All societies of humans have humans with sex characteristics in them. This is because humans obviously have human sex characteristics.

This makes sex characteristics useless in explaining all the variety in gender over populations, geography and time; even if it is granted that gender is a social construct whose existence requires the existence of human sex characteristics; or that some gender norms occur commonly enough over populations and time that they may be promoted or influenced by differences in sex characteristics over male and females (in terms of their natal sex). This "promotes" and this "influenced by" are still much weaker statements than "is explained by" or "is causally reducible to".

What remains after that small caveat is still most of the variation; and for that we have to look to culture and social life.

This outsourcing of social relations to the material and absorption of material relations into the social is for me the most interesting and significant idea in the first chapter. — Baden

I really like the value form bit.

Chapter 2: Exchange

Preparatory note:

Chapter 1 dealt with commodities and how they have value. They have value because of how exchange works. Chapter 2 looks at exchange as a social phenomenon. The focus is not on how and why people make particular exchanges of commodities, but on the general structure of exchange.

It is customary nowadays to analyse the value of an asset by what a reasonable individual would pay for it; which includes an analysis of supply, demand, and return on investment if relevant. When you go to the supermarket, what you buy and how much influences the calculations of supply and demand and expected return on investment driving the pricing mechanisms of the company which owned the product you bought; the owning company uses these things to forecast expected demand and return on investment for production of that good.

This is not the immediate topic at hand.

The topic at hand is analysing how our economy produces and maintains value at all; and how it comes to obtain given magnitudes for given goods. This is not first and most a method for analysing the specific prices that commodities obtain; as we've already seen that prices diverge from values.

So what is the value of value as a construct? What insights do we get from seeing things through its eyes? If it doesn't help in pricing schemes, why talk about it?

The value of value as a construct: it tracks changes in production and the generation of material wealth in the aggregate over interlinked economies. It allows you to do so qualitatively. Such a level of abstraction is not, as Popper would have it, a sin of the theory, it is a vital component of a description of how capital works. Prices day to day come and go in terms of "lawless irregularities" of the market; and the theoretical resolution here is not on a specific act of commodity exchange; it's on the level of what it means to purchase something with a given value to begin with, and how that value is given.

This is not to say that pricing models are irrelevant or untrue, but that Marx's analysis and economic forecasting for prices and purchases have different concerns. "What is the overall developmental trajectory of capital?" vs "What is the developmental trajectory of my utility function over the next relatively short time period?". We don't attack history or anthropology for being merely descriptive any more; why should we do the same for a descriptive take on capital?

We should not expect a "master formula" that allows us to predict the long term development of the price of every asset from this book; we should expect an attempt at a general description of how capital develops and sustains itself; and this is precisely what is provided.

Hume would probably doubt he'd been teleported to the future.

Zeno would wonder how he got here when he'd have to go through some of the past first.

Sade would immediately make a Craigslist account.

Any Buddha would wonder what they did wrong to be reincarnated as themselves.

Heraclitus would become a UN water quality technician, having finally stepped in the same river twice.

Burke would become an office clerk moaning about immigrants.

Marx would immediately be assassinated by a white lone wolf teenager.

Garvey would actually put Twitter to good use, and then be assassinated by an entirely unrelated ( :wink: ) white lone wolf teenager.

Gonna get back to this.

Chapter 1: Summary.

(1) Commodities are things that have a use value ( a use ) and an exchange value ( they're worth something in trade).
(1a) The value of a commodity is at once how much it is worth, what labour has gone into it, and the relation of those two things to the system of labour of exchange they partake in.

(2) Labour produces commodities.

(3) A specific act, or contiguous class of acts, that produces a given thing is called concrete labour. Like a specific potter's pottery. Concrete labour imbues a natural resource with a use value. Like being a cup.

(4) When a labourer labours to produce a commodity, they don't just produce a thing to be consumed for their own private use or given as a gift. That is, they do not just perform private labour. They also perform social labour, that is labour for the production of a good that satisfies human needs generically within a system of exchange and/or labour.

(5) The value of a commodity depends upon the relation of the social labour of its creation to the system of exchange and labour it is embedded within; that is, it depends upon the condition of human labour in the abstract, or abstract labour associated with the acts of labour of that commodity's creation.

(6) The value of a commodity renders it commensurable to all other commodities; that is, it can be exchanged. This requires that the labour of its process of production is social, but also that it is produced for exchange. This is a necessary feature of value in a capitalist economy.

(7) The value of a commodity within a capitalist mode of production admits of a numerical measure; that is, a specific quantity of a specific commodity is always of some definite numerical worth. This is expressible as a price or as an amount of labour.
(7a) The logical/mathematical/social structure of exchange and worth equivalences in an economy is called a value form.
(7b) "Amount a of commodity X is worth amount b of commodity Y" is the general formula of a value form, the specifics of how it works indicate the specifics of a value form.
(7c) In the statement (7b), the commodity X expresses its value relative to an amount of commodity Y. Rephrased, X expresses its relative form of value with Y serving as its equivalent form.
(7d) When all commodities can express their values in a privileged commodity Y (within an economy), Y is called the universal equivalent.

(8) The expressibility of a commodity's value in terms of a specific amount of a privileged commodity (or representative of a commodity) occurs in an economy in which, in principle, all commodities are exchangeable with every other and their exchange ratios are quantified in terms of that one privileged commodity. This value form is the money form, with that privileged commodity (or representative of it) as a universal equivalent (skipping lots of detail here).

