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“Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

nature.com

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Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#791

Post by aaplok »

dymk wrote: post #726
aaplok wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're clearly not against it because of reproducibility; you are against it because it goes against your ideological worldview. Please avoid ad hominem arguments like this. They are unlikely to convince anyone, and on a topic as sensitive as this might be interpreted as personal attacks. Your comment would have been more useful if you had restricted yourself to responding to GP's argument that the data is too nois…

That's not what an ad-hom attack is. An ad-hom would be insulting the poster they were replying to. This is at worst making an incorrect guess at their ideology, but more likely than not, it's a correct guess.

Hmm, no. Quoting Wikipedia [0], ad-hom "refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself. The most common form of ad hominem is "A makes a claim x, B asserts that A holds a property that is unwelcome, and hence B concludes that argument x is wrong". "

The person's ideology is precisely an "attribute of the person making an argument". The sentence I responded to basically states that "A is not making their argument because it's true, but because of A's unwelcome characteristic." This is pretty much textbook ad-hominem.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#792

Post by mpalmer »

LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #765
deanCommie wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's start with this: I don't know how I can explain why this kind of discourse opens trans people up to violence if we can't first agree why this is transphobic. Fundamentally we keep having this conversation in humanity. "This is wrong (homophobic, transphobic, racist, classist, casteist)" "No it isn't!" And over and over and over again. And we look back and think how could it have been possible that we were SO di…

> And you have some feminists that exclude trans women. No "trans woman" is ever a woman. They're men, males. You're trying to take women's rights from females by denying them a way to uniquely identify themselves. This right here is why "trans rights", as activists choose to define it, can never happen. If you can take the words woman and female, Germany could redefine Jew and China can redefine Uighur, and everyone…

You're trying to take women's rights from females by denying them a way to uniquely identify themselves.

Rights are not a zero-sum game or some kind of exhaustible resource; I have no idea what you're getting at with this.

I challenge your contention that "a way to uniquely identify themselves" is a right of biological women or other groups. Never heard of any such right; it sounds totally made up.

---

The meaning of words is what all people agree on. In the US, marriage used to mean a legally recognized union between a man and a woman of the same race. Otherwise it was miscegenation, or sodomy. Then as times changed, they added a qualifier: "mixed marriage" or "mixed-race marriage". Same thing happened in the last decade with gay marriage. In both cases, it eventually just turned back into marriage again.

You disagree that trans women are women. Fine. Activists are trying to make the case that they are; that womanhood encompasses more than being biologically female, and same for manhood. A lot of people agree.

---

You say that everyone could identify as black-descendant-of-slavery to access scholarships. I say you are making a laughable category error. (Did people start marrying their dogs after Obergefell was decided? They did not.)

The reason someone identifies as something other than their birth gender isn't well-understood, but it is fair to say that hormones and the development of the brain play a significant role in the way people think and behave. Hormones have strong ties to sex and gender. They have very, very little to do with race. Category error.

If non-black people started identifying as black to claim their piece of a societal debt to the ancestors of slaves, they would be (and have been[1]) ridiculed. Most people don't try this, because the vast majority of society agrees that is not acceptable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#793

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

akvadrako wrote: post #623
School-Cotton wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This infuriated me during the Covid pandemic. “The science says we need to close schools”. No, the science at most says that Covid will spread more slowly if we close schools. Whether that’s worth it or not is a political question, not a scientific one.

They are using the word science differently, to mean Science, as in "the group of recognized (by us) authorities on a subject".

They're including policy people in with the scientific people though, as "the science".

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#794

Post by newhaus1994 »

This appears to be heterodox here, but this statement is nothing to be alarmed about. IRBs have been mandating this type of risk analysis for decades for the subjects of research, and it is barely a leap to start thinking about collateral damage as well.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#795

Post by nomel »

nomel wrote: post #424
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science must always report the truth. What was the old saying? "That which can be destroyed by truth, should be"? Whenever science attempts to prop up political regimes by obscuring the truth, then tragedy and travesty occurs.

> Science must always report the truth. The only way I can interpret their statement is that harmful truths actually do exist, they're known, but we must ignore them.

It's this, or they know it will eventually be. Otherwise, why would this be needed?

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#796

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

n4r9 wrote: post #764
timr wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the links. Because those aren't providing evidence for the claim. They're just repeatedly asserting what I've already told you is faulty reasoning: we don't have a precise genetic definition of "race" today, therefore it doesn't exist. That's wrong. Regarding the specific papers: The first explicitly admits that race exists in the opening sentence (oops), then proceeds to say "the two most commonly used biologic…

The guidelines include the qualifier "at least based on modern biological criteria". This is true: if you use the modern biological criteria for race, then there is only one human race.

