guesswho
7mo ago
Because at some levels of obliviousness/recklessness it is on the victim.
This but for continuing to make racist/sexist comments at your job or on social media. If you get canceled for this stuff, it's not like you can say you had no warning.
guesswho
7mo ago
Yeah, the difference between victim blaming and victim warning is whether you think public policy and social norms should be shaped to protect victims as much as possible.
You can want that and also warn victims, or you can 'warn' victims as an alternative to doing that.
OP seems to be pretty explicitly saying that those things should be shaped to protect victims less, and place the burden of self-defense on the victims instead. That's not 'warning.'
guesswho
7mo ago
Do you not think that having a financially literate public who understands a little bit about how inflation works will help us combat it in the long run?
This is a fully semantic argument, and in a semantic argument there's not a much stronger rebuttal than 'no one else is using the word that way, so if you do you're just failing to communicate.'
Also: if you agree it's bad behavior and that some people might do it without realizing that, do you agree they should be taught not to do that?
If so, you agree with the feminist message of 'teach men not to rape' in substance, and just have a semantic disagreement about one word.
guesswho
7mo ago
At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else.
It is common to focus on the most extreme and most rare version of a problem as a rhetorical tactic to avoid addressing the most commons forms of the problem that actually affect the most people.
15 years ago no one though Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein were committing 'real' rape, so why bother raising a fuss over it? And AFAIK (IANAL), what we now call marital rape was legal across the country until the 1970s.
The expanding definition is a necessary step in actually confronting and preventing bad behavior.
I am also a high-decoupler (ie autist) who likes words to have crisp, unambiguous, and unchanging definitions. But I also acknowledge that words are actually just tools that we invent to help us get things we want, and these type of shifting and ambiguous definitions are very often a result of someone tuning the language to accomplish something important and valuable.
guesswho
7mo ago
Talk to actual high school students from not-very-well-educated areas about what does or doesn't count as rape or consent some day. 'If you paid for a nice meal doesn't she kind of owe you at least a blowjob' is far from the most troubling thing you will hear. Don't even ask about drugs and alcohol.
It's easy for well-educated affluent adults to think that 'teach men not to rape' sounds absurd, and must be some kind of dumb metaphorical power-grab in the culture war over where to place societal blame. But it is very much an extremely literal statement that is reasonably commensurate with how bad sex education is in many parts of the country.
guesswho
7mo ago
The initial objection feels a little like saying '2+2=4 is tautological because our mathematical system defines it to be so, therefore it's a meaningless statement of no value.'
Sure, the model defines numbers and operations such that 2+2=4 is tautological within the model.
The interesting theory is that this model accurately describes some aspect of reality. Which everyone before Darwin would not have expected his model to do.
That's generally true of hypothesizing models to describe reality. It's not a knock on a model that it is internally consistent and complete.
guesswho
7mo ago
When I say a person or group is bad, it doesn't mean I'm saying their opponents or political opposite is good. That is arguments-as-soldiers thinking.
guesswho
7mo ago
I think a relevant factor - socially if not economically - is the fact that Netflix (and to a lesser extent its competitors) basically used loss-leading prices and venture funding to kill off or hugely hobble cable television, independent studios for TV shows and animation, and other competitors to it's model.
Then once all the other sources of this type of media are dead in large part due to not being able to compete with Netflix's pricing model, Netflix raises the prices, and customers have no surviving good options to turn to.
This is not an unusual tactic - loss leading prices are common, tech firms cornering the market while losing huge amounts of money and then turning around to hike prices and degrade services to turn a profit are common. But it does in a very real way hurt the consumer by crafting a market that is hostile to their interests and is low on competition, where following their short-term interests harms their long-term interests in a way that's frustrating and hard to navigate.
Customers have every right to be mad about that, and honestly I think even non-customers have a right to be mad about what it does the media and the culture more broadly.
guesswho
8mo ago
Women outnumbered men in enrollment in the late 80s, but didn't outnumber men in degrees until around 2010, as far as I can tell.
Also, a lot of medical knowledge was established before most of us were born, the timeframe doesn't matter if it's treated as established knowledge and hasn't been updated since.
I think that Biden may have been imprecisely referencing the idea that many 'gender neutral' medical studies are done only on men (classically because you get less variance if the subjects are more similar to each other so picking one gender for subjects is good, and it should be men because women might be pregnant or their cycle might introduce variance).
The classic example, which for all I know may be apocryphal, is that women having heart attacks present with slightly different symptoms than men having heart attacks. But most studies done on heart attack symptoms used men as subjects, leading doctors to not recognize women having heart attacks when reporting their symptoms some larger percent of the time.
Autism is another example, women with autism/aspergers didn't match the DSM criteria which were designed around mostly male subjects, and took a while to be recognized and receive treatment at the same rates.
And I stress, all of that is basically folk wisdom I've received from mostly cultural sources, it might be an old wive's tale for all I know. But it's a commonly-cited concept on the left, and makes sense as something he could be referencing.
Also, I don't think it follows that men having higher disease burden means men's health should receive more of the gendered medical research funding. It may mean that men should get more healtchare funding.
But it's quite possible that
- the conditions men get are well-understood and just need more money on treatment rather than research, and/or
- Men's disease burden is mostly made up of gender neutral conditions that are being covered under the 'gender neutral research' category.
