I don't think this is a good comparison because there's so much about language that's subjective or dependent on context. if you could translate something with perfect denotation, you still need a human touch for connotation. the nuances of word choice and sentence structure that give something a flavor of emotionality, or cool logic, or confidence, or aloofness, etc. to say nothing of localization, how to handle meter, all the various tradeoffs a translator has to make because translation is inherently lossy. games don't have any of these problems, you either win or you don't
I think ai will prove "good enough" for most applications in the near future, but this won't eliminate human translation (or journalism, or copywriting, or whatever you might want to apply similar technology/techniques to). but it may well eliminate the bottom 80%
so many comments arguing about what everyone in aggregate is morally obligated to abstain from or morally permitted to partake in. meanwhile the article itself is just about what people end up doing. "the government closed the gyms. lots of people want to exercise together and/or with expensive bulky equipment so they make illegal gyms." no amount of ethics lawyering is going to change this
honestly I think the phased reopenings are partly to blame, once you say "this is important enough, that isn't" everyone wants to do their things and disparage other people's things. if they closed the gyms here again, I'd find an illegal one. if they closed the restaurants, or the churches, or the schools, I wouldn't care. but for the people who derive existential fulfillment from their religion, or can't tolerate taking care of their children 24/7, or [insert reason why people care about restaurants, I honestly don't understand the upside anymore], my desire to go to my gym is selfish and wrong but their need for their thing is inherently good and right
not to mention the fact that most of the country isn't locked down, and there's no internal borders, and most people didn't take lockdowns seriously after the first month or two of kumbaya we're all in this together stuff anyway. so your individual actions wouldn't even move the needle. there's a continuum between the hypervigilent closed societies where one person gets it and they shut down the city, and the endemic countries where it's already everywhere anyway so the best you can do is mitigate risk to a tolerable level and go on with your life. new zealand, south korea, taiwan vs. mexico, india, brazil. we're with india and brazil
and I don't think it could have gone any other way. americans are suspicious and callous toward their countrymen and deathly allergic to being told what to do. for better or worse, it's just in our blood. gotta make the best of it
How figurative is the blood you're referring to here?
I'm a naturalized US citizen from a country that dealt well with the pandemic. I wasn't born in my heritage country, and so have always identified first as an American. But, recent events demonstrating the "uglier" side of America's sociocultural norms has left me wondering if >~40% of the country I recognize as home don't consider me a worthwhile part of it.
same reason it's hard to steer an ocean liner. death rates dominated the way people thought and talked about this for months. now it's clearer death rates are obviously not so bad, but permanent damage and months-long recoveries and unclear immunity profile are massive unknowns, but the inertia of the previous narrative still overwhelms the minority trying to course correct. "we're all going to die" "no we're going to be fine" is much easier to latch onto than "it's more complicated than that and we don't really know." especially since most people got sick of lockdown and many are in grave economic danger because of it. people are doing a mental calculus of "well I'll probably be fine so I think we should open back up" and change their arguments to suit the conclusion they've decided on
yea my gyms here (texas) have been really good about this, either mandatory masks or open air, mandatory distancing, wipe everything down (my muay thai gym got like a metal exterminators tank for disinfectant they just spray everything with), etc etc. the article makes the point well, that if you close everything down, people will just do it anyway, so it's better to just have it in the open and under control and punish bad actors when they crop up
local gyms (as opposed to chain/bigbox) tend to be extremely tight-knit communities, which means people want to keep each other safe and will go out of their way to do it, within reason. most people don't care about everyone in their city in abstract, but they do care about members of groups they derive camaraderie from. hell of a lot safer than reopening restaurants, imo
people who act like joggers are the real threat mostly don't exercise, just as people who say things like "I don't understand why people need to get together" mostly are introverts, people who think the anti-lockdown protestors are lunatics generally don't own brick and mortor businesses, etc. people are scared and want someone to blame, ideally someone who isn't like them. and it's naturally much easier to see the things you do as essential, but the things you don't do as nonessential
So is it a joke on "Gilbert Ryle: The Concept of Mind"?
But it just reiterates his first example using breakfast instead of university...
'The first example is of a visitor to Oxford. The visitor, upon viewing the colleges and library, reportedly inquired "But where is the University?"[3] The visitor's mistake is presuming that a University is part of the category "units of physical infrastructure" rather than that of an "institution".'
I dunno, I’m actually about halfway to being convinced that if we can figure out what causes breakfast we’ll necessarily have solved the problem of consciousness, too.
