171–180 of 248 posts
Does anyone have an outside source on this? The writeup linked seems pretty one-sided, and the whole naive-surprise-meets-hardnosed-doggedness tone doesn't seem very genuine. So I'm left wondering how accurate a portrayal of events this is.
Wow, I didn't know that academia was getting this bad; what happened to letting the truth be debated a la the Socratic dialogue in the academia of all places!
Censorship is as old as organized society. Historically, the power to censor belonged to those in power (the Church, royalty, etc.) But it was never exercised openly, it always rested on some higher justification (to prevent offending God or upset the social order). And so, censorship, which is always, in effect, an instrument of domination, somehow became "the moral choice".
At some point (I'd say, fairly recently, sometime in the 70s) minorities fighting "the Good Fight" (tm) discovered the power of moral censorship and they are now basking in it. But it's a double-edged sword and it's very difficult not to cut yourself when using it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have some fundamental problems with her approach to political correctness in the Medium article. Too many to go over, but the simplest and most frustrating is the complete disregard for the experience of transgender people, stating that it's a "performance" while race is not. That itself is completely disrespectful and not understanding the core issue before arguing it.
I think you misunderstood her. She was saying that being transgender in that role was central to the character. It was the point of the movie. However, whether a character is black or not doesn't really matter (anymore). That's why we don't use blackface masks anymore. In a sense, the minority community brings it to itself. If you highlight how you're not different, then you cannot complain that stories will be writt…
I rarely see minorities arguing that they're literally no different than anybody else. Co-opting the Riddle scale [0], that sort of view is "you're not X, you're a person!". I believe the differences between people should be celebrated, and absolutely not used to discriminate. If a story is written about how a Japanese immigrant went through struggles coming to America, it would be disgraceful to have a white woman play that role.
The reality is that the majority of Americans see trans people as different. It would be wonderful if that weren't the case, but until then, any cis (non-trans) person playing a trans person is going to be a caricature of the trans experience (although a cis man playing a trans man would be slightly better). Trans people continually try to argue that they're in the same overall category of cis people of the same gender, i.e. {trans women} ∪ {cis women} ⊆ {women}. It is a uniquely minority experience to see someone who cannot understand your struggles pretend to have them for a day.
A common thing I see amongst "anti-PC" folks is the confidence in arguing a point in fields that they simply don't understand, and the hypocrisy that comes with that. She states that the norms that prevent using racial epithets or using gender as an insult are perfectly fine. Immediately after, she invalidates the experiences of all trans people in a typical fashion - "trans people are a performance and not their gender". If her mind had existed in 1970, she would've been perfectly fine with racial epithets, and argue that the people trying to tell her that's wrong are needlessly PC.
I don't even understand why this is controversial. I've explained this to a number of women before and none of them have felt hurt. On the contrary, in fact, it makes them feel better. Humans always fixate on extremes. Men and women. It's a problem in our society. We always want to see the very best and we're not interested in others who are still way above average. There are thousands of women doing great science, e…
There's no great comcrete evidence backing this up (as far as I know). But Laba is one who should know, having once been a very mathematically gifted girl.
Maybe men really are outliers on a greater scale, but IMO we do enough tamping-down of female outliers that I'm not willing to draw that conclusion from the preponderance of male geniuses we see today.
[1] https://ilaba.wordpress.com/2017/06/24/gifted-while-female/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have some fundamental problems with her approach to political correctness in the Medium article. Too many to go over, but the simplest and most frustrating is the complete disregard for the experience of transgender people, stating that it's a "performance" while race is not. That itself is completely disrespectful and not understanding the core issue before arguing it.
I think you misunderstood her. She was saying that being transgender in that role was central to the character. It was the point of the movie. However, whether a character is black or not doesn't really matter (anymore). That's why we don't use blackface masks anymore. In a sense, the minority community brings it to itself. If you highlight how you're not different, then you cannot complain that stories will be writt…
A good example of this may be the US version of "Queer as Folk", a dramatic series on Showtime from 2000-2005 [1].
Most of the main characters were gay, but only a little under half of the actors that played them were gay. Another actor was bi, and the rest were straight.