In fact, it's even possible that the 'gender neutral funding' covers gender neutral conditions that affect more men than women, in a way that makes the overall research funding more beneficial towards men overall (not saying we have evidence of that, just that the data you've presented doesn't rule it out)
guesswho
8mo ago
I mean, there is, it's the minimum possible message length (number of bits) needed to fully describe your model.
Of course, no one can actually give a maximally-compressed complete description of the universe such that we could compare two models for message length. But we can look at two proposed addendums to the hypothetical model (eg two hypotheses about natural law) and try to judge which would add more bits, and whether any observations justify that cost.
guesswho
8mo ago
But there is no finite number of observations that would justify, with any nonzero confidence, that any law held universally, without exception
Occam's Razor.
guesswho
8mo ago
I think we're getting confused.
I thought you were making a joke, I was replying with a joke.
If your original comment wasn't a joke then I don't know what you mean.
guesswho
8mo ago
So I think in a perfectly sane world it would be safe to say 'Yes, this is murder, but it's the type of murder that's not a very big deal compared to other types of murders, so we can rationally trade it off against other interests at a reasonable rate'.
But in the actual world we live in, I think once you've agreed to call a thing 'murder,' any hope of rational policymaking is pretty much DOA. Anyone who disagrees with anything you propose, no matter how reasonable or attenuated, can just say 'oh you SUPPORT MURDER' and rely on the context of the word to do their work for them.
guesswho
8mo ago
2000 is the most objectively stolen election in recent memory, the rest are fine.
guesswho
8mo ago
Of course, the fact that prompt-related text was left in may signal a level of incompetence or rushing that casts doubt on the quality of the actual science, and that's a fair worry.
guesswho
8mo ago
'Trump said there will be a bloodbath for the country' is still less of a lie than 'the election was stolen.'
/shrug. Both sides are largely stupid and dishonest, because people are largely stupid and the incentives around politics reward dishonesty.
guesswho
8mo ago
but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective.
Clean yes, sane no.
Most fertilized eggs never make it to the blastocyte stage, just by the totally natural functioning of the body. If you actually count every one of those as a full human with full rights and moral consideration, that's a single cause of death prematurely killing over 50% of the entire human population worldwide, every generation. The only morally sane thing to do if you accepted that premise is to stop all other forms of humanitarian programs and focus the entire world's resources on saving those lives.
That's not a sane outcome.
And that's to say nothing of more practical stuff like IVF, or whether it's negligent homicide to drink when conception happened yesterday and you have no possible way to know that and what that would mean for society, or etc.
Absolutist stances are often the most clean, yes, but they're rarely the most sane.
guesswho
8mo ago
This raises the obvious question as to why I would bother reading your paper in the first place if non-trivial sections of it were written by an LLM. How can I trust that the rest of it wasn't written by an LLM?
Presumably because the paper includes an experiment and experimental results that are presented accurately, and allow you to learn something new about the field.
I mean, seriously. It's idiotic that a scientific career is gated behind having to write formulaic papers like this, a sane world would have the people who are good at devising and running novel and useful experiments do that, not spend half their time trying to write summaries (to say nothing of grants and lectures).
The numbers are the useful thing in the paper, if the experimental method and results are presented accurately then who cares whether the intro was written by an LLM. This is one of the few cases where tech like that could solve an actual problem we have, of scientific careers being gated behind being a competent and prolific writer.
Of course, the fact that prompt-related text was left in may signal a level of incompetence or rushing that casts doubt on the quality of the actual science, and that's a fair worry. But if that's not the case, then great, don't waste scientist's time on writing.
guesswho
8mo ago
The culture war portion of the HBD debate has never been about individual variance, it's always been about population averages, and how those are used in service of the just world fallacy.
guesswho
8mo ago
Conservative is a lifestyle choice, not an innate identity. Editors control more newspaper columns than surgeons, that's not a social injustice, that's just people doing their thing.
You don't consider it a real answer, presumably, but progressives/feminists attribute those problems men face to a mixture of toxic masculinity and economic/social problems, and are actively trying to fight those problems on many fronts. Saying that your opponent doesn't adopt your preferred solution to a problem, and your preferred narratives about it, is not the same as them not trying to solve the problem on their own terms.
guesswho
8mo ago
Seems like a non sequitur?
Not that I think this is the strongest form of the argument, but... One side points at specific statistical material gaps between two groups and says 'the gap is evidence that there's some form of discrimination or inequality at play somewhere, we should have policies to try to eliminate the gap.' The other side says 'One group is naturally inclined to outperform the other on whatever metric there's currently a gap in, so those gaps are natural and unavoidable and we shouldn't try to close them.'
To me, it seems like that second position is the one that can justify literally any size of gap, since there's no comprehensive a priori model of how big the performance difference is, or how big of a gap that should translate to (comprehensive and a priori being relevant word here).
Whereas the first side at least has a natural stopping point of eliminating the gaps, and would need some kind of major narrative shift to justify going past that.
But you think the opposite is true? I don't understand your reasoning.
Yup, those are absolutely some of the very strong and important reasons for not doing that.
In this case, one of the countervailing reasons for doing it is, in theory, preventing or getting justice for very very large numbers of sexual assaults.
That's the tough reality of being a consequentialist, you can't just give one persuasive reason why something is bad and therefore decide not to do it, you have to actually ask what the full positive and negative consequences are and try to make a balanced judgement.
I'm not even claiming that the balance trivially obviously falls on the side of distorting the language in this case, I'm just saying an argument that doesn't weigh the intended benefits against the expected costs isn't really saying anything.
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