That would still mean that if I say “convert to Christianity or I won’t hire you” and you refuse, that wouldn’t count as discrimination. It would also mean that refusing to hire gay people would not be discrimination, as long as you only refused to hire people who participated in some activity, whether having gay sex, wearing rainbow flags, having a gay wedding, etc.
That would still mean that if I say “convert to Christianity or I won’t hire you” and you refuse, that wouldn’t count as discrimination.
So what? I’m not particularly outraged that atheists aren’t allowed into the Swiss Guards.
It would also mean that refusing to hire gay people would not be discrimination, as long as you only refused to hire people who participated in some activity, whether having gay sex, wearing rainbow flags, having a gay wedding, etc.
For some reason, this sounds more problematic to me; not sure why.
For some reason, this sounds more problematic to me; not sure why.
Probably because you’ve been more exposed to rhetoric saying how horrible it is to be “anti-gay” than rhetoric saying how horrible it is to be “anti-atheist”.
You realize this is circling back around, right? The issue is that the two are both defined by choices, because the second group is not gay men but men who have consensual sex with men, and the second group’s membership is voluntary regardless of whether or not the first’s is.
Eugine_Nier responded, in effect, that the most likely reason to see those restrictions as being in different classes is the “who—whom?” of religious hiring restrictions being ‘okay’ and sexual-behavior-based hiring restrictions being ‘not okay’ because of status alignments of religion and sexual behavior.
I’m not sure there’s a coherent one here. But for issues such as this, what people, or society are comfortable with is a to a large extent a function of what intuitions they have. In this sort of context, the distinction is likely connected to intuitions of free will, whether or not that makes any sense.
How a priori reason do you want it to be? There’s at this point a general consensus that sexual orientation, while culturally mediated, has a large genetic component. I don’t think that anyone thinks there’s say a gene for Christianity or the like. And while self-identified sexual orientation can change, that’s substantially less common an occurrence as changes in one’s religious self-identification. For example, in the US about half of all adults have changed their religion at least once in their lives. See here. Some of those people are people changing from one version of Protestantism to another, but even when you take them out, one is still talking about around a third of the population. And this is fairly well known- people understand that religious beliefs can change: indeed, many major religions have specific rules about how to handle conversions, and many forms of major religions (especially in Christianity and Islam) have active commandments to go and convert people.
Well, I guess Jews and Wiccans would be as reluctant to get baptised in order to get a job as atheists are—possibly more so, insofar as I can easily imagine the latter thinking ‘if a lie is what you want, a lie is what you’ll get’ (there was a comment somewhere on LW to that effect, but I can’t find it).
I’m not aware of any ‘consensus’ that sexual orientation has a ‘large’ genetic component. Some research suggests there is a genetic component, and it is known that there are developmental factors as well (i.e. what happens in the womb and afterwards) and also environmental factors. It is widely accepted that homosexuality is ‘not a (conscious) choice’ but that’s most definitely not the same as saying “it’s genetic”.
See other discussion in this subthread for evidence that there’s a large genetic component and that most papers in this context matter. I agree that there’s likely developmental and environmental issues at play, as well as stochastic effects.
There’s at this point a general consensus that sexual orientation, while culturally mediated, has a large genetic component.
And near as I can tell, the only things underlying this consensus are the “we can get it to show up on brain scans, therefore it must be genetic” fallacy and the accusation of being an EVIL HOMOPHOBE!!1!! hurled against anyone who questions it.
And near as I can tell the only things underlying this consensus are the “we can get it to show up on brain scans, therefore it must be genetic” fallacy and the accusation of being an EVIL HOMOPHOBE!!1!! hurled against anyone who questions it.
The brain evidence is interesting, but it goes more to a lack of choice, rather than a genetic aspect. Of course, as with any complicated behavioral trait with some variation, it is likely that at least part of the trait is due to environmental effects at a young age, possibly including womb environment.
The fact that the kind of people responsible for these kinds of consensuses believe it is perfectly acceptable to promote falsehoods under the name of science for the “greater good” doesn’t exactly increase my confidence in it.
And you are A) Linking to a discussion where you and I already discussed exactly this and why your response didn’t make sense, and B) making a massive leap that from some political groups presenting selective evidence, that one should therefore doubt scientific studies. This does not follow.
