Comments

  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    Oh and bad news - the progressives always win in the end because time is on their side.
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    ↪andrewk
    Yeah, and that. :heart:
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    ↪frank
    It's in the thread title. Perhaps you haven't been on the same topic from the beginning. The thread is supposed to be about an ideological war between vague terms, progressives and conservatives on the front of identity. I could have focussed on race, but I thought it would be too provocative so I chose gender. My thesis is that this war is more virulent in America than Europe, and the flow of the thread has rather confirmed this. Not that there is no conflict about it in Europe, and that is why I presented the APA and its enemies and for comparison the European experiment in Education.
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    Do you feel like you might have approached this topic with the intention of being provocative? Is being provocative more important than understanding how others see things? If so, why? — frank

    I don't think so. One of the things I have tried to stay away from, but others have wanted to go into is the rather uncommon cases of individuals who actually want to change sex. So I provided links to principles of education, and principles of psychology, and nothing about principles of hormone treatment or surgery. I warned that the topic was somewhat emotive and gave a fair bit of reading in an attempt to slow things down. Short of not mentioning the war at all, I don't think there is much more I could have done.

    It seemed to me that this site is well equipped to tackle such issues, having intelligent people from both sides of the political spectrum and both sides of the Atlantic.
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    Taking a closer look, the preschools mentioned in the OP are what Americans would call private schools. — frank

    That's interesting, because it is exactly the feeling I have about the complaints about the APA guidelines; that if a closer look had been taken, it would have been a non-issue. Perhaps not in every case, but in general, it seems as though a few words - 'gender', 'identity', 'social', have become imbued with a blinding emotional potency, that prevents that close look.
  • What Should Be Pinned Up Top On Front Page?
    ↪Christoffer
    The quote is "True premises and a valid argument guarantee a true conclusion. An argument which is valid and has true premises is said to be sound (adjective) or have the property of soundness (noun)."

    The conclusion that is Harry's and not part of the quote, but not distinguished clearly is "So in order to be true, your argument need to be valid." Harry repeats the error just pointed out by Baden and pretends that it is either said by the source or follows from what is said by the source. And he is wrong, as I have just demonstrated. All of which demonstrates both the importance of logic, and the futility of reducing it to a checklist of fallacies. You have to study it and think, and you can still go wrong.
  • What Should Be Pinned Up Top On Front Page?
    ↪Christoffer
    Except that it isn't.

    Roses are red.
    Violets are Blue.
    Therefore Baden is right.

    Invalid argument, true conclusion. (true premises as well.)
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    Consider the commonplace idiom, "Boys will be boys."

    ... a flippant way to excuse the actions and attitudes of boys and men of all ages. It’s typically used to explain rowdy or naughty behavior—things like jumping in mud puddles, roughhousing, and raising Cain. It’s also, unfortunately, used to explain away things like sexual assault allegations and other serious crimes. It doesn’t hold individuals responsible for their behavior and choices but rather infers all males are preprogrammed to act in such ways.

    I think this is understated. It does not merely excuse, but actually approves. This is not to say, by the way, that it is necessarily the case that boys are not on average, by hormonal influence or some such, more rowdy, aggressive, naughty, etc. But it is a fact also, that society tends to excuse/allow/approve, behaviours differentially between boys and girls. Inevitably, the effect of such differential treatment is to exaggerate differences between the sexes.

    And this is also done in obviously arbitrary ways as well, such as dress codes, trousers v skirts, blue v pink, short hair v long hair.

    Woman-boobs tend to be bigger than man-boobs, and this is a matter of biology. And a reasonable case can be made that natural selection ensures that men find bigger boobs attractive because *genes, childrearing bla*. And then sexual selection ensures that the difference becomes exaggerated, because that's what sexual selection tends to do - hence peacock tails and like useless appendages.

    In short, sexism is 'natural'. Genes will be genes.

    So it is unsurprising that folks like and seek to promote sexual stereotypes. And it is unsurprising that in the end, their arguments reduce to, 'well it's natural'. It is natural; what is unnatural is equality and freedom.
  • What Should Be Pinned Up Top On Front Page?
    People are maybe just fucking with me: let's vote "Disagree" just to mess with him! — S

    Are you saying that's not a valid reason? What's the fallacy?
  • Counterexemple to Hume's Law?
    Asserting the disjunction itself would be to assert an "is" statement. It says that it is true that either A is true or B is true. And unless both A and B are false, then the statement is true. — S

    "you ought to realise this is ridiculous" is true.
    Therefore, you ought to realise this is ridiculous.