(9) The value of a commodity is simultaneously a relation of commodities of equal worth but also a relation of the conditions of their production that render them of equal worth. In life, we only interact with the commodities' production processes through the medium of exchange; we buy shit. This gives rise to commodity fetishism; the material relations between people become social relations between things.

Sounds pretty human to me! — petrichor

That it seems human at all sounds tragic to me. That people need to turn to it to find support is even worse. But:

We should try hard to regard them as a thou, maybe even in Buber's sense of I and Thou, where there is a true intersubjective encounter, not a regarding of the other as object, and not a regarding of the other as a means to further our own interests, even if those interests be such things as our own high moral character. — petrichor

It's still an algorithm. Being able to do complicated value judgements about the style of engagement it offers is not on its cards yet. I do think it's on something like the right track, it asks questions based off of bits of information; but you give it something complicated, and it falters on what's relevant or what not. In other words, it's not an expert on asking the kind of questions that guide mental growth and robustness when the input data is complex.

It's hard to make text processors learn what bits of text are relevant to what bits of text, they struggle to tell stories that make sense for more than 3-4 sentences in a row, even given huge input data (of the order of a substantial chunk of a social media site); not the scant and scattered offerings of a mind eating itself.

It doesn't seem very human unfortunately, nor particularly therapeutic. It's quite good at providing warm sounding stock responses for short statements of feeling. If it's given a load of text it focusses on very small parts of it. It's less a therapy bot, more an empathy Turing machine.

I think it's missing all the warmth and context processing capability where it counts.

What's a conceptual scheme in the paper?

Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation; they are points of view from which
individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene.

What distinctive properties are relevant to the paper?

There may be no translating from one scheme to another, in which case the beliefs, desires, hopes and bits of knowledge that characterize one person have no true counterparts for the subscriber to another scheme. Reality itself is relative to a scheme: what counts as real in one system may not in another.

So he cares about, given two conceptual schemes C and D, whether and how it is possible to "translate" elements of C to elements of D in a manner that produces counterparts of C in D and counterparts of D in C. Davidson wishes to question the claim that it is impossible in principle to translate from C to D. Say that C and D are commensurable if some counterpart mapping/translation can occur between them. He wants to doubt whether it is impossible in principle that C and D are commensurable. How? What's his motivating suspicion?

Different points of view make sense, but only if there is a common coordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability. What we need, it seems to me, is some idea of the considerations that set the limits to conceptual contrast. There are extreme suppositions that founder on paradox or contradiction; there are modest examples we have no trouble understanding. What determines where we cross from the merely strange or novel to the absurd

A motivating suspicion is that it seems extremely strange that if there are no principles by which to notice contrasts between conceptual schemes, we could not declare them to be not commensurable (henceforth incommensurable). It is strange that conceptual schemes which are posited as incommensurable nevertheless can be contrasted in the forms they give to experience.

Then there's a swerve, an assumed implication which will serve as a Moorean shift.

We may accept the doctrine that associates having a language with having a conceptual scheme. The relation may be supposed to be this: if conceptual schemes differ, so do languages. But speakers of different languages may share a conceptual scheme provided there is a way of translating one language into the other. Studying the criteria of translation is therefore a way of focussing on criteria of identity for conceptual schemes.

The argument sketch so far looks like:

(1) Study criteria under which two conceptual schemes may possibly be translated, or not.
This will link into 2.
(2) If there are irreconcilable differences in conceptual schemes they imply irreconcilable differences in language use.
(3) If there aren't irreconcilable differences in language use, then there aren't irreconcilable differences in conceptual schemes. (2, transposition)

(1) is summarised after a length discussion of cases and counterpoints:

We may now seem to have a formula for generating distinct conceptual schemes. We get a new out of an old scheme when the speakers of a language come to accept as true an important range. of sentences they previously took to be false (and, of course, vice versa). We must not describe this change simply as a matter of their coming to view old falsehoods as truths, for a truth is a proposition, and what they come to accept, in accepting a sentence as true, is not the same thing that they rejected when formerly they held the sentence to be false. A change has come over the meaning of the sentence because it now belongs to a new language.

To find an incommensurable conceptual scheme C given a scheme D, there must be some sentence P which is in C and D such that any translation T which maps P in C to P in D changes the meaning. It is furthermore not a mere revision of belief (X believes that P mapping to X believes that not P), because truth or falsity of a proposition given an interpretation thereof is fully within the scope of the first conceptual scheme. It is a transformation of meaning rather than a revision of belief.

Notice how T seems to act on whole conceptual schemes (and their associated languages) without changing any of the content. This is the real focus of the attack in the paper; for such a T to exist, it has a major presupposition - the scheme-content distinction. He quotes Worf (of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis) as an example:

We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated

This gives a refinement of the argument structure:

(2) If there are irreconcilable differences in conceptual schemes they imply irreconcilable differences in language use.
(3) If there aren't irreconcilable differences in language use, then there aren't irreconcilable differences in conceptual schemes. (2, transposition)
(4) If there are irreconcilable differences in conceptual schemes, they must rely upon the scheme-content distinction.

