You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

jaime2000 comments on Polling Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 22 January 2014 09:14PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (118)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: jaime2000 24 January 2014 12:31:16PM *  2 points [-]

Therefore, claims like “women are X; therefore, women shouldn't be allowed to do Y”, insofar as “women are X” would normally be taken to refer to typical women and “women shouldn't be allowed to do Y” would normally be taken to refer to all women, sound a lot like fallacies of equivocation to me.

Or maybe the claimers do not believe that every rare exception warrants a deontological obligation to create an entire legal/social/institutional framework to acommodate it, regardless of consequences such as horrible inefficiency, toxic social pathologies, or the abandonment of vitally important Schelling fences (I am reminded of a comment on Steve Sailer's blog: "The military is too male. I don't have a joke, I'm just really in awe of that phrase. I'm thinking about the length of a journey that a culture must undertake in order for that to stop sounding crazy.")

Comment author: [deleted] 24 January 2014 04:55:20PM *  0 points [-]

If that's their argument, I'd rather they stated that explicitly, rather than relying on the ambiguity of generic plurals.

(And in certain cases I can't see what's wrong with just using the same legal/social/institutional framework that already exists for men. “After all, we are a university, not a bath house.”)