WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
In this case, it's not so much "the next town over" as it is "home"
Okay, so let's say he dumped me back in my home town. But I left all my stuff at his place before he deported me and, since I intended to stay in town for the night, I had dinner reservations in the morning. No matter how you slice it, being unexpectedly moved across borders at short notice is a serious inconvenience at best, and the government ought to make it up to people if it forces it upon them by mistake.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
(e.g. the neighbor house party should be a strict invite only event, and you only got into it because you literally snuck through the window)
This comment-thread is about how to treat non-citizens who were legally on US soil and are then mistakenly deported. Which may or may not describe this particular guy, but we'd moved beyond talking about him in particular.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
I will reiterate: why doesn't he request assistance from his home country where he actually has citizenship?
Because it's the US who wronged him and have a responsibility to make it up to him.
I'm NOT certain if it then follows that they can demand that the U.S. return them back to U.S. soil.
Why not? If they were allowed to be in the US, and the US expels them erroneously, surely it's not fair to them to ask them to front the cost of the trip back, which they wouldn't have needed if not for the government screw-up.
Suppose I'm at a neighbor's house party. The guy gets drunk, mistakes me for a personal enemy of his who snuck in uninvited, punches my lights out, then drives me to the next town over and drops me off at a bus stop before I come to. Once he sobers up and realizes, I think he owes me more than an apology over the phone and invitation to come back over if I want. I think he definitely owes me bus fare at least, and probably some extra compensation for my trouble. I've got no absolute right to be at his house whenever I want, but that's not the point!
There's no such thing as "razing" an institution in a democracy that swings back and forth. Anything one party can slash by executive order, the other party can resurrect by executive order. It's either an actual bloody coup, or you accept that the best you're going to get is slowing down the other side's reconstruction when they're voted back in. Stopping it altogether is a fool's errand. With that in mind, I think appointments would be 'stickier', on top of being more pro-social.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
The point of my thought experiment was to demonstrate that in principle there can be cases where it's correct for a humanities teacher to mark down a student based on the positions they hold, and not just the quality of the argument. I'm not convinced that "any non-trivial question in the humanities will simply fall far far below that bar". Perhaps bringing HBD into it confused the issue - suppose a student handed in a paper arguing that the pyramids were built by Atlantean aliens from Planet Theta. Wouldn't that be pretty analogous to the flat-earther geology student? Wouldn't you want a serious history teacher to mark down the paper relative to an equally-eloquent one that presented a basically sane theory of the pyramids' origin?
Right, if the history teacher is assuming this to be true, in good faith, that speaks to a truly horrific level of incompetence and bias by the history teacher, in terms of epistemic certainty about history or sociology or the humanities in general.
This is probably the crux of our differing views on the history-teacher thought experiment. The way I see it, for better or for worse, "HBD is noxious pseudoscience on par with flat-Earth and ancient aliens" has been successfully taught to a vast majority of the population. That is, in fact, what HBD advocates complain about. So long as it's the case, it's not a random humanities teacher's responsibility to buck against that. We can't expect him to know that all mainstream geneticists in the country are participating in a vast conspiracy to suppress a genuine controversy, any more than it's his job to guess whether NASA is faking space imagery of the round Earth. If there is blame to be assigned, it goes to the architects of the conspiracy, not to people in unrelated fields who go by the mainstream scientific consensus. And if you go by the mainstream scientific consensus, then "racism explains Africa's subpar development" is trivially false and dangerous misinformation, in the same way as "the Earth is flat".
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Ah, all fair then. I think we're basically on the same page.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
I agree! See "while I understand how they got there, I would like them to get rid of it and revert to a principled stance". I have more common ground with the pro- than anti-trans movement at the end of the day, but I am very happy to criticize the current Standard Trans Message, which has been optimized for winning PR battles, not for truth.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
If a geology student used all the best scientific practices and all the best available empirical evidence and all the best arguments by the standards of all the best geologists that somehow ended up with a convincing conclusion that the Earth was flat, then the geology teacher would absolutely be in the wrong for marking down the student.
In Thought Experiment Land, sure. But in the real world, it would be clear that the student had started from the bonkers conclusion and worked backwards, and I would want the teacher to mark him down, both to make it very clear to him that the claim is nonsense he should un-learn ASAP, and to teach him that you shouldn't assume the conclusion in the first place, let alone a crazy one.
