If DeSantis wins

tstorm823

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What do you think free will means?
The ability to deliberately affect change in the world not fully determined by circumstance.

I don't think I need to tell you what free will has to do with the suggestion that a question of choice is obvious.
Thank you!

[reads paper]

Oh my god, their options for cause were "early relationship, genetic, father problems, fear of women, mental illness, and sexual abuse". They didn't even offer the option of choice.
The direction thing is completely laughable. Even you don't believe for a single solitary second that there's any chance it's a strong relationship in the other direction.
Schadrach saved us. We can now read the paper:

"...heterosexuals and those with less actual contact with homosexuals tended io endorse all factors concerned with aetiology (with the exception of father problems and sexual abuse)..."

With regards to the cause of homosexuality, they did not present options of choice, but rather presented many options of how someone externally may be caused to be gay. Presented with questions on how much genetics, or hormones, or early childhood experiences may make someone gay, they found a strong correlation between being gay / knowing more gay and rejecting all of those explanations. They highest correlations of their 6 factors by far are genetic explanations and mental illness explanations, the two which could most reasonably track to being "born that way", which is to say being straight and knowing few or no gay people was a strong predictor of claiming gay people are just born that way. The two factors they call exceptions to the trend, one is only half an exception. Straight people are still more likely to say sexual abuses causes homosexuality than gay people, but straight people knowing more gay people strengthens that correlation rather than weakens it. Father problems is the only cause factor in their list where gay people are more likely to call it a possible cause of homosexuality than straight people.

"Father problems" is distinctly not "I am deterministically gay because of my biology."

So the direction thing isn't laughable at all. This is 30 years old, society has changed, the results would certainly be different now, but in 1990, the direction of the strong correlation was that gay people disproportionately rejected the idea that they were born this way, along with rejecting the large majority of potential causes of homosexuality. Which, that's the truth as far as I can tell. "Born this way" explanations are mostly a phenomenon of this millennium. In the past, it was straight people who saw homosexuality as a physiological condition, which I think tracks exceptionally well with non-malicious homophobia. If you refuse to see the possibility of being gay yourself, you'll be inclined to think the opposite is equally true for gay people.
 

Buyetyen

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The ability to deliberately affect change in the world not fully determined by circumstance.

I don't think I need to tell you what free will has to do with the suggestion that a question of choice is obvious.
So you're arguing that through sheer free will I can grow to be over 6' tall? OR have 6 fingers? Because that's ultimately what your baseless speculation amounts to. You demand evidence to prove your speculation wrong, but speculation is not evidence itself.
 
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Absent

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So you're arguing that through sheer free will I can grow to be over 6' tall? OR have 6 fingers?
No because god doesn't demand you to. Whereas god demands you to be straight and god wouldn't demand something you cannot do*.

This is the set-in-stone reference point against which everything (any experience, investigation, reasoning, scientific article) is checked. If jesus, then correct. If not jesus, then wrong. And the exercise consists only in looking for an argument for that.


________
*unless you're a fig tree and god is very very hungry that day, but that's a different story
 

Buyetyen

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No because god doesn't demand you to. Whereas god demands you to be straight and god wouldn't demand something you cannot do*.

This is the set-in-stone reference point against which everything (any experience, investigation, reasoning, scientific article) is checked. If jesus, then correct. If not jesus, then wrong. And the exercise consists only in looking for an argument for that.


________
*unless you're a fig tree and god is very very hungry that day, but that's a different story
I know, I just wanted to see if he would actually say that quiet part out loud. Tstorm's arguments are always an incoherent mess of post hoc justifications, appeals to religion and baseless speculation. The only way for his world view to make sense is these tortured leaps of logic and making shit up.
 

Cheetodust

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The video... that doesn't say that trans athletes have an unfair advantage over women athletes

That's your stance?

Um... That's great. Congrats
A video by a physicist who has exactly 0 authority to speak on this topic. But phoenixmgs just thinks any "smart" person that agrees with him is a good source. It's the same brain rot that makes people think Jordan Peterson has anything worthwhile to say about climate change, diet or the law. It's because they're too dumb to understand what an expert is. The internet has made a lot of stupid people think they're clever. They have lots of information but are fundamentally incapable of separating good infornation from bad or interpreting that same information.
 

Absent

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I know, I just wanted to see if he would actually say that quiet part out loud. Tstorm's arguments are always an incoherent mess of post hoc justifications, appeals to religion and baseless speculation. The only way for his world view to make sense is these tortured leaps of logic and making shit up.
His whole spiel is : not saying the decisive parts out loud. He probably learnt that through ban warnings (or bans from other places).
 