Nobody just says that "observable differences in humans are rarely genetically related to actual genetic differences", they say "race has absolutely no meaning in humans - but here in animals it means exactly what lay-people mean when they say it".

The elites are panicking about the perceived mental limits of the commoners. Normals know the limits of the words they use and actual bigots won't be deterred.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#797

Post by n4r9 »

LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #796
n4r9 wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guidelines include the qualifier "at least based on modern biological criteria". This is true: if you use the modern biological criteria for race, then there is only one human race.

Nobody just says that "observable differences in humans are rarely genetically related to actual genetic differences", they say "race has absolutely no meaning in humans - but here in animals it means exactly what lay-people mean when they say it". The elites are panicking about the perceived mental limits of the commoners. Normals know the limits of the words they use and actual bigots won't be deterred.

No one is saying it has absolutely no meaning. They're saying that its meaning has its basis in culture rather than in biology.

If you were to collect the DNA of every living human today and send the information to an alien species, would they say "aha, this clearly falls into five (or however many) pretty distinct categories"? Would anyone be able to tell them how to delineate those categories? Based on what I've read, I don't think so, which implies that what is meant by "race" is more cultural than biological.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#798

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

mpalmer wrote: post #792
LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And you have some feminists that exclude trans women. No "trans woman" is ever a woman. They're men, males. You're trying to take women's rights from females by denying them a way to uniquely identify themselves. This right here is why "trans rights", as activists choose to define it, can never happen. If you can take the words woman and female, Germany could redefine Jew and China can redefine Uighur, and everyone…

You're trying to take women's rights from females by denying them a way to uniquely identify themselves. Rights are not a zero-sum game or some kind of exhaustible resource; I have no idea what you're getting at with this. I challenge your contention that "a way to uniquely identify themselves" is a right of biological women or other groups. Never heard of any such right; it sounds totally made up. --- The meaning of…

> I challenge your contention that "a way to uniquely identify themselves" is a right of biological women or other groups. Never heard of any such right; it sounds totally made up.

And yet you've heard of a right for males to claim female's sex-based rights?

> Rights are not a zero-sum game or some kind of exhaustible resource;

Actually they are. Women have a right to sex-segregated spaces for example, and that doesn't work if they can't claim exclusive use of sex-based identifiers. Women can't have exclusively-women's prisons if men can call themselves women.

> You disagree that trans women are women. Fine. Activists are trying to make the case that they are; that womanhood encompasses more than being biologically female, and same for manhood. A lot of people agree.

You can volunteer to share your spaces however you like, but you can't make that decision for others no matter how many people you claim agree.

Also, you're being disingenuous. Transwomen claim to be female these days - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Levine - which is clearly untrue even to people who might believe in gender identities.

> You say that everyone could identify as black-descendant-of-slavery to access scholarships. I say you are making a laughable category error.

But then you reference Rachel, who did exactly that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal

Thanks to the modern intentional acceptance of appropriation and colonization other Dolezals aren't being rejected, leading some to simultaneously claim racial and sexual benefits belonging to others. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwen_Benaway

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#799

Post by n4r9 »

wyager wrote: post #790
n4r9 wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you agree that humans do not have biological races, but you disagree with guidelines that promote a more accurate terminology?

"Humans do not have biological race" is correct if and only if you change the definition of "race" to whatever definition these academics have made up expressly to make the statement true. If you use any definition that wasn't specifically concocted to make the statement true (i.e. any definition used by normal people or by actual scientists doing real work, say prior to 1990), it remains false.

What is the implication here, that geneticists decided in 1990 to pack in "real work" in order to work up a grand conspiracy to wipe out an entire concept?

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#800

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

n4r9 wrote: post #797
LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody just says that "observable differences in humans are rarely genetically related to actual genetic differences", they say "race has absolutely no meaning in humans - but here in animals it means exactly what lay-people mean when they say it". The elites are panicking about the perceived mental limits of the commoners. Normals know the limits of the words they use and actual bigots won't be deterred.

No one is saying it has absolutely no meaning. They're saying that its meaning has its basis in culture rather than in biology. If you were to collect the DNA of every living human today and send the information to an alien species, would they say "aha, this clearly falls into five (or however many) pretty distinct categories"? Would anyone be able to tell them how to delineate those categories? Based on what I've re…

It feels like this need to over-moderate use of this word is projection from people who grew up with a specific light/dark skin divide that also mapped nearly perfectly onto actual prejudice and inequality. The USA is like that episode of star trek where people were white on one side and black on the other.

People use the word like "are the dutch racially tall or is it their diet?" and nobody means or takes offense.

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