In any case, questions of moral truths like "is homophobia or racism wrong" is categorically different from questions of empirical facts like "is the Earth flat"
That's a fair point. But to the extent it holds, to the extent that homophobia or racism are moral issues and therefore different magisteria from science - then students shouldn't be "arguing in favor of" them either - any more than teachers should be looking for the converse.
So when you wrote "arguments in favor of homophobia or racism" I assumed you meant answers to questions of fact where some claims are designated as racist or homophobic - "claims about how homophobia and racism affect society and individuals within it,", as you say. "Why is Europe more successful than Africa" is a valid historical question, for example, but one for which some factual answers would be deemed racist - eg "because blacks are genetically dumber and more violent than caucasians".
(You might, of course, believe there is something to that, as a question of fact. But assuming we take the opposite to be definitive, demonstrated scientific fact on par with "the Earth is round" - or, simply, assuming the history teacher believes it to be so in good faith - then it doesn't seem to be wrong on the history teacher's part to mark down an essay which takes it to be true, no matter how eloquent it is.)
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
shall we start with the people who did get fired for putting twenty bucks toward Rittenhouse’s defense fund?
This was construed as supporting a murderous racist, not just a pro-guns position.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
Why? No one would blame a geology teacher for marking down a student who hands in a paper whose conclusion is that the Earth is flat. Sometimes positions are known by a field to be outrageously wrong, so that any student who's let those ideas become a part of their conceptual landscape is worse than ignorant. There is no reason, prima facie, why sociology couldn't deem other positions equally deleterious.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
As one tanshumanist to another, my problem with this is that it seems like a very limited view of transhumanism. What I'm rooting for here is a future where I get to be some sort of shapeshifting consciousness which only occasionally reverts to humanoid form for old time's sake; not just "a 6'9" muscular 420 IQ uber-mensch". And if we get that, surely, surely you see that only joyless luddites would keep objecting to calling someone who's manifesting as a clearly-feminine angelic metaverse hologram "she", just because she doesn't have any biological female characteristics. (Because, you know, she wouldn't have any biological characteristics anymore.) Gendered language would only be based on presentation. And if Utopia involves calling people "she" even if they have no XX chromosomes if that's how they present themselves, it seems clearly morally correct to me that we should call a female-presenting person "she" even stuck as we are in flesh bodies that occasionally have spurious XY chromosomes.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
I was arguing that it could conceivably flip it from "transition has better outcomes" to "transition and non-transition have equally good outcomes within margins of error" (if there are a lot of defiant-transitioners, all defiant-transitioners get outcomes as good as overt transitioners, and outcomes between the two groups weren't far apart anyway).
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
As other people have said, I think appointing lots of qualified conservatives to tenured positions is more likely to help the conservative agenda weather another Democratic presidency than simply freezing everything. If you just fire people and lock down buildings, the Dems can just un-lock them and re-hire everyone. Harder to do that if the vacancies are filled.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
You're a biological woman. You have healthy but pretty small breasts. You feel really, really sad about that and want to undergo surgery to make them larger. Is that mental illness?
I don't think desires should be pathologized, except in extremely rare cases. My belief is that legal adults should be able to get whatever elective surgery they damn well want, so long as they demonstrate informed, lasting consent. If it's kosher for a cis woman to get breast enhancements if she sees fit, I see no reason why the same right shouldn't apply to a biological male. Contrariwise, if we recognize that a woman who gets plastic surgery (or her ears carved to look pointy, or whatever non-gendered body modification) is just exercising her rights as a free individual, not responding to some all-important mental illness which it would obviously make her suicidal to deny - then the current classification of "gender dysphoria" as a mental illness becomes obviously nonsensical. It becomes a cheap and dirty hack to convince people to support transition, in minors and others, Because Psychiatrists Say So Suicide Risk Suicide Risk Suicide Risk Do You Want Their Deaths On Your Conscience. I think that is the great lie of the trans movement, and while I understand how they got there, I would like them to get rid of it and revert to a principled stance of "people can do what they want".
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
why not trans-canines who want a tail, why not the trans-abled who want the doctor to cut off their legs?
Why not indeed? I don't think you understood my position, which is happy with neither the mainstream trans or anti-trans positions. I'm a transhumanist, I have libertarian leanings on at least this particular issue, and I do in fact consider it a grown man's right to get an artificial tail if he wants, just as much as artificial breasts or a nose piercing. Or some sort of melanin injection that changes your skin color, if it existed. Bodily autonomy means bodily autonomy. I fully bite that bullet.