A long series of intermediary arguments begins with a characterisation of differences in conceptual schemes arriving from differences in the way they structure experience natively to their holder or differences in the way they structure experience relative to experiences formed from a theory-neutral reality. He characterises the first case as where translation procedures fail due to necessary mismatches in meanings in C to meanings in D (meaning applications/senses which cannot be translated in principle) and a case where translation procedures fail due to constitutive/formative experiences C and D being generated by irreconcilable processes. He concludes:

Neither a fixed stock of meanings, nor a theory-neutral reality, can provide, then, a ground for comparison of conceptual schemes. It would be a mistake to look further for such a ground if by that we mean something conceived as common to incommensurable schemes. In abandoning this search, we abandon the attempt to make sense of the metaphor of a single space within which each scheme has a position and provides a point of view.

And goes onto discuss partial failures of translation. Someone can pick it up from there if they like, or bone pick.

We might, agreed. But could we then feedback errors? — Isaac

I think so?

I'm imagining $f$ as causal indicators under some model. Let's say that we have, like in one of Friston's talks (the one you linked me?), a task where we invite subjects (in his case simulated) to classify images of faces based on their orientation; are they upside down or right-side up? We can imagine the environmental stimulus $\gamma$ here as the light reflecting off the images or the light emitted from a computer screen, consistent with/strongly suggestive of face patterns of course. The $\alpha$ actions would be the saccades, fixations and other eye movements employed in visual search for features that indicate the orientation of the face. But what's the $f$?

Human subjects clearly have a sufficiently broad and tailored $f$ that allows us to do this task quickly and reliably. If you record eye movements of human subjects looking at faces, we look at eyes, nose, mouth preferentially. I think this has something to do with $f$ as it relates to this task.

A feature extraction/detection algorithm was used to make simulated agents learn a good $f$ for this task; IE, they learned what parts of the face to look at to quickly determine its orientation. IIRC the simulated agents were eye movement patterns, and the $f$ they learned were the representative features of the face for the orientation determining task. These turned out to be noses, eyes, mouths. You don't need to sample (eye fixation points + saccades) much from this feature space (eye related pixels, nose related pixels, mouth related pixels, or their associated characterisation in light frequency and apparent source) to determine the orientation of the face. These points of high information density relative to the task become causal indicators for the face orientation. If (eyes + nose + mouth look like this) then (face should be that).

You can always make an error in perception, or in a sub-perceptual task like allocating a part of a face to a facial perceptual feature. In terms of "what's not in the trend (the error) assuming $f$, the stimulus $\gamma$ and the action $\alpha$?", we might be in a state of momentarily misperceiving that the face has one eye due to only sampling from one half of it, say, (these things seem to execute prior to there being a phenomenal character associated with the face), or we might judge a shadow on one side of the nose as a discolouration of it, and this error promotes another saccade $\alpha\prime$ to check for the other eye or other bits of the nose. We often saccade from eye to eye when first viewing a face (used to work with eye movement data, dunno how heavily weighted eye-eye saccades really are in facial recognition tasks). This is just conjecture, of course!

At any given "step" in these simulated agents' classification algorithm, they'll have an error associated with the probability of the face being upside down or not (a conditional expectation of the face being upside down given what's been seen, the internal state, the sensations and the actions). You can minimise energy expenditure and maximise accuracy by focussing on information rich features; if the algorithms, and we, tried to guess the orientation of a face solely by sampling from bits of bare skin on the nasal septum, we'd do a much worse job probably, as a small section of bare skin in the middle of the face that's not part of a facial feature is probably sufficiently reflection invariant that it won't inform either way.

So for the classification task, we can split the face up into the causal features of nose, eyes, mouth, and minimise the errors from there. Edit2: $f$ is probably really really broad but gets channelled into distinct behaviours by the history of the system. I don't think $f$ is updating for us, it's more that how we evaluate it changes over time, relative to what we've learned, what we're doing, and what our environment is (all the history embedded in our current action).

Edit: if eyes + nose + mouth seem arbitrary as causal indicators for facial orientation, their relative positions encode a lot. The nose is a roughly central point irrespective of the orientation of the image, and if you look up on the image and see a mouth, the face is upside down, if you look up on the image and see an eye, the face is right side up. And vice versa. The whole orientation of a human face is determined by the relative positioning of the eyes and nose and mouth; so it is not surprising that these features are learned for the task. If you wanted to represent this as (pixel colours) $\gamma$ with a feature model $f$ explored with eye movements $\alpha$ and current perceptual ambiguity $w$, I think that works too?

Edit3: pretty sure I'm confusing salience and information density here, though the two are related (I'm guessing, there's some reference to the distinction in the Friston paper, only worked with something related to saliency maps before).

All of this needn’t be led under the assumption of some abstract ‘input’/‘output’ system. That is merely an expression of the ‘theoretic’ attitude - a necessary means for distinction among the ‘white noise’. For further more ‘substantial’ evidence for this neural priming is an expression of this in the ‘natural sciences’. — I like sushi

This would probably derail us, but I can't help but indulge.

As if any approach to conceptualising anything was not a 'theoretic attitude'. Assuming you're coming at this from a phenomenological angle, the epoche only becomes relevant within an interpretive framework; its own flavour theoretical attitude. Spiralling out into its own mode of inquiry. No reason for primacy here.

Assumption that there is ‘a point’. Pointless question as far as I can tell. What does i mean to ‘have a point’ or ‘be pointless’? We can ask what the ‘theoretic’ attitude is doing, how it is structured and how theories change. — I like sushi

OK, rephrase it:

"How do we account for the presence of a modelling process that samples our environment and our actions based on causal stuff that's relevant to us (part of our model) in a manner that maximises our accuracy of representation of modelled content without requiring that the modelled content itself is informative of the structure of an external (unmodelled!) world?"

