"Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of [atypical sex]."
If the "simplistic" male/female binary explains >99% of observations, there does not seem to be a strong case for describing biological sex as a "spectrum"...
I am 10,000% behind tolerance and acceptance for people of all genders and sexes and orientations, and it's very useful to understand how much biological complexity and variation is possible. But... any honest interpretation of the data would suggest that "the idea of two sexes" is an highly accurate approximation for Homo sapiens.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
I can't believe you're having this conversation either. You're correct, obviously; you've thrown out tons of trivially correct examples to make it clear to everyone just how right you are, none of which have anything to do with this. You are of course aware that 1% out of a population has nothing to do with the concept of a 1% error on your taxes or 1% blood alcohol. Alcohol does not affect you 1% of the time if you have a 1% BAC.
Everyone here knows that if you make the population arbitrarily large, the 1% sample becomes large too. But can you really argue that being able to represent 99% with a binary spectrum isn't a pretty good approximation? What percentage would be good enough for you? Or are you going to say "99.9% isn't good enough because 7 million is a lot of people. that's more than died in X'?
> I can't believe you're having this conversation either. You're correct, obviously; you've thrown out tons of trivially correct examples to make it clear to everyone just how right you are, none of which have anything to do with this. You are of course aware that 1% out of a population has nothing to do with the concept of a 1% error on your taxes or 1% blood alcohol. Alcohol does not affect you 1% of the time if you have a 1% BAC.
So you agree then that whether 1% is negligible is based on context?
> Everyone here knows that if you make the population arbitrarily large, the 1% sample becomes large too. But can you really argue that being able to represent 99% with a binary spectrum isn't a pretty good approximation? What percentage would be good enough for you? Or are you going to say "99.9% isn't good enough because 7 million is a lot of people. that's more than died in X'?
Yes. In case you didn't notice, 7 million people is a lot of people.
>So you agree then that whether 1% is negligible is based on context?
Yeah, or as I put it: "Numbers get their significance relatively, not in themselves".
Whereas you repeatedly stated how 70 million people is a huge number in itself.
E.g. If I told you there are 70 million people that have blue eyes, is that "a huge number?" No, it's actually a small number. One would expect blue-eyed people to be in the 100s of millions or billions.
> Whereas you repeatedly stated how 70 million people is a huge number in itself.
I haven't claimed that at all. I've said over and over that context indicates whether it's important.
> Whereas you repeatedly stated how 70 million people is a huge number in itself.
No, I've said 70 million people is a lot in terms of medical and social policy. It would be very possible, for example, for 1% of people to account for 10% of medical expenses--an amount you would probably care about at tax time. I think that's a number that matters to almost anyone's political goals.
In contrast, you've been repeatedly stating how 1% is not a large number. Based on what?
> E.g. If I told you there are 70 million people that have blue eyes, is that "a huge number?" No, it's actually a small number. One would expect blue-eyed people to be in the 100s of millions or billions.
Science doesn't give a shit about your expectations. "Expectations" are entirely irrelevant to whether a number is big or little. A number is big or little depending on what effects it causes and what effects you're trying to achieve.
You're accusing me of arguing that 70 million is inherently a large number, but you're arguing that 70 million is inherently a small number, completely arbitrarily. I'm not even saying 70 million people is a big or small number inherently, I'm saying that 70 million people is a huge number when the properties of that group have medical and social implications. 70 million blue-eyed people isn't a small or large number, it's an irrelevant number, because whether or not someone's eyes are blue has almost no implication that I care about. If you understand why it's not a big or small number, but an irrelevant number, you'll understand my point.
>Science doesn't give a shit about your expectations.
Language.
Also, I didn't say it's about "MY" expectations. It's about what the expected distribution is, which is the whole context that makes something big or small.
"Expectations" are entirely irrelevant to whether a number is big or little.
Actually, it's all about that. Bringing 10,000 times 6 by throwing dice 20,000 times is too big, because the expected outcome is about 1/6 throws to be 6.
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.
> Yes, but so what? How do you link this argument back? 70 million is a lot of people in MORAL terms. What about scientifically?
What about scientifically? Scientifically, there's no concept of negligible or not negligible. On what scientific grounds did you decide 1% was negligible?
The negligibility of a percentage is only choosable based on your values and how much you value what exists in that percentage. My argument is that in most contexts, you probably care about 70 million people. If that's not the case, you may be a sociopath. But my guess is that you aren't a sociopath--you're just operating under some temporary delusion that because you've decided to say 1% of people instead of 70 million people, your decision that the group of people in question is negligible is scientific.
> We aren't talking about killing 70 million people. We're talking about the strength of constructs in terms of scientific utility.
If you're claiming that 70 million people have no scientific utility, I'd like to see what utility function you're using.
> 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?
I'm not sure how the fact that large numbers are hard to process means that 70 million people is negligible. Certainly saying 1% instead of 70 million makes it easier to process, but playing to human mental limitations isn't a particularly good source of truth.
> Also note that 1% is a figure arising from the most inclusive definitions.
I'll happily make similar arguments about 7 million people instead of 70 million.
Actually, there is a way to decide if something is scientifically better. All you have to show is that your construct is competitive within the ecosystem of constructs. You can weakly improve upon an existing model by adding tons of domain-specific complications, which is what should've happened. But instead of saying that there are two predominant sexes, along with many abnormal and discrete bins, they propose a "continuum".
The researchers found that, in the most inclusive definitions, 1% of the population isn't sufficiently accounted for by traditional constructs.
But there's no new theory here. How do I predict complications based on what factors? What's the new model? The "spectrum"? A spectrum is a scale with escalating and deescalating values as you travel up and down, where jumps in the spectrum are connected to jumps in prediction. As for abnormal and discrete bins, well, the scientific community already has that. What's new to the table? A reformation of language so that we avoid the word "abnormal"? But where's the improved model?
Also note that you propose that there's no way to think about scientific or construct "betterness". Yes there is. You can measure by complexity, prediction, explanation, or generalizability. These are just a few ways. But you waved away scientific discussion, and instead choose only to use the moral lens, and bring up sociopathy.
Also, the reason I am talking about human limitations in processing large numbers is because I am accusing the opposition of abuse. I am not saying you should believe me because of X, I'm saying beware of opposition arguments because they are abusive to human minds.
And on the matter of using percentages to interpret numbers, I return to my example of state budgets, because that is a place where politicians often abuse psychology by stating what appears to be extravagant numbers. By extending your statements, I might say that not only is $70B a lot of money, but so is $7B. But then what if you told me that $70B is less than 1% of the state budget? What did you just do to that number?
Honestly, 10,000 people dying is a lot. Therefore, let's not talk about construct validity?
> Actually, there is a way to decide if something is scientifically better.
