What I told the students of Princeton | Hacker News Reader

What I told the students of Princeton

abigailshrier.substack.com

71 pointsleephillips28 comments

I think the author has a point to make that is definity valid, but she wraps it up in this hyper-western freedom ideal that says if you conform you may as well not have been born. To me this is a shame, because the argument that perhaps gender politics is entirely too violent at times and could benefit from having more calm adults is a reasonable one. It doesn't really matter if you are a proponent or a detractor, the hate is there for all to see. Sometimes it seems like this is what unites everyone who even cares to speak of these topics: no matter what they believe, they do so while angry.

I find myself wishing that this argument would have been made separate from the fetishism of freedom, which is in itself an position that is a little alienating in how it is presented (and angry besides - isn't this the problem?)

I don't know, I think there are plenty of people out there who aren't angry, you just can't really hear them because they aren't yelling.

One thing I know for sure, the amount of anger someone has is always inversely proportionate to how much they know about a topic. Whenever someone gets angry about a topic I know for sure they know nothing about it and are therefore not worth wasting time on.

How can you resist the dominant ideology without valuing freedom? How can you challenge the norms set by the elite without asserting your right as an individual to take a non-conforming stance? Even if you argue that society would be more harmonious if we all followed a different/better norm, how are you entitled to make a statement that contradicts the current paradigm if you don't value the ability to contradict the current paradigm of society?

I suppose that an alternative basis than freedom is faith; eg "God told me to stand up for divine principles" — but even then, why are you uniquely responsive to God's will?

Seriously, I'd love to understand how you critique the status quo/advocate for change without valuing freedom.

She wraps it in terms most understood by her audience which is, well, very Western.

Your statement on 'hate' is self-referential on self-identity, akin to labeling others divisive. It's not simply 'there to see,' like a brick or a tree. You're conjuring it. As such, I directly disagree with you.

The stance that anything that cannot be touched exists only as a reflection of the observer is philosophically interesting, but not much more than that. It directly stifles communication with almost everyone else and it stops you from seeing harmful behaviour besides. There is, to my mind, very little point to it except as a (fun) thought exercise.

I assert less than that, merely that your confidence is significantly overstated, your opinion overfit. The bold, factual, and wrong “there to see” hyperbole renders discourse irrelevant.

I would like to be sympathetic to the author's argument, but this article is just riddled with trivially falsifiable inaccurate assertions.

> There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they’ve sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them. Or, at least, there’s one such book. I’ll let you try and guess what it is.

YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=transgender

> But did you know that, for contested entries, Wikipedia assigns editors, some of whom are ideologically committed activists, many of whom have very particular views they want you to walk away with.

Wikipedia is far from perfect, but this is still a gross misrepresentation of how admins and the editing process operate on contested topics. It is interesting though that Wikipedia's Transgender page does not mention the rapid-onset gender dysphoria controversy at all though.

> a 22 year old biological male at Penn who was competing on the men’s team as recently as November of 2019. That male athlete now holds multiple U.S. records in women’s swimming, erasing the hard work of so many of our best female athletes

This appears to be a reference to Lia (Will) Thomas, who as far as I can tell does not hold any U.S. records in women's swimming.

https://ussanews.com/swimmer-who-once-was-male-now-shatterin...

> YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book.

Yup, I'm seeing the same thing here. And this blog post was created 7h ago so I kind of doubt that's a recent change.

I'm starting to think there's a lot of easy advertising to be had on the "I'm being silenced!" circuit nowadays. And it probably directly targets the type of people who'd be into this book.

All three of your examples are correct statements on the author’s part. Recommendations and search results are not the same thing. The swimmer does hold records. And Wikipedia does assign editors.

> This appears to be a reference to Lia (Will) Thomas, who as far as I can tell does not hold any U.S. records in women's swimming

This [1] and some others say that those times that your link says set meet and pool records are also the best times in the country.

[1] https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/12/07/trans-swimmer-lia-thom...

> YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book.

My understanding of the author's point is that the book does not show up in a "you may also be interested in these books" kind of list, not the result of an explicit search.

Recommendations aren't the same as search results.