1. I don't see anything in the maths (and this, I think is what you've been looking at, but I'm not convinced) that requires there to be distinguishable 'structures' in the environment. Only for there to be heterogeneity in the environment (otherwise it would be impossible to model, plus with no randomness, there'd be no probability gradient to work against). All I'm arguing here is that all 'structures' are models of some sort. — Isaac

Mmmm... I don't think there's any specified structure in the paper. But there's ghosts of it, suggestions. The external dynamics model $f$ and the sensation model $g$ are "continuous nonlinear functions of (hidden and causal) states, parameterised by $\theta_i$" (where $i$ is the hierarchy level), they have a specific functional form. So there's some structure there, it's not "some arbitrary function", it's "some definite capacity of a human relating to a world" (albeit a very involved one). I'm thinking of $f$ and $g$ as "world->self" interfaces in terms of perceptual/sensation content and "self->world" interfaces in terms of actions taken.

So when you say:

Only for there to be heterogeneity in the environment (otherwise it would be impossible to model, plus with no randomness, there'd be no probability gradient to work against). All I'm arguing here is that all 'structures' are models of some sort. — Isaac

This gets mopped up by the error terms, no? There's a signal/noise distinction operative; the signal is encoded in the $f$, $g$ (in terms of external state "recognition dynamics" and sensations), the errors from these are current environmental or bodily heterogeneity.

I think you're interpreting the only site of interface between the agent and the "unmodelled" external world as the error terms (unstructured heterogeneity)? Whereas we might be able to representatively sample its dynamics using only our $f$ and $g$ models. I'm kinda reading this whole process as a machine for representatively sampling actions/sensations/perceptions from a dynamical causal model of relevant causal factors using available information (sufficient statistics).

Again, if I've read it right, $f$ and $g$ are not time varying functional forms: they embed one pattern which is evaluated at different arguments (like evaluating f(x) = x at x=2 and x=3); so they're individual level relational styles of individual to world. They're "the way our bodies weigh the causal structure of our bodies and our environment". I'm inclined to believe (1) that there's room for discovering real structure in the external world so long as $f$ and $g$ are representative (within our narrow window of concern/narrow scope of perceptual features) (2) that it makes sense to consider $f$, $g$ as embedded in an evolutionary process that would be surprising if "an organism's ability to evaluate relevant causal structure to it accurately" was not selected for (in some circumstances) - going back to my camouflage example from earlier.

Prosaically: sometimes the relationship between two quantities (and their represented phenomena) really is indistinguishable from a straight line. And this is exploitable.

"There's no reason at all why the Bayes optimal model would be true, truth is not important here" — Isaac

This comment is discussing box 1 and 2 in the linked paper.

Aye, I agree with this! It even looks like something of a category error in terms of the internal state; when watching a bike move, is it represented as having wheels as a unity moving in tandem or two wheels linked through the bike? But there's still questions of accuracy and adaptation which are relevant. If you have a goal of opening a door, your hand position needs to adapt to where the handle is and how it works; there's an accuracy constraint involved with the door's location, functionality and so on; irrelevant of how it's split up into perceptual features.

There's an interface of perceptual features that are associated with external states. If I've read it right there's some function $f$ that "specifies the dynamics of external causes" dependent upon specific external causes $\gamma$, our processual model of them $f$, our proposed actions $\alpha$ and with some error $w$. Our actions promote certain external causes; which actions are chosen depends on previous internal states/sensations/actions/external causes, our sensations/perceptions process external causes; how they are processed depends on previous internal states/sensations/actions/external causes.

Focus for a moment on the $\gamma$, if I've read things right these are "hidden causal states" which are later associated with environmental parameters $\theta$ rather than available sufficient statistics $x$, again if I've read it right. They are hidden, but inferred upon by the whole active-modelling process under some representation ("recognition dynamics"?).

Our ability to act well in an environment depends upon having a good model of it; to update our model through some error minimising in response to our current goals and current environment; the model doesn't just take input from previous modelling steps, it takes input from external states with their own dynamics under some processual representation*. It would be unable to guide action if it did not have a satisfactory (sufficiently accurate) representation* of the external states as they are relevant to our goals and bodily constraints.

I think you're emphasising that the starred representation* ($f$, I think in the paper) is another flavour of model; which it is; but it's also an observation process of relevant structures for us in the environment (we sample in accordance with it). What would be the point of all this modelling without its ability to promote accurate, relevant action - pulling causal levers whose structures we partially represent in the world? Like a codification of the world into what's relevant and available to us, and accuracy-prone (evaluable) perception and action within that codification.

...how? How do we get access to an observable that's not an output of some model? We can't take in any sensory data without it being merely confirmatory of some model. — Isaac

It's like $y = mx + c + e$, the independent variable $x$ doesn't have a model. It's playing the part of data in the model. Like when an error is observed in Friston's hierarchy and passed down. A prediction is compared to some input data, the error propagates down the hierarchy of models, producing adjustments.

Could this not be the case the with the true coral perimeter? — Isaac

I mean it might be? To my mind there are two types of comparisons. Model output comparisons, like predictions or parameter estimates to other predictions or parameter estimates (how similar are these two models?), and comparison of model output to data (how similar are the predictions or parameter estimates to those in the data?). We only know "the true values" of the parameters in the data if we've simulated the data ourselves.

