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Grandparent has been deleted and I can't see it, so I'm not sure what their post was, so I'm aiming this response in more at the terms being used and their underlying meaning.

>When people try to explain why you're coming to broken conclusions due to broken reasoning, they get attacked as radical leftists for using the straightforward terminology we have for describing the phenomenon we're discussing.

How much of this is caused by people have past experience with selective application of different lines of reasoning.

For example, use the legal's systems racial and sex based discrimination. If we look at racial discrimination, it should be pretty clear that minorities have it much worse than whites. And there is a lot of research on this. If you then look at it based on gender, it appears there is even stronger discrimination based on gender than on race, with males much worse off than females (and a minority male receiving the worst of each). But the treatment of this online seems quite different. While it is a personal anecdote, on multiple occasions I've been told the racial discrimination is caused by structural racism against minorities that treats them worse than whites at every step on the system (from being more likely to be stopped and searched, to being more likely to be convicted given equal evidence, to receiving harsher sentences), and then being told that the gender discrimination is caused by sexism against women, resulting from the legal system treating women as children every step of the way (meaning they are less likely to be stopped and searched, less likely to be convicted, and receive less time). These seem like polar opposite lines of reasoning, yet I've seen both used as the same time.

I think it is at this point you get people who become opposed to the underlying reasoning because it appears that the group using the reasoning is starting with an assumption and then picking the logic that best fits their assumption. And I think many of the people you encounter online who use this reasoning are doing just that. People of every political and other leaning like to manipulate data to fit their world view. Combined with a lack of exposure to the actual scientists who work on this it can paint people's view of the language. To say nothing of scientist being humans and thus there being examples of scientist being very non-scientific about some issue (while I don't know of any examples on this particular issue, I did read through case of correspondences published in a scientific journal dealing with classification of certain behaviors as mental illnesses where some scientist were making some very indefensible arguments concerning evolution of which numerous counter examples were available that basically boiled down to "there is no way trait X evolved because it isn't reproductively advantageous in our environment").

And to be clear on my own stance, I do think that systematic racism exists in our current system, including in sub-systems where there are no racist members. There are agent models that show with even a small in-group bias, completely devoid of any out-group bias, you can have a system where out-group bias is apparent. For example, a system of entities of type A and B where A's has a certain preference for grouping with other A's, but no preference for not grouping with B's, ends up behaving similar to a system where A's have a preference for not grouping with B's.




Grandparent has been deleted and I can't see it

Go to your HN profile and turn 'showdead' on. It hasn't been deleted, users flagged it.


Oh, I thought it was something depending upon getting a certain rep and I hadn't hit it yet. Thanks.


> These seem like polar opposite lines of reasoning,

The problem is you are viewing them as reasoning about the cause from the effect alone rather than reasoning about the cause from a combination of the effect and masses of historical evidence.


[flagged]


This is a string of non-sequiturs.


Then allow me to fill in the gaps.

>What masses of historical evidence?

This is a question in response to the GPs post that:

>>masses of historical evidence

>The ones that show that being a male has long been a major disadvantage in a legal system?

This is a purposed answer to the previous question, making the claim that there is plenty of historical evidence that males have been strongly discriminated against by the legal system, even if we went back in time. Need I source a claim showing that men were more likely than women to be charged, convicted, and receive longer sentences? This has been the case for at as far back as I've looked.

The reason for this is because GP acted as if I was ignoring some evidence that would justify the argument that the legal system is biased against women because it goes easier on them and make it somehow compatible with the second argument that the legal system is biased against racial minorities because it treats them harsher. It shouldn't be hard to see that these things still appear to be in contradiction.

>Yes, going back into the past being a minority was even worse than it is today, to a point where there was absolutely no justice at all

This is to preempt a response that if you went back in time, the legal system was even more biased against minorities than it is today. Instead of waiting for that response to be potentially made, I made it myself. I preempt this based on past experiences of seeing the point made in counter to my point.

> but that doesn't have an impact on the line of reasoning used to try to say the legal system discriminates against women.

I then follow up saying that I don't see this as a counter, because it doesn't impact the half of the two statements I have a problem with. One can try to explain why racial minorities being treated worse in the past by the legal system supports the statement that the legal system going easier on women is discriminating against women, only that the claim that I made in the first half of this sentence is not enough.

>This type of response only further reinforces the notion that the underlying reasoning and terminology is created ad-hoc to justify existing notions.

I then finish by saying the type of response from GP, which does not explain their argument to any degree other than a claim of forgetting to take historical evidence into account, makes people more dismissive of the original line of reasoning and the terminology associated with it, that of systematic discrimination, because the historical evidence appears to support my claim, not theirs. In short, an unsatisfactory defense strengthens the opposition's argument.

Would you like me to further clarify any point?


From what I can tell, the person who introduced the (unrelated) gender discrimination issue to this thread is you. As to the rest of your comment: I didn't doubt that any of what you had to say was important to you. I just don't think it has anything to do with what I said upthread.




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