Not in a general sense, there isn't. "Better" can only be scientifically defined in terms of a utility function, a goal. If you're trying to conduct, copper is better than rubber, if you're trying to insulate, rubber is better than copper. If you're trying to provide adequate healthcare and social protection to people, then a lower margin of error would be better.
> All you have to show is that your construct is competitive within the ecosystem of constructs.
Competitive based on what utility function?
> But there's no new theory here. How do I predict complications based on what factors? What's the new model? The "spectrum"? A spectrum is a scale with escalating and deescalating values as you travel up and down, where jumps in the spectrum are connected to jumps in prediction. As for abnormal and discrete bins, well, the scientific community already has that. What's new to the table? A reformation of language so that we avoid the word "abnormal"? But where's the improved model?
I think an admission that the current model is inadequate goes a long way towards motivating the discovery of better models.
> Also note that you propose that there's no way to think about scientific or construct "betterness". Yes there is. You can measure by complexity, prediction, explanation, or generalizability.
Okay, so you've named a bunch of utility functions. Now do you really want to apply those to this situation? How do we apply these to the question of whether 1% is a negligible margin of error. Let's optimize for those:
1. Lower complexity: "everyone is a man" seemed to work back in the day.
2. Higher complexity: let's subdivide male and female. There are certainly other genetic traits besides X and Y chromosomes that we could include in our definition of sex. (Hint: It's silly to optimize for higher complexity, but why? I propose that the answer is based on your values.)
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"
Yes, I think people are playing border politics without realizing it. They want to be more inclusive, but this is about construct validity and adding something new to the table, not talking about how 70 million people dying is tremendous.
>Relative to what? I can't believe I'm having this conversation.
Relative to the total population. Whether it's Canada, the US, France, or the Whole World you're taking into account, it's still 1% of it.
>You can't just say 1% is a negligible amount without context.
Probably you missed TFA and the whole conversation thread you're answering to?
The context was if only 1% of the population doing them is enough to call sexual preferences "a spectrum" (with regard to those "atypical sexual practices"). Something divided in 99% and 1% is not a "spectrum" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact there's a word for that 1%, outliers.
>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?
Of course. 1% blood alcohol gets its significance not in what it is ("1% oh, so much") but RELATIVE to the amount that's OK for a human to stand.
1% error in missile calculations gets its significance RELATIVE to the target area it has to hit and the acceptable margin of error.
> Probably you missed TFA and the whole conversation thread you're answering to?
TFA and whole conversation are exactly the context which makes it ridiculous to claim that 1% is an acceptable margin of error.
> Of course. 1% blood alcohol gets its significance not in what it is ("1% oh, so much") but RELATIVE to the amount that's OK for a human to stand.
> 1% error in missile calculations gets its significance RELATIVE to the target area it has to hit and the acceptable margin of error.
Agreed. 1% error in judging the gender of people is significant relative to medical and social policy targets. On what grounds are you claiming that 70 million people are ignorable in medical and social policy?
Ironically, the only argument from you I've seen so far against sex being considered a spectrum is basically, "1%, oh, not so much". You said: "You say that like it's some huge number. 70 million or not, it's still 1%."
And ultimately, this is in research before we are even talking about medical and social policy. I'm not sure why we should just discard that 1% of data at all--there's no reason to artificially create error in reasoning that isn't imposed by data collection methods.
> 70 million people is more than the number of people killed in both world wars.
I've seen some estimates that suggest 72 million were killed in WWII alone, either from direct involvement or as civilian casualties. Considering the world population was ~2 billion at that time, close to 3.6% of the total world population died as a consequence of the war.
Oftentimes, it's helpful when comparing approximate statistics from different eras that you use the same relative baseline--in this case world population at the time those statistics were estimated rather than now.
Edit: Didn't see esrauch's sibling comment. Give 'em an upvote.
> So one person isn't a lot of people ... are you saying one person is negligible? That one person's life doesn't matter?
Can we make laws, do medical research, etc. that will effectively help 1 person? I don't think so. If I see one person by the side of the road with a flat tire, I'll help that 1 person, but in the context of policy and research, 1 person usually doesn't matter because policy and research can't usually create a meaningful impact.
We can, however, make laws and do medical research that has an impact on 70 million people. I present as evidence for this the fact that life has gotten better (according to a variety of shared values which we could agree upon--fewer suicides, less violence) in the last few decades for people of atypical sexes.
> 1% is 1%. Every life is important, but 1% is still 1%. And 1% is not a lot. Whether it's people, apples, or pencils doesn't matter. It's a ratio.
No, context matters. If you don't think 1% is a lot in any context, maybe let's get you up to a 1% blood alcohol and see how you feel (hint: you won't feel).
> Which is nothing this thread of discussion was about.
> Nobody said not to study or legally hep those people.
> Just that 1% is not enough to describe the total of cases as a "spectrum".
Assuming that your medical and social policies are at all data-driven, failure to include people in your data is a guaranteed way to ensure that they are not studied or legally helped.
> Relative to the total. Are you that fucking stupid?
Since we're answering rhetorical questions here, no, I'm not stupid.
My point is that the choice to compare the number to the total population is entirely arbitrary. That's why I compared it to the numbers of people killed in the world wars, and the populations of major countries. Why is your arbitrary choice of comparison somehow more valid than mine?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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".
True, but sex has medical and social implications that go beyond people's preferred terminology. You've brought up some of these concerns yourself.
> 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.
I'm not sure what makes you think that nobody in Western countries defines themselves as a third gender.
CO2 is 0.04% of atmospheric air by volume. Would it be a highly accurate approximation to say that air has no CO2? Could we then say that it is not possible to have problems with too much CO2 in the atmosphere, since our highly accurate approximation says there isn't any?
The article stands well on its merits. It's not political. It's talking about specific, measurable things with specific measurable effects, and 1% of a large number is still a large number.
Surely 1% of the population is enough that we should e.g. have a way to legally recognize them, instead of forcing everyone to fit themselves into one of the two options.
Also there is the fact that not all forms of atypical sexual development are really relevant to daily life.
For example it did not surprise me that the woman described in the beginning had no idea about her chimerism - after all her sexual organs were straight female (proved by the fact that she got pregnant, three times), so her blood was probably circulating lots of estrogen instead of lots of testosterone. Sure, her color vision was maybe working at the reduced, male level, but really - it is not that important.
On another note it is worth remembering that in vitro fertilization increases the risks of mosaicism and chimerism.
Why defend a "highly accurate" approximation that also happens to be oppressive to the people who fall outside of it? So far as I can see learning to incorporate more nuance into our social understanding is the way these oppressive institutions are overcome, and how more diverse groups learn to coexist. Defending approximations like this runs dangerously close to committing the "naturalistic fallacy" of taking the way things are as the way they ought to be.
Did you read the article? How is it oppressive? 1% of people have chromosomal problem that might affect fertility or have other medical impacts. This has nothing to do with an 'oppressed class'.
