ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Isn't that still a decent salary for a governess?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Don't know how it happened in Korea, but a lot European countries ended up borrowing it too. The native word for sex often feels (extremely) vulgar, and the non-vulgar alternatives are either vague euphemisms, clinical multi-word phrases or compound words in languages like German. "Sex" by comparison is pretty handy - short and neutral.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Are we arguing that the value provided by sugar water delivery and DoorDash makes up for the cost of putting their kids in school
Yes. While this may be the price tag, there is no way in hell it takes $6000 per month to teach a single child. For this money you could literally hire a governess for each child (well, +/- the sudden spike in demand for teachers), and operating at scale is supposed to make things cheaper.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Yeah, me too. I'd much prefer it if the Democrats' response to 2016 was equal to that of Republicans' to 2020.
You accuse me, first, of hypocrisy-- of not understanding how you create definitions, even as I accuse you of not understanding the gender-ideologist’s position. I would instead characterize that as disagreement. I think either we are using the same word (‘definition’) to point at two separate topics, or your definition of ‘definition’ rests on an incoherent theory of mind and therefore incomplete self-understanding.
Don't get me wrong, a disagreement between us most likely exists as well, but if you understood my position you'd be able to describe it in terms I would recognize as accurate, and you haven't really done that yet. This is much broader than the disagreement over my approach to definitions, so far, whenever a second person pronoun was followed by a description of an idea or behavior it has failed to match thoughts I have or approaches I take, which is why I believe you don't understand where I'm coming from. You've been informed of that repeatedly, and instead of trying to correct any misunderstanding between us, you're confidently claiming I lack self-understanding. It's quite clear you're not living up to your own standard here.
Funnily enough the position you describe as yours is much closer to mine than the one you describe as mine. I don't believe there's anything fixed, or platonic about concepts, and if I depend on "objectivity" of any kind it's only to the extent I believe there's a physical reality external to us, which doesn't much care what we think of it. You're right that the lack of various lanes and sidewalks would not affect how I see vehicles and pedestrians, but I hold that you're wrong it makes no sense to talk about changing definitions. Definitions are necessary to express ideas, and if you're using the word "car" in some other way than I am, it's pointless to fight over who has the "correct" definition (and I'm pretty sure you were making that point yourself), and much easier to just switch over to yours, express my ideas with your concepts, and make-do with pointing fingers at objects when all else fails.
I like the idea of the brain as a supervised classifier, nothing you said about the mutability of definitions goes much against anything I believe, and I don't think there's any one true way to classify things, but where it falls flat for me is the insistence that definitions are derived from goals. I believe that not only is it possible to have the same goal while having different definitions, or different goals while having the same definitions, I believe it's not even possible to talk about goals, unless you have a set of coherent definitions to begin with.
You call them an idiot, they call you a bigot,
maybe they really are stupid and/or evil.
There’s no doubt in my mind that plenty of gender-ideologists are stupid and malicious.
That's great, but the words "stupid", "evil" and "malicious" never left my virtual mouth, so you've been essentially talking to yourself throughout the train of thought. This was a particularly egregious example of not meeting me where I am.
If you choose to hurt yourself… okay? It’s not like taking drugs, where by hurting yourself, you become more likely to hurt other people too.
So to take another example, if a patient goes to a doctor and asks for an opioid prescription, not because he's sick, not because's he's in any sort of unbearable pain, but because it will make him feel good, and the doctor runs his clinic by the motto "the customer is always right", you'd see absolutely nothing wrong with that edit: you would not see that as a valid case for government intervention?
It’s reasonable for the government to set up guardrails when it comes to medicine. And verifying that patients (and if applicable, the parents) are giving informed consent and that the drug or procedure given will be successful at giving it to them is extremely non-trivial. I suspect a “perfect” implementation of the system would result in a lot fewer minors ultimately getting medically transitioned.
I don't think you have to go as far as "perfect". A very basic implementation of the system would result it that, and it would likely limit many adult transitions as well.
And yes, it’s true that you and I were able to discuss this issue without reference to the definitions of “man” and “woman”, but that’s because we more-or-less agree on those definitions in the first place
If you believe that having a discussion this way requires to have the same definitions in the first place, why did you say this:
If you taboo'd the words 'man,' 'woman,' 'male,' and 'female,' you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about whether people should be empowerd to advertise their sexual preferences via their mode of dress...
?
Therefore our disagreement probably hinges on the definition of “government” and “intervention” and “right” instead, and we will almost certainly go around in circles if we aren’t careful about making sure we’re talking about the same things.
I'm pretty sure I share the definitions for all of those 3 words with you and I simply disagree on whether government intervention is actually wrong in this instance, or whether people have a particular right. This is a good example of why it's backwards to claim that you need to have a goal in mind when creating a definition.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
Hinging an argument on an accusation of dishonesty is precisely why I feel it is reasonable to request evidence of dishonesty, lest that accusation of dishonesty also be dishonest.
