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> "You would think that, no matter what your goals for the roles of gender (or sex) in society are, you would achieve these goals best by deliberately seeking o
by Crito 12y ago
> "You would think that, no matter what your goals for the roles of gender (or sex) in society are, you would achieve these goals best by deliberately seeking out and investigating the properties of the underlying biology (and culture) with the utmost of academic and intellectual integrity, and only afterwards pushing for the policies you prefer to realize that world."
That is how it is supposed to work, but reality is never so clean.
One of the best modern examples of doing it backwards (starting with a conclusion, and then working backwards from there), is so called "intelligent design"/"creation science". Many different groups and movements are guilty of it, but the ID scene is relatively unique in the lengths that they went to present themselves as legitimate scientists. See: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School...) Those nutjobs insisted that they were real scientists, despite the glaring contradictions with their nonsense and the scientific method.
His comparison was rather apt.
- kijin 12y agoID was nuts because it tried to present itself as a description of the past. But if you're trying to issue prescriptions for the future (i.e. what kind of world do you want to create?), there's nothing fundamentally wrong about first identifying where you want to go and then cherrypicking biological and psychological traits to manipulate in order to get there. It would be just like writing a program to get the results you want.
- Crito 12y agoDescriptions of the past are not nuts. History, the legitimate peer-reviewed study of history, does the same. Evolutionary biology tells us much about the past, as does much of physics. None of that is problematic. ID was nuts because of their flawed methodology. > "But if you're trying to issue prescriptions for the future (i.e. what kind of world do you want to create?), there's nothing fundamentally wrong about first identifying where you want to go and then cherrypicking biological and psychological traits to manipulate in order to get there." Do not confuse policy forming / social engineering with science.
- kijin 12y agoActually, I agree with you. What I meant is that ID used an inappropriate methodology for what it purported to do, but the same methodology might be appropriate in other contexts such as social engineering.