> If the "simplistic" male/female binary explains >99% of observations, there does not seem to be a strong case for describing biological sex as a "spectrum"...
1% of the world population is nearly 70 million people. That is not a small population. One would hope that we might be more flexible in our descriptions considering how large of a population that is.
It's closish to 99.9% so 7 million. Which is a big enough population that we should consider how we draft our laws and policies but not nearly so large that "male" and "female" cease to be useful concepts for our everyday lives.
> Does that make a highly accurate approximation into a less accurate one?
What we have right now is not an approximation, but a binary measurement. Turning sex into an approximation would be considered a significant step forward considering science tells us it is not binary.
As simon_ and Symmetry point out, that binary is in fact a pretty accurate approximation. So it seems we have both a binary measurement and an approximation in one. Perhaps we should consider that something can be both a binary measurement and a reasonably accurate approximation of a spectrum.
Regardless, my earlier question stands. At what point is it acceptable for an approximation to not be accurate in detail? What's the acceptable level of error in approximations?
> What's the acceptable level of error in approximations?
I'm fairly sure the lifes of those affected negatively by the error are outside the "acceptable level". We're talking about humans here, not mathematical rounding errors.
It seems your objection is not to approximations or the error inherent in them, but to what happens when people forget approximations are not reality. Is that correct?
The 'two-sexes approximation' is boolean, not binary. Boolean involves two possible values; binary involves an infinite number of possible values, represented in base-2.[1][2]
Not to be pedantic, but binary is entirely correct in this context. We aren't talking about computer science. Binary means relating to, composed of, or involving two things.
Boolean is simply a binary variable, having two possible values: true and false.
People are generally pretty significant. 70 million people is very significant.
> 70 million is not a significant number of atoms of most things, for instance.
70 million people is a pretty significant number of people.
> The important question is the second one I posed. What is the acceptable level of error in an approximation?
Since you seem to have mistaken my rhetorical question for an actual question, I'll restate it as a statement: 70 million people is not an acceptable level of error in an approximation.
I think an acceptable level of error in approximation in legal and scientific terms would be one where the error is not likely to affect people negatively according to shared values (a shared value might be: people shouldn't get beaten to death or commit suicide--both problems among atypically sexed people). That number is difficult to come up with: it would have to look at impact analysis to see whether programs can effectively help people. And as technology, social programs, and medicine become better, the margin of error would likely go down. I can't come up with that number exactly, but given that we've seen significant benefits from social programs for atypically sexed people in the last few decades, I think it's pretty clear that we can still provide more benefit.
I'm not sure what you're saying. If your model does not accurately reflect observations, your model is wrong. That's not to say it isn't useful - we still teach Newtonian mechanics, after all - but you wouldn't use it in any serious discussion of the topic.
They probably meant 'serious discussion' as a proxy for 'discussion demanding the highest available accuracy.'
But that doesn't really work in this analogy because quantum physics essentially assumes Newtonian physics as axiomatic, so there is no way to avoid it no matter how 'serious' you're trying to be.
Why defend a "highly accurate" approximation that also happens to be oppressive to the people who fall outside of it? So far as I can see learning to incorporate more nuance into our social understanding is the way these oppressive institutions are overcome, and how more diverse groups learn to coexist. Defending approximations like this runs dangerously close to committing the "naturalistic fallacy" of taking the way things are as the way they ought to be.
A strong case can be made because the line is extremely blurry and there can be severe consequences for forcing a category on people that doesn't fit.
Sex and gender are shoved in people's faces practically every waking moment which means this "highly accurate approximation" breaks down billions of times a day with consequences ranging from discrimination and depression to sterilization and death.
How certain are you that you or some close doesn't fall outside the binary?
> If the "simplistic" male/female binary explains >99% of observations, there does not seem to be a strong case for describing biological sex as a "spectrum"...
I'd suggest that it all comes down to how we're making those observations and what we're then doing with the classifications we've derived.
Why are we trying to describe the idea of biological sex? If it's for the sake of a scientific classification, then simplistic is a horrific idea. Biology by definition (in a modern world) is dealing with the small scale deviances and the nitty gritty. We're 99% rat, but the differences are somewhat remarkable.
We've been observing the wrong thing for thousands of years. Your assertion is almost correct; 99% of the time the _outcome_ of observation might be male or female, but it doesn't actually _explain_ anything. All it does is answer the question "does it have a penis"[1].
Which in 2015 has far less medical relevance than it did in centuries gone. "Well Mr. Smith, she is of the weaker species, this little touch of the vapours is to be expected, of course." is a diagnosis heard less and less. We're now increasingly diagnosing and categorizing conditions a genetic level, never-mind just what your second sex chromosome is. [2] From a technical point of view, it's already far more complicated than male/female. Simplifying science to that degree does it a disservice.
The big problem with binary though is the way it permeates through culture, language society and even thought.
Essentially, at birth, we clumsily label and categorise people based on their sex organs and worse, refuse to officially acknowledge the grey area. It's like asking someone with severe allergies if they want the shell fish or the peanuts. "Oh I'm sure they would both kill you, Sir[3], but you will be eating one for your entrée"
Put bluntly, I don't effing understand why everyone is so interested in what I have down my pants? You'd think it's entirely irrelevant except for some very specific circumstances, but instead we all have to publicly broadcast this binary allegiance all day every day. Everything. Pretty much every trivial form online makes me choose between "Mr", "Mrs", "Miss" or "Dr"[4] and usually as a mandatory field and yet you really don't need to know if I have a labia or not to be able to print my name and address and post me a parcel. It doesn't need to announce this on my bus pass or in nearly every english pronoun.
Through childhood I repeatedly went through conversations along the lines of "Which football team do you support?" I don't. I don't watch football. "That's fine, but which team do you support?"[5]. Not having an allegiance, even a lapsed one, is not an option.
By simplistically describing homosapien sex as binary it means anyone who doesn't conform is left out. It's not a legitimate option. Not viable, abnormal, mistakes, a freak of nature if you will. We're essentially saying that these people are inhuman and unnatural, which is obviously untrue.
The UK has allowed people to change their legal gender for over 10 years now[6], which legitimises the idea that external observation and internal state might not be linked. Simplifying that disparity to a binary state though, does a great disservice to the human condition. It seems odd that it's now legitimate not to identify as M||F but you've still got to identify as M||F.
"No", "Other" or "I don't know" should be a completely legitimate answer in response to sex or gender. It needs it's own category, it needs words to identify it and language to be able to describe it otherwise it's not a real thing, it's just anomalous.
And anyway, I'm disappointed; this is hacker news. Define it as either binary value or a boolean, but we should all be aware that as well as TRUE or FALSE, 0 or 1, variables can legitimately be undefined and it's something you have to be capable of handling.
apologies for the rambling answer.