The page you linked to doesn’t exactly present evidence of a strong genetic component (or much of a consensus for that matter).
The brain evidence is interesting, but it goes more to a lack of choice, rather than a genetic aspect.
Except it’s not evidence of lack of choice (unless you adopt a very specific kind of Cartesian dualism) either.
And you are A) Linking to a discussion where you and I already discussed exactly this and why your response didn’t make sense,
Your reasoning was basically “everyone lies thus some political group lying isn’t evidence against their other claims”. Not a particularly strong argument at the best of times, certainly not here were the situation is extremely analogous to the lie at the link (just substitute “transgender” for “homosexuality”).
B) making a massive leap that from some political groups presenting selective evidence, that one should therefore doubt scientific studies.
It wasn’t just presenting selective evidence, it was getting BS or outright lies declared part of the scientific consensus.
The page you linked to doesn’t exactly present evidence of a strong genetic component (or much of a consensus for that matter).
Could you elaborate? For example, the estimate from the largest study in the page (3,826 pairs) seems pretty nontrivial: 39% of variance! That’s not small or trivial by any means—that’s getting up there with some twin estimates of intelligence. And especially since the shared-environment estimate is 0.
The page you linked to doesn’t exactly present evidence of a strong genetic component (or much of a consensus for that matter).
Of the studies in question, the only one which showed a weak correlation listed is Bearman and Brückner, which still showed a 7.7% concordance rate for male homosexuality. The female rate is lower, which shouldn’t be that surprising, given that the other studies included also showed lower concordance rates for females, and that there’s other evidence for female sexuality being more malleable than male sexuality. Moreover, the largest study in question, the Sweden study, used literally every single pair of twins born in the country, which makes for a much larger study and handles the selection bias problems. And that study agreed with the results of the other studies excepting Bearman and Bruckner.
The brain evidence is interesting, but it goes more to a lack of choice, rather than a genetic aspect.
Except it’s not evidence of lack of choice (unless you adopt a very specific kind of Cartesian dualism) either.
What does this have to do with Cartesian dualism at all? For that matter, how is this at all relevant, since as I stated earlier, the matter under discussion is what is descriptively thought of as a choice or not by members of society. The entire point was discussing why someone would have a different reaction to the homosexuality discrimination issue than the atheism discrimination issue. In that context, colloquial intuitive notions of choice are relevant.
Your reasoning was basically “everyone lies thus some political group lying isn’t evidence against their other claims”. Not a particularly strong argument at the best of times, certainly not here were the situation is extremely analogous to the lie under discussion (just substitute “transgender” for “homosexuality”).
That’ isn’t what the argument is. Please reread that discussion.
It wasn’t just presenting selective evidence, it was getting BS or outright lies declared part of the scientific consensus.
Really? Did you see any evidence in that discussion that any aspect of this has had any influence on the scientific studies in question? Have they somehow managed to fake data and get it through? Do you think they’ve had papers get rejected? The only plausible sort of situation is selective granting, which requires specific aspects of the LGBTQE movement (not even generically but people who would agree with this lying idea, which the vast majority would not) to have somehow gotten positions in grant giving institutions. Do you have any evidence for that?
which still showed a 7.7% concordance rate for male homosexuality
In isolation, this number tells us nothing. What is important is the gap between concordance rates for MZ, DZ, and siblings. There are several popular hypotheses that predict a large effect of prenatal environment. In fact, the particular paper give 7.7% MZ, 4.2% DZ, and 4.5% siblings, so it detects no effect of prenatal environment and does suggest genetics.
The brain evidence is interesting, but it goes more to a lack of choice, rather than a genetic aspect.
Except it’s not evidence of lack of choice (unless you adopt a very specific kind of Cartesian dualism) either.
What does this have to do with Cartesian dualism at all?
Unless you accept some form of Cartesian dualism you should expect every aspect of the mind to show up on sufficiently advanced brain scans, whether or not it is a choice. Thus, the brain evidence isn’t particularly interesting.
For that matter, how is this at all relevant, since as I stated earlier, the matter under discussion is what is descriptively thought of as a choice or not by members of society.
And my point is that this perception isn’t grounded in anything objective and thus itself needs an explanation.
