I think that's what [...] means
I'm suggesting that applying that principle in general doesn't have to mean applying it exactly the same to imprisoned criminals.
(Similarly, I am in general strongly in favour of letting people communicate freely and privately with others, but if we choose to restrict and/or monitor the calls of people in prison then that makes some sense.)
That's not letting people define their own identities but letting experts define their identities.
It's intermediate between the two: letting people define their own identities but giving experts a veto in a case where the risk of abuse is especially severe. Again: a general principle of letting people define their own identities may need amendment when dealing with people we have locked up in the name of public safety, just as general principles of free speech and free association and so forth get amended when dealing with those people.
Don't let yourself get mindkilled because it's a political topic.
Thanks for the advice. I commend it to all. Do you have a particular reason to think I am getting mindkilled, beyond the fact that (1) I disagreed with you and (2) you think my arguments are weak? (You have disagreed with me and I think "X might have bad consequences if applied unaltered to dangerous criminals, so proposing X in general is wrong" is a terrible argument; should I conclude that you're getting mindkilled?)
Do you have a particular reason to think I am getting mindkilled, beyond the fact that (1) I disagreed with you and (2) you think my arguments are weak?
Yes, that you fail to distinguish between the question of whether to let people self identify themselves and whether people in hormone therapy really change their gender.
The debate whether or not a XY transexual with no penis, a vagina and big boobs is female or male is a quite different question from the debate whether or not the act of identifying as female means that your gender is female.
I have the...
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.