Regardless, I think that, like in Friston's approach, the model errors don't behave like predictions or parameter estimates, they're modelled as coming from some distribution, and when we take input data or perturb an external state as the result of an outputted prediction, there is some error which comes from a comparison of an observable whose value is not an output of some model. That's $T$ or $e$ "when exactly specified" in the coral measurement error model, the 'input data' in the coral model would be $L$.

Edit: a good rule of thumb in my book is that error terms crop up in models whenever they have a dependence on something external to it. If any model, even the human body-brain system has an 'error', there's an external source (a process which does not output model internal predictions or parameter estimates, but instead outputs observables/data that relate to the modelling process) associated with it.

I did write a little bit about what assuming the boundary of the coral is a fractal would entail, but decided it wasn't relevant. The fractal dimension isn't a particularly good measure of anything like volume or length or area. If you put two Sierpinski triangles next to each other, one two times the height of the other, they have the same fractal dimension, but different convex hulls (the smallest triangle which contains all points of the fractal is bigger for the one which is scaled up).

The perimeter is always from some (set of) spatiotemporal location(s), per some concept of what it is to "measure the perimeter" (since especially for something like coral a number of decisions are going to have to be made about what counts as measuring it versus what details can be ignored). — Terrapin Station

There are lots of ways coral size could be measured. We fixed a concept for what it means to measure the perimeter of the coral; a photograph of it from above has a line drawn around its outmost extent within the photo. The line is then measured. Broadly considered, this type of thinking crops up in model uncertainty and the design of a measurement procedure.

In my book, we can aggregate all that into modelling concepts; what notion of size we use for the coral is another assumption. We can make another one, a better one might be taking the coral and immersing it in water and measuring the volume displaced, but that destroys the coral.

Fix the background assumptions; there's still a true perimeter of the coral in the photo, the one of the photo. If there weren't, the equation $T = L + e$ probably would not work?

I wanna throw this into the arena because it looks like a good test case @creativesoul @Isaac @Terrapin Station.

Say you measure the perimeter of a bit of coral's by taking a photograph at it and drawing a line around its border. You can draw lots of lines, and it's a really irregular object, and you don't get the same line each time.

If your measurement of the coral's perimeter is $L$, and the true perimeter of the coral is $T$, you can write (assume a model):

$T = L + e$

where $e$ is some error. If we knew the true measurement $T$ there'd be no need to form $L$ in the first place. But this is also true for $e$, if we knew what the error was exactly, we'd be able to add it to $L$ and recover $T$ exactly.

But what we can do is take a bunch of measurements, draw a bunch of lines, straighten them out to get a length. Say we've taken $n$ measurements. Then you can add all the length measurements $L_i$ together and divide by $n$ to get the mean length:

$\bar{L}=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^{n} L_i$

The virtue this has is that when you take their mean , the mean is known more precisely than any of the individual estimates (under some assumptions about $e$).

So, we end up with a more precise estimate of $T$, but only if the assumptions are satisfied. Can we check if the assumptions are satisfied? Yeah, to some degree anyway. Is there always some doubt that the assumptions are correct? Yeah, since how you check the assumptions also has assumptions.

Does the fact that we're always working under assumptions entail that the coral does not have a true perimeter? I don't think it does. The error we make depends upon there being a true coral size as well as there being a fallible modelling process applied to it.

Yes, indeed. Real Hard Work. fdrake must have felt a real sense of achievement. — Amity

Maybe? I dunno what for though. @Baden's our lord and saviour.

I've already pointed to the disparity between people that are raised in a two parent home with a more cohesive family and those that aren't. Are you so unwilling to accept that there might be other causes to the problems you are pointing out. Is every problem the result of racism? — Harry Hindu

(1) "People without a stable family environment in their childhood generally do worse in their later lives (as measured in income)" is exactly the same kind of statement as: (2) "People with black skin from poor neighbourhoods generally do worse in their later lives (as measured in income)"

"The same kind of statement" there means "they aggregate over individuals to the level of demographics and look at statistically at relative disparities".

You can be white and come from a shitty family environment. Not everything is racism. I would never argue that all disparities come from racism, that would be silly.

So why do you resist the coherency and relevance and truth of statements like (2) but not the coherency and relevance and truth of statements like (1)? You can obviously think (1) in a way that makes (1) obvious and understandable to you, why is (2) much harder for you to think when it's the same concept applied to a different demographic?

And I often find myself admiring Banno's short and punchy style too. It's very contextual. Quality comes in all shapes and sizes. — Baden

:up:

In terms of the long effort post vs point counterpoint format in arguments, especially on here:

One advantage of long form responses over point by point is that long form responses seem to stay on topic more regularly than short form ones. I think it takes a remarkable coincidence for two people to point-counterpoint ( or any short reactive comment to reactive comment ) for a long period of time and stay on topic; this is because the interlocutors, when engaging in that style exclusively, have not put enough effort into articulating their interpretations to triangulate upon their substantive disagreement.

There can be a very frustrating dynamic, for both people, when the posting styles mismatch. A long form commenter might get frustrated that the counterpoints are irrelevant, a short form commenter might get frustrated that they have to read so much irrelevant waffle.