Your reasoning was basically “everyone lies thus some political group lying isn’t evidence against their other claims”. Not a particularly strong argument at the best of times, certainly not here were the situation is extremely analogous to the lie under discussion (just substitute “transgender” for “homosexuality”).
That’ isn’t what the argument is. Please reread that discussion.
I have, twice in the last few days in fact. Why don’t you try rereading it?
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume I misunderstood your argument there, if so could you state it more explicitly.
Really? Did you see any evidence in that discussion that any aspect of this has had any influence on the scientific studies in question?
Well Julian practically admitted it.
Have they somehow managed to fake data and get it through? Do you think they’ve had papers get rejected?
Sometimes, generally pressure is applied to people who produce politically incorrect results. Look what happened to Mark Regnerus or Jason Richwine, or to use a more famous example James Watson.
Eugine, within 2 minutes of your comment above, I received a block downvote to all my recent comments regardless of subject. Given this thread, which I presume you must have already seen, my interest in whether this was your action should be clear. If you are attempting to simply ignore the issues, you may want to be aware that this is causing serious concerns and problems within the community, and at least one LW user has considered implementing a response of block downvoting all your comments and those of people with views similar to your own. This situation is creating a mindkilling political mindfield and it is in your and everyone else’s best interest for it to be headed off before the situation deteriorates. Therefore a straight answer from you as to whether you are involved in this would be both appreciated and in the best interest of the community.
If you think you can get away with ignoring ialdabaoth’s requests because of the user’s relatively low status, you should be aware that my own status on LW, while not very high, is likely not so low that simply ignoring me will be a remotely productive response.
You have made some valid points above, but I cannot given recent events discuss them or any other issue with you, until you address the community’s concerns here.
I would like to loudly add that I am very interested in the norms of polite discourse being followed on LW, and am throwing whatever status I have behind this request. Furthermore, if this turns out to be the sort of thing that is best resolved in PMs rather than comments, I am willing to facilitate conversations that way.
Attempted to reverse the effects of the block downvote. Note that any permanent solution to this problem cannot rely on the co-operation of possible defectors. If there is not a method for detecting such defections and preferably determing the source, it continues to be a viable method of asymmetric warfare.
Also might be a decent idea for someone to take formal responsibility for moderating the website. Several people have moderator powers, but I do not know of anyone who is actually responsible for such moderation. (It seems that this would fall to Eliezer by default, but this does not seem to be Eliezer’s comparative advantage.)
ETA: A designated moderator is necessary even with a system such as I described in place since the automated detection can screw up. A human overseer spending, say, an hour on this each week, may be greatly productive if thy have the appropriate tools available.
I didn’t relaise that “falsehood” meant “not necessarily true”. I also remain unclear why a statment as guarded “believed to have a genetic component” would need to be qualiied with a further “maybe”.
Yes, it’s a continuum. That’s why I said “to some extent”, “hardly”, and “more … than”.
That would still mean that if I say “convert to Christianity or I won’t hire you” and you refuse, that wouldn’t count as discrimination. It would also mean that refusing to hire gay people would not be discrimination, as long as you only refused to hire people who participated in some activity, whether having gay sex, wearing rainbow flags, having a gay wedding, etc.
So what? I’m not particularly outraged that atheists aren’t allowed into the Swiss Guards.
For some reason, this sounds more problematic to me; not sure why.
Probably because you’ve been more exposed to rhetoric saying how horrible it is to be “anti-gay” than rhetoric saying how horrible it is to be “anti-atheist”.
Actually I think it’s the other way round, at least in the last few years. (There are many more atheists than gay people in my social circles.)
Alternate hypothesis: one has a choice and the other one does not.
You realize this is circling back around, right? The issue is that the two are both defined by choices, because the second group is not gay men but men who have consensual sex with men, and the second group’s membership is voluntary regardless of whether or not the first’s is.
Eugine_Nier responded, in effect, that the most likely reason to see those restrictions as being in different classes is the “who—whom?” of religious hiring restrictions being ‘okay’ and sexual-behavior-based hiring restrictions being ‘not okay’ because of status alignments of religion and sexual behavior.
That’s a good point.
What definition of “choice” are you using that makes that statement true?