---------------
[1] Admittedly a bit glib, but ignoring the last 120 years of science this is probably the most distinct observation we've been able to make of a live subject. Talking points might include testis and eunuchs, the ability to give birth and the difference between sex, gender and gender stereotyping... oh, and sea horses.
[4] which until rather too recently has basically meant "penis", "already owned by a penis", "has no rights, available to be owned (warranty void if introduced to thinking)" or "even more respected penis".
[5] Feel free to make your own analogies; I recommend some of the misunderstandings between religion and atheism or the futility of voting for a political party you don't like as starting points.
Ugh, this apology seems lamely antiseptic. "We are reviewing our notification procedures" is not the level of self-abasement I would expect after a mistake this serious.
Could someone weigh in on the following quote? Sounds fishy / wrong to me:
To put this in perspective, a balloon that is one kilometer in diameter is capable of lifting about 700,000 tons, or the weight of two Empire State Buildings. Add a second balloon of the same size and the lift capacity of these two balloons increases exponentially: it’s now capable of supporting nearly 6 million tons of weight.
I assume they meant that if you were to double the diameter of the balloon, it would be a superlinear increase in lifting capacity (since volume is cubic in radius). However, it wouldn't actually be exponential, and two balloons added together definitely does not equal more than the sum of their individual lift capacity.
Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that first number is in the right ballpark. From [0], the lift generated by helium vs Earth air at STP is approx. 1.03 g/L. This suggests a lift of approx. 590,000 short tons on Earth:
Then, if we assume that the gravity on Venus is 90% of Earth standard, you get about 656,000 short tons of lift. Note that this doesn't take into account the different air density on Venus.
You're right, that doesn't make any sense. The buoyant force is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced. Doubling the volume of your balloons doubles the buoyant force and therefore doubles the weight you can carry. The relationship is linear, not exponential.
I'd agree, that doesn't sound right at all. Perhaps they meant doubling the size of the balloon? Doubling the diameter of a sphere indeed increases its volume many times more than double.
It is uncharitable and silly to believe that a good person could not have those positions in good faith. You may disagree with it, but "torture is sometimes permissible" is not an evil opinion held exclusively by evil people.
Perhaps he could have the opinion that, as he tweeted, "the CIA saved American lives" in good faith. But he was criticizing a 525-page Senate report on the same day it came out, December 9th. This report has a lot of details on CIA misrepresentations on how they "saved lives". I doubt he read the report before he tweeted.
I don't think that's in good faith.
It is in good company, as Dick Cheney admitted he hadn't read the report, while still asserting it was "full of crap".
Let me give a single example of the kind of CIA claims about the effectiveness of torture that the report documents. On page 188, the report describes a briefing George Tenet and a CIA lawyer gave to some White House officials. (See footnote 1101 for a partial list of attendees.) Their slides included the claim that their torture techniques helped identify Richard Reid.
Richard Reid was arrested before the CIA tortured anyone under this program. This program could not have helped catch Reid unless it also involved the use of a time machine.
You may think this is a silly example, but the report documents dozens of instances of this level of misrepresentation. Footnote 1393 demonstrates another causality inversion that the CIA thinks they caused, in which they tortured someone in 2003 to get enough information to disrupt a plot in 2002.
Check it out for yourself; you can read the Senate report's 525-page executive summary here:
Maybe I'm wrong about torture, and maybe I'm misreading or misunderstanding the report. But I think Conway's dismissal of the report without reading it is in bad faith.
I think the only way it is possible to hold it "in good faith" is to be unconsciously bigoted. That is, you don't realize you're a bigot, probably because you haven't examined your underlying beliefs.
To see this most clearly, try to imagine a situation where you would find it acceptable for an American soldier to be tortured by some foreign power.
First, thank you for providing a thought experiment that challenged my own beliefs on the topic. Something like that is rare.
Given the social climate surrounding the issue, it seemed appropriate to switch to a throwaway. I'll strive to keep the discussion interesting and thought-provoking.
I'd like to followup with you and get some insights. Thinking over your example leads me to conclude, "There is no such thing as what's 'acceptable,' only what's effective."
I think we care about what's acceptable/unacceptable because we need a collective line in the sand for what would be self destructive.
I think if some concepts are not marked as non bargainable, they will eventually be common.
Torture and terror falls in this camp for me. If we agree there are cases it's ok to use them, eventually we'll have a neighbor tortured because of some other thing society abors.
I think Post-911 and the Bush Administration making statements that in order to save lives and prevent more terrorists attacks they had to torture terrorist suspects.
It is a kind of the ends justify the means, the type of road that leads to tyranny. Which is why the Patriot Act got passed and hasn't been repealed yet.
You know that terrorists will use torture and everything they got and won't stick to laws and rules to get their ends to justify their means.
So what prevents us from becoming just like the terrorists we are fighting? Does it really need a fight fire with fire, and it is not terrorism when we do it? Are there better ways to fight terrorism that we haven't considered yet?
> So what prevents us from becoming just like the terrorists we are fighting?
'prevented', not 'prevents'. That's a passed station now, it's official, it's documented and it's absolutely horrible.
You see, when a bunch of deranged idiots does something there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances, but when a nation state does something there are none, unless you want to claim they too are deranged idiots.
Ironic that US Special Forces trained the Taliban to fight the USSR in the 1980's and then later on their leader founder Al Qaeda using the same tactics to fight the USA.
I think US failed foreign policy helps create a lot of terrorist networks. We pulled out of Iraq and Syria too fast and then ISIS/ISIL took over in the power vacuum there. So in trying to end the war too soon, to score points for people back home, we actually made it worse in Syria and Iraq.
In leaving Afghanistan we gave control back to the Taliban.
So the US war effort in the Middle East has failed as terrorist networks just take back control.
The USA won't admit to the things it does, it covers up the Prism NSA spying system, it covers up the torture, it covers up murdering people with drone strikes, then it goes after the news media that reports on all of the bad things the USA is doing to censor it.
Maybe we cannot prevent being a tyranny, maybe it is too late? We had to become a police state with the Patriot Act and Prism in order to fight the war on terror and then what have we become over that?
If we're talking about effectiveness, you then have to define what's the criteria that you're optimizing for - that's mostly the difference between morality frameworks. Certainly there is argument that was made within utilitarianism that if 1 people are tortured so that hundreds of millions of people can avoid having a speck of dust in their eyes, it's still a net gain for happiness (and so it's an acceptable, even preferable scenario to happen).
The fact that it's impossible for human agreeing on the criteria to be optimized asides. Normally there are many reasons that we almost never make morality argument based on effectiveness (unfortunately, I'm not articulate enough to summarize those reasons in a comment). The trolley problem is a good example: if it was a straightforward effectiveness argument, we all know what the "rational" decision should be.
