Did you read this piece in good faith? I don’t see the authors having the blind spot you claim they have.
They made their case for a gametic definition of sex by explaining how the other definitions you’ve proposed are downstream of it. Along the way, they also explained how the gametic definition provides a certain generality that explains a lot of phenomena, both within and across species. As such, it seems they did make a solid case for the gametic definition of sex. Given that the definitions you favor are subsumed under theirs, why should they acknowledge yours?
While I acknowledge that the definitions you proposed could be useful in other areas of biology in an operational sense, that doesn’t make them the right definitions for describing and explaining what’s true about reality. This is akin to classical mechanics—it’s wrong, but the fact that it’s a good approximation of reality for many engineering use cases means it’s still useful. Again, wrong or incomplete as an explanation for aspects of reality, but still useful for the task at hand. The authors are evolutionary biologists, they care about the definition that best describes and explains a certain aspect of reality. A developmental biologist or a doctor might use your definitions because they’re good enough approximations that simplify the task at hand.
Furthermore, what makes you think they wouldn’t change their mind about the number of sexes if you were able to present the existence of a third gamete? Their definition permits that. In fact, they were explicit in stating that nature doesn’t have to stick with two discrete gametes, but that’s what we’ve ended up with. They don’t take this result for granted either, citing both observations and mathematical models to explain why we end up with two gametes. Why there are two gametes, no more, no less, is an open question. They explicitly quoted Ronald Fisher on this. That alone should tell you evolutionary biologists don’t take the binary for granted, which makes your accusation that they’re biased by “common sense” rather suspect.
You go on to grant that their definition could account for a hermaphrodite as a third sex, then accuse them of bias for their supposed unwillingness to do so. You also fault them for failing to account for sterility. All of this stems from your failure to understand the gametic definition of sex. If you did, three things should be apparent. First, the existence of a third gamete doesn’t imply that such an organism is a hermaphrodite. Second, a hermaphrodite fits well into their definition, being an organism with the floor-plan to produce both gametes. Third, the gametic definition is concerned with which floor-plan(s) an organism is instantiated with, not whether they can actually produce the corresponding gametes. Accusations should come only after a sincere effort to understand the other side. The ones you’ve made suggest a poor understanding of their points, not flaws in the points themselves. You accused them of being ideologues, but your misunderstanding here makes me question what’s actually going on; is the article too challenging for you, or are you the ideologue acting in bad faith?
Out of respect, I’m inclined to think you’re acting in bad faith here, and your subsequent accusations follow the same pattern. As such, rather than engaging further, I hope my comment helps signal to others that your response is woefully unreliable and that they should read the article directly instead.
The notion of race and ethnicity in biology has been politicised by ideology. Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja clarifies this in point five of their piece [0] in the Skeptical Inquirer.
I don't know what Jerry Coyne is talking about because genetic vs. environmental causation of behavioral and physical traits, broken down "racially" and otherwise, is a very active field of study.
He isn't saying there isn't such research being done, he's criticizing the attempts made by ideologues to discredit and discourage research along such premises.
Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well.
Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here.
Yes, I read the piece, and I find it very difficult to reconcile with the volume and quality of research going on in this area. My feeling is that some people want there to be a kind of Heckler's Veto on "controversies" they're concerned about, so that they can rail against it. But there isn't.
The real issue for people concerned about the politicization of this issue is that the science isn't going their way right now.
Are you just going to outright dismiss the evidence I provided earlier for this politicization? As I explained before, your point is perfectly compatible with his. If you’re able to follow this kind of research, I’m frankly baffled by your inability to grasp the idea that acknowledging attempts to politicize this topic doesn’t imply that research in the area can’t proceed. The evidence for politicization is all over the editorials in your major research journals. If research in this area is booming as you’ve described (I don’t follow this research), all that means is that the politicization attempts have been unsuccessful.
As for your mind reading about the author’s intent, he is, to the best of my understanding, a standard-issue liberal. As such, I don't really get where you're coming from with this.
Great, I didn't know we can dismiss evidence without justifying why. The author claims that there is politicization by ideologues, and the evidence he provided flats out suggests that. If anything, the disagreement seems to be the extent or areas where it's actually happening, which is the point I'm trying to make, which you have not engaged with. I'm frankly puzzled by all my (past) interactions with you. It seems we agree a lot in some way or another yet somehow, you always come across as bad faith to me. That's why when you eventually conceded to one of our past discussions, I decided it was no longer worth engaging. I thought Hacker News is a place for reasoned discussion, I guess I'm wrong to come back to it.
