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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26356 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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This is just incoherent, and I can't fully tell which parts of my disagreement comes from my values, my understanding of the factual situation, or only my ability to perform gradeschool/undergraduate math. By my best guesses:

For pure math:

  • 0.2% is not 50x smaller than the baseline, it is 500x smaller. You've stuck with 50x throughout the rest of the comment, so maybe it was just a typo for 2%? I honestly can't tell, because 0.2% is in the neighborhood of Canadian Census data, while 2% is within the range of other reports. EDIT: Fixed, thanks.
  • A smaller group would naively have the same variance as a larger one. As a trivial example, examine the distribution of heights of people born on January 8 (of any year). It will very closely match the distribution of the general population, despite being about 1/365 the size.

For factual disagreements:

  • I'm not sure that medical treatment regimes are more consistent than biological processes. Even if every patient chose to target the same goal (e.g. 65 ng/dl testosterone, the center of the "normal female range") and the doctors succeeded at that, the different treatment regimes required would have different secondary effects. A sufficiently broad array of consistent (and consistently achieved) targets could overwhelm the variance introduced by treatments, but I would be mildly surprised if every patient had the same goals and also maintained them better than normal biological processes can.
  • Comparing the most extreme outlier of each group is pants-on-head crazy: If that was your standard, then you would dismiss 49x (or 499x?) overperformance by trans athletes as "not the most extreme outlier". For an analogous situation, I'd say that Finland outperforms China at producing elite athletes, because it has 100x the Olympic medalists per capita. A fair application of your argument would say that China has twice the medals therefore it outperforms Finland.

0.2% is not 50x smaller than the baseline, it is 500x smaller. You've stuck with 50x throughout the rest of the comment, so maybe it was just a typo for 2%?

You're right, when I was googling I first got the 2% number for trans identification among teens and thought 50x, but that includes non-binary. The overall percent of trans women is more like .2%. So yes, it should have been 500x throughout, meaning my argument is an order of magnitude stronger than I was saying.

(other numbers say maybe it's more like .4, so 250x smaller instead of 500x. Proportionally not a big change to the argument either way since we're talking about number of standard deviations, I don't think the difference between 500x vs 250x population size adds another standard deviation to the outliers)

A smaller group would naively have the same variance as a larger one.

So I am kind of moving fast and combining two ideas there. As I said, I'd expect the variance to be smaller because the population is more homogeneous. But more importantly, the smaller population means the range covered by the outliers in either direction is much smaller, which is the central argument I'm making about how good athletes from a population are vs. the average member of that population.

For an analogous situation, I'd say that Finland outperforms China at producing elite athletes, because it has 100x the Olympic medalists per capita. A fair application of your argument would say that China has twice the medals therefore it outperforms Finland.

This is a great analogy.

Should Finland and China have to compete in different leagues, because Finish athletes are just so superior to Chinese athletes that it's unfair for them to compete against each other?

Well, given that China beats Finland the majority of the time, it seems really weird to say Finland has a huge advantage over China.

Again, per capita athletes is not a meaningful measure to this conversation. We're not pitting the entire cis population against the entire trans population to see who makes the most athletes.

What matters is the actual trans athletes vs the actual cis athletes. They are the ones that we care about having a fair competition between.

It doesn't matter if China needs a billion people to produce athletes good enough to compete against the athletes Finland can produce with only 5 million people. As long as the actual athletes in the competition are evenly matched, it makes sense for them to compete against each other.

Same here. Even if it takes a population of a million cis women to throw a set of athletes who are equivalent to what a population 2,000 trans women can produce, who cares? Since that is the actual ratio in the populations, if we end up with a set of athletes from the two populations who are on equal footing and can compete fairly against each other, then there's no reason not to let them compete.

Same here. Even if it takes a population of a million cis women to throw a set of athletes who are equivalent to what a population 2,000 trans women can produce, who cares? Since that is the actual ratio in the populations, if we end up with a set of athletes from the two populations who are on equal footing and can compete fairly against each other, then there's no reason not to let them compete.

You do dismiss (hypothetical) 499x overperformance by trans athletes as irrelevant? I thought my interpretation was absurd and expected a rebuttal, not agreement. I'm honestly not sure where to go from here.

I spent a long time explaining why the operational definition I want to use is what actual matters to athletes and fans on the ground and is therefore the best metric to use. I spent a lot of time examining your analogy to the olympics and pointing out why it supports my position.

You could, you know, explain your metric in more detail, and argue for why it's better, if you believe it is.

Remember, the issue at stake here is not 'which population is innately better at sports' but rather 'should trans women be allowed to play in women's sports leagues'.

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