There are multiple morality frameworks, most including torture, and very few that don't. Western Christianity (ie. "New Testament") and it's "atheist variant" Humanism are fully opposed to torture (unless you count banishment as torture, which some do), but most other ideologies aren't.
Take the old testament, which is certainly a moral framework. Or, when it comes to frameworks in use, islam's moral framework, for example, specifies torture as punishment for crimes (whippings, beatings, certain prescribed forms of execution, forcing children to witness execution of convicted parents, ...). But this is not the exception, most religions support torture, mostly only as punishment:
It's not limited to religions either. For instance, most or all person cults support torture.
A lot of people have serious trouble with the concept of multiple moralities, yet of course that's exactly what different religions are. People seem to find it easy to tolerate, oh going to temple instead of church, but if you disagree on marriageable age, slavery, or punishment then you're a monster. Never mind that by that standard, the majority the planet's population fails.
> Take the old testament, which is certainly a moral framework.
The Old Testament (and ditto with the New Testament) is not a "moral framework"; it is a set of stories which have been incorporated as part of the justification or inspiration for numerous moral frameworks, many of which conflict deeply with each other.
This makes it useless for getting a confession to a crime with no corroborating evidence. However, if you have a method of independently verifying the information you get, you can get useful information.
Note: I oppose torture, but effectiveness is orthogonal to my opposition. Something can be effective and still evil.
Not that effective for gathering reliable intelligence in a timely manner, but very effective for other purposes: To punish, to instill fear in potential enemies, to satisfy a need for revenge.
The "gathering intelligence" excuse is used only because it allows "good people" to convince themselves they support torture for rational, "good" reasons. Nobody would openly say they support torture because they want to see the enemy writher in pain and fear and be forced to eat their own shit. Even if this is the real reason.
Can we construct a situation where that would be appropriate? Well, let's get as close as we can, factoring out as many moral variables as possible, to make the question more concrete.
Let's imagine that it's the 1980s, during the Cold War. And let's create an inverse Dr. Strangelove setup.
Let's say that the United States, based on erroneous intelligence, has become convinced that a nuclear attack from the USSR is imminent. To prevent annihilation of the population of the United States, authorization is given to promptly and preemptively attack the USSR and the protocol is started.
Now, let's say that there are a number of persons who are able to disarm these attacks, and that one of them has fallen into KGB hands. The KGB has just one hour to prevent a nuclear holocaust.
To factor out another variable, let's assume that the general being held by the KGB is located somewhere that will be within the blast range of the mutual destruction, such that should the reciprocal attacks take place, the general will in the coming days die of a mix of radiation poisoning and starvation, no doubt a gruesome way to die.
How far is the KGB ethically entitled to go to try to extract the cancelation codes?
Now, "utilitarianism" was mentioned below, and the simple utilitarian would answer, as noted, that if there was even any chance of a small discomfort being removed for a great many, than it would be worth incredible pain for a single person. Such is a common attack on utilitarianism -- that it allows for persecuting the innocent.
However, that's a very superficial view of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism also considers that in trying to maximize the happiness (or some proxy for it) within society, that people care very much about some basic presumption of justice within that society. For instance, I would not expect a society which tortured suspected jaywalkers to be optimized for happiness. It gives us a sense of security and comfort to know that there are certain guarantees in our social systems.
There's also the argument from the perspective of justice (i.e. an argument from rights rather than outcomes). The notion there is that you can construct a set of rights by supposing a "veil of ignorance" in which you do not know where you would fall in a society or situation. For instance, if nobody knew if they were the torturer or torturee, they might both agree that torture is wrong and that it should not be practiced. The "veil of ignorance" is basically what the grandparent's question on transposing nationalities was trying to get at.
The utilitarian viewpoint doesn't lend itself towards as clearly defined of a set of rules for right and wrong. On the other hand, a strict set of rights can draw questions at the extreme ends of the ethical spectrum.
In the abstract that's all fine and good but we're talking about some very concrete situations here that go nowhere near those extremes. Extremes are nice to come down on something 'in principle' but barring extraordinary concocted up scenarios to expose the weaknesses of having a pre-set mind about anything at all it is still very useful to come down to some ground rules that everybody lives by, for instance, laws and in this case the Geneva convention.
The idea is that then if someone decides to cross those lines that you try them in court to see if a judge sees it the same way, if not off to the slammer you go.
I agree. But sometimes thought experiments can be useful in sussing out why we hold certain values. Torture I don't actually consider to be one of those that's particularly opaque, but asking "Why do I think this is wrong?" and looking at the edge cases is often an enlightening process. (And I've been reading a good bit of political philosophy lately trying to resolve some dissonance on other topics where I found my own views inconsistent.)
It's the engineering mindset at work: reduction to extremes can give you a good idea of whether or not something has a discrete solution or if it is multi-valued. In this case it seems to me that it is likely to be multi-valued but only in non-real-world scenarios and for all intent and purposes you might as well treat it as discrete: torture == bad.
If you're inclined to go down that path: the Japanese treated US POWs terribly, and the US still dropped two nukes as a weapons test (there was credible intelligence Japan was in the process of surrendering because of the "regular" fire-bombing campaigns - but dropping nukes was seen as a great deterrent against Sovjet. And as a great opportunity for a field test).
Note: I'm mentioning this because you're scenario isn't quite as hypothetical as one might hope - for neither those bombed nor for the abused POWs.
Do very many people do this thought experiment and say "Wow, I'd totally let the European guy keep the codes to disarm the bomb, but I'd torture the brown one."?
edit: It's a serious question. The claim is that people who support torture do so because they're "unconsciously bigoted." That seems silly so I've posed a counter question: How many people's belief in torture falls apart if they imagine the subject looking like them/sharing their religious views/etc? I don't imagine it's very many.
It's a good question, I have no idea why you are being downvoted.
Consider a person who's moral principles are based on empathy. Empathy is well known to be racist - we simply don't feel equally bad is a black person gets pricked with a needle than a white person. (Errors like this are why I believe empathy is a terrible basis for morality.)
Now consider path dependence. If you first think about a brown person being tortured, you (statistically) are more likely to accept it - you simply feel less empathy for this person. Then when you generalize to the case of a white person, you'll similarly support torture.
Conversely, if you first think about a white person being tortured and then generalize to a black person, you'll oppose it.
So it doesn't happen that belief in torture falls apart, what happens is the example you think of to start with determines that belief.
I still think that's a bit simplistic and maybe politically motivated. Of course groups have different feelings towards their members and non-members.
First study: why in the world didn't they report their findings of how black people felt watching white people get hurt? That's a pretty bad bias.
Second study: are these people just fishing for proof that white people are racist?
