OwlFancier posted:

Then kill you are self because that's dumb?

Seriously how can you not value the individual but somehow magically value the collective? The collective is a collective of individuals and the wellbeing of the collective is comprised of the wellbeing of its components.

And the binary system model is dumb because it doesn't work in practice or rationally.


At least one in two hundred, apparently. Though precise numbers are somewhat irrelevant because to the mind inclined to think so, no amount is ever enough.

SwimmingSpider posted:

I would say up the point where such accomodations infringe on your or someone else's safety or well-being. So if someone's pronouns were a slur, or if you had a bomb strapped to your body that was wired to detonate if you said "xe", then sure, that seems like an appropriate situation to ignore their request, but outside of extreme circumstances like that, I can't think of any realistic limits.

OwlFancier posted:

In the sense that slavery also worked, by using human suffering as the lubricant.

Traditionalist gender roles are stupid, they are opposed to human wellbeing and encourage oligarchy.


Trends are made up of individuals you pillock. You might as well say that we don't need to care about healthcare because only individuals can actually die.

OwlFancier posted:

I would define "inherently cruel" as "not working" because the only valuable meaning of "working" as it applies to a social system is "promoting human welfare".

OwlFancier posted:

I dunno I would have thought "manifestly harms a majority of people" would be a pretty commonly understood definition of "doesn't work".

OwlFancier posted:

Well yes some people are obscenely morally bankrupt but I am charitably assuming that most of the people reading what I'm writing don't fall into that category.

EXTREME INSERTION posted:

I have enough trouble with people's first names, I'm trying to imagine meeting someone and remembering unique neopronouns along with their conjugations.

blowfish posted:

this would be a good thing because people caring about genders of other people (maybe apart from their friends/partners) is just a dumb loving thing that doesn't fulfil any useful function

SedanChair posted:

If somebody in real life demands to be called "xir" please get back to us here in the thread. Make sure you measure the single horn coming out of their forehead, as well.

blowfish posted:

I have sat in meetings where the chair opened by "I am %NAME, a %GENDER and %PRONOUN, and want to clarify this is a safe space for all sexual and gender identities and orientations" when the topic was something completely unrelated to gender or even identity in general so yeah occasionally tumbler does spill over into real life.

jivjov posted:

jivjov posted:

Do you have something against the idea of a group of people assuring all present that everyone is welcome?

SedanChair posted:

But this isn't surprising, because everything that isn't white and straight and male and cis is the same to you. Your enemies. And now you want special rights not to conform to basic expectations of politeness in public. I mean, you already have those rights, but like all reactionaries what you really want is not to be criticized.

Ddraig posted:

Granted some are more connected to the latter than we would like, as evidenced by this thread, but it's still generally accepted that a human is a human and a snow leopard is a snow leopard never never shall the two meet, in any sense.

furiouskoala posted:

if their proponents can agree on a set of terminology to push.

Krysmphoenix posted:

And what the gently caress is wrong with being a "special snowflake", especially with regards to gender which has been snared by the gender binary for so long? What's wrong with anyone wanting to break out of that and try to self-define themselves?

Sulphuric rear end in a top hat posted:

Science has always had some flexibility in what defines a species. Humans and Neanderthals could, for example, produce viable offspring, yet are classified as different species.

Ddraig posted:

language is moving away from that.

Sulphuric rear end in a top hat posted:

The earliest protozoa were sexless. Gender barriers happened at some point in the past, but the original biological intent of being able to produce viable genetic offspring has changed with the times as well.

Sulphuric rear end in a top hat posted:

There are sociology disciplines devoted to intersectionality.

Brainiac Five posted:

Ah, the old "we are genetically programmed to conceive of cars and construction vehicles" saw.

Cingulate posted:

Everything is somehow connected. Almost no effect in the life sciences is precisely zero.

Brainiac Five posted:

Saying that playing with construction vehicles is caused by hormones relies on the assumption that we are genetically programmed to understand what a backhoe is

Brainiac Five posted:

That's what the researchers are arguing in their abstracts, though!

Cingulate posted:

Yes, as a punching bag. Come say this sentence in the stats and psychology threads so we can all have a mean-spirited laugh!

Okay, you can't know this, but significance is not what you think it is. Significance refers to the detectability of an effect given a sample, not to the existence or importance of an effect. And in the brain and behavioral sciences, it is generally assumed that almost all possible comparisons have some non-zero effect that would come up as significant in a sufficiently large study. This does not mean the effect is of substantial magnitude; it does mean that an effect being significant has become an outdated statement.
Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine is a good book on how, to phrase it carefully, inconclusive and preliminary all of that research is.

Generally, no general statement can be objectively verified with empirics, and specifically, there is nothing objective in brains that says that some complex, common trait is or is not to be classified as a mental illness.

That transgender people's brains function differently from cis people is not a meaningful observation - it's either trivially true (what else do you think experiences a misfit between sex and gender, the liver?), or lacking substantial evidence. For now, we're not even remotely sure what the, if any, substantial differences between sexes are, and the studies on that have been much bigger.

Cingulate posted:

The most-cited text in this context is probably Cohen's "The Earth is Round (p < .05)". It's very readable, too. You can find copies everywhere, but here is one: http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~maccoun/PP279_Cohen1.pdf

Beyond that, it would actually be pretty hard to not come across a few of the vast number of recent papers that have been written on this. One easy way of finding more would be to look at any of the 3500 citations of Cohen's paper.
Psychological Science's Most Read list featured for a long time one of Cumming's many publications on the topic: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/1/7.abstract

In a similar vein, basically all major organizations have published some condemnations of significance tests in the last year, such as
Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-errors-1.14700
the ASA: http://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108

Already in 1998, BBS published a defense of p values, indicating the strong tradition of criticism: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=30907&fileId=S0140525X98591169

And so on.
But really, you should just read Cohen's paper, twice. It's all in there.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.

Yup. There is this intuition that brain = biology = biotruths. But trivially, for two people to behave differently in similar contexts, their brains have to be different, and if two people with the same brain enter two different situations, they will leave with different brains. So finding structural MRI differences doesn't inherently tell you that there is an innate differences (phenotype vs. genotype).