Kalbear

1 hour ago, JGP said:

Please.

We don't understand the precise neurological mechanisms that were ground for its emergence, but we know what it is. We'll also know if an AI ever achieves it lol  

We almost certainly won't unless we develop significantly better testing methodologies. Because right now doing things like LLM have shown our speech and communication isn't actually that sophisticated. 

That would have hit harder if you had actually read what I said instead of ignoring it or if you had read what I said instead of what Ran interpreted it as. 

But keep on assuming I'm saying those specific people are fooled but I'm not, or even that I had a single thing to say about being misled. It is as you say significantly easier to dismiss a point when you ignore it and substitute your own point that you can rebut instead.

14 minutes ago, DMC said:

OR, you just don’t actually care about any issues.

Shit you're on to me

1 hour ago, Ran said:

But, Kal, why is this issue in particular of particular importance to you?

Because I have friends who are trans. Probably not a lot more than that, honestly. 

1 hour ago, Ran said:

You're basically a sheep engaged by political marketing talking (in your view) to other sheep who are also engaged by political marketing, but you're still just a sheep, so ... why should anyone actually listen to anything you're saying? You're not an island of rationality in a vacuum. You're highly politically motivated, as anyone who looks at any random page of the US politics thread will see, so it seems you've fallen into the very trap you're tut-tutting about. 

Didn't say I wasn't! To be clear I'm not saying that you can't have rational viewpoints on something, only that you care more about something because of those marketing hooks. This isn't the same as following something blindly because other people are telling you to, exactly; it's that you are more engaged about certain things because of these manipulations. 

And that, in turn, makes it more likely for you to make less rational decisions because  they are triggering your moral responses. 

But no, I don't claim to be an island of rationality in a vacuum. I only claim that there are specific reasons why such an incredibly minor issue - of trans people in professional sports, of which there is maybe 1 if you look kinda sideways at it - causes such an emotional reaction in people to restrict those specific people's ability to participate, and that's because it plays into some of liberal's natural biases. 

Again, there is a difference between taking the spoon-fed narratives that sides are giving you (which is what I think you think I'm talking about) and having a visceral and emotional response to specific arguments because of your moral leanings. 

1 hour ago, Ran said:

 It's a really strange thing. I assume you are very much aware of it, but it seems to make any discussion futile because you're now no longer in the position of someone offering your own reasoning or views, but rather in the position of someone who is repeating someone else's reasoning because their marketing has hooked you.

Ultimately it's something I'm constantly thinking about, and I'm sure I get it wrong some times. Something I do regularly is that if I see myself reacting strongly to something - especially something really positive - I deliberately step back from it and pause significantly before responding or engaging. I don't know everyone does that, and more importantly I don't know a whole lot of people are conscious of how specific things may engage them more than others. 

11 minutes ago, Tears of Lys said:

Well that was very enlightening.  Don't consider fairness because there is a vast conspiracy that uses it as a tool to confound liberals. 

It must have worked because I'm feeling confounded.  

I didn't say that, but thanks!

No, it's important to understand why this issue in particular might be especially important to you. And one of the reasons is that it triggers your moral outrage around fairness. This is the same principles behind things like sharing false stories or getting engagement on social media or any number of things. I absolutely believe that you feel fairness is an important issue, possibly one of the most important things you personally can consider. The trick is that other people know that too. And they will absolutely use that to get you engaged. 

And it isn't a vast conspiracy; it's just marketing. Marketing people understand these viewpoints either directly or effectively via testing of messages. They do revisions of the messaging all the time along with opinion tests, and then they hit on things that affect more people the way they want to. Do you think they don't? Do you think that every Republican out there harping on the fairness of athletics for women vs trans women happened in a vacuum, and they all just magically came to that conclusion? How do you think that Republicans get their talking points? 

4 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

The Olympics/high end sports isn't a basic part of society. 

Yet it's crucial to make this a major issue?

4 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Maybe, people aren't thinking about it that cynically and they really do just think fairness is really important. 

Oh, I don't think that people like you are thinking about it that cynically, but I'm far more confident that the folks who are framing these attacks at the higher levels are doing this. They might not be studying Haidt et al, but they'll be doing it this way because their focus groups and studies indicate that this messaging is more effective at getting more people involved than doing other things. That's just the nature of these kinds of attacks. They aren't coming organically from the world; the trans attacks are part of a coordinated, well-funded effort. 

ETA: the other aspect of it that we were talking about before - the puberty blockers - is another good one that tends to trigger liberals real well, the notion of causing harm. Another masterful technique to get more people on board. 

My favorite part of the above is that anyone who actually carries out that order or facilitates that order can (by the defense counsel's viewpoint) be tried and convicted without any other requirements, including officials who can be impeached. 

But the president cannot. Very weird, that. 

4 minutes ago, Tears of Lys said:

The problem is that anyone who questions this topic in ANY way is labeled as TERF or transphobic. 