> The less privileged the target seemed, the less participants thought s/he would experience pain. In other words, participants associated hardship with physical toughness. Importantly, target race (Black vs. White) was no longer predictive of pain ratings once we controlled for participants’ perceptions of the target’s privilege,
but they just sidestep that part for the conclusion:
> The present work demonstrates that people assume a priori that Blacks feel less pain than do Whites. This finding has important implications for understanding and reducing racial bias. It sheds new light on well-documented racial biases. Consider, for instance, the finding that White Americans condone police brutality against Black men relative to White men
How am I supposed to take these people seriously? Experiment 5 showed that blackness only correlates with a deeper, more predictive factor but they ignore that to go on a socio-political rant about the plight of black Americans. They do everything they can to fit the results into a preconceived narrative. This isn't science, it's social activism masquerading as science. 90% of their "conclusions" was about things that weren't even part of the experiment.
.
This isn't bringing us any closer to understanding how and why people are able to do awful things like commit torture, which should be the goal here. Instead we have to put that question aside and ask why such political bias isn't being called out in science.
For the purposes of the original question, namely how the perceived race of the victim might lead someone to support torture, these questions are moot.
However, they are useful questions more broadly. Ultimately the issue is that people motivated by empathy are going to be inconsistent and biased. While this probably won't lead them to change their opinion, the example use case they first think of may drive their original opinion.
> To see this most clearly, try to imagine a situation where you would find it acceptable for an American soldier to be tortured by some foreign power.
Sure: If a company of US soldiers has infiltrated an area and is planning to blow up a church during a wedding, and one is captured, it might be acceptable to torture him for the information of the plot, so it might be averted. "Might", only if that is the very last resort and has at least some chance of success.
The reason it's hard to come up with such a scenario is that probably most of us assume American soldiers are acting on orders, and those orders are at least well-intentioned, even if they end up doing wrong.
> "torture is sometimes permissible" is not an evil opinion held exclusively by evil people
I took air to mean that support of torture eliminates a person from the top strata of the category of "good person" - by itself a handwavy categorization - that should be held up as some kind of exemplar of virtue, as pg has done.
It's a point I happen to agree with, and regardless of whether or not you think Dante would create a special place in hell for rich guys who provide political cover for torturers, it does undermine to some extent the premise of of pg's article.
Writing an article like this about someone you actually like is dangerous. As Pappy Boyington said, "Show me a hero and I'll show you a bum."
I really appreciate your response, but I think there is a problem with our mental model of a moral paragon.
Is it really smart to believe that childlike simplicity of purpose is morally admirable? That never being seen to take a side in an ugly situation with horrible tradeoffs on all sides is a prerequisite for being a top quality "good person"?
My sense is that rather than courageous, it is extremely easy to take sides like opposing torture in all forms at all times. Such positions receive automatic praise and require little complex thinking. That does not necessarily make them wrong, but we should subject them to an extra shade of rational skepticism.
Relatedly, it is obvious to me that when Ronco takes a pro-torture position, it is not out of personal weakness or malice, as people seem to imagine, but could only be the result of serious careful thought. A sociopath, for example, would never ever take a position so likely to garner knee-jerk criticism for no personal gain. I suppose a troll might, but he is extremely obviously not a troll.
> Is it really smart to believe that childlike simplicity of purpose is morally admirable?
I don't have any idea what you're talking about but I'm guessing we like "smart" rather than "childlike simplicity."
> That never being seen to take a side in an ugly situation with horrible tradeoffs on all sides is a prerequisite for being a top quality "good person"?
On the contrary, regardless of how you define "good person," I suspect having taken a side would be a necessary factor. The more relevant factor would be having chosen the correct side.
> My sense is that rather than courageous, it is extremely easy to take sides like opposing torture in all forms at all times. Such positions receive automatic praise and require little complex thinking. That does not necessarily make them wrong, but we should subject them to an extra shade of rational skepticism.
I don't think the amount of effort or risk involved in reaching a moral decision can be considered an indicator of that decision's correctness. We would not consider someone who took one second to decide to help an old lady across the street to have acted more morally than someone who had to take a little more thought to make the decision based on the same reasoning, after all. And plenty of decisions to choose ethical conduct over unethical conduct are quite easy for most of us to make - you can think of your own examples. Effort isn't any sort of reliable indicator.
Indeed I did; it's precisely what I was replying to. No matter how good a person is, they will encounter moral dilemmas (or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them) with no good option. For any one of these situations you can say "OMG! I'm so indignant that they chose A" ... And the same for B.
> No matter how good a person is, they will encounter moral dilemmas (or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them) with no good option. For any one of these situations you can say "OMG! I'm so indignant that they chose A" ... And the same for B.
It's as if you believe every moral choice, including the choice to support or oppose torture, is a choice of equal moral consequence such that a person deserves praise whichever way they choose. I don't intend to sign on to this new ethical theory of yours.
Okay, let's start over. I'll pick things apart as well as I can.
> Good people can't ever support anything with (moral) downsides?
"Moral downsides" is not, as far as I know, a term of art in ethics or religion so it is hard to know what you mean, but I'm pretty sure you've been downvoted for underplaying the importance of a decision to support something many of us believe to be intrinsically evil.
> Indeed I did; it's precisely what I was replying to.
You were replying to post where I indicated that having chosen to support torture removed Ronco from the category of person so admirable we should hold him up as an example for the rest of us to follow. This is - usefully, I think - a lot more specific than dividing the world into "good people" and "bad people."
> No matter how good a person is, they will encounter moral dilemmas
That is part of the human condition, yes.
> (or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them)
There also exist math problems that could be posed to them. I wonder why you've gone all hypothetical here.
> with no good option. For any one of these situations you can say "OMG! I'm so indignant that they chose A" ... And the same for B.
There are, hypothetically, moral dilemmas such that every outcome is equally bad.
The decision to support torture is not one of them. I do not believe even a supporter of torture would characterize the decision to engage in torture or not to engage in torture as a decision such that deciding one way or the other will result in equally bad outcomes.
> By that standard, there cannot exist good people.
Sure thing; I hope some of it will make more sense now.
>"Moral downsides" is not, as far as I know, a term of art in ethics or religion so it is hard to know what you mean,
First of all, I never used that term; I referred to downsides, and clarified the context in a parenthetical. Because so much of grandstanding about torture is apparently from a deontological perspective (cf. your insistence on things being "intrinsically evil"), this was simply to clarify that the "downsides" were with respect to a moral calculus, not e.g. some CBA of material costs.
Second, certainly you can compose concepts together, even when that combination of the words is not formally enumerated in some lexicon?
Third, it feels much like you're calling me ignorant by unnecessarily drawing attention to specific phrases and complaining about them not being in the official lingo. Now that you know what I'm referring to, could you either a) give the standard term for it which you would not have complained about, or b) apologize for the insinuation, or c) explain why you were unable to infer meaning of a new term the normal way?
