It's crazy that people are calling for someone to be expelled from the board because they're from a conservative think thank though. You want a diversity of viewpoints at the table.
No, the problem with her is that she's a transphobe and racist.
E.g. I'm 100% against trans participating in sports. It's disgusting when men pretend to be women just to have a record on their name. It's even more disgusting when it's celebrated as diversity or progressive or whatever.
Does that make me just a "relatively conservative" or full-on "transphobe"?
I agree it's a waste of my time to respond to comments like that. But on the other hand, letting those comments dominate the public space unchallenged is just legitimising their views. Which leads to vocal minority getting even bigger and louder. At the end of the day, it's the most vocal people who set the playrules. And I'm not a fan of ever-more-progressive rules, CoCs and legislations.
> I'm 100% against trans participating in sports
There's a nuanced argument to be made here.
> It's disgusting when men pretend to be women just to have a record on their name.
This is not that nuanced argument. I can assure you no one that is trans "pretends" to be a woman for sports records. That comment (as well as the word choice of "disgusting") shows a severe lack of understanding of trans people.
> It's even more disgusting when it's celebrated as diversity or progressive or whatever.
This shows a particular bias against "progressive/diversity" ideas and colors the comments before them with an even worse light that highlights the lack of understanding.
> Does that make me just a "relatively conservative" or full-on "transphobe"?
Just like anything, there are gradients and being transphobic now doesn't mean you have to be in the future.
I understand biology that born-male will be stronger in many sports than born-female even after a lot of hormone therapy (or maybe vice-versa in some sports). Born-female taking male hormones will have advantage over regular female as well in many cases.
You got gender disphoria and need a treatment for it? Sure. But there're side effects. Just like for many treatments.
> This shows a particular bias against "progressive/diversity" ideas and colors the comments before them with an even worse light that highlights the lack of understanding.
I'm considering ideas on their own merit, not how they're labeled. And it's disgusting that progressive/diversity label was ruined buy affairs like that. And yes, I definitely have bias against ideas that seem to have a label they're not worth of.
> Just like anything, there are gradients and being transphobic now doesn't mean you have to be in the future.
I hope definition of "transphobic" will change and I won't be called one in the future.
But the body and hormone levels absolutely do affect physical sports, you're right. If you want to dig into hormones, what about intersex people? What about people classified as women with significantly higher testosterone levels? Despite the classification most hospitals do, a surprising amount of births show non-traditional genitalia, and if you go beyond the external looks then the waters only get murkier. How many athletes are actually not traditionally male or female but were simply never classified as such medically due to a lack of awareness and education? Do you then want to have all sports competitions separated based on hormone levels instead of sex/gender?
> I'm considering ideas on their own merit, not how they're labeled. And it's disgusting that progressive/diversity label was ruined by affairs like that. And yes, I definitely have bias against ideas that seem to have a label they're not worth of.
But you give no argument for the unworthiness of it and instead start from the assumption. Not only that, but you paint with a very broad brush and are not digging into any of the nuance. That doesn't scream openness and combined with other things you said again comes off as ignorance or lack of education on the subject.
> I hope definition of "transphobic" will change and I won't be called one in the future.
That definition will only go the other way as more people become educated on trans people. What defines transphobia is ignorance, not gusts of cultural wind. What would make your actions change will have to be you, not the classification of them.
As an aside generally, being transphobic or racist or sexist should not define you - it's a chance to learn and understand. It's not an identity, despite how it is assigned like one to many public figures these days. What's much more important than never saying or doing something sexist/racist/transphobic/etc is being open to changing and understanding to not do it in the future. Really it's just listening and understanding other people's experiences.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2018/04/26/ne...
I don't care if they changed gender for the sake of winning sports titles or not. I'm against them competing in sports anyway.
> If you want to dig into hormones, what about intersex people? What about people classified as women with significantly higher testosterone levels?
That's definitely could an issue (see last paragraph). But IMO it's different that this is accidental from the individual's perspective. They themselves may be not aware of this. Sort of like getting lucky with good genes or rare mutation. Meanwhile for a transgender is purely a rational choice to transition. You may argue it's not fully rational since treatment is needed. But ultimately people do choose treatments and accept consequences for all sorts of illnesses.
> But you give no argument for the unworthiness of it and instead start from the assumption. Not only that, but you paint with a very broad brush and are not digging into any of the nuance.
Unfortunately interwebs comments are not well suited for a nuanced discussion. The person I originally replied to didn't go into nuance, neither did I. It'd be great if internet commentary moved towards more nuanced and longer discussions. But unfortunately old good forums with mile-long pagination are getting more and more scarce :( Especially with diverse audience.