However, treating all these things as personal desires should also logically mean that we stop medicalizing them. I think it's disingenuous of the trans movement that they simultaneously go for the bodily-autonomy line, which I respect, and want to keep "gender dysphoria" classified as a mental illness. You really can't have both. Wanting-sex-reassigment-surgery should not be classified as a mental illness any more than wanting-a-tattoo-really-bad. (You could certainly find biological women with self-image issues who were suicidal before getting cosmetic plastic surgery, but that doesn't make the surgery a medical intervention then, just an expense she has decided on of her own free will in pursuit of her happiness. We shouldn't treat the matter any differently if it's a biological man who elects to get the same procedure.)
There is, of course, a separate conversation about whether someone who makes himself disabled on purpose should get the same unemployment benefits etc. as someone who lost an arm by accident. But if a millionaire wants to cripple himself at his own expense, and can demonstrate that he's making that choice of his own free will after careful consideration, rather than in a fit of psychosis - then I don't see why that should be a crime. Hella weird, but it's not my business.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
Your last paragraph doesn't follow from the rest of your post - indeed, it seems at odds with it. The transableism guys are claiming they deserve accommodation because their wacky desire is a mental condition isomorphic to gender dysphoria. The problem very much isn't that we've become unwilling to call these things mental illness! I say that neither should be classified as mental illness. Gender reassignment should be classified as elective plastic surgery, not treatment for an illness. This is what a principled stance for personal autonomy should yield, and cuts through all the bullshitting about suicide risks.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Your overall point is correct, but:
If you count defiant transitioners as part of your control group, it biases your study in favour of transition, because defiant transitioners amount to "transition with a bunch of extra annoyance" and as such are near-guaranteed to do worse than the transition group regardless of how good or bad transition is.
That's not necessarily true: suppose transition, even with transition-with-extra-annoyance, always leads to strictly better outcomes. The control group will then have better outcomes if the defiant transitioners are counted than if they aren't, possibly on par with transitioners within margins of error depending on how many there are and how much the extra annoyance impacts outcomes.
This point aside, I also think any study of this sort would need extremely careful design to separate the effects of social transition vs the actual puberty blockers. I think you'd need two control groups: one where the kids socially transition but don't take puberty blockers, and one where they don't transition either way. And while it's very easy to tell if somebody's been taking unsanctioned hormones, it's rather harder to tell if they switched pronouns among friends, so you really couldn't run a study like that with participants who don't play fair.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
This is a very stranger take. Children very much have a concept of being a boy or a girl, and are aware of grownups being men or women. Also, "minors" doesn't just mean hapless little six-year-olds who don't know about the birds and the bees. A fourteen or fifteen-year-old is a very different matter.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Couldn't Trump & al try forcing appointments, as the middle solution?
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
Yes, this is more or less right. I've certainly encountered endorsement of something like this in left spaces. "It kinda sucks, but the right decided to make women's sports a battlefield of the greater societal conflict about What A Woman Is. Making sure they don't win that fight is of existential importance and takes precedence over concerns about the short-tem fairness of competitive sports". Personally I wish we'd settled on advocating for "let's rename them XX League and XY League". It seems more principled. Harder to turn into a slogan, though.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
I think the disconnect is that representation advocates don't want proportional representation of the general population demographics — what they want is aspirational representation for every minority. The hope is for every black (etc. etc.) child to have just as many black characters in fiction to daydream about being when they grow up that a white child has. From that framing, no single demographic can be "over"-represented until each slice has exactly as many performers as every other.
(The above is an explanation, not an endorsement. Mind you, I would actually quite like to see Idris Elba as James Bond, but more in a race-blind-casting this-guy-is-really-good kind of way. Besides he's probably too old now.)
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
if people March with Nazi flags, the right will scream at every opportunity from every available microphone, on every podcast and blog that they don’t support this nonsense.
Scott Aaronson keeps rightly lambasting Musk for not doing this about the salute thing.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
Spending the first 20 pages going over the problematic beginnings of railways as a tool of capitalism and facilitator of imperial conquest and colonization of indigenous peoples, funded by the capital created by the transatlantic slave trade, only to tepidly conclude that despite this legacy the idea can be rescued to create a more equitable future... what?
Presumably the author wrongly expected that these sorts of counterarguments were the main objections that he had to advocate against? So obviously you start with what you believe the opposition to believe already, and then you refute it.
Could be an exact-words thing. The informant is anonymous and his exact words haven't been made public. Therefore the U.S. government has not produced the evidence, though it claims to possess it.
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