Where exactly is the physical strength of males necessary in modern society?
The only circumstance in which there are men strong enough to so something that women can't do is at the most elite level of athletics. Any role relevant to society that would require that level of strength, we have machines for, because the majority of men and women are not elite powerlifters, and because they probably need way more strength than is safe even for those elite athletes to require all the time.
And then yes women can give birth and breastfeed (though it doesn't seem like being raised on formula alone is much of a problem these days). I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.
People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.
> Where exactly is the physical strength of males necessary in modern society?
Bricklayers? Much manual labour. Some women can do it, some men cannot, but far more men can do it than women.
> People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.
We have very simple fixes for that - such as clothing and protective sun creams. The same does not apply to physical differences between men and women.
> I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.
Not as much as some people think they should. It really depends what specific views you are thinking of. There are important differences: for example, women do initially need more parental leave to recover from giving birth. I think its a good idea to give men as much, but with different timing. Pregnancy has huge physical effects for quite a long time.
It goes both ways too. There wold be real social advantages to having more men becoming nurses (which can benefit from physical strength) and teaching (so boys, especially disadvantaged boys, have male educated role models).
> We have very simple fixes for that - such as clothing and protective sun creams. The same does not apply to physical differences between men and women.
Brother do you hear yourself. Your key example, the thing holding your entire argument together was brick layers. Fucking... brick layers.
And you think we don't have anything to eskew gender differences? Brother, look around you. 99.9999% of jobs can be done by men and women thanks to modern technology. Including fucking war!
Because you know what's stronger than men? Guns. And you know who can hold guns? Women. So, there you go, that's why the US army accepts women.
While this is true, these are nothing burger examples. The world will not crumble if you don't help a nice lady put her luggage in the overhead compartment.
Yes, as a man, our "strength" is mostly for show and is redundant in modern society. Also most men are not even very strong because we live sedentary lives. Because - surprise! - 99.9999% of all economic activity has nothing to do with strength.
This isn't ancient Rome and you aren't a spartan. Most men are fatties sitting at an office job. They don't have, nor need, strength. They need statins and metformin.
There's lots and lots of jobs where physical strength makes a fuckton difference. I don't see construction workers, garbage people or figherfighters using exoskeletons yet.
Also, ask women how their mood and abilities swing during their cycles. Both menstrual and life cycle with menopause and stuff. Some have it easy, but many women I know have quite big swings in both cases. And yet modern society requires one to perform the same day in day out. Which works out pretty well for men, but for women... I'm not so sure.
There are women construction workers, garbage people, and firefighters. There are much better reasons why these fields have disproportionately fewer women than a biological barrier to the required level of strength.
I am interested to hear what career or societal role you think a women cannot or should not do because of menstrual related mood swings. Because it clearly isn't President of the United States or billionaire CEO.
There're always exceptions. But so far what I see it's 100-to-1 if not worse. And I'm not at all surprised that women ain't exactly keen of lugging around heavy weights. Especially due to damage it can do to women-specific health. Or reduced abilities abilities after childbirth for many women. Of course nowadays many women don't care about their reproductive health nor give births, so maybe we don't need societal norms around this anymore?
I don't think that women cannot or shouldn't do something. I see they don't exactly enjoy to suck it up and do the job regardless of their body needs.
We as a society used to tell boys to „man up“. Now that's frowned upon (and that's good). But now we started to tell girls and women to „man up“ and ignore their cycles. And both are just as bad. At least we should give teenage girls and young-to-middle-age women few extra days off school/work in a month. Scheduling might become a nightmare with irregular cycles though. Dealing with menopause for significant portion of women is awful too. But I've no idea how modern economy could deal. Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.
I somewhat agree with you, but I think there is an underlying cause. We are generally not accepting of individual differences, needs, and commitments outside work. We have improved in some ways (e.g. with regard to making adjustments for disability) but there is a long way go.
> Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.
I think individual specialty and massive group specialty is somewhat different.
For individual specialty (be it skills/abilities or lack of them), people can choose career or life paths accordingly. E.g. I’ve met a dead/mute constructions dude. He specialized in line of work where he works solo. If I accidentally wasn’t home while he was here, I wouldn’t have ever noticed.
