You’re on page four already. When are you going to start showing that?
Miller, if you have a problem understanding my position, then feel free to ask a question–I’ll try to explain the simple concepts I’m discussing in even simpler terms for you. If all you want to do is snark, there’s a different forum for that.
I’m not really interested in producing some list of studies just so you can dismiss them based simply on your distaste for the result. But thanks for the invitation.
I think we all get your position. You’re saying that people should believe sex is a myth if they believe race is a myth, because sex, like race, can only be classified based on subjective criteria.
We’re saying that your position is inaccurate because sex, unlike race, can be classified based on objective criteria. Inbred Mm domesticus (who probably knows a little bit about this, considering the name) has just provided a concrete example of such a criterion.
In response to all of us who have pointed out that this difference exists, what are you saying exactly? I mean, I’ve read your previous posts - you’re reiterating your original point and saying we don’t understand how sex works. So why are we wrong about sex being determinable objectively? Why is it inaccurate to say that identifying (for instance) the defect just named above is an objective marker for sex, and that no similar process will work for race?
You don’t happen to have a list of Communists in the Government in your pocket too, do you?
Thanks, but I’ve seen how well that’s worked out for other posters.
I am calling bullshit on this statement.
I have already provided a highly reputable cite which shows that 99.8% of people are readily able to be assigned to a sex, based on appearance, that also matches their genetics.
Since you entire argument hinges on this claim, I am going to ask for your evidence for it. Please provide a reputable reference that there is no general objective definition of male and female that encompasses 95% of the population. Don’t worry about whether it encompasses 100%. As you have already been shown, in science 95% objectivity is considered sufficient to accept an effect as real.
So please provide evidence for this ludicrous claim that there is no general objective definition of male and female that encompasses 95% of the population.
And once you have utterly failed to provide evidence for this claim, we can then dismiss your entire argument, since this claim is the lynch pin of your argument.
So what? Are you seriously suggesting that a single subjective decision seven steps removed renders the machine’s decision making process subjective?
Because if that is your point, it is so wrong as to be laughable, and despite your repeated asertions and our repeated assistance, you clearly still don’t understand what “objective” means.
And if that isn’t your point, I have no idea what your point is.
Please explain.
Umm, yes.
And you can’t measure the speed of light unless you first define “speed” and “light”.
And you can’t measure the distance to the moon unless you first define “distance” and “moon”.
What point do you think you are making here? 
Yeah. Sure.
Nobody has a damn clue what you are talking about. Despite asking multiple times you refuse to tell us what the hell you are talking about. You are unable to provide references for the outrageous claims that you have made, despite being asked multiple times
But your posts aren’t obfuscatory and contradictory at all.
You could provide the requested evidence for your assertions any time you want. You just don’t wanna.
Right? :dubious:
Blatant strawman.
Nobody in the history of the world has ever claimed that “just because a classification scheme is not objective does not mean that it’s useless”
Since you claim otherwise, then provide a quote of someone saying this.
You made this up out of whole cloth. It’s bullshit strawman of the most blatant kind.
What we have been saying is that just if a classification scheme is not objective, it has no scientific validity.
And we have been through this with you in multiple other threads. Science is the study of the objective universe. If something can’t be objectively measured, then it ain’t amenable to study by science.
Whether a subjective classification scheme has any utility in sociology or law or anime scriptwriting is utterly irrelevant to whether it has any scientific validity.
Since you concede that your racial classification schemes are purely objective, you have conceded that they have no scientific validity. In contrast, we have established that a sex classification scheme is objective, and has biological utility.
So I ask you once again: Please provide a quote of someone saying that “just because a classification scheme is not objective does not mean that it’s useless”.
Anyone. One single person. On this board or off.
Because if you can’t do that, then this whole thread has clearly been “about” nothing more than setting up a strawman. You assert that someone said that “just because a classification scheme is not objective does not mean that it’s useless”, then you try to demolish that position, when in reality nobody has ever espoused such a position.
What I find hilarious is that, despite this whole thread being “about” a blatant strawman, you have still been unable to actually demonstrate that the strawman mischaracterisation is incorrect.
That’s hilarious.
If I were trying to establish that a classification scheme that is not objective can still be useful, I could do it in the first post. Yet you can’t do it after 4 pages.
And you’re a lawyer? :dubious:
The bolded part above is simply incorrect. There is no objective definition of “male” that takes into account all the variables, just like there’s no objective definition of “white person.” If a person with XX chromosomes, a penis, and testes walks into Doctor Bob’s office and asks “am I male or female?”, Doctor Bob may say “you have XX chromosomes, so obviously you are a female.” That same person may walk into Doctor Sue’s office, and she might say “you have testes, so obviously you are a male.”
Of course someone can say “for purposes of this study/conversation/book/whatever, ‘male’ means a person with XY chromosomes.” Once that has been established, only then is it the case that it can be objectively determined whether a person is or is not a male.
No, it is perfectly correct. You either refuse to accept or are unable to understand that a test acceptable in science if its results can be replicated with >95% accuracy.
This is all perfectly true, and all utterly irrelevant to whether the objective definition is scientifically valid.