>but I'm pretty sure you've been downvoted for underplaying the importance of a decision to support something many of us believe to be intrinsically evil.
That would be a bad reason, since I never "underplayed" the importance of this, which would suggest some sort of "well, yeah that's bad, but no big deal". I'm complaining that, if you are going to write someone off every time their decision has a downside, they can't win, no matter how good they are, and so the existence of such downsides isn't a strike against their goodness at all, any more than a politician is evil for recognizing the existence of tradeoffs between funding for hospitals and funding for schools. (Can you believe (Jack|John) (John|Jack)son? He supported reduced funding for (school|hospital)s! Does he not thing (education|health care) is important?)
>>(or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them)
>There also exist math problems that could be posed to them. I wonder why you've gone all hypothetical here.
That was simply to avoid the (slimy) trick of refusing to engage moral dilemmas -- i.e. consider someone praiseworthy simply because they never had to encounter a hard choice. Is that a reasonable caveat?
>There are, hypothetically, moral dilemmas such that every outcome is equally bad.
>The decision to support torture is not one of them. I do not believe even a supporter of torture would characterize the decision to engage in torture or not to engage in torture as a decision such that deciding one way or the other will result in equally bad outcomes.
Why the focus on the case of the outcomes being equally bad? A "supporter of torture" can (and usually do) agree that torturing people is bad, but not as bad as letting millions die when the bomb goes off. (This is where people usually muddle the distinction between "it wouldn't work" and "it would be bad even if it did work".) They simply don't regard the badness of that option as a dealbreaker. (There's no requirement that the options be equally bad for the logic to apply.)
That's the same thing I'm criticizing on your part. You could equally well play the game of "he advocated letting millions of people die! Bad!" Well, sometimes you can't win. The very best people can be placed in that dilemma, and their having to take one bad branch should not be a strike against them.
The point I was trying to express in one line originally.
> I never "underplayed" the importance of this, which would suggest some sort of "well, yeah that's bad, but no big deal".
Okay, you don't think you're underplaying the importance of a person's support of torture, but in saying things like this you are lumping all a person's transgressions together:
> if you are going to write someone off every time their decision has a downside
This is absolutely not "every time," this is the time the guy used his influence to provide public support for the institution of torture by America instead of using his influece to condemn it.
Incidentally, I'm not talking about writing someone off. I'm talking about excluding him from the very enthusiastic category person we should admire as an exemplar of good which pg created for Ronco. (seriously, he invoked the Bible)
> they can't win, no matter how good they are, and so the existence of such downsides isn't a strike against their goodness at all, any more than a politician is evil for recognizing the existence of tradeoffs between funding for hospitals and funding for schools.
I agree that if we regard all moral transgressions as being equally serious then it makes no sense to draw the distinction between good and bad acts, or perhaps even good and bad people. I just think that is an absurd premise.
> Why the focus on the case of the outcomes being equally bad?
A choice between equally undesireable alternatives is usually what is meant by "dilemma." Some of that is just the dictionary, but more intuitively it's just not usually worth arguing about the cases where one choice is regarded as worse than another.
> That's the same thing I'm criticizing on your part. You could equally well play the game of "he advocated letting millions of people die! Bad!"
In much the same way that I do not believe all moral transgressions are equally serious, I do not believe all arguments are equally sound.
> "torture is sometimes permissible" is not an evil opinion held exclusively by evil people.
... for a rather arbitrary definition of "evil" (and "good"), one I don't share. Doesn't it make you think a little when every depiction and description of hell contains various forms of torture?
Except he doesn't say "torture is sometimes permissible". He supports the specific actions of CIA where torture were used, but didn't lead to reliable intelligence of value. So it was not a "ticking time-bomb scenario", it was "torture because we have the power to do it".
> It is uncharitable and silly to believe that a good person could not have those positions in good faith.
Imagine someone who just straight up punches people in the face without any warning for using the n word. Can that ever be in good faith? At what point is it OK to physically hurt others?
This doesn't justify torture, but I can imagine many situations where it physical violence can be good. I would say it is ethically good to physically harm someone if that harm prevents then from harming others, for example.
There are tons of questions surrounding when it is OK, but to say that physical violence is never appropriate is to live in a fantasy world where evil doesn't exist. There are some forms of aggression that cannot be successfully resisted without resorting to violence.
It's really easy to come up with hypotheticals when violence stops other violence, with no other ill effects and no risk.
Real life isn't as pretty. You meet violence with violence and all you're guaranteed is violence. You may 'win', you may not, but all you're certain to achieve is perpetuating the cycle.
"Good", "evil" and "good faith" are all too ill-defined to be used in a philosophical discussion like this: you will have to define them. It's fine for pg to used, because a) He's almost using good as the opposite of mean, and b) He's not discussing about morality. When it comes to morality discussion, a lot more bets are off and you have to be careful on what basis you're defining "good", "evil" and the like.
To be more on point, there are a lot of "evil" people that are acting on good faith - the comical image of an evil genius who's hell bent on taking over the world for his own greediness or for fun doesn't really exist in real life. You can truly believe that the best way to win a war for your country (and help your fellow country men) is to exterminate the other country, so you make an order to massacre everything that move. That would be evil acting in good faith.
> It is uncharitable and silly to believe that a good person could not have those positions in good faith.
No it is not. Certain things are just incompatible. "good person" and "supporter of torture" are a good example of this.
The illusory "effectiveness" of torture doesn't matter, you may as well ask if slavery is profitable, as others have pointed out. If you're asking that then you have already lost your way.
What you're saying is only true if you assume the existence of a modern test-prep mentality. Do the applicants know in advance which facts they will be asked to regurgitate, or do they need to understand a wide variety of material at this level of detail?
Also, I really do not agree that the math sections are easy. Students applying for non-quantitative majors are definitely not required to be able to produce non-trivial geometric proofs like this.
Nearly all of these math problems were covered in my math curriculum between 7 and 11th grades and are really not hard if you have practiced it before. Actually, the only part of this exam I find difficult is geography, because it requires to have memorized many minor facts (something I find nearly useless in the days of Internet). I guess it depends on your country and education system.
Without saying anything about the broader thrust of an argument, I'll highlight a pet peeve: the drawing of wildly overconfident conclusions from social science research.
The economics experiment on how rural Indian farmers respond to financial incentives is interesting, but... is it really applicable here? How solid is the unstated assumption that elite CEOs have similar ability to perform under pressure as random subsistence farmers? Doesn't sound that solid to me...
If we stipulate that the charter schools in question have strong selection biases in their student bodies and better resources relative to public schools, then:
a) It's true that statistics are frequently misused by journalists and advocates, BUT:
b) It hardly impugns the schools themselves. Taking a subset of more promising students without behavioral issues out of failing public schools and giving them better resources at charters is not necessarily a bad idea.