But no one accused him of dishonesty. Nate never said "I didn't get any contract", that's my entire point! It's his opponent that exposed himself to an accusation of dishonesty if and only if he didn't send the contract. This, and the fact that you thought it's his reputation as a better that's at stake, makes me think you're not really getting the logic behind my reasoning, but I don't know how to explain it any better.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
If it was actually 50-50, why did he take down his real time election result projection?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
That would not be fair. In the absence of Nate confirming that he refused to sign a contract, a claim of having sent the contract is just a claim absent further evidence.
I disagree. All Nate has to do is say "no you didn't, you fucking liar", and if Keith can't provide evidence of sending him the contract, he's the one that's going to suffer reputational damage. On the other hand, if Nate says that, but Keith promptly provides evidence, this will look even worse for him. Since Nate knows for a fact whether or not he received the contract, his decision on how to react to the claim tells us something about the truth value of the claim that he was sent the contract.
There are also scenarios that would explain a lack of reaction. Maybe after the spat Nate blocked Keith, and has no knowledge that he's now going around claiming that he sent the contract. So while the lack of reaction doesn't outright prove the contract was sent, I maintain that the potential reputational damage that can result from the claim is a weak form of evidence in itself, and thus it is the demand to provide hard evidence that's unfair.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
To be fair, in the absence of Nate denying it, I don't think he necessarily needs to provide proof.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
Did the other guy send the contract?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
They're oblivious to more than one problem. I don't know if they realize what effect these sort of "now that this affects Jewish people, it will be acknowledged as a problem" proclamations could have.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
This is an extremely pedantic point to make, but sure, I can agree that the metaphor I chose was perhaps not totally correct.
Sorry about the pedantry, but I find it frustrating because to me the metaphor has a clear and useful meaning, it says the the way one drew the categories is fundamentally broken. In biology you can create categories like "mammal" and "reptile", and even though nature will throw a duck-billed platypus at you sometimes, these categories will still cleave reality at the joints. On the other hand, if you tried to draw a boundary in a way that includes half of all known mammals, and half of all known reptiles, that division would be broken, and wouldn't cleave reality at the joints.
The broader point I made was that there isn't one correct way to define "white" (which you seem to agree with) and therefore who is white and who isn't is socially constructed.
The important thing to note is that even though there isn't one correct way to define any particular race, the core is usually the same, and people fight over the boundaries. This makes broad statements like "white is socially constructed" clearly false, as that implies the core of the concept is up for grabs.
like the Latinos who invented about thirty races for different admixtures of black, white and native
They're just operating at a different level of granularity. It does nothing to disprove the point that race is not socially constructed.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
The size of the boundary is exactly what makes it socially constructed.
Originally you said race doesn't cleave reality at the joints. Even if there's no objectively correct size of the category, it doesn't prove what you originally said. If there's a lot of joints, one person can cleave slightly to the left of how another would do it, and they'd both cleave at the joints.
If you get someone to put two groups close to each other, they'll think of them as close to each other? Is that the claim here?
In one case I meant "how related they are to each other" in the other I meant physically, so a person can take a look at each of them, and mark their similarities and differences. As opposed to just name-dropping "Native American" and "Siberian" to a person who has never seen either, and is only aware of the geographical separation between America and Siberia.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
Maybe I'm pedantic, but I'd call that "language is a social construct".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
You're talking about language, I'm talking "sort these according to how hard they are to separate with your eyes".
Yes, I'm sure. I even know which exact video you got this from. It also had an example of an African tribe that supposedly can easily tell very similar shades of green apart, because they have more words for it in their language.
The phrase you quote does not imply an inability to perceive blue - the sea is pretty damn dark during a dark storm, and wine is also often dark enough that you can't tell it's color - and the African tribe thing was outright made up for the clicks (or views, I guess) by the BBC and a corrupt academic they were filming.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
Ok, well I'm pretty sure that if ask people to pair up objects of the same color, they'll also do that regardless of their language or culture.
If you're going to say that no one claimed that the sameness of colors is not socially constructed, then I don't know what content is the sentence "color is socially constructed" even carrying.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality
I'm not sure what you mean by "objective", I only said it's not socially constructed, but let's go with it, I guess. I don't know how you're separating the two. Once you sort groups by similarity, you can draw a rough boundry around them. You can call that category "white" or you can call it "blorgoschmorg" but it will consist mostly of the same people, especially if you ask the sorters to draw boundaries of the same size.
which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?
If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.
Yeah, but that's irrelevant. Again ask people to sort colors by similarity, and they'll reach pretty much the same result, regardless of their language and culture.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
If it conflicts with the above in some way, it would seem that the term "white" used in ordinary language
That's not ordinary language, that's a bunch of court cases with goofy rules about precedents.
That you can define "white" in a way to be defensible via the chart doesn't mean that's how it's always or even typically used.
If you ask people to sort ethnic groups by how closely related they are to each other, I'm pretty sure it will match the genetic clustering.
That is a particular goal you're putting your definitions in service of. If defining something changes how you sense the world around you
You keep criticizing me for how I argue with progressives without understanding where they're coming from, but you're not really practicing what you preach. Instead of listening to how I see and use definitions, it sounds like you're a lot more interested in telling me how I should see and use them.
