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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28986 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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If you're a member of category A and want to become a member of category B, the individual judgement you'll receive will be the product of how people feel about the rights and responsibilities conferred about groups A and B and their assessment of your relative fitness to bear those rights and relative suitability to execute those responsibilities.

So I don't think it's necessarily inconsistent for people to support transgenderism and not transracialism. I can easily imagine, say, a racist that believes in gender egalitarianism. Or in reverse, a racial egalitarian that believes in traditional gender roles. Or even just someone who isn't making ideological but tactical decisions-- believing in principle that neither transgenderism or transracialism matter because in the utopian future no one will see race or sex, but in the present advocating for differential treatment in some areas and egalitarian treatment in others as pragmatic steps toward achieving said utopian future.

I do not understand why we use mental energies on the philosophical why of things when we have the perfect answer. Transgenderism empowers the left, transracialism does not. So the first is logical and the second is not, simple as.

indeed, we now know that more genetic variation exists within any one racial group than between racial groups (Lewontin 1972, 397).

Have seen this cited many times, just now got around to giving it a read.

Given it’s 1972 of course the authors aren’t working with fully sequenced genomes, they’re using 17 blood group markers. They’re also using racial groupings that put South Asians in the same category as the Irish.

I expect that genes correlated with traits that people associate with race such as skin color, epicanthic eye folds, height, etc. will vary between groups as they do according to visual observation.

Nah, "more variation within than between" is still true when using full genomes and removing bad faith parts of classification. What they don't tell is that it's also true for recently diverged species and that one trait is influenced by many genes (and vice versa). Suppose there's 20 genes affecting trait X, and population A has 40% chance to have X-increasing allele in each gene, and population B has 60% chance to have X-increasing allele. Looking at genes in isolation, there is no pattern, but overall pattern that B was selected to have higher X, and looking at two individual phenotypes, it's a chasm between them.

They’re also using racial groupings that put South Asians in the same category as the Irish.

if splitting to 3 major races, it's as it should be. What is bad faith is when they introduce small mixed race populations as members of race which isn't greatest in the mix, and give these small populations same weight as large ones.

if splitting to 3 major races

Excuse my ignorance, but what are the 3 major races? My guess would be Eurasian, African, and American, but if this is the methodology, then wouldn't the results be inherently worthless? I don't see how it can make sense to put Thais and Swedes in the same racial category and have anything approaching precision.

Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid.

In this, the "American" are probably Mongoloid.

Were the Irish categorized as Mongoloid? That would be quite funny.

I don't profess to know the particular distinctions, but no, the Irish would certainly be Caucasoid.

The real split would be in India. Phenotypically I believe they would qualify as Caucasoid. Hence, swedes and dalits are the same race.

Thanks for the context.

I took anthropology classes in college. They loved using "more variation within racial groups than between them". They didn't cite sources for that claim. I'm rather hoping there is some sturdier basis than that 1972 paper. I would still suspect it is false, but they should at least cook up some rigorous-seeming papers to support it.

There's a sense in which this statement is trivially true- the khoikhoi and hadza and pygmies are all black.

This sense has the disadvantage of not addressing the question, but it is literally correct.

Let me generalize:

Suppose that it's costly and disadvantageous to be X. But there is a benefit to being X, in certain circumstances; in particular, there is the benefit of in-group support from other X-ers if one is a recognized X. If that's the sole benefit, then only the criteria set by these other X-ers matters. Either there is a way to for a non-X-er to join (restricted or now), or there isn't.

Now suppose that a powerful entity wants to benevolently help out the disadvantaged community of X. Then those who are not-recognized-X now have two different incentives for becoming recognized-X: in-group support, and/or a slice of the entity's largesse. If the form of that largesse is finite, then it incentivizes the already-recognized-X-ers to vigorously insist on the X-community criteria for recognition of X-ness. But the tighter those criteria are, and the higher the benefits flowing from the entity, the more likely someone not-recognized-X will insist that they're really X--to the entity or the larger community that entity is trying to impress with its benevolence--even if that gains them nothing from other X-ers but hostility.

So, I predict:

  • If top Chinese universities institute affirmative action quotas for Uygurs, there will be applicants claiming to be Uygur without any documented Uygur ancestry but whose grandma traveled to Xinjiang that one time.

  • If Medicaid becomes available to any recovering alcoholic, there will be applicants who insist they fit the bill because they used to make fools of themselves while tipsy at parties and are still embarrassed by that.

  • If UCLA decides to give scholarships to furries, there will be applicants who say they qualify because they once dressed up as a sexy fox for Halloween.

Goodhart's law strikes again....

In hindsight, one of the things that struck me as odd and continues to strike me as odd about Tuvel's paper was the way that defenders sought to minimise the significance of the paper itself. I remember some of its defenders saying things like "this isn't very significant, it's trying to nitpick a slight clarification about the way we use language, this is what philosophers do all the time", and so on.

It seemed strange to me that philosophers would be so critical of the significance of their own profession. What Tuvel does in the paper is argue for an equivalence between transgenderism and transracialism. That would seem to leave two options, if we wish to be intellectually consistent. Either 1) we ought to treat transgenderism and transracialism equivalently (whether affirming both or denying both), or 2) we assert that Tuvel's argument is wrong somewhere (and implicitly ought to show where it goes wrong). Those are your options, if you take philosophy remotely seriously. Either Tuvel is right, in which case we should treat the two situations the same, or she's wrong, in which case it's incumbent on the objector to show where she's wrong.

Either way, that isn't a minor clarification of a point of language - it's an argument that leads to either radically revising what we think it means to be of a particular race, or else rejecting transgender identities along with transracial identities. If that argument is correct, it's a big deal. It's not a silly linguistic game.

It seemed strange to me that philosophers would be so critical of the significance of their own profession.

There's actually a long tradition within philosophy of doing just that! Although in this case, that's irrelevant; it's clear that all of the criticism of Tuvel's paper was politically motivated.

It is ipso facto more reasonable for a white man to become black, or red, or yellow, or whatever, than for a man to become a woman. Of course the contradiction would be noticed eventually in a feminist journal. Academics have many vices in thought, but few of these people are dumb in the conventional sense. Honestly much of the ‘work’ of academia in grievance studies these days seems to be reconciling different claims in leftist dogma. So an exploration of two dogmas is to be expected.

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