> What defines transphobia is ignorance, not gusts of cultural wind. What would make your actions change will have to be you, not the classification of them.
I did research the topic and made my mind. IMO people who just jump on the ever-more-progressive bandwagon are much more ignorant. Ignorance shall be judge on refusing to look into the issue, not on coming to reasonable-yet-subjectively-wrong conclusions.
> That definition will only go the other way as more people become educated on trans people.
Personally I went the other way after reading more into it.
> What's much more important than ever saying or doing something sexist/racist/transphobic/etc is being open to changing and understanding to not do it in the future.
Yes. But that ability to change must be open both ways. IMO today's definitions went way too far and are too close to doing full horseshoe. Understanding is not just pushing the boundaries of what is progressive to no end.
> Do you then want to have all sports competitions separated based on hormone levels instead of sex/gender?
I'd support protection for the lesser (?) gender (women in endurance and power sports, men maybe in gymnastics?). Just have open group and the protected one for the lesser gender. In the long run, we'll probably need one more group for genetically-modified individuals.
This gets me curious. In your definition, a person with strongly deviating hormonal levels isn't transgender until they are aware of their situation?
Someone having issues with their hormones doesn't become transgender either.
So I'd say it's safe to say that the person has to have consciously chosen to transition to be considered a transgender. Also, people who didn't transition (yet) on hormonal level but did minor plastic surgeries and wear clothes accordingly are considered transgenders too.
If someone has XXY chromosomes and consider himself one gender their whole life, do they "trans" between something?
They may not view their own activity as "pretending" to be women, but the position of people like Kay Cole James (and many others, on both the left and right) is that they are simply not women. Whether or not they believe it about themselves is irrelevant.
When has that happened?
5sec googling: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/21/transgender...
There is a difference between someone transitioning from one gender to the other and someone pretending to be a woman, for whatever reason.
The "5-second googling" example you give is a of a transgendered woman who is also an athlete. I don't see how this fits in with "men who pretend to be women to win".
The simple solution I think is that sports should be sex based, not gender based.
What would stop me from lying that I am a woman (I could even put on some makeup) to compete as a women? In some sports difference between men and women is so big that average male athlete could easily compete with top-of-the-line females. There's more than enough incentive for some douchebag to go the dirty way to get some glory.
Gender is a subjective experience of a person. Doping is not. I don't find your comment funny.
>> What would stop me from lying that I am a woman (I could even put on some makeup) to compete as a women?
It wouldn't be enough to just "put on some makeup". The latest recommendation from the IOC for male-to-female transgendered athletes is that they must have testosterone levels in the female range for a year before they can be allowed to compete.
I struggle to believe that a male athlete would accept taking hormones or being castrated to reduce their testosterone so they can "pretend to be a woman" in order to compete. Not to mention, that would significantly reduce one's athletic prowess.
Generally, what you suggest is such a remote possibility as to be completely absurd.
Yet performance related to hormones is not a "subjective experience". Nor body composition. E.g. in cycling females are at big disadvantage because their hips are wider, making them less aerodynamic.
> I struggle to believe that a male athlete would accept taking hormones or being castrated to reduce their testosterone so they can "pretend to be a woman" in order to compete.
I see you haven't been in sports scene much. I saw even amateurs in local weekend-warrior league taking doping (the cheap one, with very clear risks later in life) just to win some meaningless local race. People fucking love even tiny slice of glory.
> Not to mention, that would significantly reduce one's athletic prowess.
Those people don't care about absolute prowess. They care about podium. For example, it's not uncommon for amateurs to cheat to qualify for lower-tier group just to singlehandedly win against weaker opponents.
Source: spent many years in local amateurs and semi-pros cycling scene.
What I don't understand is what all this has to do with transgendered athletes.
These attributes are neither objective not illegal.
Google are hypocrites; they want diversity, but not diversity of thought.
E.g. is it moral for male-to-female trans to compete in women sports events?
Why play on the thin lines instead of focusing on the issues that have the largest and broadest effects on people?
do you think the number of trans people compared to the world population isn't "a subset so small to be statistically insignificant by any measure"?
The short summary: as a lower bound, probably more than 1 in 10k people (0.01%) would identify as transgender. Including the DSM definition of gender dysphoria as an indicator, that figure rises to 1% or possibly even higher.
Now, my question to you: how small should a subset be to be statistically insignificant? For popular reference (and I apologize for using this example again), keep in mind that the global prevalence of Judaism is 0.2%.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20141205022609/http://web.hku.hk...
I agree. However those that do will affect (negatively) all the non-transgender women they are competing (and winning) against. And that does have "the largest and broadest effects on people" just not only transgender people.
