Instagram took down post with figure from paper showing male advantage in sports | Hacker News Reader

Instagram took down post with figure from paper showing male advantage in sports

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84 pointsEvgeniyZh55 comments

That's the problem with `hate speech`. It can be defined as anything you don't like, including science.

I saw someone's picture of chantrelle mushrooms (read: food, not drugs) laying on a table get flagged. Some racy bikini pics will get taken down, depending on how many haters an influencer has (this is why they make backup accounts). The moderation increasingly responds to enforce the views of the most puritanical or offended users.

IG gets a billion items flagged per day. I'm sure there's way worse examples of unjust moderation than this chart. It's not politically motivated, just mindless.

On twitter I'm constantly clicking on "Show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content" and "view sensitive material" warnings, and 99% of the time it's entirely mundane.

It feels just like a moral panic with a group of authoritarian puritans at the helm of `Trust & Safety`.

I use showdead on hn, and I'd say it's kinda 50-50. A comment thread like this one is gonna draw out the worst offenders though.

On Twitter you can set you account as "offensive" and then all your content will be marked as one

The Twitter algorithm seems to be finely tuned to promote comments which fit the desired ideological narrative while demoting anything which goes against it. This often leads to strange situations where some mundane "conservative" post is followed by a page full of critical "progressive" posts, each of which has only a few "likes". After wading though a page or 2 of such finally posts which are more in agreement with the original comment show up. Those comments tend to have far higher "like" counts which seems to indicate people, well, like those comments better than they do the "progressive" ones.

In itself there is something to be said for confronting people with different opinions and as such the algorithm could serve a function if it showed this behaviour across the political spectrum. This, however, is not the case - "progressive" posts are followed first by pages and pages of "progressive" comments in support of the post. Only after wading through those posts do the first critical comments appear.

This behaviour is not entirely consistent but it does occur more often than not, especially in situations where there is a sufficient number of "progressive" comments to fill the first page or 2.

In short, Twitter is heavily biased towards "progressive" comments/commenters - I assume the algorithm looks both at the content of the comment as well as at the commenters comment history to decide whether to promote or demote specific comments. As such is is not a usable platform for open discussion, not even for those who support those "progressive" causes - unless they consider an echo chamber a suitable location for such discussions. This leaves aside the fact that the message format used on Twitter makes it nigh impossible to express nuance, the whole thing is made for online shouting matches.

I think we've gotten better at describing moral panic as tribal fighting these days. (Moral panic infers that it's a shared sense of mortality)

There should be better technology out there to allow for different group standards without having to conflict with each other. (Also while allowing for communication and visiblity for ideas)

I know that's a hard problem.. but it goes beyond just engagement.

Double edged sword here. This is obviously scientific. We have womens and mens sports separate because of these distinctions. But I can see how they can bundle it with the famous 4chan “X% of crime is committed by Y race” which takes 0 account of the actual factors that contribute to that stat as they focus incorrectly on race.

Yes, correlation and causation aren't always straight forward and often the former is used as the latter just to discredit a group of people "in the name of science".

There's no way we're going to solve these problems if facts are suppressed because people might draw the "wrong" conclusions from them. Racial crime rates are directly pertinent to, for example, assessing BLM claims that black people are being targeted by police. Many people (incorrectly) believe this is true because the relevant facts are suppressed.

Men’s and women’s sports are segregated in part because men have large amounts of testosterone which is like a naturally occurring performance enhancing drug. So, of course men will outperform women in most sports, even if all other factors like access and funding were equal.

But the chart leaves out sports where women can beat men or are very comparable like some gymnastics, ultra-long distance swimming & running, sailing, bowling, equine sports, shooting, rock climbing, racing etc.

Basically, sports that minimize the importance of muscle mass and maximize the importance of muscle efficiency and endurance tend to be much more competitive, but that’s missing from this chart which shows men being superior across the board.

From the study:

"The metrics were compiled from publicly available sports federation databases and/or tournament/competition records."

"Although not an exhaustive list, examples of performance gaps in a range of sports with various durations, physiological performance determinants, skill components and force requirements are shown..." [0]

To clarify why I'm quoting these - I don't think they're trying to spin it one way or the other. Reading the report one can see that they say things like "which creates advantages in sports where levers influence force application, where longer limb/digit length is favorable", i.e. not all sports.