I'm trying to tell you - it doesn't change how I sense the world around me. I can substitute my definitions for yours, or anyone else's, and the way I see the world will stay the same. It's useful to have symbols in order to reason about reality, but what what symbols are assigned for what is not a big deal, I can do substitutions in my head with little effort.
Either that statement uses my definition of "man" and "woman," in which case it's false, or it's using your own, in which case it completely fails to communicate any information.
Ok, maybe I misunderstood something you said, let's go over this again:
It doesn't matter whether we live under TradCath divinely ordained gender-complementarity, uno-reverso Amazonian matriarchy, or full-blown egalitarianism, my definition of "man" and "woman" stays exactly the same. My views on what their rights and duties are may vary, but a man is a man under TradCathism, matriarchy, or egalitarianism, and a woman is a woman under all 3 as well.
Then you have confused the map for the territory. There's no point litigating what a "man" and a "woman" is just to change an entry in a dictionary. A definition is a tool, constructed to serve some particular personal or social end. If your definitions do not change when your goals and understanding of the world do, they are useless. If your definitions do not influence how you think and act, they are useless. Definitions do not exist in an abstract void-- they are the cognitive tools with which we understand and classify the world, so we can come to particular decisions and conclusions.
I said my definition of "man"/"woman" is independent of the social order I, or the person in question, is living under. Your response seems to be arguing that this makes my entire approach to definitions wrong, because if what I don't change what I consider to be a "man" or "woman" depending on the social order I'm under, that makes those definitions useless. I don't know what other conclusion to draw from that, other than that a useful approach to definition necessitates that the same person can be a man in one social order and a woman in another. If you didn't mean to say that, than I honestly don't know what your response has to do with what I said.
What?
Let's say you tell me "I'm for equality between the sexes", and because I'm cynical by nature, I don't believe you and suspect that this is something you want only for your own benefit. But then I see you advocating for something that would put you at a disadvantage, and benefit the opposite sex. That's an indication that I haven't met you where you are, and I should adjust my perception of you.
Policies are a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves. Obviously once you decide on an end, then it makes sense to talk about policies, but until then it's pointless.
Your argument went:
- In order to talk about policies, I need to first talk about what I mean by "man" and "woman".
- But before talking about that we need to talk about what goals we're trying to achieve by creating those definitions.
If policies are a means to an end, and definitions are explicitly created is services of particular ends (see also: "A definition is a tool, constructed to serve some particular personal or social end.") then decoupling definitions from policies is a largely fruitless task. The only people who can have a productive conversation this way, are people who already signed on for the same end goals (except they won't even kno.
and the glib little propaganda piece you linked falls into the exact same failure state.
I don't see how. People should be able to answer a simple question like regardless of their preferred policies, or the end goals they're trying to reach. My views on this issue are more or less opposite to yours, we have to start with the definitions, in order to make sure we're even talking about the same thing. From there we can try to find out if we agree or disagree on questions of end goals or the means to achieve them.
Okay, let's do that.
On the issue of sports, my position is that the differences in reproductive biology correlate with a whole swath of physical capabilities, such that putting the group with one set of reproductive characteristics against another, will put one of them at a massive disadvantage, and physical danger.
On the issue of prison much the same arguments apply, except on top of them there's the risk of not only physically maligning prisoners of a group with certain reproductive characteristics, but subjecting them to the risk of sexual assault.
On the topic of medical interventions, I believe they need to be stopped because they don't meet basic medical ethics standards. People are being encouraged to participate in what is effectively a medical experiment, without being informed that this is what they're signing up for. This is particularly egregious when it comes to children, but even cases of adults aren't ethically in the clear.
The transgender debate touches on many other issues like education or parental custody, but this should be enough to demonstrate that what you said about definitions is wrong. I argue for my views even with the words tabooed, and it makes no difference to me what definitions we use.
And I don't think a non-catholic government has the correct moral authority to legislate what sports teams do to make money or who's allowed in which bathrooms based off a non-catholic, non-consensus over gender and what the purpose of defining it is.
Governments have been legislating on what people are allowed to do to make money, and how, since we had governments. Unless you're a hardcore libertarian or an ancap, I will need some more meat on the argument for why this is where we must draw the line on government intervention.
m not sure, because doing that requires us to exchange actual information first. I think we're arguing on completely different levels because we can't agree on terminology.
I don't think we've been arguing over the meaning of any particular word.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
The steelman of "race is a social construct" is that the usual notion of race doesn't cleave reality at the joints.
Cool, because if that's the steelman, then we can say that the entire notion is false, since it doesn't get better from there.
This is false, it does cleave reality at the joints. You can run a genetic clustering algorithm, and you'll see coherent clusters emerge that correspond to the colloquial understanding of "race". Containing a variety of different subgroups does not blow up a category, and if it does, you just blow up the entire system of biological taxonomy as a whole, as well as each of it's components individually
(Disclaimer: I am definitely in a glass house here.)
Fun fact: it used to be a sand castle.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
Or perhaps they opted for exactly the same chicken dinner.
Sure, it's not just "lives for the sake of lives", the child's innocence of any wrongdoing also enters the picture. Responsibility and the wisdom of having casual sex is mostly orthogonal to this issue.
More options
Context Copy link