I'd also generally challenge that one competitor in a field has that large of an effect on people's lives. Yeah, that first to second stings slightly. How about that 15th to 16th? And how many sports really have this problem right now? Let's again focus on this relative to its effects.
Same issue how we treat transgenders touches a lot of other fields. E.g. who can perform body search? Can ex-male-now-female do body search on a female? I could easily see many females not so happy about it.
The same reasoning is going to apply to e.g. restroom usage as well.
This is an existing concern of many, that must be discussed. I disagree strongly that recognition of trans women takes away something from other womens' rights (if nothing else because there are so few trans women), but the opinion seems to be widespread enough that it must be confronted, and by that I don't mean with knee-jerk reactions and twitter flamewars. Like, really debated. So that it can be put to rest and we can all move on to more productive debates.
But, calling someone who expresses that view a transphobe and a racist is not debating them.
When it comes down to which direction a gigagantic ship has to head One side has to win.
So pick a side guys. Know which side you are on. Nothing is going to be smooth about what lies ahead.
Teller publically accused Oppenheimer of being a traitor and had his security clearance pulled and then blacklisted as a communist because he didn’t see the point in building Teller’s Hydrogen bomb whose sole purpose is kill as many civilians as possible. In the end, the bomb was built, and Oppenheimer’s career was over.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller#Oppenheimer_co...
This is a board concerned with AI Ethics, and so diversity isn't really an important part of the game. If she forwards positions which are unethical, and would forward a vision of AI that is unethical, then she should not be on the board.
Google shouldn't be so meek as to pretend that she has a valuable perspective on these issues merely being being conservative. Conservatives have been wrong on incredibly important issues many times before.
When some people say they want a diverse field of thought, what they really mean is they want a diverse field of thought that they agree with. I don't agree with some of her views, but that doesn't mean she shouldn't have a voice.
It's the Human Rights Council after all, not the Human Rights Skeptics Council.
Or are you paraphrasing and dramatising for effect?
Such an inflammatory quote should surely have a reference to be taken seriously
I won't bother listing out the various reasons people might have to disagree with the modern trans movement. But attaching hyperbolic statements to make someone out to be genocidal is not appropriate and seems like a bad-faith rhetorical attack.
No one wants to erase trans people from existence Thanos style.
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497
Do I need to spell out the problems with that?
The point of an ethics board is, presumably, to work out the hard problems in ethics.
This assumes that you know what "basic dignity" means. But that's what the disagreement in the case you mention (LGBT) is about. To people who fundamentally oppose LGBT-ness, LGBT people are making a serious ethical mistake, one that affects society as a whole, not just them as individuals, and treating them with basic dignity requires taking that into account.
> The point of an ethics board is, presumably, to work out the hard problems in ethics.
All problems in ethics are hard problems. Thinking that that isn't true, that there are some ethical questions that are so obvious that a board of AI ethics doesn't need to consider them, is itself, I would say, an ethical mistake.
It does indeed. And I do, indeed: basic dignity entails treating a person as an end in themselves, and never merely as a means.
> All problems in ethics are hard problems.
I don't think this is true. It's not particularly hard for me to answer that skinning cats alive for pleasure, pointlessly hurting other human beings, and irrationally loathing oneself are all obvious moral wrongs, in the sense we would not be willing to accept any moral system that permits them (much less encourages them).
As you mentioned in your parent comment, an ethics board should have a point. In order to have a point, we need to admit of at least some ethical baseline[1]. If not, we'll continue the most pointless ethical pursuit of all: re-litigating arguments that reduce to the ones we give philosophy undergraduates for practice. We have bigger fish to fry.
[1]: Even, as I have said, if that ethical baseline adheres to no particular moral system.
But this does not mean agreeing with every choice that person makes, or even agreeing that that person should be able to make all possible choices without getting disapproval from others or even without legal penalties. Even a murderer who is convicted on conclusive evidence can still be treated with basic dignity as you describe it; that doesn't mean we will give any weight to the murderer's complaints about being incarcerated.
> It's not particularly hard for me to answer that skinning cats alive for pleasure, pointlessly hurting other human beings, and irrationally loathing oneself are all obvious moral wrongs, in the sense we would not be willing to accept any moral system that permits them
Who is "we"? All of the activities you describe have been practiced by some human societies.
I think you are very overconfident in the universality of your particular ethical beliefs.
Absolutely. But what should I conclude about our ethics board from that? I don't think I'm undermining the anybody's dignity by claiming that the board should focus on more salient issues than how much dignity to grant various gender/sexual minorities.