    But Hume never made the claim as it is attributed anyway. The way he put it is more so that if 'ought' does not appear in any premises, but appears in the conclusion, then the deduction is invalid, which is true for any term. Unsurprisingly, if one defines 'is' statements so as to include 'oughts', then his supposed law can have all the exceptions you like.

    Hume famously closes the section of the Treatise that argues against moral rationalism by observing that other systems of moral philosophy, proceeding in the ordinary way of reasoning, at some point make an unremarked transition from premises whose parts are linked only by “is” to conclusions whose parts are linked by “ought” (expressing a new relation) — a deduction that seems to Hume “altogether inconceivable” (T3.1.1.27). Attention to this transition would “subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason” (ibid.).
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    Go away.
  • Counterexemple to Hume's Law?
    The domains are connected by statements that declare what ought to be. The connection once made, logic can do its thing; it is in making the connection that neither logic nor being can get a foothold.
  • What Should Be Pinned Up Top On Front Page?
    Not sure why people are against it? — Christoffer
    It's just not the sort of pinup decent folks want to see. Show me your boobies and I'll show you my phallusies ...
    so adolescent. Tut tut!
  • Counterexemple to Hume's Law?
    The disjunction AvB is either an "is" statement or an "ought" statement. — Nicholas Ferreira

    Why do you want to say this? It seems obviously false, as you have just declared it to be both. There is little point in this logical trick, even if it 'works'. It says nothing about the status of ethics, and Hume's point stands, that what is and what ought to be are separate domains.
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    What is being overlooked in this thread is the psychological development of a child BEFORE it gets to school. The environment that the parents provide and how the parents behave are adopted as the norms for that child before it even gets into the educational system — Harry Hindu

    I you had read the link in the op, you would have come across this:
    One of the group’s teachers, Izabell Sandberg, 26, noticed a shift in a 2-year-old girl whose parents dropped her off wearing tights and pale-pink dresses. The girl focused intently on staying clean. If another child took her toys, she would whimper.

    “She accepted everything,” Ms. Sandberg said. “And I thought this was very girlie. It was like she was apologizing for taking up space.”

    Until, that is, a recent morning, when the girl had put a hat on and carefully arranged bags around herself, preparing to set off on an imaginary expedition. When a classmate tried to walk off with one of her bags, the girl held out the palm of her hand and shouted “No” at such a high volume that Ms. Sandberg’s head swiveled around.

    It was something they had been practicing.

    By the time March rolled round, the girl had gotten so loud that she drowned out the boys in the class, Ms. Sandberg said. At the end of the day, she was messy. The girl’s parents were less than delighted, she said, and reported that she had become cheeky and defiant at home.

    But Ms. Sandberg has plenty of experience explaining the mission to parents.

    “This is what we do here, and we are not going to stop it,” she said.

    That is a clear description of the effect of parental upbringing being undone, and the parents' negative response to it.

    So you are wrong, it is not being overlooked.

    if the left really wants to achieve the "honorable" goal of gender-neutrality, then that would really entail forcing hormone treatment on pregnant mothers so that the fetus adopts a more sex-neutral state (so those sexual differences aren't noticible) and then removing all children from their parents after birth and raising them all by the state — Harry Hindu

    And this is a completely ridiculous and insulting claim arising from your now obviously deliberate conflation of gender as social construct and sex as biology. It is very very clear that gender neutrality in education has nothing to do with the suppression of sex differences, nor is there any suggestion in any country being discussed here that all children be raised by the state.
  • I Ching - the Metaphysics of Flux.
    ↪Ying
    Thanks for that, interesting links that I need to spend some time with, and a very useful cosmology. I have lived with this in the background as I have lived with a Christian cosmology in the background, along with scientific materialist, and so on. So I am always wanting if not a reconciliation, at least a translation, an understanding of one in terms of the other. What I am trying to do is to get some idea of the status of the various elements in relation to the philosophical language more familiar here. There seems to be an affinity with Pythagorean ideas of cosmic vibration and so on, and also with Platonic forms, but without the separation of ideal from the tangible.

    Something new to me already is the sense that 'the ten thousand things' are no more 'things' in the materialist sense than yin and yang are things, but just a further iteration of the possibilities of process, such that one might, if anyone had the stamina and insight, elaborate each of them in turn with its own name, description, and commentary.