Should the work of women be on that list for the sole reason that they are women? There are many more men who have written papers far influential than the ones you've mentioned yet they didn't make the list. If you believe in equality, then you have to believe that the work of people who happen to be women can compete on their own merit. The absence of women in that list isn't necessarily evidence of bias as implied in your remark.
I'd put Liskov's Programming with abstract data types up against any of them. Fran Allen's work was so fundamental it's hard to find compiler stuff that doesn't build on her work.
You asked for "citations", the thread is literally filled with references to them. How is it not bad faith to have to prove to you things that you can easily check for yourself?
You misunderstood the request. Your original comment was claiming that there were many papers far more influential than any of the papers named that were by women. I was requesting evidence of this influence. In response you say that what, all of the references filling this thread are more influential than say Liskov or Allen? If not all, which ones?
The original comment you were responding to was pointing out that none of the papers listed were by women, and suggested several that were that are undeniably influential. Perhaps you think they aren't because you haven't read them, or presumably even heard of them?
This makes me wonder if there is a relationship between cardiac surgery and personality changes. I remember reading something similar about Lee Holloway[0].
For the race-essentialist practices described by the original poster, Yascha Mounk's "The Identity Trap," published in 2023, and interviews with Coleman Hughes regarding his college experience at Columbia are insightful resources.
To delve into the philosophical roots that lead to the type of absurd reasoning mentioned by the original poster, "Cynical Theories" by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, released in 2020, is recommended. Despite Lindsay's more recent radical stance, the book provides a critical exploration of these theories. It is also heavy on citations.
For the kind of misconduct in higher education described by the original poster, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) or the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) serve as reliable references. There's no lack of explicit anti-semitism on campus.
The discussion around "woke" culture is often muddled by attempts to obscure its existence, framing it as merely an extreme right-wing concern. For those who genuinely want a quick way to challenge their priors regarding "woke" being some kind of "right-wing" thing, you should give this short piece[0] a read. Does it comport with your notion of "right-wing"? If not, you should start questioning those who use "right-wing" as a boogeymen to convince you that there isn't a radical ideology who've created newspeak for their brand of racism, sexism, whatever-ism.
If they are qualified, shouldn't they be able to compete fairly with the rest of the applicant pool? I think this scenario should only be a cause for concern if people are being passed on for anything other than their competency, such as race.
I think that's in part because the sources that were once credible, i.e. NGOs, universities, media, and other cultural institutions, have taken a hit to their own reputation as a result of their institutional capture over the years.
For every article you can find in support of one camp, one could find a counter piece from other credible sources as well (i.e. NYT vs The Economist and The Atlantic). For every NGO one can quote, someone else can quote from someone who've resigned, or once run/founded the very NGO that they're now criticizing (i.e. Danielle Haas, Ira Glasser, Nadine Strossen, Bob Bernstein). You can even pitch the NGOs against one another, such as HRW and Amnesty against the ADL.
Ultimately, bad faith actors are indeed the root cause of the problem. However, I think the bigger problem here is the inability of these bad faith actors to recognize that belong to the very group they're criticizing. If facts were all that mattered, I would expect to see more people expressing more nuanced takes, or express more uncertainty. After all, it would be rather surprising for a consumer of news to hold their view with that much confidence when even the mainstream sources they are relying on is in dispute with one another.
> Ultimately, bad faith actors are indeed the root cause of the problem. However, I think the bigger problem here is the inability of these bad faith actors to recognize that belong to the very group they're criticizing. If facts were all that mattered, I would expect to see more people expressing more nuanced takes, or express more uncertainty.
I don't think it is due to "bad faith actors" at all. I think it is better explained by (1) Israel/Palestine is a really hard problem, one where both sides have done wrong, and the "side" one is on often comes down with which wrong angers you more (which is more a question of subjective emotions than objective reasons), (2) the increasing tribalism and political polarisation of Western (and especially US) society, which gets overlaid on the Israel/Palestine conflict, however roughly (right-leaning people nowadays skew pro-Israel and left-leaning pro-Palestine, although there are an ever-shrinking number of exceptions to both generalisations)
The "bad faith actors" explanation is attractive precisely because it paints the problem as simpler and less intractable than it actually is
The solution to that is to not take sides. International Humanitarian Law doesn't take sides: for example, you can't target civilians, no matter who they are or what they or their homies have done, or who they support or don't support. There's no need to take any side on that.