I’m not sure there’s a coherent one here. But for issues such as this, what people, or society are comfortable with is a to a large extent a function of what intuitions they have. In this sort of context, the distinction is likely connected to intuitions of free will, whether or not that makes any sense.
I don’t see any a priori reason why those intuitions should apply to the case of religion but not homosexuality.
How a priori reason do you want it to be? There’s at this point a general consensus that sexual orientation, while culturally mediated, has a large genetic component. I don’t think that anyone thinks there’s say a gene for Christianity or the like. And while self-identified sexual orientation can change, that’s substantially less common an occurrence as changes in one’s religious self-identification. For example, in the US about half of all adults have changed their religion at least once in their lives. See here. Some of those people are people changing from one version of Protestantism to another, but even when you take them out, one is still talking about around a third of the population. And this is fairly well known- people understand that religious beliefs can change: indeed, many major religions have specific rules about how to handle conversions, and many forms of major religions (especially in Christianity and Islam) have active commandments to go and convert people.
Well, atheism is correlated with IQ and (ISTM) Openness to Experience, which are both somewhere around 50% inheritable.
Look at what I found by googling for
atheism twin studies!Yeah, well, Judaism is correlated with IQ as well :-D and I bet any non-mainstream religious beliefs will be correlated with Openness to Experience.
Well, I guess Jews and Wiccans would be as reluctant to get baptised in order to get a job as atheists are—possibly more so, insofar as I can easily imagine the latter thinking ‘if a lie is what you want, a lie is what you’ll get’ (there was a comment somewhere on LW to that effect, but I can’t find it).
Such a requirement would bother (to put it mildly) me much more as a Jew than it would as an atheist, FWIW.
Yes, on re-reading my comment it sounds like I was trying to win an award for the Understatement of the Year.
I’m not aware of any ‘consensus’ that sexual orientation has a ‘large’ genetic component. Some research suggests there is a genetic component, and it is known that there are developmental factors as well (i.e. what happens in the womb and afterwards) and also environmental factors. It is widely accepted that homosexuality is ‘not a (conscious) choice’ but that’s most definitely not the same as saying “it’s genetic”.
See other discussion in this subthread for evidence that there’s a large genetic component and that most papers in this context matter. I agree that there’s likely developmental and environmental issues at play, as well as stochastic effects.
And near as I can tell, the only things underlying this consensus are the “we can get it to show up on brain scans, therefore it must be genetic” fallacy and the accusation of being an EVIL HOMOPHOBE!!1!! hurled against anyone who questions it.
The fact that the kind of people responsible for these kinds of consensuses believe it is perfectly acceptable to promote falsehoods under the name of science for the “greater good” doesn’t exactly increase my confidence in it.
Twin studies show a strong genetic component. There’s also (weak) evidence for epigenetic effects. See here. There’s also circumstantial evidence of a link to female fertility.
The brain evidence is interesting, but it goes more to a lack of choice, rather than a genetic aspect. Of course, as with any complicated behavioral trait with some variation, it is likely that at least part of the trait is due to environmental effects at a young age, possibly including womb environment.
And you are A) Linking to a discussion where you and I already discussed exactly this and why your response didn’t make sense, and B) making a massive leap that from some political groups presenting selective evidence, that one should therefore doubt scientific studies. This does not follow.
The page you linked to doesn’t exactly present evidence of a strong genetic component (or much of a consensus for that matter).
Except it’s not evidence of lack of choice (unless you adopt a very specific kind of Cartesian dualism) either.
Your reasoning was basically “everyone lies thus some political group lying isn’t evidence against their other claims”. Not a particularly strong argument at the best of times, certainly not here were the situation is extremely analogous to the lie at the link (just substitute “transgender” for “homosexuality”).
It wasn’t just presenting selective evidence, it was getting BS or outright lies declared part of the scientific consensus.
Could you elaborate? For example, the estimate from the largest study in the page (3,826 pairs) seems pretty nontrivial: 39% of variance! That’s not small or trivial by any means—that’s getting up there with some twin estimates of intelligence. And especially since the shared-environment estimate is 0.