    There is something I am trying to articulate, and failing to, about the way the fundamental division permeates reality that is very different from the hierarchies of Western dichotomies. It is as if, as well as computer programs being composed of 0s and 1s, every program and every sub-routine is in some significant sense 1-ish or 0-ish.
  • Brexit
    I've thought about starting a thread on this British (or should I say English) gloominess and persistent self-flagellation, that only seldom is interrupted by some brief upbeat monent. — ssu

    Could be interesting. I lived in France for a few years.One of the historic differences is the revolution. It may seem extravagant, but the class divisions in England especially play an important role. Most of the government went to the same school, and the same university. That's only slightly an exaggeration.
  • Brexit
    What bad could happen to you? — ssu

    I dare say we will survive, but the UK is losing influence, losing money, losing jobs, losing trade. We already have gone back to folks dying of malnutrition, rising inequality, rising homelessness, a loss of human rights and political accountability, increasing crime and quite a deal of despair and desperation. Plenty more bad stuff could happen.
  • Is Democracy an illusion?
    Have a chat with Plato, who thinks that democracy is a degenerate form of government.

    The ideal state is an aristocracy in which rule is exercised by one or more distinguished people. Unfortunately, owing to human nature, the ideal state is unstable and liable to degenerate into timocracy (government by property owners), oligarchy, democracy, and, finally, tyranny. States are not made of oak and rock, but of people, and so come to resemble the people of which they are made. Aristocracies are made of just and good people; timocracies of proud and honour-loving people; oligarchies of misers and money-makers; democracies of people who are overcome by unnecessary desires; and tyrannies of people who are overcome by harmful desires.

    Plato provides a detailed account of the degeneration of the state from aristocracy to tyranny via timocracy, oligarchy, and democracy. Democracy in particular arises from the revolt of the disenfranchised in an oligarchy. The state is ‘full of freedom and frankness’ and every citizen is able to live as he pleases.
    https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/hide-and-seek/201607/plato-democracy-tyranny-and-the-ideal-state
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    It has to be admitted that the distinction between the physical, social, and psychological cannot be maintained absolutely. The transvestite might shave his legs, or bind her breasts in a temporary body modification. And things become very knotty when one considers sanity and madness.

    1. Madness is physical; a disease/malfunction of the brain.
    2. Madness is a social construct: a formal status like criminality, conferred on the individual by society.
    3. Madness is subjective, a feeling and an identification.

    All three are obviously true in some ways and in some cases, and extremely controversial in others. But perhaps all this is for another time, and another thread.
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    Given the distinction between sex as a physical phenomenon, and gender as a social construct ( and one might for clarity compare the physical phenomenon of money, as bits of paper and metal and the social construct of currency as its function as a value in social exchange ), it is worth pointing out, since the topic has come up once or twice, that there is a big difference between transgender, and transsexual. Someone who decides to present themselves as 'the opposite sex' by purely superficial means - hair, make-up, clothes, mannerisms, a transvestite, is concerned with gender, and is a very different sort of person to one who seeks to take hormones and have surgery and is concerned to change their own sex, as far as they can.

    Some people have a revulsion for either that makes them effectively indistinguishable...

    Perhaps consideration of currency as a social construct will also illustrate that a social construct is not something one can, as an individual, do anything much about. You want a tin of beans, you need 50 pence. You can say 'I don't believe in money', but the nice man at ASDA won't just let you have a tin of beans for nothing. And when hyperinflation sets in, and the price goes up to £50, it won't do you any good to say 'I don't believe in inflation and offer 50 p for the beans. Social constructs are 'made-up' but they are not voluntary.
  • Is Sartre's deferring to immaterialism legitimate grounds on which to criticise his philosophy?
    Is it not? Considering is a verb; does that not make it (and thus considering to act) an act in itself? It requires the passage of time. Time in which material changes take place. This probably highlights my misunderstanding of Sartre's philosophy. — Hay Digger

    Yes you're right. I sacrificed exactitude to brevity there. Allow me to correct myself. To consider acting is not the act under consideration except on rare occasions such as this, when it's philosophy, and other occasions when it is prevarication.