Is she making up her Amazon recommendation shadowban? Was she misinformed? Is/was there a shadowban, but one caused by third parties manipulating Amazon's ranking signals rather than by Amazon's own minions? Maybe. I have no idea.

However, just try to search for "When Harry Became Sally". When you discover that you can't find it, you might be curious to know why Amazon decided to censor it, not by deranking it in searches or recommendations, but by outright refusing to sell it at all (after initially offering it for sale).[1]

Amazon has a history of problems with rankings for culturally sus books. There were issues about a decade ago with certain feminist and LGBT books getting flagged as adult and therefore downranked or hidden. Whether they did that intentionally (with human intervention) or whether it was an automatic result of signals, doesn't matter, though the fact that books with a LGBT flavor were adult-flagged while straight-flavored books weren't either goes to willful conduct or horrifically inadequate algorithms. The pattern of Shrier's allegation now is similar to the problem back then, although the content is different. The moral panic back then was people (particularly minors) unwittingly stumbling across adult content. The moral panic today is anything critical of LGBTQ++.

[1] https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/statement-on-amazon/

The chilling effect is real. It's disheartening that we are asked to play along with unsubstantiated dogma on topics as fundamental as gender. Has anyone here managed to express opinions like Shrier's in a casual manner without having the reputation take a hit?

Her book is the number one result on amazon when you search "transgender"

She's speaking to an audience of Princeton students and grads

You are reading about it on hacker news

Chilling effect? People would pay really good money for this type of exposure.

Its survival bias. She stuck her head out, didn't budge, and navigated the criticism smartly. But many other faculty members and writers have been forcibly ushered out of their positions or made to recant their non-woke opinions.

Well yeah all the time ! Around me (I know no trans and am not either), nobody seems to care, when I say it's perfectly fine and tolerable people either give 0 fuck or agree. The toilet thing only seems to bother girls, the guys I know dont mind if girls wanna come in ours, even non trans. And I think it's less dogma than sad experience with abusive males on the woman's side.

This should be unflagged. It's open, honest, and well-argued, even if you disagree with it.

Can anyone explain to me why this is flagged and disappeared from the front page? Just curious to understand the process.

I believe if enough people flag a story then this happens. And, sadly, it’s clearly the case that there are a large number of HN members who will flag stories that support a viewpoint at odds with the ideology that they favor, regardless of the quality of the story or the discussion, or its score. It is a way of doing ideological battle by abusing mechanisms that are supposed to serve another purpose.

If what comes out of your mouth is (eg.) a disapproval of same-sex or inter-racial relationships, maybe you should be afraid to speak.

And it's likely that Shirier would agree--I doubt she would be critical of eg. a publisher refusing to publish ku klux klan diatribes.

The problem is that this isn't a black-and-white issue. Most people agree with cancelling someone at a certain point--we just dont all agree where to draw the line.

As far as sports go, maybe it is time to stop having men's sports and women's sports and instead have different leagues in a sport be based on performance or measurable characteristics directly related to the sport.

You finish near the top a lot in your league, you get bumped up to the next up higher performing league. You finish near the bottom a lot in your league, you get moved to the next lower performing league.

That could take care of the issue of where transgendered people should compete, and it opens up competitive sports to more people.

That's one way to get rid of women's sports.

> and it opens up competitive sports to more people.

The minor minor league levels will get zero audience and therefore zero money.

We already have those leagues now... they're just called rec leagues.

One issue I could think of is women playing a sport which has considerable groinal contact, such as basketball. I'm sure there is some amount of women players who would not be comfortable with men essentially grinding up on them in the paint. For those without experience, if you are offensively in the paint a typical strategy is to shove your butt out into the defenders groin to create space.

By making all sports coed you invite the potential for more sexual harassment, especially at the lower levels of competition due to the close skill levels between minimally athletic men and moderately athletic women.

We can also get rid of weight classes in boxing, wrestling, and MMA.

That's pretty much the opposite of what GP is advocating. The idea is to divide all sports into effective "weight classes" instead of segregating them by gender.

Sure, revel in some sense of freedom for being a “contrarian.” But recognize the naïveté in thinking this has any constructive meaning in our time.

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