On the other hand when you have massive groups with some specialty that match similar pattern… Over time it becomes a „norm“. It's not like some people decided what gender norms we should have a millennia ago and rolled with. It was rather a society trying to accommodate some groups of people with some skills and abilities and gender norms becoming a thing were a side effect.
As for more lax working conditions all round, it would be nice. But I’m not sure how modern economy would handle that in a fair way. And once you start institutionalizing more lax conditions for certain groups… I want to see that shitshow.
Can you first define what you'd be comfortable considering as evidence before I spend time on this? I don't want to provide research just so the other party complains that there's still some cultural bias somewhere.
Also, what kind of humans do you generally interact with? How many of these are children?
>What differences in social roles have been proven "necessary"?
Given that we're in a huge democraphic crisis which will bring untold disaster and misery, a huge depression crisis, marriage crises, and a loneliness epidemic, perhaps we're not the best arbiters of whether they've been proven "necessary" or not.
As for the questions, to some degree they indeed do, so partly yes, but also those differences in treatment are not on a case by case basis, but on average.
If the west would stop vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin, we'd realize that humanity as a whole does not have that much of a demographic problem. "We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments, unless people are honest about racism.
>we'd realize that humanity as a whole does not have that much of a demographic problem.
Humanity as a whole has a demographic problem. A few countries are just outliers (being still quite above > 2.1), but nowhere enough to offset anything at a global scale, and besides, they're on the decline too, just earlier in the curve.
Second, caring about your ethnic culture is not the same as "vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin". It's just not treating nations as comprised of interchangable consumer/worker units whose shared culture and history (or lack thereof) doesn't matter.
Most countries have a long history tied to a culture created from one or a handful of ethnicites, they're not just pieces of land for settling associated with a civic contract, like the us has been (and of course even that came at the erasure of the native cultures and populations).
>"We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments
They're totally compatible if you don't treat people like interchangable units arbitrarily exchanged, but as humans with a past, a history, an ethnicity, a culture, and so on, they've build over time.
Same way you wouldn't just exchange one of your kids with another kid, but that doesn't mean you think the other people's kids are inferior.
Ethnicity and culture are not static concepts. They change over time. The culture in central Europe, North America, the Middle East etc. 500 years ago looked very different from today. The ethnicity too. People have always migrated and that's part of where ethnicity and culture are coming from in the first place. And that's a good thing.
Nobody talks about individuals or people as arbitrarily interchangeable units. That's a populist exaggeration.
The "natural state" of a culture and an ethnic group is the continuous exchange and intermingling with other cultures and ethnic groups. It's a success of the nationalist right to make people believe that it's the opposite.
Of course the language abilities of LLMs is not proof of consciousness at all. If some alien entity made a model that was truly just 10^1000 hard-coded if-statements to respond to every possible question, it might seem way better than our best models now but would obviously not be conscious.
The problem is just that even in the most lousy, turing test-failing LLM there's no guarantee that not a single subsection of these giant neural nets hasn't replicated the basic computational blocks of consciousness found in something even as simple as a snail.
> a model that was truly just 10^1000 hard-coded if-statements to respond to every possible question
That's a really compelling argument against the Turing Test. But in order to build such a machine, you would need an enormous amount of compute to populate the answers. The interesting question is then whether consciousness emerged while doing all that pre-compute.
Not really. (a) People hate responding to surveys and hate emails, you're more likely to lose users than to get data (b) there's no way you're surveying people's in a way that gets you information like "time spent on a page" or "time between commits" or whatever.
This is just nonsense tbh. Surveys and customer outreach solve completely different problems from analytics.
I agree you can't practically get the same information as you could with telemetry.
Survey data is still real data that can be used for "analytics".
Some people also hate telemetry. It feels invasive. I have a guess about what direction the percentage of consumers who hate telemetry is moving toward.
I'm not taking a side on whether a product should add telemetry. I'm rejecting the absurd notion that these suggestions are at all giving the same information.
No one claimed that they give the same information, only that it's viable to produce a good product that solves your user's needs without using telemetry. The whole point is that you don't get the same information, e.g. no private data that the users haven't provided informed consent for upload to your servers.
Side comment: |> and %>% aren't the same btw! The newish base pipe (|>) is faster but doesn't support using the dot (.) placeholder to pipe into something other than the first argument of a function, which can sometimes make things a little cleaner.
