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wedrifid comments on A Rational Education - Less Wrong
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The transgendered or intersex have more reason to be biased, not less. The very core of their identity is at stake!
Biased, yes. I thought of that. But I don't think "bias" is really the issue here.
If you want to know what the corpus callosum does, find some people who don't have one. If you want to know what gender does, find some people whose gender is different than the rest of us. Natural experiments.
Are we investigating the guy without the corpus callosum here or are we taking on faith what he says about the population at large?
I don't think you take anyone's word on faith -- we don't have genuine "space aliens," neutral and unbiased. But, because these are social questions, you "investigate" different kinds of people not by cutting their brains open but by listening to them tell their side of the story.
That is a good start and we must take care not to stop there. The risk with social questions is the temptation to give social answers. To look at 'sides of a story'. As well as absorbing social perspectives it is necessary to look at the raw science. To look at the behaviors of mammals in general and in particular those of the apes that have mating patterns similar to ours. To compare and contrast the expected outcome of game theoretic models with our observations of human behaviour. The answers those investigations give are not always popular. They also don't always match the stories that we like to tell ourselves!