    But I think Sartre would also posit a condition of presence, say of an artist looking, acting, considering, deciding, responding moment to moment a creative wholeness. In a sense it is almost universal to conceive the scholar as habitually absent- minded, absent from the full world, and contemplating an abstraction. I think Sartre, living through war, occupation and so on, found the material world interrupting that life of philosophical withdrawal in ways that he could not ignore, and it is thus the necessity to 'get real' that he tries to incorporate into his ethics. He would much prefer to drink coffee and chain-smoke while pontificating in a pavement cafe, bur finds himself obliged to actually man the barricades, or or else betray himself.
  • Is Sartre's deferring to immaterialism legitimate grounds on which to criticise his philosophy?
    My reading of this is that he is saying that the mind is withdrawing from the material world. — Hay Digger
    The way I understand it is different. Suppose I am considering what to have for lunch. Maybe beans on toast, or maybe omelette. Neither of these is part of the material world - there are eggs in the kitchen, but no omelette. To consider acting is not to act. So it is not a claim that thoughts themselves are immaterial but that what they are about is immaterial, rather as an architect draws plans for a building that does not (yet) exist. The plans are as material as anything, but there is no building and may never be one. Yet oddly, one doesn't complain about how the architect models the world on these grounds.
  • Being Unreasonable
    Go and have a little chat with Hume about reason and passion, guys.
  • Villains
    That makes him a role model, right? — Mariner

    No. He's following me, I'm not following him. It just looks that way because he's ahead. :razz:
  • Villains
    I doubt you consistently follow your own suggestion here. What do you think of Paulo Freire? — Mariner

    My impression is that he follows my suggestion rather better than I do. I think he might say that a hero is a personification of an ideology, and an ideology in practice has victims to whom the hero is a villain; and it is the victims' job to liberate us from our heroes.
  • Villains
    Sure, in the non-fictional world, no one is pure villain (or pure hero), but does that mean that we should not orient ourselves according to this spectrum of possibilities? — Mariner

    My link is to the purported non-fictional world, I suppose, and folks are orienting themselves according to just the sort of outstanding landmarks that would appear on a mythological map. Churchill - nobody thinks he was pure anything - stands out as extreme, either hero or villain, and people orient themselves in opposing directions. It's not that we should not, but it seems we cannot orient ourselves in this way with any certainty.

    I think my argument, such as it is, is that to orient oneself in reality according to fantasy criteria is to live in fantasy; the world in which Churchill is hero or villain - in which anyone is hero or villain - is a fantasy world, not the non-fictional world people take it for.
  • The end of capitalism?
    When we rather coolly refer to “real estate” or the “ownership of the means of production” we are actually talking about, at least philosophically, is the loss of unity between subjectivity and objectivity. The common air amid these hills was an aspect of the common land which were systematically stolen by a parcel of Parliamentary rogues. When Wordsworth thought of the common air or the common wind it was in association with this vast loss affecting not only England but the USA whose landmass was surveyed then divided into squares, after precisely targeted settler violence terrorized the indigenous inhabitants, to be sold also in the 1790s.
    https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/14/the-significance-of-the-common-wind/?fbclid=IwAR034iNIOldp-wE1AnNdKL5tPIm5y5wwXTRgQFHnORDdY-3pJp-7fAoi_ik
  • Villains
    Disclaimer: The only fantasy world that I claim to be an expert on is the Tolkienian work. There may be lost of errors in what follows, due to my lack of familiarity with the details of the stories mentioned. — Mariner

    'Lost of errors' seems appropriate. It is surely the mark of a fantasy world that it separates neatly into heroes and villains? Consider this supposedly real debate: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/13/winston-churchill-was-more-villain-than-hero-says-john-mcdonnell?CMP=fb_gu&fbclid=IwAR38Zlf2KB9cYnRojSxqfwTDVC7XtNbthDLGc0LEI2TIP9hE-koydyIVge8

    The fantasy is that there is a right and wrong view, as if Eve could-have/should-have eaten the apple of the tree of knowledge of good without evil. As if a law could mandate one thing without forbidding another.
  • Brexit
    ↪Benkei
    We are standing at a cliff edge threatening to jump off. We are blaming the cruel world. Don't imagine there is much power in reason to influence us; we need the Samaritans, not some turbulent priest telling us we're going to hell.
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    ↪bert1


    Biological sex is assigned at birth, depending on the appearance of the genitals. Gender identity is the gender that a person "identifies" with or feels themselves to be. — NHS

    Note the 3 terms.
    1. sex - biological.
    2. gender - undefined.
    3. gender identity. A feeling/identification.