As I (think I) said in another comment, the strongest possible position one can adopt is the one supported by the facts. The Palestinian issue is so hard because there is an overwhelming amount of facts and only a few people are really in possession of all the facts. That's what skews the debate.
So e.g. when you go on the internet (I mean the-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter) you see a veritable fire hose of facts taken out of context. It's like people, humans, don't have a memory, they can only remember what's been posted on Twitter in the last week or so. The videos of Israel's atrocities circulate freely, but no videos of Hamas' atrocities circulate and even if they did, that was three months ago. So people kind of organically are shunted into one side, or the other, like sheep to slaughter, and there's no way to form an opinion that is really on the side of peace, huanitarian law, and human life.
So the solution is to not take sides and not try to form an opinion, even. Support peace, support IHL, support whoever is not talking about killing people, or taking over land, or waving flags, or saying who's right and who's wrong. In a war, to take sides is to perpetuate the war. To help people find peace we must stop taking sides.
Sooner or later, governments (and sometimes even other institutions) have to make binary choices – e.g. whether or not to vote for some UN resolution, whether or not to recognise the State of Palestine, etc. Of course, if one is just a private individual, not one of those leaders, one has the luxury of not choosing.
> for example, you can't target civilians, no matter who they are or what they or their homies have done, or who they support or don't support
You can't tell from footage of the aftermath of an airstrike whether it was illegitimate targeting of civilians or not. A big part of what it was depends on the intentions and knowledge of the military commander ordering the strike, which a video of its aftermath couldn't possibly convey.
> The Palestinian issue is so hard because there is an overwhelming amount of facts and only a few people are really in possession of all the facts
There is also a lot of interpretation of limited evidence – e.g. is event X an isolated incident or the norm? A video on social media can't tell you that. And even if a video is showing accurate footage of an incident, it usually can't convey the broader context of that incident.
>> I think that's in part because the sources that were once credible, i.e. NGOs, universities, media, and other cultural institutions, have taken a hit to their own reputation as a result of their institutional capture over the years.
The part about "institutional capture" is obviously right, but the International Humanitarian Law (IHL) NGOs exist exactly in order to support and promote IHL. And it's a standard that when an IHL NGO speaks out against Israel's actions, Israel's or its supporters' response is to say that the NGOs are Hamas. That's where the main "hit" to those NGOs' reputation has come from.
You can see this tactic also in the defense Israel mounted to South Africa's case at the ICJ, where they basically accused South Africa of being in cahoots with Hamas [1]. In the most extreme form of this "defense", everyone is Hamas. I was watching this interview with Alan Dershowitz [2] where he says Doctors Without Borders have been recruited by Hamas, Unicef and Unesco have become voices for Hamas, and even the climate movement and Greta Thunberg is a mouthpiece for Hamas:
And you know who is not Hamas, and therefore has credibility, according to Alan Dershowitz in the same video? The US State Dept., the UK, "some" of the other European countries, and Germany, and an academic who's a friend of Alan Dershowitz (although he disagrees with him). So, everyone who agrees with Israel's positions has credibility, everyone who disagrees is Hamas.
That is not NGOs lacking credibility because they adopt, say, a left-learning position, it's Israel and Israel's supporters doing their damnedest best to claim that those organisations have no credibility because they speak out against violations of IHL, which is what they exist to do, when it's Israel that violates those.
Well, the same NGOs have no hesitation to condemn Hamas' atrocities and violations of IHL, or the violations of IHL of any other nation-state or non nation-state actor [4]. That's what they constantly do. To quote Andrew Stroehlein, of Human Rights Watch, "If you only care about war crimes when your enemies commit them, then you don't really care about war crimes." [5]
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[1] Ask me if you need a reference to that, I don't have one at hand.
[2] The interviewer in that clip is also extremely partisan, no question about that. Also, it's a vile smear to identify Dershowitz as "Ex-Trump and Epstein lawyer", as if that's all he is.
Yes! I hadn't managed to sit through and read the thing until now, though I've seen a number of interesting excerpts quoted.
Two that really stuck out to me was-
Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy. I once complimented a long-time, left-leaning Opinion writer over a column criticising Democrats in Congress for doing something stupid. Trying to encourage more such journalism and thus less such stupidity, I remarked that this kind of argument had more influence than yet another Trump-is-a-devil column. “I know,” he replied, ruefully. “But Twitter hates it.”
Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”.
The NYT has always gathered the zeitgeist of highly affluent and artsy new Yorkers, who tend to be highly invested in maintaining their status quo. They may not be right wing by principle, but they get there a lot on some subjects by talking to lots of bankers and financiers.
I guess 'maintaining status quo' is to me a conservative / right wing thing. I'm recollecting for example in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent a critique of the NYT being very pro-establishment, pro-government. But I guess that critique itself is from an extreme.
The upper crust of Manhattan is filled with left of center people who think taxes on the rich are too low, but they themselves aren't rich (because Manhattan is expensive and they spend/save all their income) and that Trump is bad because he raised their taxes when he capped SALT.
I have friends here who semi-jokingly call me a republican for being more center-left than them & not wanting to watch John Oliver, while they own $10M of rental properties & don't think they are rich. The kind of upper class folks who have laid off numerous people in their career without a hint of remorse, but also think the social safety net is too weak. People who vote for AOC but plan to move to FL for tax purposes. Etc.
Basically the Loro Piana $500 ballcap demographic.
20 years ago, when I was right-wing myself (in College Republicans, etc), the AM radio I listened to and people I talked to all thought NYT was very left-wing ("liberal").
I don’t know what you mean. “Liberal” was in scare-quotes because that’s just the word that rightwing talk radio used to describe anyone on the left (or even center), and they said the word with disgust.
Yes, I know libertarians call themselves “classical liberals” and the left uses “neoliberal” as a similar epithet for anyone more centrist than themselves, but that was the connotation of the word.
I meant that this happened in the past 10 years. “Liberal” wasn’t associated almost solely to “left”. It was generally accepted. This “classical liberal” euphemism, in its current meaning, is also kinda new, and almost everybody who uses this nowadays is not associated to liberalism at all.
They made their case for a gametic definition of sex by explaining how the other definitions you’ve proposed are downstream of it. Along the way, they also explained how the gametic definition provides a certain generality that explains a lot of phenomena, both within and across species. As such, it seems they did make a solid case for the gametic definition of sex. Given that the definitions you favor are subsumed under theirs, why should they acknowledge yours?
While I acknowledge that the definitions you proposed could be useful in other areas of biology in an operational sense, that doesn’t make them the right definitions for describing and explaining what’s true about reality. This is akin to classical mechanics—it’s wrong, but the fact that it’s a good approximation of reality for many engineering use cases means it’s still useful. Again, wrong or incomplete as an explanation for aspects of reality, but still useful for the task at hand. The authors are evolutionary biologists, they care about the definition that best describes and explains a certain aspect of reality. A developmental biologist or a doctor might use your definitions because they’re good enough approximations that simplify the task at hand.
Furthermore, what makes you think they wouldn’t change their mind about the number of sexes if you were able to present the existence of a third gamete? Their definition permits that. In fact, they were explicit in stating that nature doesn’t have to stick with two discrete gametes, but that’s what we’ve ended up with. They don’t take this result for granted either, citing both observations and mathematical models to explain why we end up with two gametes. Why there are two gametes, no more, no less, is an open question. They explicitly quoted Ronald Fisher on this. That alone should tell you evolutionary biologists don’t take the binary for granted, which makes your accusation that they’re biased by “common sense” rather suspect.
You go on to grant that their definition could account for a hermaphrodite as a third sex, then accuse them of bias for their supposed unwillingness to do so. You also fault them for failing to account for sterility. All of this stems from your failure to understand the gametic definition of sex. If you did, three things should be apparent. First, the existence of a third gamete doesn’t imply that such an organism is a hermaphrodite. Second, a hermaphrodite fits well into their definition, being an organism with the floor-plan to produce both gametes. Third, the gametic definition is concerned with which floor-plan(s) an organism is instantiated with, not whether they can actually produce the corresponding gametes. Accusations should come only after a sincere effort to understand the other side. The ones you’ve made suggest a poor understanding of their points, not flaws in the points themselves. You accused them of being ideologues, but your misunderstanding here makes me question what’s actually going on; is the article too challenging for you, or are you the ideologue acting in bad faith?
Out of respect, I’m inclined to think you’re acting in bad faith here, and your subsequent accusations follow the same pattern. As such, rather than engaging further, I hope my comment helps signal to others that your response is woefully unreliable and that they should read the article directly instead.