The great skeptical mind
Heh.
So the great skeptical mind has decided that we can only discern sex with 100% accuracy or with the accuracy of made up woo-woo nonsense.
Stellar critical thinking. https://t.co/8Ohjo3CklB
— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) January 8, 2022
a high degree of reliability. And it turns out, female people are better at it than males. So we'd thank you to stop telling us we can't perform a cognitive task we're much better at than you because you're a bit shit at it.https://t.co/1gPpj4qkun
— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) January 8, 2022
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1479859700103618561
Yes PZ, sexual maturation is just like changing sex how right you are. https://t.co/GMex2VeJxB
— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) January 8, 2022
Amusing how Myers’ behaviour imitates the conservative Christians he used to ridicule.
BTW, I was wondering if anyone here has seen this. Richard Dawkins has written a new article for Areo Magazine, where he defends the binary nature of sex. I thought it was interesting:
https://areomagazine.com/2022/01/05/race-is-a-spectrum-sex-is-pretty-damn-binary/
“He’s forgotten science”
I slightly disagree. He hasn’t forgotten, he has compartmentalised. Much like the professional geologist that is also a young Earth creationist, he shifts mental gears depending on the topic. There have been many occasions, usually when talking about non-human organisms, where he has demonstrated that he knows sex is merely a matter of the sexed characteristics of the body; but bring the same topic up with reference to humans and suddenly he goes off the rails. The knowledge is there, but it is compromised by thought-traps he possibly doesn’t even notice when the topic is one where he has an ideological stance.
Makes me wonder what the difference between an arachnophile and a creepy spider dude is, because I’m not 100% sure. :P
Dr. JCJ is adorable. :)
Thank you for that link, Mostly Cloudy. That was a refreshing read. No nonsense.
Myers’ continued sophistry about this subject is so much squid ink which he uses when he doesn’t want to honestly answer a question.
He knows what he’s doing and he knows he’s practicing some obscurantism, using his authority as a known skeptical biologist with a large following to deliberately mislead people down a path that supports a political view. He’s forgotten nothing. I don’t think he’s even compartmentalized. He and Gorsky are motivated to pretend that science supports their view and block anyone who can prove them wrong.
Case in point, Dr. Hilton.
When did anyone claim the ability to discern sex on sight “with 100% accuracy” ? I don’t think anyone claimed that. Strawperson fallacy.
Every time they claim to be arguing against the gender-critical position, they instead set up a strawman to knock down. This has two advantages for them: firstly, it’s trivially easy for them to refute a simple position no-one holds, and, secondly, by avoiding stating the correct position of their idealogical opponents, they avoid their followers learning what it actually is. Since they also forbid their followers to go to the source of the opposition’s arguments, this means that they can keep their cultish hold on those followers, and the followers keep their beliefs untainted and unchallenged.
Creationists fall subject to what Dawkins has called the tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind, a form of essentialism that harkens back to Plato. As one essayist put it
Dawkins also ties that fallacy to inadequate poverty programs and abortion, where a fertilized egg is either a human being, or isn’t. So does PZ.
He is, in my opinion, honestly and sincerely convinced this gradual gradation of natural blending applies to “man” and “woman.” And he seems to believe that the GC are Platonic essentialists with just those lazy habits of thought and stubborn blindness to nuance that would claim that Intersex poses no serious classification problem. The same fundamentalist mindset would try to control nature by asserting 100% accuracy in determining sex by ordinary observation. We’re discontinuous minds incapable of grasping that a man who knows s/he’s a woman, moves in the world as a woman, and musses around with hormones and sex organs isn’t going to fall into a neat, comfortable, essentialist, Platonic box of just-that-and-no-exceptions class of “Man” anymore. Woman is wondrous, and contains multitudes.
In Mostly Cloudy’s link at #1, though, Dawkins brings up the opposite problem: the Blending Fallacy. Our minds can also see gray when it’s black and white, and that, too, gave us trouble understanding evolution. It also gives some of us problems understanding the rigid binary nature of sex. The hope is that they’ll be just enough wiggle room there to squeeze in social justice.
Colin Wright has identified it as the Univariate Fallacy:
https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1124406797916409856?s=20
Or, as Samuel Johnson supposedly said (I can’t find a source), “The fact that there is such a thing as twilight does not mean that we cannot distinguish between day and night.”
Huh. I can’t find a source either – it’s all “as Samuel Johnson put it” – all secondary. That makes me think he didn’t say it.
“Misattributed quotes are a carbuncle on the ass of society.”
—Dorothy Parker
It’s worth noting that PZ makes a not-insignificant amount of money by pandering to his commentariat, all of whom deeply believe that biological sex is a social construct now. Am I saying that he’s craven enough to lie to the world in order to make money? Of course not. I do note, however, that even tenured professors at non-research universities don’t earn much, and that it’s all too easy to lie to oneself when the lie “isn’t really a lie” if one stretches the truth enough and there is motivation to do so.
James @14,
Myers doesn’t do it for the money. To cite XKCD:386 – “Someone is wrong on the internet” is enough to account for his online output. Once, in a fit of curiosity, I checked in Google Groups to see what Myers was perhaps up to back in the 1990s, and I found that he frequented alt.astrology on Usenet and was responding with hundreds of rebukes to astrologers. Why? Because as the pig could tell you, he likes it.
Myself, I can understand that. I was on AOL Online back in the early 1990s and had exchanges with Rush Limbaugh dittoheads back then. Should I have known better? Probably. Social media hasn’t changed since then, it’s just gotten bigger.
I usually point to that sort of thing as an example of the sorites paradox, as it presents the problem in a very easy formulation (if I have a heap of rice, and subtract one grain at a time, when is it no longer a heap?). People know what a heap is, people know what a non-heap is, and neither meaning is undermined by the fuzzy boundary.
This ‘problem’ of language was solves millennia ago; it is simply how words work.
The Dawkins essay was interesting. One has to ask, though, if the better approach to Ms/Mr Morris conundrum was not invasive surgery, not drugs, not awkward social adjustment, but careful counseling?
I surmise that the whole idea that sex is a malleable spectrum is really a red herring purposely thrown to sow confusion. It doesn’t have anything to do with the trans gender claim that they have a mind whose sex is that in contrast to their physical body. I can’t see why throwing ambiguity into the mix provides biological nor philosophical clarity.