    Compare:
    Gender refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men – such as norms, roles and relationships of and between groups of women and men. — WHO

    This fills in the gap and gives us definitive completion of physical, phenomenological, and social. It seems a pretty consistent terminology to me.
  • The Reptilian Conspiracy Theory vs Buddhism
    ↪pbxman
    If it's not worth discussing for you — pbxman

    It is worth discussing, briefly, what is and what is not worth discussing. Thus Buddha's noble silence does not involve him not saying anything.
  • The Reptilian Conspiracy Theory vs Buddhism
    Anyone who answers declares themselves a reptilian or else another exploited sucker. Either way they are unbelievable, and this is thus a world view that declares itself not worth discussing.
  • Tao Te Ching appreciation thread
    Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no talking.
    The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
    Creating, yet not possessing,
    Working, yet not taking credit,
    Work is done, then forgotten.
    Therefore it lasts for ever.

    Clearing out the attic, and it's full of work done and forgotten. Stuff that I might get round to using, too good to throw away - wood, cloth, and above all paper. Childrens' school work, art projects, my poems, half written stories, philosophy notes journals. If I was famous, it would be an archive worth a fortune for academics to trawl through. As it is, the recycle bin is going to be very full every week for the foreseeable.

    So I'm imagining god or the drowning man, or you, going through my actual life, deciding whether any of it is worth keeping... there are a few things that I still want to keep, and a few that my children will hold onto; perhaps I have said a kind or helpful word here and there...

  • Should billionaires be abolished?
    on the basis that somehow nothing could possibly work properly without them. Now that's social engineering. — Baden

    Well you surely see that without Mr Jobs and Mr Gates, there would be no working computers because RiscOS and Linux etc etc etc don't exist.
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    Meanwhile the black students were made to attend a neo-nazi rally where they burned Nelson Mandela in effigy while marching around the fire screaming “Make Ireland Great Again!” — frank

    You think you are joking?

    https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2018/oct/26/black-sheep-the-black-teenager-who-made-friends-with-racists-video

    Watch this, folks, and get some idea of how social pressure works, how identification works, how stereotypes work, and how they are different from biology.
  • Should billionaires be abolished?
    Let me offer some un-prevailing ideas.

    1. Property, ownership, and money are social constructs.
    Therefore;
    2. Billionaires are rich because we agree that they are, not because they are smarter or more industrious...

    3. I no longer agree.

    4. Companies are global, but governance is still local, and so governments are no longer in control.

    5. Without International agreement on transparency, an end to tax havens and enforcement that reaches all parts, nothing can be done.

    6. That's why big business seeks to undermine international cooperation EU, Nato, etc.
  • Redundant Expressions in Science
    But can we distinguish things as artificial and natural by the initial state as "active thought"? — Christoffer

    Just so, it is a pragmatic distinction but no longer absolute; one has to allow a degree of arbitrariness in claiming a significant difference between a straw hut and a bird's nest. and one would have by your criterion of active thought, to go along with the idea that sexual selection is artificial selection - the peacock's fan being the result of the peahen's choice, as @StreetlightX argues above, as is the weaver bird's nest building, although that seems also to have natural component.

    Where the distinction becomes really unhelpful though would be in trying to work out whether or not a termite mound is or is not the product of a group mind, termites functioning as neurone-analogues.

    But personally, I am quite sympathetic to maintaining the now arbitrary distinction as natural/man-made, as peasants do, bouyed by tradition. and then peacock feathers are natural, unless they are made of plastic.
  • Redundant Expressions in Science
    In the good old days, there was a grand triple order - God, Man, Nature. Now folks that want to manage without God have a problem, which has been pointed out here, that Man and Nature, or artificial and natural, collapse as man is part of nature sans god. And such a collapse deprives 'nature' of any meaning, because it deprives it of any negative. If there is nothing that is unnatural, then 'natural' means the same as 'everything'. But this is a purely linguistic phenomenon, and non-philosophers are happily immune from such vandalism of useful words and continue to use 'natural' in contrast to 'man-made', and trust that god has provided an appropriate hell for philosophers.
  • Morality and the arts
    can you go into that a bit more? — Brett

    I can say more words... Those ones were stolen and adapted from...

    Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that. — Bill Shankly

    Science merely reflects the world, and reaches its zenith in truth and utility. But Art does much more, and it can be seen in cave paintings, and modern works mentioned by others. It operates by invocation, calling into being. It makes possible what was impossible, thinkable what was unthinkable, moral what was immoral and vice versa.
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