Silvanus

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Thank you!

[reads paper]

Oh my god, their options for cause were "early relationship, genetic, father problems, fear of women, mental illness, and sexual abuse". They didn't even offer the option of choice.

Schadrach saved us. We can now read the paper
I'm getting an invalid response from that link. Can you copy the contents?

I mean, if it turns out the abstract is just a completely inaccurate description of the contents, that's kind of ridiculous. If that's the case, it's a good thing we have two other more modern studies giving strong indicators of the opposite.

non-malicious homophobia.
Ah yes, the non-malicious form of hating or fearing people because of their demographic. Classic.
 

Schadrach

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Thank you!
For reference, Sci-Hub is a decent source to get access to basically any paper. You just stick the DOI URL in the search and it's probably available. Presuming Sci-Hub isn't blocked by your ISP.

I'm getting an invalid response from that link. Can you copy the contents?
Probably blocked by your ISP. It's a contentious site.

Try as an alternative
 

tstorm823

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So you're arguing that through sheer free will I can grow to be over 6' tall? OR have 6 fingers? Because that's ultimately what your baseless speculation amounts to. You demand evidence to prove your speculation wrong, but speculation is not evidence itself.
Not even a little bit. Nobody is suggesting people can decide everything in their lives, some people believe people don't actually decide anything. You may notice the paper we are discussing considers only potential causes, rather than motivations.
His whole spiel is : not saying the decisive parts out loud. He probably learnt that through ban warnings (or bans from other places).
I don't believe I have ever been banned from a website, and I get exceptionally few warnings. Pretty sure I have fewer than 1 warning here per year on average, and that's including the time periods where saying "troll" was an insta-warning.
I mean, if it turns out the abstract is just a completely inaccurate description of the contents, that's kind of ridiculous. If that's the case, it's a good thing we have two other more modern studies giving strong indicators of the opposite.
It's not an inaccurate abstract, it's just vague.
Ah yes, the non-malicious form of hating or fearing people because of their demographic. Classic.
I think you can reasonably distinguish between those who hate people and those who'd say live and let live while maybe not going to the same parties.
 

Silvanus

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For reference, Sci-Hub is a decent source to get access to basically any paper. You just stick the DOI URL in the search and it's probably available. Presuming Sci-Hub isn't blocked by your ISP.



Probably blocked by your ISP. It's a contentious site.

Try as an alternative
Many thanks for your effort.

...Right, so it only shows that gay people are less likely to ascribe explanations than heterosexuals. Yeah, looks like I got the wrong impression from the description. Hadn't clocked how damn old it was when I first found it, either. Serves me right for lack of effort.

Well, we have two others, at least, showing the bulk of "choice" responses nowadays comes from those who have little experience of gay people and/or are anti-gay.


Research has found that positive attitudes toward homosexuality are associated with the belief that its origins are biological, whereas negative attitudes are associated with the view that its origin is personal choice (Jayaratne, 2002; PEW Research Center, 2003; Schneider & Lewis, 1984; Whitley, 1990; Wood & Bartkowski, 2004).
 
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Silvanus

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I think you can reasonably distinguish between those who hate people and those who'd say live and let live while maybe not going to the same parties.
...people who would avoid going to a social event because gay people might be there have a gigantic prejudicial hang-up. And yeah, that's hate/fear.
 
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Absent

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...people who would avoid going to a social event because gay people might be there have a gigantic prejudicial hang-up. And yeah, that's hate/fear.
No it cannot be hate because christians do not hate, they always enslave, stigmatize, ostracize, torture or murder with love.
 
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Trunkage

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A video by a physicist who has exactly 0 authority to speak on this topic. But phoenixmgs just thinks any "smart" person that agrees with him is a good source. It's the same brain rot that makes people think Jordan Peterson has anything worthwhile to say about climate change, diet or the law. It's because they're too dumb to understand what an expert is. The internet has made a lot of stupid people think they're clever. They have lots of information but are fundamentally incapable of separating good infornation from bad or interpreting that same information.
No, that's not the problem

She has two main things

1. She provides evidence why she thinks transwomen are generally (but not always) stronger than the average ciswomen. This is limited to adult transitions, starting transitions as a teenager can a different kettle of fish. Some said that the difference remained for 3 years, others 15.
Note: This is the only part Phoeixmgs bothered to listen to
2. She noted that there was ANOTHER group that, by DEFINITION HAD to be stronger etc than the average. Can you guess what group that is? Ciswomen athletes. Even if you believed in point 1, that has literally nothing to do with banning trans athletes. You are using the wrong measuring stick. It would be like measuring someone height with a set of scales

This physicist does get things wrong. But it not even saying what Phoenixmgs thinks it saying
 

Terminal Blue

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The ability to deliberately affect change in the world not fully determined by circumstance.

