And that's so obvious that I begin to wonder if he's sincere, or if he's just stirring up shit to capture people's attention.
I always like to introduce people to this rules of civil conversation during such exchanges.
https://therulesofcivilconversation.org/
Equally helpful to maintain conversations that are positive is to check out own biases and fallacies:
Edit: For the two people who read this, in this buried submission, in this buried comment, a quote humorously apropos from the article: "so hair-trigger is the hypersensitivity, a mere invitation to discuss something is enough to set it off."
It may be that, given something like 80-90% of humans on earth follow such religious institutions, we as a species have some genetic factors that make us intolerant of differing viewpoints. I can imagine such genetic factors could have played a role in social cohesion early in human evolution.
The problem is the fact that people who hold these viewpoints see religious people as their enemy, so they're weirdly blind to how they themselves are religious. And it's a young and immature religion that hasn't yet been through the formative historical chapter of the Spanish Inquisition, the witch hunts etc., and the reckoning that followed. History will repeat itself.
<armchair anthropology time>
I recall a recent genetics study[1] concluding that the homo sapiens (or direct ancestor) population bottle neck was ~1000 people for about 100,000 years.
My mind immediately wondered whether that length of time was long enough for some evolution to occur that reflected those conditions. Surely that world was insular for the people/hominids and extreme enough that survival was at the forefront of nearly all behaviours and social phenomena.
If any of that rubbed off on our genetics and all of human evolution and history since has not provided any sufficient forces to alter those traits, then it stands to reason our psychology is somewhat hard wired for catastrophic/post-apocalyptic in-group survival defensiveness/aggressiveness beyond even our animal/primate cousins.
All of that rests however on what time periods are required for evolutionary changes. My vague memory of studying a tiny bit of population genetics is that big changes can happen pretty quickly if there are factors capable of altering the size of the population substantially and that persist for a few generations.
</>
Otherwise, yea ... seems pretty obvious to me that our world (global society) and its complexity is very much a "reach exceeding grasp" scenario for our species.
Generally, I suspect greater stability and prosperity is rather possible but would require a drastic change in what we prioritise in our education and upbringing, where I would guess that we have a fundamental choice between what is compartmentalised or distributed in the way of social thinking, processing and decision making. It seems to me we've de-prioritised the average ability of the population to effectively participate and understand broad social and economic issues and decisions, and, are instead emphasising specialised/compartmentalised economic roles.
Naively, I would propose that investing in more distributed social/economic understanding would be better for society at large, which has arguably taken place with modern wealthy western civilisation. But, in line with my armchair anthropology above, I wouldn't be at all surprised if plugging more humans into the broad social issues of the day, however good attempts at their education etc have been, will naturally lead to tumult and division that is inevitably irrational and driven by inapt or misaligned psychological drives.
Going sci-fi on this ... it's curious to think about whether the "great filter" may simply be whether a species evolves intelligence etc by following only a narrow, and therefore unlikely, set of evolutionary paths or biological/geological histories that confer the required innate traits for being able to scale up to larger and well coordinated civilisations. Like, could the ice age dynamic of our planet have limited the possible evolutionary paths a species could take to those which make population scaling difficult and unproductive?
It's how I can get a new job and call myself a Data Scientist, but as Rachel Dolezal is mentioned in the article, cannot alter her appearance and be Black. The categories are simply grounded in different things.
Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir, does a phenomenal job at describing this principle in Categories We Live By. It's a plus that it's both fairly short and approachable.
This theme was already explored in the literature [0]:
> Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal’s attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner* graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one’s race in the way it might be to change one’s sex. Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism.
Unfortunately, just as is happening here, instead of engaging with the substance of the paper on its own merits, there were widespread calls to simply retract the paper and dispose of it down the memory hole [1].
[0] Tuvel, R. (2017). In Defense of Transracialism. Hypatia, 32(2), 263–278. doi:10.1111/hypa.12327 (https://sci-hub.se/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/...)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_transracialism_controv...
What's your explanation for this, what do you suppose the retraction advocates explanation is, and why might they be different?
For comparison here is some Asta, where the jargon leaves me unclear at what she is saying:
>Gender is a paradigm case for me. However, even if we assume that my account does justice to the construction of gender, the question remains whether this notion of social construction and social meaning is really adequate for accounting for the metaphysics of all social categories of individuals. Perhaps the two aims pull in opposite direction here: theorizing the type of social construction involved with gender, on the one hand, and offering a general metaphysics of social categories of individuals, on the other.,
Are you waiting to be told what to do? The article is asking whether we're approaching Orwellian times. If police turn up at your work because of a satirical tweet you wrote last night, maybe that's something to write about and be concerned about.