I think the problem is that there are several people who are questioning this topic in many ways who are acting precisely like a transphobe. As an example, recommending segregation when there are a crazy amount of ways to allow for people to participate is clearly not questioning this topic in 'any' way; it's clearly siding with the notion that you simply don't want that person to be part of the group. And maybe that's not transphobic directly, but it is exactly what transphobes are proposing. 

Also, I don't really think that the actual problem is that people who question this are labeled as transphobic. I think that the problem is that a whole lot of trans people are getting the message that they are not welcome in basic parts of society, and a whole lot of those people are looking at allies who are also throwing them out because of concerns of 'fairness'. The labeling is not nearly the actual problem. 

I'll also note the cleverness of framing this in terms of fairness. For most conservatives simply being able to block folks because they're trans is more than enough from a purity/ingroup perspective, but liberals famously favor fairness. Doing this argument this way means many liberals will then be real concerned about restricting people's access in terms of being fair. 

Just now, BigFatCoward said:

I've been quite clear I only think that rules should govern high end sports. Olympics/world championships etc. nNobody needs to tell a 14 year old they can't play hockey with their mates. 

Okay, but that is literally what the other proposals have been about. And the Olympics/world championships for all the sports out there already have ways to deal with this if they need to, and in fact have already done so in one case (and even that was shitty). 

So what is the problem?

Just now, Tears of Lys said:

Except I can think of many instances where government DID dictate how a sports league of any size ran their system.  Mostly to the benefit of sports in general.  I'm sure you can too.  

Legislating "fairness" can come in many guises.  

Sure, but those dictations were to add inclusion, not to add exclusion. Note that when the government has stepped in and said things need to change it was to give athletes either more rights (like the NCAA with NIL) or more access (like Title IX). I'm fine if the government wants to make things more expansive, but there are a very, very scant few cases where the government stepped in to regulate a sport, and none that I can find that restricted athlete access. 

1 minute ago, BigFatCoward said:

I never said governments. Sporting bodies make the rules.

But the problem with that is different sports have very different rules, some degree of consistency would be better for everyone imo.

Eh. I don't think you need that. I don't think you need the rules governing FIFA to apply to rec league soccer. I don't think you need Olympic rules to govern high school diving. 

I think that at MOST you can take what @karaddin said as the base point and then rule on case by case basis as you go, because the actual amount of people affected is so small that individual judgments can be reasonable. You absolutely do not need to make a blanket condemnation of it or a blanket restriction based on hypotheticals, especially across all sports. And you really, really don't need to create a separate league or set of leagues for sports as a response. 

And yeah, you might get results that aren't fair to some people. Which is true all the time. Especially in sports. You'll also get some results that are MORE fair to some people. 

17 hours ago, DMC said:

Wait..is this a typo or are you actually saying there are no issues you care about that you haven’t formally organized for?  Cuz the latter seems pretty haughty.

What can I say, I'm fuckin awesome

7 hours ago, DMC said:

Biden, Trump tied for first time in months in 3-way race with RFK Jr

Thought I’d share this because it aligns with something I noticed yesterday looking at RCP’s latest polls - that in a number of them, Biden is actually doing slightly better in the polls that include the third party candidates than in head-to-heads with Trump

The first thing you see at RCP are seven swing state polls from Bloomberg/Morning Consult.  Should be noted these still don’t look good for Biden, but interestingly, in three of the states Biden is actually doing a point better in the 5-way race than the head-to-head.  The margin is the same in two other states, and Trump is doing better in the 5-way in the last two (much better in Nevada).

Trump apparently also said as much, that he's somewhat worried about RFK. 

11 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Whether they are currently is irrelevant, you make rules now before there are issues so people know where they stand. 

Emily Bridges would be one example though. Her performance trajectory very much would have had her winning Olympic medals this cycle.  She was an outstanding cyclist pre transition and her performance held up very well post transition.   And this is why trans only events is also problematic, 2 people who were performing at the same level before transition could be miles apart afterwards, like i've said many times, there are no easy answers here. 

You can't begin to have the conversations when someone has dictated years of their lives to competing at the highest level then pull the rung from under them. 

That would be extremely unfair on the athletes. 

I think you can do that, and until you really are having an issue you absolutely should. There is nothing that stops these sport bodies from making very fast rules. In fact they've already done so in other cases that don't involve trans athletes. This isn't constitutional law, it's fucking high school sports and in a few cases small niche sporting events. 

More importantly I don't think that as a rule sports needs legislation about fairness whatsoever. That's entirely up to those sports leagues. If you need the government to step in and set rules about sporting it should be for either the commercial aspects or literal cases of breaking the law (like Larry Nassar). Why should the government get involved? 

What is so critical that any government needs to dictate how a sports league of any size runs their system?

26 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

I think the argument "very few people are affected" is a dangerous one, because it cuts both ways. If one argues that any unfairness in athletics is of little concern because there aren't very many trans women competing, someone else could argue that employment discrimination against trans women in, say, the sciences, also wouldn't matter. After all, just how many trans women scientists are there? 

Seems to me that if something is unfair, it's unfair no matter how many people are affected. 

Except the number of people affected so far is zero.

2 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

That's 2 separate issues. Yes, they are. On a whole other planet of better.  Ask the most dominant female athlete of all time (Serena). 