The point is breakfast is what we define it to be. It is a set of objects that have certain properties that we deem to be described as breakfast. In the same way consciousness is what we decide it to be. There is no natural definition, its a thing we made up. This also implies that searching for the natural explanation of consciousness is about as useful as searching for the natural definition of breakfast.
The article is saying that there is an experience/phenomenon of "the breakfast" that cannot be explained by an analysis of its constituents. The whole (the breakfast) is more/something else than the sum of its parts. Contemporary scientists only look at the parts because that's what their methods allow them to do/reason about. They miss the essence of the breakfast. Their methods don't even allow them to acknowledge that breakfasts exist -- however & whatever that would mean and imply.
Since I think the current scientific treatment of consciousness is rather deplorable (unconscious scientists unconsciously trying to be consciously smart), I like this article.
Interestingly an appreciation of what is meant by "qualia" seems to be correlated with age. I would wager that it is also inversely correlated with scientific qualifications. Imho there is a kind of person that while hugely clever is not necessarily very conscious and curricula (also imho) select for those kinds of people.
So when you say "unconscious scientists unconsciously trying to be consciously smart" I take it literally. I think scientists can only make such claims as "consciousness does not exist" because they are not particularly conscious themselves. Or at least their awareness is, in the flow, as it were, with no meta - no awareness of awareness and hence no consciousness as I think the term is best described.
Oh and I like your interpretation of the article better. Although I'm not convinced I give the author that much credit.
this has been a contentious argument for at least half a decade that I've seen, and I won't rehash it here, but the magic words to google if you want to read more are "truscum" and "theyfab"
previous poster's claim is a common piece of folk wisdom that ultimately stems from this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16298429/ 2005, n=187. the authors are blanchardites so the language they use is needlessly confusing, but they find 107.3 mean iq among the male-attracted trans women, 121.7 among the female-attracted
I presume this is a consequence of the datasets they had to work off but it is really frustrating that they have one catchall "transgender and gender-diverse" category, segmenting by birth sex or particular gender identified with would be interesting/valuable
I realize this might be rude but I'm not sure what the polite way to ask is, isn't your sex always your birth sex for the most part? Outside the effects of the medications and the cosmetic effects of the surgery isn't your body still mostly the same as far as the nuts, bolts, and genetic disorders, are concerned?
That depends on what you mean by "sex." And even then, it's not a neat binary thing by any definition. Most things that involve humans fall on a bimodal distribution. Cropping out the wide fields in that distribution is convenient for statistics, forms, and rhetoric, but it doesn't reflect the true range humans are capable of.
Can you elaborate on this more? I meant "sex" in the way that my physician would use the word. I'm aware of things like intersex conditions but, unless someone is actually intersex or otherwise complicated, your reply doesn't really answer my original question.
I'm not that poster but I can elaborate. Basically your physician couldn't easily use "biological sex" as a blanket term to accurately asses the risk factors and health needs of a medically transitioned person. Our sex is "otherwise complicated."
The reason for this is that medical transition, primarily through the mechanism of hormone replacement therapy, actually changes some aspects of biological sex and the associated risk factors at a "nuts and bolts" level even though its not touching every single aspect of biological sex. It's not purely cosmetic, though that's a common misconception. Hormones ultimately control a lot about how human bodies express sex and the associated medical factors. In reality "biological sex" is composed of multiple sexually differentiated systems within the human biology that can theoretically operate somewhat independent of each other, and changing the dominate hormone in your body will flip or at least shove a lot of those systems towards the other end of the distribution. I guess a way to phrase this in developer terminology would be that "biological sex" is sometimes a leaky abstraction.
As a personal example: despite my birth sex, it would be a mistake for my doctor to ask that I routinely get regular breast cancer screenings in the same way it would be a mistake to ask a cis man to regularly screen himself for breast cancer. My risk of breast cancer is much lower than a cis woman's and comparable to a cis man's. But at the same time I have absolutely zero risk of prostate cancer, and it would also be a mistake to try and test for that based on any possible symptoms I'm having. An ideally perfect doctor would be able take my history and be cognizant of what risk factors of biological sex, exactly, which conditions were associated with, and then be able to map that onto my body to figure out what I'm at risk for. As you can probably imagine, this is very difficult to do. A lot of times what makes a condition linked to sex isn't actually understood in the first place.