But you could not tell from the performances which were which. The straight actors were as convincing as the gay actors, even in scenes involving serious erotic action.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_as_Folk_(U.S._TV_series)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, reality is under no obligation to care about your feelings. I don't like the idea men live shorter than woman, but that's reality. Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. And nobody here said that women are less capable than men. The hypothesis was, that the distribution for some traits for men has more kurtosis, so while the mean is similar, there are more outli…
Reality is under no obligation to care about your feelings, yes. But that does not imply: 1. that humans are not obligated to care about each other's feelings, either. If you are pursuing a course of research that is purely hurtful and has no perceived positive impact, nobody is making you pursue it. (I don't think this paper is in this category, to be clear.) 2. that an idea is more likely to be true simply because…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what authoritative accounts have you used to dismiss the paper and the journal editor? If you believe the editor when they say "I am happy to stir up controversy" why not also believe them when they say "we could make a real contribution here"?
> what authoritative accounts have you used to dismiss the paper and the journal editor? I read the paper and drew my own conclusion. > why not also believe them when they say "we could make a real contribution here"? That snippet in context: "After the Middlebury fracas, in which none of the protestors had read the book they were protesting, we could make a real contribution here by insisting that all views be heard…
How so?
> I'm with her, there.
With who?
I have to issues with it: The write-up seems very one-sided as can already be noticed in the language (1) and the paper, as others have pointed out, is not much of a good scientific paper (2). It seems like the whole controversy was engineered or, at least, he deliberately tried to provoke/"troll" the academic community with his paper. 1) Certain parts of the post ring my alarm bells when it comes to the language use…
"The actual magnitudes of these desirability values are assumed to have no significance, and are used only to make comparisons between individuals." (page 4)
"To quantify the notion of “selective”, it will be assumed that for each sex in a given sexually dimorphic species there is an upper proportion p ∈ (0 , 1) of the opposite sex that is acceptable for mating." (also page 4)
The paper applies exactly to the scenario where the top bracket corresponds e.g. to the top 10%.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are ambivalent about whether this article should have been censored in the way it was?
We have political movements that are committed to removing basic human rights from 50% of the population, so sure. Maybe when Roosh doesn't have millions of followers we can discuss this stuff openly. It's an argument for scientific guilds in areas like this. God I hate writing this. Ten years ago I would have totally had the opposite opinion. That was back when I thought we'd moved past these things. Recent outpouri…
Regarding your autism example: of there were an acknowledged weak link, we could at least have a discussion about it, and maybe do research on mitigating the risk.
But if there were a link between autism and vaccination and your scientific guilds spent decades denying it, and then the truth came out, the public would never trust another damn thing you said ever again. Even if you made a safe vaccine, nobody would take it.
I'm disappointed that after 10,000 years of civilization we have to re-learn this ancient lesson yet another time. Nobody has ever accomplished a net good by slowing the accumulation of knowledge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have political movements that are committed to removing basic human rights from 50% of the population, so sure. Maybe when Roosh doesn't have millions of followers we can discuss this stuff openly. It's an argument for scientific guilds in areas like this. God I hate writing this. Ten years ago I would have totally had the opposite opinion. That was back when I thought we'd moved past these things. Recent outpouri…
Have you considered the dangers of giving unreasonable people a monopoly on the truth? If you refuse to candidly discuss the truths of the world, people will turn to those who will. Regarding your autism example: of there were an acknowledged weak link, we could at least have a discussion about it, and maybe do research on mitigating the risk. But if there were a link between autism and vaccination and your scientifi…
The thing that disturbs me the most is that this kind of inane BS is making inroads among people that I thought knew better... people that I thought had brains.
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Responding to the reply since HN's anti-discourse rate limiter kicked in:
You're right about the last paragraph, but it's mostly not the fault of science so much as our political leadership.
Years ago when we invaded Iraq and then it came to light that there were no WMDs, never had been WMDs, and the whole thing was deliberately concocted, I remember saying to friends that this was going to have consequences with a capital C. I was right.
I said the same thing after the 2008 bank bailouts. Major damage was done to the fundamental trust basis of our society and there will be consequences. I was right.
During the 'oughts the elite of our society stacked their credibility up in a big pile and set it on fire. I wish I had an answer. If they were honorable they would own up to it, but I see none of that. Apparently they decided invading Iraq and bailing out banks was more important than the bedrock trust on which our society is built and they're committed to going down with the ship.