Other harm done by "racial" categories

[whYNOT]

On 12/1/2024 at 1:59 AM, Doug Morris said:

... is saying that unfairness and/or injustice in the way male and female athletes are viewed and/or treated is the result not of inherent biological differences but of biases. 

 

Looks like we don't look at the same multi-forms of media, where I've watched, heard or read in the past decades, an explosion of female adepts, in sports, business, entertainment, sciences, politics, arts,  etc.,etc. - and high levels of attention, respect, popularity and money dedicated to them (to which, one could say "about time!") -- where you only see: inequity. 

With such "attention" levels, indeed, one might begin to perceive over-compensation and an artificial imbalance created, as if guilty males have "left the room" or been banished.

My sense is there's still a considerable fallout from "critical feminist theory", ignoring the great strides made, and social "biases" disappearing or quite non -existent.

Your input reminds me of that "ressentiment" which Hicks picked up from a post-modernist, and from which certain PoMo/Woke feminist thinkers will never gain satisfaction  - until maybe, female supremacy vengefully replaces male supremacy? I cannot claim to know what subjectivists believe in.

---

"The meaning of RESSENTIMENT is deep-seated resentment, frustration, and hostility accompanied by a sense of being powerless to express these feelings". Merriam Webster

Edited December 2, 2024 by whYNOT

[tadmjones]

Marc Andreessen just commented on this on Rogan.  He attributed the use of the concept to Nietzsche and taken to logical conclusion leads to the inverse of morality.

[Doug Morris]

23 hours ago, whYNOT said:

Looks like we don't look at the same multi-forms of media, where I've watched, heard or read in the past decades, an explosion of female adepts, in sports, business, entertainment, sciences, politics, arts,  etc.,etc. - and high levels of attention, respect, popularity and money dedicated to them (to which, one could say "about time!") -- 

I am not denying this at all.  I am saying some bias, and some effects of bias, still linger.  

I am not saying inequity is all there is.  I am saying that it still exists to some extent.

The main point here is that you, tadmjones, and Bill Maher have smeared Scientific American by lifting a quotation out of context and ignoring its actual wording.

 

[tadmjones]

In this segment the Hill further ‘smears’ Scientific American by referencing an article from Reason magazine about how bad the publication was under the recently resigned editor in chief. So lots of smearing in several places.

[whYNOT]

Childish "projection" - those accusers of ~your~ "bigotry", racial, misogynist, (etc.), display ~their~ true colors, bigotry.

Anyhow, when ideology corrupts science: a revealing talk by Michael Schermer, about writing for the S.A., its editor and other matters, (replacing "the context", Doug Morris).

 

 

Edited December 3, 2024 by whYNOT

[tadmjones]

Those gnostic spells are potent.

[tadmjones]

Non-transgender women, lol.

https://www.dailyfetched.com/new-york-times-torched-after-referring-to-biological-women-as-non-transgender-women/

[Doug Morris]

Even if all of the above is true, it is also true that the quotation has been lifted out of context and that its wording has been ignored.  

Probably most things in our society have been corrupted to some extent by mixed-economy statism, although the corruption can lean either to what is traditionally considered "left" or to what is traditionally considered "right".  

Probably most things in our society have been corrupted to some extent by deeper philosophical confusion.

We do need to be careful what we believe.

This debate started because tadmjones wanted to express skepticism about the article I was originally discussing about the harmful effects of lumping people together based on the "racial" categories the federal government has set up.  Does anyone want to claim that there is something wrong with that article?  Does anyone want to claim that identity politics is the only harm done by such categories?

 

[whYNOT]

On 12/2/2024 at 3:22 AM, whYNOT said:

 

With such "attention" levels, indeed, one might begin to perceive over-compensation and an artificial imbalance created, as if guilty males have "left the room" or been banished.

My sense is there's still a considerable fallout from "critical feminist theory",

Since individualism has become widely unappreciated, abused and forgotten, an individual needs to consider what the collectivists everywhere are behaving like "by group" - what are "they" up to? In this major area, gender: the growing influence and power of the tribe "women" in higher education.

Apart from their students, academics also influence the general "media" which then seeps into the socio-culture-- and so, into politics and world affairs. So Academia requires careful attention.

Trying to uphold an earlier male-dominant world is/was reprehensible, unjust, unfree and irrational, and the changes have been rapid lately to favor women so e.g. many more today are University Deans. But the replacement "world", as the balance moves further the other way, somewhat in compensation for the past injustices one fancies, and some but not all hired on their talent and merit, might not have rational and free results, either. That the female -and often critical theory feminist - academics (who place greater priority on "moral concerns" and social justice, than on truth and truth-telling) are growing in numbers and authority, as anyone had already observed, is corroborated in this interesting Quillette clip. For the better?

 

 

 

Edited December 4, 2024 by whYNOT

[tadmjones]

Here's an article critiquing the SA article

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/10/24/scientific-american-is-back-to-distorting-the-facts-to-buttress-its-ideology/

[DavidOdden]

19 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

Does anyone want to claim that there is something wrong with that article?

Since you ask, here is what’s wrong.

It became fashionable for the media to whine about Trump saying things but not also stating what the evidence was for the statement, and it would be reported that “Trump falsely claimed without evidence that ___” (fill in your favorite example). This is a multi-edged complaint-sword which can sometimes be wielded appropriately, and sometimes it is not appropriate. Every politician makes claims without also stating the evidence. Newspapers do it all of the time.

The article makes what appear to be scientific claims, but does not provide evidence for those claims. For a puff piece in The Guardian or NYTimes, I wouldn’t expect there to be serious evidence, but this article was published in Nature, which used to be a serious scientific journal (but as of January 2021) has been transitioning to pop-sci magazine. The version you cite is identical in content to the one published in Nature. That article fails to scientifically establish that AANHPI individuals (by whatever criteria) suffer significant negative healthcare outcomes as a consequence of their categorization. This simply is not a scientific article, moreover, it does not even give evidence that there exists an underlying peer-reviewed scientific article that could substantiate the allegation.