> Not criticize
I believe his problem is when criticism bares teeth and is delivered as legal action, or some kind of penalty or strike action, or drummed up hit pieces etc.
He didn't describe any legal action. Youtube is a private company. Youtube is owned by a trash company. I don't get it.
If I understand the article, people who don't "get this article" are the very sort he is describing.
> Not criticize or complain about his dumb tweets?
What in particular did he say that you find "dumb"?
I understand his article. He is bothered that he gets pushback and labeled all sorts of things because of what he writes. It happens. It's life. It's also not new. It's why so many religious/political people chose to create their own publications throughout history to not have to deal with editors/market forces.
Is he incapable of stepping back and understanding that the world is changing? Or looking at the bigger picture? Or thinking critically about the ways this moment mirrors other moments in history?
> The Times (January 18) reported that “a transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis”. If “with her penis” is not quite 2+2= 5, it’s getting close. 2+2= 4.5?
It's so curious that Dawkins, of all people, seems to be complaining that unorthodox thought -- that is to say, a rejection of traditional religious doctrine -- is expressible in the English language.
That's not what he's "complaining" about at all. In fact, quite the opposite - that certain political and/or religious groups are _making it impossible_ to express unorthodox opinions that run counter to their dogma and catechisms, and that this is being accomplished through the control of language.
Which many people, like Dawkins, complained about, but, on the other hand, complying with this guidance works out well in the long run because it highlights the absurdity of ideas like: a man is a woman if he says he's a woman.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/05/timeline-bath...
> the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm.
Ever heard of people who are intersex? Given the diversity of the human condition that some people are born feeling not like the sex of their body at birth does not seem far-fetched to me.
> What I didn’t know, and learned from Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born.
Is this is actually happening on a significant scale? All that I have ever seen were books for children that say, it's ok if you feel different and not a single one that said you will be better if you are different.
To your second question, yes. To address your statement after that, peer pressure is hell on a little kid.
Some women do have penises. Some men have XX chromosomes. Some women have XY chromosomes. Some people have XX and XY chromosomes. Science tells us that. This has nothing to do with transgender people. But it does suggest "sex" might not be as simple as a metaphysical binary.
As an example, about 9% of population is left-handed. When was the last time someone mentioned violence when talking about handedness?
Recalling the HN guidelines:
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I expect Dawkins has run into quite a bit of the same mode of equivocation and redefinitions of terms he writes of, when he went around striking down anti-scientific Creationist arguments such as "evolution is just a theory." A Creationist would parrot this line, thinking that "evolution is just a guess." A scientist understands this to mean, "a falsifiable hypothesis verified through empirical evidence and experiment."
It's worth taking a look at what Frege had to say with respect to words, their meanings, and what they can refer to [1]:
> It might perhaps be said: Just as one man connects this idea, and another that idea, with the same word, so also one man can associate this sense and another that sense.
Hence the necessity for interlocutors to "come to terms" on what exactly they mean by stating their definitions clearly before there is any hope of rational discussion.
This is rapidly becoming more and more difficult, as old words with a long history of usage such as "gender" are being appropriated to mean, and refer to, things quite different from the original senses and references of those terms.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
Speaking of words, why would “Professor” Dawkins do that?
> This is rapidly becoming more and more difficult, as old words with a long history of usage such as "gender" are being appropriated to mean, and refer to, things quite different from the original senses and references of those terms.
Like "chaos" in physics, "master" in computing, or, as you point out, "theory" in science as a whole.
Wikipedia has John Money introducing a distinction between biological sex and gender identity in 1955, by the way.
Goodness, what a whine. If you’re not a person who is directly confronted with this, why are you throwing yourself into this debate? The only reason to enforce your idea of a person’s gender over their own view of it is because you’re a jerk. It’s that simple. Stop being a jerk.
Do we all join in with Trump flag waving caravans of F150s? They were a whiny minority recently.
Like, a quick prayer won't hurt you if you don't really believe in it, will it? Just do it to be polite. Hands together, eyes closed, done. What's the problem?
I think the analogy is better said that Trans allies think it’s rude to yell in people’s faces that god doesn’t exist (which is exactly what Dawkins does, so points for consistency).
There’s no personal obligation on what you believe, just don’t be a jerk and tell people that they can’t exist.
