happened, so the the same number of people dying was far more than 1% at the time. Looks like WW2 alone was 3-4% of the global population. The world wars were also important for reasons other than number of deaths anyway.
  - copsarebastards 12y ago
    That's a fair point on the change in population since WW2. However, I think that the atypically-sexed population is important for reasons other than numbers, too.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      Sure, but that's a totally different argument.
      - copsarebastards 12y ago
        It's the argument esrauch was making.
- threatofrain 12y ago
  Yes, but so what? How do you link this argument back? 70 million is a lot of people in MORAL terms. What about scientifically? We aren't talking about killing 70 million people. We're talking about the strength of constructs in terms of scientific utility. This is also the problem with huge numbers. It's very hard to process and we are intuitively intimidated by the largeness, such as with numbers from the state budget. $70 billion? Oh my god. How am I supposed to process that number? Also note that 1% is a figure arising from the most inclusive definitions.
  - panzagl 12y ago
    People are reading too much into this article- it's more like "1% of the population has this interesting genetic condition that may have impacts under some conditions" not "1% of the population is being discriminated against"
GauntletWizard 12y ago
Numbers are perfectly significant in being themselves large. 70 million is a great market for a set of niche clothing lines, self-help books, sex toys, etc. It's just not enough of a market for governments to spend an extraordinary amount of effort on dealing with the specifics. This is a long-tail number, too; 'Male', 'Female', and 'Other' probably makes sense if you expect 1% of respondents to select other. However, 1% don't select other; They get offended that you don't have Facebook's 72-pronoun list, and even if you do, that doesn't cover their particular favorite.
- copsarebastards 12y ago
  > However, 1% don't select other; They get offended that you don't have Facebook's 72-pronoun list, and even if you do, that doesn't cover their particular favorite. Keep in mind that social media generally exemplifies the dregs of humanity. The people who make a fuss about "Other" on the internet are not representative of the everyone in that 1%. I'm pretty sure you don't have enough information to make the statement you did above.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    Given a free and unlimited choice, I'd happily bet the vast majority of this 1% would happily and wholeheartedly select either "male" or "female". Moreover they'd probably be quite offended if you suggested they didn't belong in those categories, even if the wonders of medical science revealed they had certain abnormalities they might not even have been aware of or otherwise might have attempted to surgically "correct". Men with low sperm counts, men that discover they have a womb in their late seventies after fathering several children and even intersex people who had an operation a very long time ago are probably happier being bracketed as "men" than "somewhere fairly close to male on the gender spectrum", and the same goes for the women not wanting to be considered "further away from female on the gender spectrum" than their sisters because of polycystic ovaries. From this perspective we don't want to redefine gender as a spectrum so much as to accept that our definitions of "male" and "female" need to be sufficiently broad to encompass small quantities of genetic material transferred across umbilical cords and even the odd phenotypical abnormality. Frankly, arguments against the gender binary are much better rooted in cultural phenomenon like South East Asian Katoeeys and Samoan Fa'afafine who openly define themselves as a third gender rather than medical abnormalities which for the most part people prefer to overlook or even medically "correct" to align themselves with a binary gender identity they feel mentally comfortable with.

threatofrain 12y ago

I would still take issue with the usage of spectrum. A spectrum is a scale with escalating/deescalating and predictable variation. As you go "up" and "down" the spectrum, I don't think you can say how you're supposed to interpret that. In my opinion, we should be supporting or phasing out concepts depending on its usefulness as a predictive instrument. I don't think the "spectrum" lens offers any power over "two major sexes with many small discrete bins". But the spectrum view does seem forced, as if the intended effect is a more inclusive "we". Better would be to say that there are two major sexes, as well as some rather rare cases (MOST inclusive definition ~1%). They each belong in their discrete bins as domain-specific studies. I also think you are letting your concern for humanity cloud your constructs. You seem to be very concerned about exclusion from normal. 70 million sounds like a big number if you were living in Europe at the time of the Bubonic plague. But this is the same problem with large numbers when we hear about state budgets. We hear titanic numbers, but it's hard to grasp how big or small it really is. How big is $100 billion to the state? Medium? A lot? A little? What if I said, hypothetically, that it was marginally less than 1% of the state budget? Are you going to say to me, "Well, think about how even Bill Gates doesn't have $100 billion. Think about how much that would mean to you." ? If I brought it down to an intimate level, I would never be able to talk about huge numbers because it hits my intuition too hard.

Retric 12y ago
Testosterone is a good example where just because there is a M/F differences does not mean that all M have more Testosterone than all F. So, within the Male designation there is a range of how Male someone is.
- threatofrain 12y ago
  You see, "high" and "low" testosterone does make sense on a continuum. It is plausible to think that incremental jumps on this scale could mean incrementally different predictions. I could see how there could be some noisiness and complication, but that doesn't mean the construct lacks competitive utility. However, I don't think the researchers would accept testosterone as an adequate spectrum to contain human sex. So what spectrum is proposed, then? I have difficulty imagining, because I think having a spectrum of Maleness vs Femaleness would be antithetical to what the researchers want.

DiffEq 12y ago

Not being mean here, but purely looked at, these "atypical sexes" are deformities. I don't think it is accurate to call them anything else.