I wanted to say thanks for giving such a detailed reply. I still have some things that I'm unsure about as far as the framing of everything but having concrete examples like your point about your lowered risk of breast cancer is immensely helpful in understanding where I'm making social judgements vs. just being ignorant about the topic as a whole. It's often hard to get clear answers like yours because just phrasing these kinds of questions often feels like a minefield. So your patience in answering what I'm sure is an at least somewhat demeaning line of questioning is very appreciated and helps a lot in wrapping my head around this.
I appreciate this, thanks. Answering these kinds of questions can feel like unwrapping bandages in front of strangers. So it's good to hear that it helped somebody out. Thank you for your empathy.
when it comes to this topic, "sex" "gender" "male" "female" "man" "woman" etc etc are overloaded with contradictory meanings by people trying to make sneaky ontological arguments. unless I'm specifically talking about the signifier itself, I don't really care about these kinds of games, so I just try to say unambiguous things
anyway aside from language legerdemain, the word "sex" is also used to refer to what sex you're legally designated as, which is only loosely coupled to biology by now
The terms "gender" and "sex" are defined differently by different people, but in general the definition is something like this:
Sex is usually defined in terms of genitalia, genotype (chromosomes) or similar biological properties. However, this is still not a binary male/female property, see for example intersex people. Depending on your definition, undergoing surgery may change your sex, gender, or both.
Should intersex conditions be considered normal human genetic variances (like eye colour), or genetic disorders (like Down Syndrome)?
It’s humane and polite not to describe people as abnormal, but being medically accurate I’d argue that humans are indeed binary sexed, and immutably so.
It really depends where you draw the line of "intersex condition", it's not really a term physicians specialized in the field use anymore, because variance in sexual development is ubiquitous if you look hard enough. "DSD" is typically used when there's a pronounced effect that is physically diagnosable, but it often misses other neurological factors that, for instance, corelate in transgender people.
Then again, a lot of severe conditions that would often fall under the DSD umbrella are often overlooked until they become somehow important. For instance, complete androgen insensitivity, so zero functional testosterone in an XY individual, is often not diagnosed until you notice the lack of periods / cervix.
Calling it bimodal is a much more precise way to go about it that acknowledges we have two broad categories, with lots of exceptions and caveats.
> Should intersex conditions be considered normal human genetic variances (like eye colour), or genetic disorders (like Down Syndrome)?
Doesn't really matter, for this purpose.
> I’d argue that humans are indeed binary sexed, and immutably so.
Unless you defining terms such that the variations are not merely disorders but actually nonhuman, you are clearly wrong; human alignments of sex characteristics are non-binary though bimodal.
> human alignments of sex characteristics are non-binary though bimodal.
You either produce sperm, or ova - or neither (which if caused genetically is an abnormal variant).
“Producing the wrong gamete for one’s perceived gender doesn’t construct an additional sex, nor alter the definition of sex such that there are female sperm / male ova producers - this holds even if that perception has genetic as well as psycho-environmental causes” - in my opinion.
But .. we’re philosophical / political at this point .. which is the problem.
> You either produce sperm, or ova - or neither (which if caused genetically is an abnormal variant).
Or both, at least in theory, though true hermaphroditism with both ovulation and spermatogenesis, while theoretically possible and observed on other mammals has not, AFAIK, been conclusively shown in humans.
But, sure, you can redefine “sex” to be restricted to any one of a number of axes of sexual variation that exist in human and result in either a simple quaternary, trinary (or, if you try a little harder than you have, binary) distinction, but what is the point?
the commonly accepted estimate for intersex conditions is 1.7% of lives births, via https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11534012/ from this basis it's not much of a stretch to imagine the reality is that there's a greater spectrum of sex difference that is illegible because it hasn't been medicalized. certainly seems like a more plausible explanation than "ok ok, so there's people who don't fit into our perfect platonic ideal categories, but other than the 1.7% of weirdos the categories are still perfect"
it's god of the gaps thinking, people are addicted to drawing clean lines around discrete categories as a vestige of modernism. taxonomy brain. we don't have good ways to say "there are two major clustering points, which most people are roughly close enough to one or the other to call them that, but there's enough overlap and so many dimensions that it makes drawing clean boundaries impossible"
I suspect as gene sequencing gets commoditized and personalized medicine actually becomes practical, we'll find a lot more cases where it makes sense to analyze people on the basis of their individual traits rather than what broad groups we can class them under
I think ai will prove "good enough" for most applications in the near future, but this won't eliminate human translation (or journalism, or copywriting, or whatever you might want to apply similar technology/techniques to). but it may well eliminate the bottom 80%