There you go again with the straw-men. That isn't my case that sex is a mental construction. Willies aren't mental constructions. They are biological ones, constructed by millions of years of natural selection. — Harry Hindu

So, you've gone so far as to argue that sex is now a mental construction. What about species? How do you stop yourself from slipping on the slippery slope? — Harry Hindu

Dude. a construct in that sense isn't just a mental thing. It's a way of splitting up a phenomenon into components that have measurable aspects. I linked to what I meant by construct. Here it is again. Then I gave you the definition I was using in my own words, they were:

A construct is a conceptualisation of a phenomenon of interest that facilitates its study and (ideally) captures all relevant variability of the phenomenon in question.

Then I gave you a worked example unrelated to the topic, that should hopefully ease a charitable reader in:

So, for example, a depression index in clinical psychology might measure mood intensity, mood persistence, feelings of worthlessness, thoughts of self harm, concentration issues, anhedonia... All of these are indicators of the presence of depression and its severity. Depression as a construct, then, correlates with each of its indicators; which is what it means for those things to be an indicator of depression. Depression is more likely given an indicator, and more likely given a strong scoring on all indicators. — fdrake

Perhaps I should also have included motor symptoms in the index. Maybe you got the wrong idea that the sense of construct was purely mental because I didn't put in a bodily component.

Here's another example; chronic fatigue syndrome, as a construct, (in terms of symptoms) is indicated by persistent fatigue, chronic bodily pain, reduction in energy... If you gave gave someone a checklist of things in this construct (symptoms) and they ticked all the boxes, they'd be more likely to have chronic fatigue syndrome.

The crucial thing about a construct is that it should indicate patterns in the studied phenomenon. That is to say, it should change when the phenomenon in question changes. Differences in the phenomenon should be observable in the construct. One should track the other.

How can you tell the difference between a consensus that is socially constructed vs one that is acquired by simple observation and categorization based on similarities as members of the same species as opposed being members to just a culture? — Harry Hindu

So with sex, let's take your checklist of what sex is, define it as a construct, and see what happens; what would the world look like if gender = your idea of sex? That is to say, "what if gender and sex were one construct characterised by sex characteristics?"

- chromosomes (XY is male, XX female)
- genitals (penis vs. vagina)
- gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
- hormones (males have higher relative levels of testosterone than women, while women have higher levels of estrogen)
- secondary sex characteristics that aren’t connected with the reproductive system but distinguish the sexes, and usually appear at puberty (breasts, facial hair, size of larynx, subcutaneous fat, etc.) — Harry Hindu

All the sex characteristics are roughly constant over human populations and time. This means that there is little to no variability in your sex construct over time and population. Moreover, in areas and times where the same sex characteristics hold within a population (same human anatomy), there are marked differences in norms of conduct, expectations regarding typically sexed bodies... cultural differences. Social differences.

None of the things on your list vary with any observed social pattern. This means they do not explain any of the variation in social patterns regarding gender.

As a construct then, your "sex = gender" idea does little to explain anything about cultural norms, expectations, archetypes... Or how they can shift over time.

In fact, this is good evidence that we need (at least) two constructs; sex and gender; to explain all this variation. One that tracks anatomical properties of bodies in populations. One (or more) that tracks social stuff in populations.

(edit: @'Isaac' would easily pick this apart in terms of the sociometrics, but I don't think it makes any huge errors; one glaring one I can see in re-reading is that stuff like depression has multiple constructs which are measured and then summed to produce severity scores, rather than being one thing. Anyway. This is probably fine. Sexual characteristics of populations are a multidimensional construct that still don't vary too much over time. Social aspects of gender do. Doing it with one construct (sex) is like trying to measure an area when you can only measure length and do no calculations..)

Atheism precludes any good approach to ethics because of an imminent, but unspecified in timing and nature, debt based economic crisis. And the only way to solve this is with a nebulous appeal to religious tradition.

Right.

Either you reason within a system, or else you reason about a system, because in all other cases, you are just doing system-less bullshit. — alcontali

I love that we have ethical standards for applying surgical procedures to children's genitals within some ethical systems, and deciding whether people can drive or not on whether they have boobs, or stoning someone to death because they've been raped, or castrating them because they're gay, or selling your mother, or keeping slaves... Truly a high point of a rational approach to ethics, and not an ossification of historical codes with the normative weight of tradition at all.

What's really important in these cases is that we can weigh the impact of modifying any of these traditions to the tradition rather than to the people they concern.

No, no, if we looked at any of these things in terms of merely systemless principles of "equal rights" and "minimise harm, maximise good" or "act to maximise human agency within our capabilities" and "personal autonomy" we'd really be doing nothing at all for anyone!

This is some good shit. Recommend pinning it.

I'm simply attempting to show that believing that there is a group of people called Asians does not count as having a racist worldview. — creativesoul

Aye. "I am always consistent" is a weird vantage point to pick apart.

Being from a place isn't a matter of biology is it.
It's a matter of geography and culture.
And Asia is huge. There's a lot of cultural variation in it.
Then there's the Asian stereotype(s), which should be guarded against.

I don't think @NOS4A2 is that stupid here, I just think he's not articulating himself very well. Why it seems difficult to draw these distinctions clearly for him is a different matter?

So the metaphysics of possibility is some other thing.

The different modal logics specify certain conditions on the accessibility relation or certain desired axioms for them; the two are interchangeable. I think it's usually the case that specifying some property of the accessibility relation specifies some axiom of the modal logic.