> Who is "we"? All of the activities you describe have been practiced by some human societies. I think you are very overconfident in the universality of your particular ethical beliefs.
We is you and me, on today, 2019, benefiting from the moral failures of those that precede us. Those that follow us will no doubt benefit from our moral failures.
We humans have done lots of bad things. I don't feel as if any worthy moral system (again, without committing to any system in particular) is threatened by the historicity of unjustified cruelty towards animals, other humans, and ourselves.
I also haven't presented any of my particular ethical beliefs, i.e. views that follow directly and uniquely from the particular moral system that I think is right. I've only presented ethical claims that I think all sound ethical systems uphold.
That you should not believe you know the "right" answer to any ethical question.
> I don't think I'm undermining the anybody's dignity by claiming that the board should focus on more salient issues than how much dignity to grant various gender/sexual minorities.
Thinking that that question is not "salient" is the same mistake--you think it isn't salient because you think you already know the right answer. But what if you don't? You're not even considering that possibility, and that, I think, is a fatal mistake for an ethics board.
> We is you and me, on today, 2019, benefiting from the moral failures of those that precede us.
You're assuming you know which past beliefs were moral failures and which weren't. An ethics board shouldn't assume that.
> Those that follow us will no doubt benefit from our moral failures.
You're assuming you know that those particular things you cited aren't moral failures. An ethics board shouldn't assume that.
> I also haven't presented any of my particular ethical beliefs
Sure you have. You've made claims that you know certain things are wrong. Every such claim is an ethical belief.
> I've only presented ethical claims that I think all sound ethical systems uphold.
And your claim that "all sound ethical systems" uphold these beliefs is an ethical belief of yours.
100% agreed. But in context, GP said:
> holds abhorrent positions on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights
and comments of a similar sentiment appear elsewhere. Yet nowhere do I see it specified what she actually said! Even many of the news articles I could find seem to be guilty of this as well. I did find one which links to some Tweets she made (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/01/google-ka...).
> .@Heritage’s DACA solution is simple: take care of American dreamers first, build the wall, and implement these 3 basic fixes to current policy.
So... she approves of the border wall. I don't personally agree, but hey.
> The #EqualityAct is anything but equality. This bill would shut down businesses and charities, politicize medicine, endanger parental rights, and open every female bathroom and sports team to biological males. Learn more here:
So she is against the EqualityAct and whatever that entails (I don't know anything about it) on the grounds that she doesn't want people who were once male in a female bathroom. Again I don't agree with her, and there are indeed strong arguments against her position, but I don't buy the argument that such views are abhorrent or entirely unreasonable.
> Today @heritage will critique gender identity @UN_CSW because powerful nations are pressing for the radical redefining of sex. If they can change the definition of women to include men, they can erase efforts to empower women economically, socially, and politically.
Well that's certainly a complicated issue, and one not well suited to a Tweet. But again, agree or disagree with her, I hardly think it's abhorrent or entirely unreasonable.
On the whole I probably wouldn't have selected her myself, but this outrage is all beginning to look rather silly to me. I suspected as much when no one quoted her up front though.
This critically misstates the claim. I don't have to (and don't, in fact) find her "abhorrent" or think that her reasoning is invalid (although it is unsound). I think she's wrong, and that everybody should be on the same page about that. I don't want dawdling on my ethics committees.
And that's precisely why she should be on your ethics committee. If the only people you allow on your committee are those you think are "right", you are shutting out precisely the people whose views your committee most needs to hear. If you hear their best arguments, and are able to rebut them, then you can have confidence that their views are indeed wrong. Or if you hear their best arguments, and realize you can't rebut them, then you will have learned something. But if you don't hear their arguments at all, how do you know whether you can rebut them or not? It's like having a trial where only the prosecution gets to speak.
This is an annoying failure of language, and I'm mostly to blame for it. I mean that she's wrong in an undercutting sense: her position undermines the moral endeavour, rather that offering a valid alternative moral claim.
An ethics committee should obviously have people who disagree about the ethicality of a topic -- that's the point, after all. But it's an ethics committee, not a metaethics committee: it assumes that all humans have dignity, and doesn't admit of positions that reject that assumption.
Of course, none of this means that we can't debate the metaethical validity of "dignity." In fact, we should! But we shouldn't confuse that debate for ethics, and we especially shouldn't allow metaethical claims to undermine moral argumentation that has already assumed a basic framework.
This is an ethical claim that you are making, and the board should not prejudge the answer to it. It should hear arguments on both sides.
> it assumes that all humans have dignity, and doesn't admit of positions that reject that assumption.