So, they're coming to the same conclusion. Either way - some small percentage of people are always going to be upset if they can't just do whatever they want.

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3

But from that same paper:

> When comparing athletes who compete directly against one another, such as elite or comparable levels of school-aged athletes, the physiological advantages conferred by biological sex appear, on assessment of performance data, insurmountable.

The paper is missing that these differences are not insurmountable in all sports, and not even in all Olympic sports (they reference the IOC multiple times). It's an important distinction not addressed adequately in the chart or the paper IMO.

> In this review, we aim to assess whether evidence exists to support the assumption that testosterone suppression in transgender women removes these advantages.

If your study is designed to analyze the fairness of different testosterone levels in all Olympic sports (or a cross-section of all sports) in an un-biased way, then you should include data on all Olympic sports (curling, artistic gymnastics, artistic swimming, equestrian, fencing, figure skating, marathon swimming, rhythmic gymnastics, sailing, rock climbing, surfing, table tennis, etc.), or at least include varying types of sports like endurance sports, dexterity sports, artistic sports, equine sports, etc.

Maybe they just don't have data for those other sports, but then at least include a prominent caveat that this data is incomplete and is not a good representation of all sports or even all Olympic sports, or limit the scope of your paper to what your more narrow analysis actually is.

> Of course, different sports select for different physiological characteristics—an advantage in one discipline may be neutral or even a disadvantage in another—but examination of a variety of record and performance metrics in any discipline reveals there are few sporting disciplines where males do not possess performance advantage over females as a result of the physiological characteristics affected by testosterone.

Correct, but why not name those sports and include them in the chart? Apparently the authors know that these sports exist enough to acknowledge that they are "few" in number.

Just a little too much of an agenda wrapped in science for my taste. I don't think it's the best chart to be promoting, because it's incomplete and paints a picture that male sporting dominance over females is "insurmountable", when in fact "dominant in many areas, but comparable in a few areas" is a much more accurate conclusion.

That said, I don't think it's hate speech by any means, just a poor chart from a poor paper with incomplete data.

> "Solemn declaration" isn't exactly what you want to read in a paper that's free of bias.

You got that exactly wrong. No bias is being displayed by that quote because they're simply describing IOC criteria.

The full quote is:

"Accordingly, the IOC determined criteria by which transgender women may be eligible to compete in the female category. These include a solemn declaration that her gender identity is female and the maintenance of total serum testosterone levels below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to competing and during competition."

Sorry, I didn't continue reading the rest of your comment.

Gotcha, like "I do solemnly swear". I see, I did get that wrong.

> have large amounts of testosterone

Why does everyone only focus on the hormones as the major difference between men and women? Men and women's skeletal structure differ in a significant way. Men are larger generally and hence have larger lungs. All of these differences add up.

I think because some sports favor smaller bodies, or more efficient bodies. Bigger is not always better.

But in most sports high testosterone is an advantage over low testosterone.

Thanks for letting us know. I wasn’t aware of these other factors too.

I had an old teacher on Facebook yesterday have a spouse censored because it says “stand up for what you believe in even if you stand alone”

Had to click multiple times to see the post as it Facebook gave me multiple warnings on how inappropriate it was to view.

This happens all the time to him. He is the Best person I know. The sort you model your life after.

But having an opinion criticizing any woke mentality gets him temp banned constantly.

I saw something like this with an image going around with an innocuous inspirational quote (may have been the same one) that had a content warning on it.

Someone said it had some metatags designed to trigger that automated warning filter, but I haven't looked into it to find out if that was what happened.

I know that post, and I think it fooled a visual algorithm. Look in the background, and the people in front of the light poles look like they're hanging from gallows.

Someone else did some testing, and they seem to have found the problem, which was indeed a visual issue that an algorithm misinterpreted. https://www.truthorfiction.com/stand-up-for-what-you-believe...

This happens much more regularly than most people know. Everyday I see moderates and conservatives sharing screenshots of very reasonable posts that resulted in past account suspensions or bans, or post-specific censorship, content flags ("missing context"), etc. In most cases they are given no reason other than a vague claim of violating 'community standards'. The net effect is that one side of many controversial topics has little representation and exposure. When foreign powers distort societal discourse, we call it "propaganda". We need to start using that same label when tech companies do this.