Of the studies in question, the only one which showed a weak correlation listed is Bearman and Brückner, which still showed a 7.7% concordance rate for male homosexuality. The female rate is lower, which shouldn’t be that surprising, given that the other studies included also showed lower concordance rates for females, and that there’s other evidence for female sexuality being more malleable than male sexuality. Moreover, the largest study in question, the Sweden study, used literally every single pair of twins born in the country, which makes for a much larger study and handles the selection bias problems. And that study agreed with the results of the other studies excepting Bearman and Bruckner.
What does this have to do with Cartesian dualism at all? For that matter, how is this at all relevant, since as I stated earlier, the matter under discussion is what is descriptively thought of as a choice or not by members of society. The entire point was discussing why someone would have a different reaction to the homosexuality discrimination issue than the atheism discrimination issue. In that context, colloquial intuitive notions of choice are relevant.
That’ isn’t what the argument is. Please reread that discussion.
Really? Did you see any evidence in that discussion that any aspect of this has had any influence on the scientific studies in question? Have they somehow managed to fake data and get it through? Do you think they’ve had papers get rejected? The only plausible sort of situation is selective granting, which requires specific aspects of the LGBTQE movement (not even generically but people who would agree with this lying idea, which the vast majority would not) to have somehow gotten positions in grant giving institutions. Do you have any evidence for that?
In isolation, this number tells us nothing. What is important is the gap between concordance rates for MZ, DZ, and siblings. There are several popular hypotheses that predict a large effect of prenatal environment. In fact, the particular paper give 7.7% MZ, 4.2% DZ, and 4.5% siblings, so it detects no effect of prenatal environment and does suggest genetics.
Unless you accept some form of Cartesian dualism you should expect every aspect of the mind to show up on sufficiently advanced brain scans, whether or not it is a choice. Thus, the brain evidence isn’t particularly interesting.
And my point is that this perception isn’t grounded in anything objective and thus itself needs an explanation.
I have, twice in the last few days in fact. Why don’t you try rereading it?
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume I misunderstood your argument there, if so could you state it more explicitly.
Well Julian practically admitted it.
Sometimes, generally pressure is applied to people who produce politically incorrect results. Look what happened to Mark Regnerus or Jason Richwine, or to use a more famous example James Watson.
Eugine, within 2 minutes of your comment above, I received a block downvote to all my recent comments regardless of subject. Given this thread, which I presume you must have already seen, my interest in whether this was your action should be clear. If you are attempting to simply ignore the issues, you may want to be aware that this is causing serious concerns and problems within the community, and at least one LW user has considered implementing a response of block downvoting all your comments and those of people with views similar to your own. This situation is creating a mindkilling political mindfield and it is in your and everyone else’s best interest for it to be headed off before the situation deteriorates. Therefore a straight answer from you as to whether you are involved in this would be both appreciated and in the best interest of the community.
If you think you can get away with ignoring ialdabaoth’s requests because of the user’s relatively low status, you should be aware that my own status on LW, while not very high, is likely not so low that simply ignoring me will be a remotely productive response.
You have made some valid points above, but I cannot given recent events discuss them or any other issue with you, until you address the community’s concerns here.
I would like to loudly add that I am very interested in the norms of polite discourse being followed on LW, and am throwing whatever status I have behind this request. Furthermore, if this turns out to be the sort of thing that is best resolved in PMs rather than comments, I am willing to facilitate conversations that way.
Attempted to reverse the effects of the block downvote. Note that any permanent solution to this problem cannot rely on the co-operation of possible defectors. If there is not a method for detecting such defections and preferably determing the source, it continues to be a viable method of asymmetric warfare.
Also might be a decent idea for someone to take formal responsibility for moderating the website. Several people have moderator powers, but I do not know of anyone who is actually responsible for such moderation. (It seems that this would fall to Eliezer by default, but this does not seem to be Eliezer’s comparative advantage.)
ETA: A designated moderator is necessary even with a system such as I described in place since the automated detection can screw up. A human overseer spending, say, an hour on this each week, may be greatly productive if thy have the appropriate tools available.
I didn’t relaise that “falsehood” meant “not necessarily true”. I also remain unclear why a statment as guarded “believed to have a genetic component” would need to be qualiied with a further “maybe”.
Let me get this straight… Are you trying to evaluate the truth of a statement by its position in a signaling game?