Okay, you should be able to then tell me what trans woman is out there currently that is absolutely dominating her sport.

Or were you insinuating that Serena Williams is trans?

Because to my knowledge the number of professional or even amateur athletes that are trans and are crushing their sport is...zero.

2 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Whether we need to legislate is a whole other issue. 

If you don't, why are you talking about it then?

1 minute ago, Week said:

Annihilated in a scrimmage? Deep breaths, please.

I guess the problem I am having is where the actual, ya know, literal problem is here that is supposedly being legislated. Are there a lot of trans women angling to join women's national soccer teams? 

And are they so much better than the normal women that we need to preemptively legislate or fret about it? 

Also, to go back to the actual topic the thing I'm far more worried about is the same thing Israel is being dinged on - that the tools they're using is incredibly failure-prone. That might be okay when you're trying to identify a tree, but it's not great when using it to detain people or to call airstrikes. 

6 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

I do care, thank you very much. I haven't taken to the streets for the cause. I'll give you a mea culpa as long as you give me the list of issues you haven't formally organized for so I can badger you about your lack of resolve.

There aren't any, but please continue. 

And no, I doubt you care at all. I doubt it's a big deal whatsoever until it has a possibility of affecting you. 

6 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

But regardless of that care, a potential for abuse is worlds apart from intentional systematic abuse. 1 or 2% of people mistreated is terrible, but 50% mistreated would be a whole lot worse.

Abuse is abuse. Yeah, it's worse, but you're still okay with that 1-2%. 

6 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

See, we agree. The US has had many authoritarian undercurrents, and the unregulated surveillance state has proven to be one of the most insidious and robust. But it would still be far worse under a MAGA 2.0 administration.

I don't think it would be far worse, at least not for a while. That's the thing about authoritarian systems - they don't tend to prosecute everyone. They barely harass most people. They just make sure that you know that you could, at any time, be harassed. For some reason or no reason.

Which is exactly the state we have right now for a whole lot of folks. 

6 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Disagree. More importantly, I have a hard time believing that you would seriously equate a surveillance state of Trump 2.0 with our current one. You love your cynicism, but come on. Whatever is going on now, it will be much worse under an admin full of Steve Miller wannabes and Christian fascists.

I'm sure the abuse will be greater. But the potential for abuse by Trump or anyone else will still be there. You should care about the potential for abuse regardless of who is in control. 

To be clear I'm not equating anything - I'm saying that the problem exists now, not in the future. 

That said it likely doesn't matter that much when laws aren't really important and no one cares about holding powerful people accountable.

Just now, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Please explain how this currently applies to half of the country.

It doesn't; it applies to ALL the country. 

Just now, Phylum of Alexandria said:

As I said, I don't like this type of surveillance and interference. But surely even you can understand how a broad expansion of something bad is much worse. And how something rife with opportunity for abuse is not as bad as a protocol where abuse is the entire MO.

My point is that abuse is the entire MO already. 

5 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Please explain.

We are already using facial scanning and a whole lot of other data to block, suspend, or restrict people regularly. We do it for all sorts of stupid-ass shit, like a 7 year old having the same name as a terrorist and being blocked from flying. There are already no actual process rules or rights around this.

The difference, as I said, is that you're now worried about it applying to you. 

12 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Yeah, and I don't like it. Why would I want it to be spread to half the country? Especially when tied to face scanning at the airport?

It already is for half the country, or more. If you don't like it, you should not like it right now.

2 hours ago, RhaenysBee said:

I added The Gentleman to my sickday(s) watchlist. 

I tried to figure out if and how it was related to the movie by the same title by the same direction. It’s not. ‘Kay. I suppose he just really likes this title?

It was rather fun for the first 5-6 episodes. Then I kinda got tired of it because it was buildup on buildup on buildup and I found myself asking, To what? For me the magnitude of the climax was disproportionate to the amount and complexity of all that buildup. The way I see it, we didn’t quite arrive anywhere surprising, impactful, meanigful, fun, punchy. It was much ado for very little. I like the dynamic, the cinematography, the editing, the style of storytelling, the visual experience, I even liked the acting quite a bit. I certainly enjoyed the whole thing more than The Gentleman movie. If they ever made a season 2 I would probably tune in out of curiosity. 

Yeah, this is my take too, especially the ending. Things were wrapped up way too neatly, there were a number of side plots that were entertaining and added nothing to the story, and a number of times things just kind of...stopped. 

I was honestly expecting something clever with the carrier pigeons, but even that wasn't special. 

It's pretty and fun, and often funny. Early on in the season there are some real good Ritchie crime sequences and cutting wit. But the ending was definitely a letdown. 

9 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

I am disconcerted by the recent emergence of mandatory face scanning at airports. Right now it's a convenience, but should our government fall into the clutches of a paranoid and vindictive autocrat (which is basically a coin flip in the US at this point), you know that tech will be abused. "Oh, you want to flee the country, Mr. Resistance? Oh no, it looks like there's an issue with your passport..."

This is already the case, just not for people like you.