Part of this is enabled by the hyperbolic language used to justify censorship. "Hate speech" is really just code for "speech that disagrees with the progressive left". The reason these policies are written they way they are and enforced the way they are, is because these companies have employees and leaders that are biased, who brought their own political biases into the workplace. If a company is mission-oriented and tries to represent the interests of all customers, they would take a different approach that is more balanced. But at this point I don't think a small clique of urban West Coast companies can be trusted with the kind of power they have. The solution is to regulate social media as a common carrier, because it is a basic essential service in the modern world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utili...

This is a great post that identifies a large problem. I wish it could be solved one day.

Being a moderate right now is like being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

It's funny because if men didn't have clear advantage in sports (and competition in general as the advantage is there in less physical activities like mind sports/games as well) then it would be hard to justify existence of women only competitions. One of the conundrums of woke culture - no matter how you try to flex it your ideology doesn't fit the reality.

Btw, that anyone needs to see studies to be convinced men has significant advantage in sports over women is already a sad sign of common sense often being lost nowadays.

> One of the conundrums of woke culture - no matter how you try to flex it your ideology doesn't fit the reality.

The danger and horror of ideologies that embrace contradictions is that they can justify whatever they want, at any time, without worrying about self-contradictions or consistency. It's up to everyone else to look past the superficial points and figure out what their real goals are

> Btw, that anyone needs to see studies to be convinced men has significant advantage in sports over women is already a sad sign of common sense often being lost nowadays.

I for one appreciate data, even if it's obvious to others that are more familiar with the sport. It's interesting to me to see exactly the % difference rather than just intuitively noticing that there is a difference.

Also, women do dominate some sports.

For example, woman dominate ultra-long distance open water swimming (marathon swimming):

https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/marathon-swimming...

> women hold 14 of the longest 23 current neutral endurance records

https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/why-women-have-be...

> the best women per year were 12-14% faster than the best men

Just focusing on the narrow selection of swimming on TV I would have assumed that men are always faster than women at swimming, which isn't the case.

Common sense will get you pretty far, but it shouldn't be the final verdict.

I mean don't let this one exception detract from the main point. We know men are stronger, faster, have better endurance and have higher bone density. We also know people with more fat and less dense bones are more buoyant. It's interesting that the trade-off is in favor of women in ultra marathon swimming but it's not exactly a surprise that in that particular event there are additional factors in favor of women. Without even checking who wins those events I can also tell you white people are better than black people at them, again for the same reason (buoyancy).

On the other hand over reliance of published studies may lead to you believe nonsense like lack of advantage of trans women (biologically born men) over women in almost all sporting events. Clear nonsense to anyone who ever seen how hormonal changes influence speed/strength/endurance development but suddenly a debate if the only thing we can go with are published studies (I mean, even that points to the obvious conclusion if you dig deep enough but the fact that it's not easy to get "people with more testosterone at puberty develop stronger bones/more muscle etc." published makes it seem way less obvious than it really is.

So, that's kind of the point is that the more we study bodies and collect data on their differences the more we might be able to find / create sports where men, women and transgender can compete on a relatively level playing field together. And we perhaps already have many of those sports in the Olympics like equestrian, darts, curling, motor biking, sailing etc.

By including those events in the chart and showing little to no difference between the sexes in some sports, I think it actually helps the case that those other sports in the chart (which heavily favor strength and therefore testosterone), should continue to be played in separate divisions based on testosterone levels to create an even playing field.

But just saying transgender women shouldn't compete with women in any sport (which is what the paper is advocating), I don't think is backed up by the data. I think that's why people are mad, is that they conveniently skip over all of the mixed sports where testosterone is of little to no advantage, but then say that the male advantage is "insurmountable in nearly all sports" but only provide data on the sports that are already split up.

So, their proposition that transgender women not be allowed to compete with women in darts, sailing, etc. seems biased and they awkwardly skip providing any data around those sports in the paper.