And your claim that the views you are excluding "reject the assumption" that all humans have dignity is an ethical claim, to which the board should not prejudge the answer.
> none of this means that we can't debate the metaethical validity of "dignity." In fact, we should! But we shouldn't confuse that debate for ethics
Meta-ethical debates are ethical debates. You can't prejudge the framework any more than you can prejudge any other ethical question. That's a key reason why all ethical questions are hard.
I think this is the fundamental disagreement.
Ethical debates are debates over ethical claims. Ethical claims are normative claims, i.e. claims about what ought to be the case. Metaethical debates are debates over metaethical claims. Metaethical claims are positive claims about normative objects, i.e. claims about what the objects of ethics are.
"Should we eat meat?" is an ethical debate with various opposing positions. "Is the Good the same thing as the Right?" a metaethical debate with various opposing positions. But, crucially, individuals with opposing metaethical positions cannot present sensibly opposing ethical positions: they're simply not reasoning about the same Good or Right, even if they're using the same words. Why should our ethical committee entertain such a futile endeavour?
You can't make positive claims about normative objects, because any such claim ends up being a normative claim based on your personal judgment. You can't objectively test normative objects to establish claims about them the way you can with ordinary objects like rocks.
> Why should our ethical committee entertain such a futile endeavour?
It's not a futile endeavor, because if there are in fact groups of people with fundamentally opposed meta-ethical positions--for example, not agreeing on what the Good or the Right is--then figuring out how such people can coexist in the same society, or even on the same planet--or even whether they can--is an important ethical question that needs to be investigated. And it can't be investigated if only one view of what's Good or Right is represented.
Apologies, I didn't mean to imply that you personally stated exactly that (it was the GP that did). However the context (both this comment chain and the entire thread) is critically important here. The grandparent, many sibling comments, and many news articles all do state as much.
The bit I quoted from you was
> > all sensible moral systems tell us to treat LGBT individuals with basic dignity
which to me seems to imply that you think her views go against "basic dignity", which actually does seem to me to be roughly the same as claiming they are abhorrent.
> I think she's wrong
I agree.
> and that everybody should be on the same page about that. I don't want dawdling on my ethics committees.
Uhh... I vehemently disagree here. I don't want to dictate other's views, and I am very much against anyone who does want to do that. "Dawdling" on your ethics committee would be... people who don't share your views. Which isn't imo a valid reason to exclude them.
What it comes down to for me is that calling for someone's removal or exclusion on the basis of their views is to my mind an attempt to dictate moral values. On the other hand, calling for such on the grounds of poor reasoning ability citing past arguments they've made seems perfectly valid. As previously noted, if it were me she wouldn't be my first choice (or my second, or my third, or ...). But that's quite different from the current public outrage, calls for removal, claims of abhorrent viewpoints, etc, etc.
I think it comes down to a distinction in kinds of views: contrasting versus undercutting. Ethics committees exist to bring together and flesh out contrasting ethical claims; they can't cope with claims that undercut the ethical endeavour itself. I take the ethical endeavour to fundamentally be about human dignity; someone who can't commit to that can't "do" ethics in any way that a committee will find useful.
I also suspect we would both agree that an ethics committee whose members don't hold views on human dignity that are reasonably similar to our own won't arrive at results that are useful to us personally (due to that difference in fundamental values).
I also (as previously noted) would agree that people with an established history of forwarding logically faulty arguments aren't going to prove useful and thus have no place on an ethics committee.
Where I disagree is your implication that her views are somehow opposed to our shared societal understanding (as Americans or westerners or whatever) of human dignity. Since I don't know her personally I suppose they might well be, but if so I've yet to see evidence of it.
What I see is an increasingly polarized rhetoric in the media on a number of topics. Unfortunately, that currently seems to extend to characterizing people who don't wholeheartedly agree with trans activists or who raise even reasonable questions about these things as being somehow immoral or unethical people. Such behavior seems to me only to stifle any useful discourse on the topic, drive people farther apart, and to actively push views on both sides towards ever farther extremes.
(As an aside, that last paragraph would seem to fit almost as well in any of the Facebook regulation threads of late. Looking at the history of the early 1900s, I honestly have to wonder if social media is really what's causing all these problems, including the one being discussed here, or if it simply makes visible the extreme polarization that currently exists.)
This reads a lot like "diversity doesn't matter all of a sudden, because I disagree with some of the diverse views represented here"
For instance on an Animal and Food ethics board it doesn't make sense to accomodate someone who denies the moral relevance of animals, because that is an indefensible view in modern philosophy. Their increasing the "diversity" of the viewpoints on the board would be of negative value, not positive value.
It is the same sort of situation here.