As we have already explained to you several times, what you are arguing is not science. Science works on hypotheses. No hypothesis is 100% accurate. Not one. That isn’t a flaw in science, it is a feature. All that is required for a hypothesis to have scientific validity is that it be logically valid and that it be detectable at levels above chance.
That’s it. Total.
It doesn’t matter that a selection process fails one time out of 500. It’s completely irrelevant. An objective selection process that is 98.8% accurate, as is the case with determining sex based upon chromosomes, is scientifically valid, unless a competing hypothesis is *more *accurate.
So your repeated claims that there is no objective definition of male is utter twaddle. You are making it up out of whole cloth. I have already provided you with a reference that says that sex can be ascertained based solely on appearance with >99% accuracy. Your claim that there is no such ability to discriminate is total nonsense.
It appears to stem form an ignorant belief that an objective standard is somehow scientifically invalid if it isn’t 100% accurate. That is utterly, completely and entirely incorrect in a every way. It’s ignorance of the grossest kind. An objective standard is scientifically acceptable if it works >95% of the time. In fact it just needs to be separable from random chance, but convention sets that level at 95%.
We can readily assign humans as being male with >95% probability using objective criteria, and members so assigned will have additional commonalities with >95% of other group members.
Therefore “male” is a biological reality.
We can not assign humans as being of a race with >95% probability using objective criteria, and have members share additional commonalities.
Therefore “race” is **not **a biological reality.
Now you may wish to argue that science is flawed and untrustworthy because no hypothesis is 100% accurate. Good luck with that.
What you can not do is argue that a hypothesis is not scientific because it is not 100% accurate. That is not a standard of scientific validity used by anyone else in the whole world, It’s a standard that you just made up for use in this thread. Nobody else n the whole world agrees with it.
Yet this invented assertion that a hypothesis doesn’t even exist in science if it isn’t 100% accurate is all the argument that you have left.
Wrong. There are any number of objective definition of “white person.”
Blake, the point you keep missing over and over when you rant and rave about your precious 95% number is that I am talking about the attitudes of the “race is a myth” people, not the science of the whole thing by itself. As has been shown to you in multiple posts, the “race is a myth” people believe that race “does not exist” because it is not possible to determine people’s race objectively. I’ve never heard them say that there was any particular numerical threshold they were interested in.
Each of those is an objective definition, right?
[QUOTE=Rand Rover]
Blake, the point you keep missing over and over when you rant and rave about your precious 95% number is that I am talking about the attitudes of the “race is a myth” people, not the science of the whole thing by itself. As has been shown to you in multiple posts, the “race is a myth” people believe that race “does not exist” because it is not possible to determine people’s race objectively. I’ve never heard them say that there was any particular numerical threshold they were interested in.
[/QUOTE]
Fine. Since your assertion is that gender is equally unprovable, simply prove that race can be objectively determined at 99%…i.e. that there is some genetic marker or other across the board physiological evidence that conclusively shows a person to be of a ‘race’. Please show your work.
-XT
No they don’t.
If this were true you would show us where somebody said this. We have asked multiple times.
You are just making this up. It’s strawman.
People on these boards constantly do things like post a picture of a person and ask me “is this person black or white”? You did it yourself in this thread. Or they say “are Jews, Iranians, Germans, and Icelanders all white, or are some of them different races?” What they are doing is saying that I must prove to them that there is an objective way to tell if every person is one race or another or race has no meaning.
But you don’t see them doing the same thing with gender. They don’t say (as I have in this thread) “here’s a person with XX chromosomes, testes, a uterus, boobs, and a 5 o’clock shadow–is this person a male or female?” But the two questions are absolutely equivalent.
I’ve never asserted that, so I don’t need to prove it. You really should try to understand my posts in this thread before asking questions such as this and embarrassing yourself.
No. The point is that Doctor Bob and Doctor Sue have different definitions of “male” and “female.” Each of their definitions by itself is objective, but the fact that they have different definitions shows that the definition overall is subjective (i.e., it depends on whether a person thinks chromosomes or what’s between the legs is more important).
And we can Warn you for violating the forum rules if you accuse other posters of lying.
[ /Moderating ]
[QUOTE=Rand Rover]
I’ve never asserted that, so I don’t need to prove it. You really should try to understand my posts in this thread before asking questions such as this and embarrassing yourself.
[/QUOTE]
It’s really not me embarrassing myself in this thread. Sadly, you don’t realize who IS being embarrassed in this thread.
If I show a picture of a male with full frontal nudity, or I show a picture with a female with full frontal nudity, then most people are going to be able to say, with high confidence, that the picture is either of a male or female. In only a very small number of cases would the superficial inspection be wrong. The same can’t be said for a picture attempting to depict some nebulous concept of ‘race’, as you yourself have admitted in this post, because there IS no agreed upon definition of what ‘race’ is, or how it’s defined. I’m unsure why this seemingly simple concept is so difficult for you to grasp, or why you continue to think, in the face of pretty much universal disagreement from just about every other poster in this thread that there is some sort of equivalency between assertions of race and gender, but it seems you are bound and determined to continue down this path, despite the fact that it makes you look really silly.
-XT
I didn’t accuse another poster of lying. I said that if he said something then it would be a lie.
Just more proof that what I actually say doesn’t make a damn bit of difference–you people just read my posts, come up with whatever meaning you want, and then off the fuck you go.