I am sorry to be blunt but you seem to be a kind of person who never was around serious competition. Men have significant advantage in darts, motor biking, sailing and it's not even remotely close in the case of last two. Men also have very significant advantage in chess which can't be explained by participation rate (a lot of recent discussion about it, I won't get into it but the conclusion is clear). In case of sailing it is obvious for anyone who ever done some - it's pays off to be strong and very often it pays off to be heavy. It also seems men do better in events that require prolonged focus (chess, go, bridge, eSports) without physical component. We don't know exactly why yet but denying that only creates unreasonable expectations for women.

Isn't the reason that women perform better than men at ultra long-distance swimming that they're more buoyant and it's such a long-distance / low metabolic rate pursuit that structural efficiency (more buoyant body) is the dominant factor of performance?

I swam in college competitively through the NCAA level and this was the accepted wisdom amongst my peer cohort.

If this is the case, respectfully, I don't see it in conflict with the thesis presented by the two articles cited in the OP Twitter thread that got banned (i.e., that people who went through puberty as males have a categorical advantage in athletic pursuits over those who went through puberty as females).

If it is not, I'd be interested to learn what's actually going on! A very interesting outlier to be sure.

Platform bias fueling/supporting tribalism strikes again.

sports revenue isn't magic, it's simple

it's sales

if females doesn't earn as much as males it's because they don't sell as much as males, it's that simple

why would i lose money only because that female sells much less than her male equivalent?

but the women sports persons demand the same prize money and sponsorships, you know because "equality".

I agree with you to a certain extent, but I think with the right marketing push it is possible to create female sporting superstars - Ronda Rousey is a good example.

In the case of US Soccer, the women bring in significantly more revenue than the men but are paid far less. https://www.vox.com/2019/7/10/20686692/us-womens-soccer-team...

This is also because the women's team had originally negotiated a contract that prefers stable salaries over the higher risk-reward benefit that comes with winning: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/09/22/uswnt-equal...

I wasn't aware of this story, thanks

This is because there are labor markets — men’s soccer as a global labor market makes so much more that players have better options even if a specific team is not doing well. That’s why you don’t do wage comparisons on a team basis but market basis. I’m sure there’s some flagging software company that earns lower revenues than a thriving restaurant, but the devs at that company will still earn more than the waiters at the restaurant.

The only way to change that is to make it illegal for workers to look for better employers, and make it illegal for firms to look for cheaper workers. But until that changes, individual employers will pay the prevailing wage, regardless of how much revenue they are getting.

This also works in the other direction. Company X makes so much but they only pay their cooks such low wages, etc.

Advertising and promotion plays a huge role in consumer preferences.

It’s not like people are picking any product or service in a vacuum. They’re heavily influenced by culture and what’s “cool”.

And what’s “cool” can be influenced by racism, sexism, etc.

No one possibly thinks women and men are physically equal, right? This is why we have separate women and men sports.

Oh there is definitely a large group of people pushing this mistaken belief. When you hold the belief that there are no genders then logically there can be no women's sports and you cannot hold the idea that there are physical/mental differences between men or women without some for of cognitive dissonance.

The media and many others are backing transgender men entering multiple women's sports like it's not a problem. They're even ok with it happening in MMA and it's terrifying. You're going to have woman killed with this sort of stuff.

https://nypost.com/2021/09/11/transgender-fighter-alana-mcla...

Maybe a tiny minority do, but it isn't so much about the physicality and genes, but treatment and identification. Someone who's a man or woman in 99% of all contexts (except biology) think Sports, which is a human construct, is discriminatory, and as all human constructs, can be re-invented and changed.

Hey, not taking sides here, just saying it's not as simple as reducing to people who think women and men (or female and male) are actually the same.

But if it helps taking sides, from our current way of doing most competitive sports, it makes sense to split into male and female (biologically speaking, at birth) and transgenders shouldn't compete on the other side.

My understanding is that in most sports there’s an “open” division where everyone can compete - though that means in practice men dominate. The “women” division is then created as a way towards better representation. It’s a progressive policy, not discrimination. If we get rid of the women’s division we’ll be left with men-only sports.

blank slate supporters really believe it's all environmental, any difference between individuals is environmental and we just need to change things until everybody is equal

> separate women and men sports

Most professional sports I know of (in the US) technically don't have separate men leagues. There are women only leagues, and leagues open to anyone. There is no rule preventing women from playing in the NFL, NHL or MLB. But in practice if you don't enforce a minimum % of women players like I've seen in some amateur mixed leagues, it makes them men only.