I don't think I need to tell you what free will has to do with the suggestion that a question of choice is obvious.
You absolutely do need to explain that, yes.

No account of free will I'm familiar with, from theology to secular metaphysics, would suggest that desire is a choice, or that no part of human nature is beyond conscious control. The question only ever extends to whether desire determines our choices, and even that question is rather useless to anyone not burdened by the need to somehow reconcile belief in an omnipotent creator with the importance of moral action, because it's fundamentally not possible to ever know the answer and because the answer matters to us about as much as the chemical composition of water matters to someone who is drowning.

I would have thought one of the few advantages of being a self-proclaimed anti-intellectual would be the ability to avoid pseudo-intellectual topics like free will.

2. She noted that there was ANOTHER group that, by DEFINITION HAD to be stronger etc than the average. Can you guess what group that is? Ciswomen athletes. Even if you believed in point 1, that has literally nothing to do with banning trans athletes. You are using the wrong measuring stick. It would be like measuring someone height with a set of scales
I'd add here that the physical mechanism which control variations in strength are themselves not actually separate from sex at all. Variations in production and receptivity to androgenic hormones produce variations in strength in both sexes. Intense physical training causes physical masculinization. At the extreme end, this results in a significant number of cis female athletes at the highest level being forced to take anti-androgens in order to be eligable for competition as women, despite literally being cis women.

People in general need to sit down and think about the fundamental implications of suggesting that fair competition between women requires women, not just trans women but cis women, not to exceed certain physical limitations even if they are the result of natural variations in their bodies. We would never ask a male athlete who wins too many races to take pills to make him slower or be disqualified from competing, we would celebrate him for pushing the limits of human ability. If you set out to find the strongest or fastest women in the world, you will find women with highly atypical bodies. Being trans barely even registers in that equation.
 
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tstorm823

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I would have thought one of the few advantages of being a self-proclaimed anti-intellectual would be the ability to avoid pseudo-intellectual topics like free will.
I'm not an anti-intellectual, I'm anti-intellectualism. I am against systems that believe truth and morals come directly from human reason.
Well, we have two others, at least, showing the bulk of "choice" responses nowadays comes from those who have little experience of gay people and/or are anti-gay.

"Research has found that positive attitudes toward homosexuality are associated with the belief that its origins are biological, whereas negative attitudes are associated with the view that its origin is personal choice."
You're not considering that these things are not mutually exclusive to what I'm saying or that other study. The people with the most positive attitudes toward homosexuality are not necessarily homosexual. Outsiders from a group can have a more positive opinion of the group than its actual members. There are absolutely people who when polled would have more consistent positive responses about homosexuality than the actual gay people. That's gonna be true of any group, nothing looks perfect from close up, everything can look perfect from far away.
 

Silvanus

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You're not considering that these things are not mutually exclusive to what I'm saying or that other study. The people with the most positive attitudes toward homosexuality are not necessarily homosexual. Outsiders from a group can have a more positive opinion of the group than its actual members. There are absolutely people who when polled would have more consistent positive responses about homosexuality than the actual gay people. That's gonna be true of any group, nothing looks perfect from close up, everything can look perfect from far away.
Right, so you're suggesting that those positive attitudes and 'born that way' respondents are coming from.... straight people who have high interaction with gay people, while gay people themselves hold the opposite views...?

OK, I don't really know what to tell you at this point. All I know is that I've been in LGBT+ spaces on-and-off for over 10 years, and pretty universally, if you asked someone whether they and their friends "chose" to be gay, you'd either get a laugh in the face or told to fuck off. The suggestion often evokes anger, because it's precisely the same position that fuels an enormous amount of the prejudice they/we have suffered.

You're right that I can't find a survey on this specific question focusing exclusively on gay people. I'd suggest that's because it would be denigrating to ask-- a little like how I'm sure I also can't find a survey exclusively asking gay people whether they think homosexuality is a perversion or not.
 

tstorm823

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All I know is that I've been in LGBT+ spaces on-and-off for over 10 years, and pretty universally, if you asked someone whether they and their friends "chose" to be gay, you'd either get a laugh in the face or told to fuck off.
Is anyone asking that question?
 

Casual Shinji

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In other news, DeSantis is currently in phase two of "fuck around and find out" with his pursuit of Disney.

Change that to 'DeSantis fucks around and Florida finds out' - DeSantis himself is going to be just fine, but Florida... yeah. I hope it was worth it electing a governor who burned down your state so he could run for president.
 
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