If you can fix a notion of possibility, or a notion of accessibility, then you can see what the other does through this equivalence. I think the modal logics are more of a modelling tool for different accounts of possibility or necessity (like uh... necessarily P => P makes sense for metaphysical possibility/necessity, but ought that P => P does not make much sense for deontic possibility/necessity).

If you wanna know what possibility "is" in general, look elsewhere, if you wanna stipulate some possibility behaviour or accessibility relation behaviour and see what happens, the definitions help. You can embed lots of different metaphysical intuitions into the logics.

What do you actually believe regarding sex and gender?

:point:

"But the left does this too therefore I don't have to think about it!"

Let's take a moment to reflect on what's gone on the the thread.

There used to be an argument about new pronouns and free speech and stuff.
Now there's an argument about whether trans or non-binary people exist, and about gender.
This is the general pattern, arguments about the map mask underlying prejudices in the territory.

It is unrealistic to think that what was the norm for thousands of generations can change in 11 years. — Harry Hindu

It is improbable for it to change a lot, but not improbable that racial disparities in US poverty rates would decrease (rather than stay constant) if well addressed. Even if you grant that everything's been colourblind since then, it isn't doing a damn thing to address poverty rates. Which is strange; why are there persistent racial disparities in poverty in the US if colourblindness assures equality of opportunity? This is granting the polices are colourblind, of course (in this world of Harry's where there's no extant politics of prejudice).

This is even a relatively benign example (though still horrible), trying to talk about colonialism or imperialism here as the most pernicious forms of structural/systemic racism would just look like lefty buzzwords.

Short of taking people's children away and raising them to be color-blind by the state, what is your solution? I keep asking for specific institutions and specific solutions and you can only speak in vague generalities. — Harry Hindu

Your argument: "If this guy I'm shouting at on the internet can't solve all of a country he doesn't live in's problems, I am right and he is wrong".

Gender is sex because that is how we've use the term and now a particular political entity wants to redefine it for their own political agenda. — Harry Hindu

Right. What's sex? Sexes are summaries of presence/absence of sexual characteristics. The sexes male and female correspond to typical configurations of human bodily anatomy in terms of their sexual characteristics. Women have wombs, vulvas, boobs, a certain hormone chemistry, periods... Men have testicles, dicks, facial hair, a certain hormone chemistry... Typical clusters of these things define the sexes male and female.

Now, let's set up sex as a construct. A construct is a conceptualisation of a phenomenon of interest that facilitates its study and (ideally) captures all relevant variability of the phenomenon in question.

So, for example, a depression index in clinical psychology might measure mood intensity, mood persistence, feelings of worthlessness, thoughts of self harm, concentration issues, anhedonia... All of these are indicators of the presence of depression and its severity. Depression as a construct, then, correlates with each of its indicators; which is what it means for those things to be an indicator of depression. Depression is more likely given an indicator, and more likely given a strong scoring on all indicators.

In our case, sex as a construct would look at human bodies, and look at their sexual characteristics, whether they are male or female or intersex.

Now, let us hypothesise that sex is gender. As Harry instructs us to. Let us agree with Harry and see what the world would look like if he were right!

What does the claim sex is gender entail? This should suggest that there are no unique sources of variation which are not causally reducible to sex as a construct. That is, any variability in gender norms, archetypes, codes of conduct, expectations and practices should be explainable by the presence or absence of sexual characteristics of bodies.

Now, the sexual characteristics of bodies are constant across cultures in terms of their presence or absence. In every population of humans there are the same sexual characteristics in roughly the same proportion. That is there are negligible differences in sex characteristics over human populations. Moreover, sexual characteristics of humans are roughly constant since before we were even H. Sapiens. Let's just say they were constant since 10,000BC to be sure.

But, the norms, archetypes, codes of conduct, expectations and practices regarding male or female bodies differ strongly over cultures and over time.

If sex = gender, we would expect little to no variation in norms, archetypes, codes of conduct, expectations and practices regarding male or female bodies over time or human populations.

But there is strong variation over both.

Huh.

Guess sex isn't equal to gender then.

Edit: just in case the logic is difficult, if two constructs are the same, we would expect variation in one to strongly correlate with variation in the other. Since there are negligible differences in population sex characteristics over populations and time but over the same populations varied configurations of gender norms, we can't say they're the same construct. Differences in one do not explain differences in the other; they don't even correlate, nevermind strongly correlate, nevermind cause (edit: nevermind conceptual or logical identity).

Gender cannot be causally independent of sex if gender is a shared expectation of the sexes. — Harry Hindu

Do you think having a willy necessitates being a breadwinner?

All you have to do is use your eyes and you can see that blacks are not worse off now than they were in 1964. — Harry Hindu

Was that the claim? No. Was the claim "Blacks are worse off now than they were in 1964 in the US"? No. Let's grant your claim that all policies are colourblind now, and at least have been since 2008. What would you expect to happen? I'd expect that without targeted intervention on effected communities, we'd see that economic indicators like poverty for black people would have a roughly constant difference from those of white people. And that is what you see.

Now, the claim wasn't that "black people in the US are worse off than they ever were relative to themselves", it was that "black people in the US are still worse off than whites", and years of "colourblind policy" (in your model of the world) is doing absolutely nothing to change that.