The Olympics does split into men-only and women-only, I think.

A number of trans rights activists (TRAs) are trying to erase the concept of 'sex' entirely, including sex-based differences. Although this seems absurd on its face, TRAs came to this point in the debate gradually: initially there was a focus on making the claim that gender is short for 'gender identity', which is in their view entirely unrelated to biological sex. This seemed agreeable to a broad audience, but committed TRAs then started looking to erode the sex-based separation seen in spaces such as bathrooms, sports, and more. The Biden administration took this further by redefining the word 'sex' when it comes to official law and policy (example: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-hhs-redefines-sex-...). Now TRAs are pushing for drivers licenses and birth certificates to allow self-identified information in the 'sex' field. Doctors and activists in the medical world are ceasing to use words like 'mother' and instead are using terms like 'birthing person' or 'uterus owner'. Sex-based sexual orientation (like 'lesbian') is being replaced as activists push for redefining it in terms of gender identity. These days, even pointing out that the word "woman" is defined as "adult human female", where "female" is defined biologically, is deemed "hate speech" by TRAs on Twitter.

For sports specifically, it is worth listening to this Megyn Kelly podcast episode where she speaks to two girls affected by this issue in high school sports, as well as two sports biology researchers - one of whom is trans - discussing sex-based differences in sports: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-trans-athletes-deb...

In depth, balanced discussions around this issue are also difficult to come by because of censorship and vitriol. A good listen on this facet of the issue is this interview of journalist Abigail Shrier, whose recent book drew the ire of TRAs: https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/3054d6c7/courage...

Great summary of the situation. I wonder how long things will continue in the direction they've been going, and when things will begin rolling back in the other direction

It's hard to say. For me it is fascinating to look on the dynamics of activism and politics from the sidelines and try to connect the dots across locations and with history. In the US it is difficult to openly discuss this topic because of social media censorship, risk to social/professional status, and so on. But the stances pushed by progressive TRAs in the US are also very new and highly radical. There are other perspectives that grant trans people recognition and basic civil liberties but do so differently. For example, older cultures that recognized additional genders for much longer have treated them as a third category rather than a spectrum of infinite choices (which seems more like personality) and without the concept of gender fluidity (where your gender can change day to day). Countries in Asia and Africa typically do not accept the US-progressive perspective of trans issues or are hostile towards it entirely. European nations have a healthier (but still emotional) debate on this topic than the US, as it seems more psychologically safe and socially acceptable to express your ideas there. China seems to be enacting a strong social-shaping agenda in favor of traditional (biological) gender and sex. And so on.

The only thing I have certainty about is that the people who seek to shut down others, or censor debate, or get people fired, or distort/lie are on the wrong side of things. There are large numbers of people who engage in these illiberal actions on all sides of this debate.

In context it seems kind of fair. You can use true facts to support hateful views. I'm not a fan of censorship, but the cat's always been out of the bag when it comes to social media censoring things.

The argument could be made that letting biological females compete for awards and cash prizes against biological males is misogynistic.

But misogyny only exists if gender exists. If gender doesn’t exist then there is no such thing as misogyny or sexual discrimination.

If one's position is "we have to censor the truth because the truth is immoral" then it's worth considering having an "are we the baddies?" moment.

You know it's not just a picture right? There's a description under the picture, that likely was the part that was being censored.

Are you talking about the text from the paper itself ("The male performance advantage...") or something else?

"The truth" is such a vague term.

You can say things that are true, but are also misleading, simply by omitting pertinent information.

I think most people's position when they're offended by a "truth snippet" is "this is immoral because it's misleading / incomplete / biased, etc.".

In this case, they omitted many sports where men and women are much more level competitors like curling, darts, bowling, equestrian, motor bike racing, marathon swimming, sailing, etc. And ignored marathon swimming where women routinely beat men.

And they didn't pick a diverse cross-section of sports that focused on various attributes like upper body strength, lower body strength, accuracy, agility, dexterity, flexibility, endurance, efficiency, artistic movement, decision making, etc. They just published a chart of the more male dominated sports where strength is of outsized importance and said that the male advantage is "insurmountable" as justification for banning transgender athletes (based on testosterone levels) from all female sports.

So, people aren't debating what's in the chart, they're debating what's not in the chart.

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