The article directly addresses why it's a bad idea: "it makes little sense for the district to heavily subsidize schools [i.e. charters] serving less needy children that already have access to more adequate resources. It makes even less sense to make these transfers of facilities space (or the value associated with that space) as city class sizes mushroom and as the state indicates the likelihood that its contributions will continue falling well short of past promises."
Also, the article mentions that many of the charters have suspension rates between 20 and 50%, which suggests that either a.) the students at these schools do have behavioral issues and/or b.) the charters use aggressive suspension policies to get students to leave.
Heavily subsidize? Last year, the charter school my kids attend got $1300 less per student than the non-charters in the district. The school has roughly 1200 students. That means we probably saved someone (district? state? not exactly sure the break down of funding sources) roughly $1,560,000 that year over having all those students in the non-charter schools. At the very least, the other non-charter schools got more (per student) than they would have (assuming there isn't a magical $1.56M sitting around, the schools would have received somewhere in between the two numbers for ALL students).
Transfers of facilities space? The school recently took out a loan and bought an empty business complex to renovate as our new campus because the campus we were using was an old run down school that the district had already closed several years prior to us moving in. They closed it (and two others in the district) due to budget cuts. Closing these schools caused teachers to lose their jobs & class sizes at the remaining schools to increase.
Or c.) some public schools don't have high enough behavioral standards for their students for whatever reason and some students have problems adjusting to the new expectations.
If journalists are concerned about the quality of reporting around this issue, explaining the suspension rate seems like a great story. It would be hard work, though, since schools rightly don't talk to strangers about specific disciplinary incidents.
I remember reading something that disproved your point b): mixing students from different socioeconomic background (which in general is a very good proxy for academic performance) benefited the poorer students a lot and hardly had any impact on the richer ones. So in short taking out the best students of a diverse class only negatively impacts the ones who stay.
I can try and find the exact reference, but a quick google search brings up a ton of articles on socioeconomic mixing.
Point b) is a problem if charter schools are held up as a general solution to the problems with our schools - because the solution obviously doesn't scale. (The hard-to-teach students need to go somewhere.)
Independent of that, it's also problematic because you're essentially giving up on the "failing schools public schools", by taking resources away from them.
Call me crazy, but I have no emotional attachment to buildings and organizations (whichever you mean by schools). As long as the students in failing public schools have at least replacement-level alternatives, there won't be a net negative here.
> The hard-to-teach students need to go somewhere.
That's obvious. The criticism is that, in the current system, laws and tradition have dictated that "somewhere" is Oswald Cobblepot High School down the street, and if that school is a hole, sucks to be you. Blame the voters that didn't pass the bond issue five years ago. Or get rich and move to a nicer neighborhood.
And that last point is especially important. The rich have places to send their problem students. And they can afford to move to overpriced neighborhoods that effectively weed out at-risk students from the student body. The current system (unintentionally) creates public schools full of hard-to-teach students.
The point made in this piece is that such students do not have alternatives other than public schools, since the charter school policies are explicitly designed to weed them out. The end result of such policies is that "good" students who have the means to do well in school end up in charter schools, and "bad" students who do not have the means to do well in schools end up in the public schools. But, the public schools will have less overall money than before, since some of their funding has been siphoned off to the charter schools.
As I see it, this exacerbates the problems of rich schools and poor schools.
My point is that the system is already stacked against students, even if every school were a traditional public school. There are always expensive neighborhoods, private schools, tutors, etc.
And one of the side effects of the current system is that rich parents and poor parents don't even live in the same school district anymore. And housing prices are both inflated and tied to the quality of the local schools, which is insane if you think about it.
Anecdotally, I know several teachers. Their salaries, for their education level (Master's degree) and cost of living (NYC area, often teaching in the city), are very low. One particular example I know is a NYC public school teacher with a Master's in education and several years experience making $45k.
Many members of this community are fine with the notion that paying programmers more will tend to attract better programmers. I see no reason why we can't extend that to public school teachers.
The article you linked to mentions that the standardized testing organizations have such a lock on testing that schools have to buy their specific expensive study materials or else the students will do worse on the standardized tests.
I don't even know if I would agree that giving more money to all schools would solve this problem. What's to keep those standardization study materials companies from raising their prices to increase their profitability?
How about if we instead take apart the centralized institutions that allow testing companies to maintain monopolies on testing and standardized testing study materials?
Once again, this isn't a problem rooted in money for education. This is a problem of entrenched power structures that prioritize maintaining their power over educating children.
A potential solution, if the district is large enough, to that is to create an open enrollment district. Stop forcing kids to go to a specific school just because they happen to live at a certain address, or change schools because they need to move.
Why not a school with behavior experts? Wouldn't a concentration of students with specific needs make it easier to address those needs because you can concentrate those specific resources there? To take an extreme example, look at the success of schools for the deaf or schools for the blind.
Public schools have special education teachers, and sub-schools within existing schools for special education teachers. In other words, we already do that. We just don't fund it very well.
Use of bad statistics and refusal to answer specific questions that show the badness is usually reason enough to discredit someone or something. Also, in a) those stats are used by the companies (schools) themselves - that's where the journalists and advocates got their data. If you have good solid data, you lead with that.
Regardless of the original reason for it, this policy makes most statistics about the school suspicious. What would you think of a study where the researcher deletes all the data points they don't like? The school is doing the same thing except that instead of deleting data points, they are expelling students.
It is a similar problem to survivor bias when researching financial fund performance.
The incentives to improve performance on statistical measures like test scores will tend to cause overly strict schools to survive whether or not the administrators started out as true believers in strict discipline or just figured out along the way its effect on test scores. Once the relationship is understood, administrators who are watching performance will be reluctant to move towards lenient policies that bring test scores down.
WRT point B, the "better resources" are the kids, providing better numerical metric results to the teachers and operators of the charter schools. It would help your argument to expand on "not necessarily a bad idea". I don't see any particular advantage in rewarding a subset of educational professionals for doing little more than gaming the system.
Maybe, but I would wait to hear from a physicist. When I was a student, one of the most important papers one year was about a dark matter (WIMP) detector that failed to find anything, thus "trimming the parameter space" for what the particles might look like. If this is a genuine clue, it's probably very exciting.
The year-long isolation seems to me like a much crueler part of the ordeal than anything food related. We consider it inhumane to do this to convicted murderers, even when they have interactions with guards and activity time that make them much less isolated than "Nasubi" seems to have been.
If the "simplistic" male/female binary explains >99% of observations, there does not seem to be a strong case for describing biological sex as a "spectrum"...
I am 10,000% behind tolerance and acceptance for people of all genders and sexes and orientations, and it's very useful to understand how much biological complexity and variation is possible. But... any honest interpretation of the data would suggest that "the idea of two sexes" is an highly accurate approximation for Homo sapiens.