Edit: this post was badly written, I should've wrote "Let's assume policies have been colourblind since 2007 and further that colourblind policies are sufficient to address disparities in poverty". Under this assumption, the roughly constant relative discrepancy between blacks and whites in the US negates the disjunction, so either the policies have not been colourblind, or that colourblind policies are not sufficient to address racial disparities in poverty.

Harry further assumes that policies are colourblind now. But that would then mean that he would be committed to that colourblind policies are not sufficient to address racial disparities in poverty in the US assuming he believed the evidence was valid (which is unlikely, because Harry is Harry).

I brought up the evolution of sex to show that our species has diverged enough from our far distant hemaphrodite ancestors that when those hidden genes are activated during conception and our physiology has changed so much since then, that the outcome of ancient DNA expression in a body that it wasn't designed for can have unpredictable consequences. — Harry Hindu

I brought up hermaphrodites. You didn't say anything about hermaphrodites, and they were not part of your argument. To my understanding, you were suggesting that the equation of gender and sex in humans makes sense in light of natural selection. I brought up hermaphroditism and other forms of sexual reproduction in organisms to show that evolution alone is not even a sufficient explanation for sex in humans - since it produces many forms of sexual reproduction.

You can't just argue "gender is sex because natural selection", the evolutionary story is way more complicated than that. Natural selection isn't a magical device that allows you to equate cultural characteristics with anatomical characteristics.

It's also an incidental part of the discussion; mostly off topic. The central claim is whether gender is reducible to anatomical sex; not how sex came about in humans. An account of gender in terms of the evolution of human sex only argues for your point that gender = sex once the framing is accepted that it's even relevant at all.

I indulged in refuting your irrelevant points because, well, I don't want you to propagate these ludicrous falsehoods, or to have a bulwark of intellectual terrain to retreat to to avoid more relevant challenges. If you want to reduce gender to sex on the basis of natural selection, you have to do more than just frame your central point (gender = sex) as correct.

Gender roles differ over cultures, how many genders there are differ over cultures, yet we share the same evolutionary history - the same sex characteristics. How can you possibly account for the cultural disparities in gender, and the cultural shifts in gender roles over time, when all of this has occurred so quickly that evolution will not have acted much?

If 'we're still the same species with the same sexual characteristics' sufficed for an explanation of gender, if that's all there was to it, then you'd expect little unexplained variation from your model. Your account of things (sex=gender) leaves all cultural shifts, cultural norms, differences in gender expression, differences in social roles, and even the progression of expectations you want to reduce gender to unexplained; there is far too much variation left unaccounted for for your account to be sufficient.

Moreover, the sources of variation - cultural ones, norms of conduct and explanation - vary independently of human sex characteristics. We have the same anatomical structures independent of culture.

This is just bad reasoning upon bad reasoning. I don't think you even know how to keep your story straight, or what you're aiming to account for.

Notice that the list isn't identities - they are behaviors expected of those biological identities. That is what it means to have a shared expectation as opposed to having an identity. If gender is a shared expectation of the behavior of the sexes, as you agreed with, then gender would be statements like, "Men wear pants", not "Man". That confuses the expected behavior that the members of a culture share ("men wear pants") with the biological entity, "man". — Harry Hindu

The only confusion there is yours. Cultural variation regarding sex and gender is causally independent of anatomical variation of sex characteristic in humans. You need to keep these two things (sex, gender) somewhat separate to tell a coherent story about them. Even their relationship.

but analytic philosophers see the constant focus on that as being as OCDishly annoying as if we were to constantly tell physicists or chemists that they need to be talking about epistemology all the time and not just talking about forces and atoms and molecules and bonds and so on. It's not that the epistemological aspects are being denied or ignored. It's rather that analytic philosophers, like most scientists, most mathematicians, etc. think that we don't have to constantly just talk about epistemology. — Terrapin Station

That's interesting. The analytic tradition studying knowledge (at least from what I've read) usually looks at how statements are justified and how we tell the truth using them. The continental tradition studying knowledge (at least from what I've read) usually looks at knowledge as a social product. The focus on epistemology in that narrow analytical stereotype sense is one big disconnect between the two paradigms.

Systematic racism existed in the past. It doesn't now — Harry Hindu

My position hasn't changed and Bitter Crank's post doesn't change it. It supports what I've been saying. — Harry Hindu

Let's look at the post in question, and see if it supports the idea that there's no systemic injustice now.

I can point you to a history book - THE COLOR OF LAW (2017) - that will show that we do not have, and have not had equality of opportunity. We need not go back as far as the 18th and 19th centuries and slavery. Let's go back to the 1930s. — Bitter Crank

"Do not have" - we don't have equality of opportunity now.
"Have not had" - we didn't have equality of opportunity then.

After 40 years of official segregation, and 70 years of de facto segregation, suburban whites were much better off financially than they were immediately after WWII, and urban blacks were as bad off, or worse off, than they were in 1946. — Bitter Crank

Present tense, worse off now.

The presence of these disparities and the mechanisms that keep them in place? That's systemic injustice; a systemic racism.

All you did was reinstate: systemic = legal = institutional, despite that being undermined by the post in question; it showed how policy and legal inequalities manifest now in economic and cultural disadvantages. There were laws and policies that caused disadvantages, and those disadvantages both remain and have amplified.

Yes. I suppose they are not so anti-racist then. — NOS4A2

Wow. Biting the bullet.

These are the racial demographics and localisations in Detroit.



(Red = caucasian, blue = black, orange = hispanic)

They were there before the data analyst colour coded them.