If you are sufficiently interested in the topic, you might dig through real science journals to see to what extent the implied claims might be true, and in particular, is it especially true of AANHPI subjects, compared to “Native American”, “Latino/a/x”, “white” or “black” populations? The more you dis-aggregate data, the smaller the sample and the worse the credibility of claims to statistical significance (which is what underlies the complaint in the first place).

The greatest harm done by this article is to degrade the status of serious scientific research. It is difficult to strike a balance between scientific rigor and popular understandability. Even in the olden days, Sci Am never was a peer-reviewed journal for original research, it was a higher-level version of Science News. As long as we bear in mind that the article does not make or support a scientific claim, then the article becomes a less-annoying ideological puff-piece.

The article starts by asserting that “these patients have been lumped together with people

from other communities in a single category: Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander”. Not a single piece of evidence is provided to support this claim. Give me a number! This terminology was invented 25 years ago for the purpose of the census, and the set of terms used changes with each iteration of the census. As a starter, a serious article on the topic should at least accurately report the range of suggested options for self-reports of race in patient intake forms (medical data does not come from the census, it comes from case studies involving actual patients and whatever race, if any, they reported on their forms).

The correct conclusion to be drawn about ethnic self-identification data in health science is, simply, that it is of negligible value, and more likely of great dis-value because correlation is not causation, the health problems of people are generally not the result of genetics (there is a genetic component to race, which is not just a social construct), they result as much if not more from cultural factors.

As an advocacy piece, rather than a science piece, the article falls short by suggesting that existing demographic questions need to be more nuanced, rather than abandoned in favor of actually relevant questions and testing of behavior and genetics. The problem, it is suggested, is finding a way to have enough detail to find trends, “without adding so many

checkboxes that a long list leaves participants exhausted”. Contrarily, I suggest that making the checkboxes a central research question and compensating study participants accordingly might result in better experimental control in aid of finding the actual cause of health problems.

In short, the article makes claims without evidence, just as Trump has been accused of doing.

[whYNOT]

Here's the clincher:

6.) Whether or how often women hunted is irrelevant to our views of men and women. Really, why does ideology push Scientific American, and in this case O&L, to distort the facts and to leave out contrary data, when the rights of women don’t depend in the least on whether they hunted or on their relative athletic performance?  Women’s rights rest on morality, not on observations of nature. Yes, there are some trivial exceptions, like those of us who don’t think that transwomen should be allowed to compete athletically against biological women, but there are many feminists who agree with that.  The real feminist program of equal rights and opportunities for women has nothing to do with whether they hunted as much as men in ancient (or in modern) hunter-gatherer societies".

--

Of course, who today cares? The relevancy of the SA article -of how much, where and how often ancient females were or were not also hunters rather than just gatherers has not the remotest connection to present-day context. Women now, thanks to capitalism, possess or have access to every mechanical and electronic device men have - and enjoy equal rights. A present woman or a man may be a modern 'gatherer'  or 'hunter' when and as they choose.

When a bitter and twisted - "scientific" - ideologue needs to resort to, by any means and falsehoods, "equalizing" male-female physicality, the hunt and the sport, in order to advance the uber-male sisterhood, you know that they've reached the end, and deserve to be laughed out of town.

Apropos, (Woke) Hollywood, not to miss out, has been churning out hundreds of popular movies in recent times, in which a heroine fights and defeats brutal men who kidnapped her kid or attacked her family - or some righteous motive. I have seen enough to recognize how wide-spread the genre is.  At first, the fantasy of a slim woman beating up and punishing big, bad men, single-handedly or several, may have been quite novel and satisfying, after many boring iterations it's become obvious, a sign of the vindictive and misandrist, anti-reality ideology backing them.

Edited December 5, 2024 by whYNOT

[DavidOdden]

Here is a follow-up on my point about the claim that “these patients have been lumped together with people from other communities in a single category: Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander” – no evidence is provided that this is actually true. Here is some evidence that it is untrue. There are federal regulations governing drugs and medical devices, and there are federal rules about reporting ethnicity “for federal purposes” (which would include getting FDA approval). The FDA “suggests”

a standardized approach for collecting and reporting race and ethnicity data in submissions including information collected and reported from clinical trials and clinical studies

which is open to negotiation (compliance is always simplest) – by law, there does have to be “demographic reporting”. While not a requirement, they recommend that you “should” do certain things. First, they recommend “using the two-question format for requesting race and ethnicity information, with the ethnicity question preceding the question about race”, where the suggested questions are “Are you Hispanic/Latino or not Hispanic/Latino?” (first) then “What is your race? More than one choice is acceptable”.

Then they suggest suggesting answers (“Hispanic or Latino” and “Not Hispanic or Latino”), and for race: “American Indian or Alaska Native”; Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; White”. There is a secondary more-detailed race question (along with hair-splitting of “Latino”), then for race a single “White” category and the following AANHPI categories: “Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Other Asian, Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, Samoan, Other Pacific Islander”. Nowhere is AANHPI an option, unless the subject comes up with that designation themselves. The only suggested options are “Asian” (not Pacific Islander), or massive hair-splitting that roughly replicates frequency in the US (e.g. the lack of distinct “Laotian” or “Micronesian” categories corresponds to the fact that there are few Laotians or Khmer in the US). In other words, by looking at why ethnic data is reported in the first place (required by law) one would realize that researchers are responding to federal requirements – which the article fails to even consider. And there is no such requirement of AANHPI-lumping.