The base pipe has an underscore as a placeholder. From the docs:
Usage:
lhs |> rhs
Arguments:
lhs: expression producing a value.
rhs: a call expression.
Details:
[...]
It is also possible to use a named argument with the placeholder
‘_’ in the ‘rhs’ call to specify where the ‘lhs’ is to be
inserted. The placeholder can only appear once on the ‘rhs’.
I believe this wasn't added in the initial implementation of the base pipe so some didn't realize it got included later, and still does not let you use constructs like e.g. combining multiple transformations of the input on the rhs. But for most purposes it's certainly sufficient
If you force something major and permanent on somebody without their consent for no good reason, of course it would be evil. It would be evil to force somebody gay to be straight and it would be evil to force somebody straight to be gay, that has nothing to do with the goodness or badness of being straight or gay. Hair dye is temporary.
All of the arguments in this thread seem to be treating this research's outcome as deleting a person, and applying a corresponding moral judgement thereto. But it is not!
I personally find that choosing to not have a child with Down Syndrome by engineering away the possibility in advance is no worse than choosing not to have a child at all, and better than aborting a viable but affected fetus, because no life is ended. I am not a murderer for choosing not to have any child at all because I feel that my genes should not be imposed on another generation, and I am not a Nazi for saying that if I had a child, I would take any available humane steps to ensure it received the best subset of genetic material from the set available to it. I would, in fact, argue that leaving the creation of a whole person who will have to experience life for 80 years to a series of genetic coin flips is morally reprehensible. Just because we've always done it that way doesn't make it desirable or humane. I welcome this development.
All analogies are flawed and I think you’re taking the wrong message here.
If doctors gave mothers a vaccine that prevented down syndrome, at a high level, that would be the same as putting an anti-down syndrome drug in the water supply.
The point of the example is not about whether putting things in the water supply is good or bad.
It could be true because their surrounding/family... would take care better of them than the average person, that I might understand, but still, it's really a stretch.
can you really say you're happy with something when you don't know what life without it looks like? You adapt. You make peace with it. That's human nature. Doesn't mean it's the best option.
People with legs are objectively superior to people born without legs. This doesn't imply those without have no value but it would be pretty silly to deliberately bring people into the world without legs if you could easily prevent or fix the problem
If you start with hypothetical demographic groups A and B that are for all intents and purposes exactly identical, but you implement a system such that if A commits a crime they have a 10% chance of being caught and if B commits a crime they have a 50% chance of being caught, you will achieve the following:
1. More short-term crime prevention than a system catching 10% of A's crimes and 10% of B's crimes (good!)
2. Enforce a societal belief that A is intrinsically better than B (bad!)
3. Disproportionately burden children, families, and communities in B than A, causing them to indeed perform worse in everything than those in A (bad!)
4. As a result of 2 & 3 it is not a stretch to say simply causing B to do more actual crime (potentially negating point 1 entirely)
If you believe that crime enforcement is not for the sake of vengeance but instead something done to improve the well-being, safety, and happiness of citizens, you may see that inequality=bad just as crime=bad. How to best solve this trolley problem is complicated but it's important that people are aware that it is complicated before firing off an answer.
Most crime is intra-racial. Group A will do better over time, with fewer people becoming victims of crime, if it is subject to better policing, because more of the malevolent actors within it will be incarcerated or deterred from engaging in (mostly intra-racial) predatory behavior.
That is only part of the equation. You may be removing more malevolent actors in the immediate short term, but depending on how that policing is done, you might also be creating more malevolent actors too. Overpolicing a group can create distrust between the community and the police. Once you feel the system does not care about you or treats you unfairly, there is little reason for why you should care about it. And if P(Caught|Group X) != P(Caught), the system is treating you unfairly.
I would argue we as society don't want crime to stop simply for the sake of crime stopping (or for prison labor), but ultimately because we want to feel happy and safe from harm and unjust treatment. The systems we design need to factor in the humanness of the police and their communities and make sure they are not set up in a way that loses sight of that bigger picture.
The only circumstance in which there are men strong enough to so something that women can't do is at the most elite level of athletics. Any role relevant to society that would require that level of strength, we have machines for, because the majority of men and women are not elite powerlifters, and because they probably need way more strength than is safe even for those elite athletes to require all the time.
And then yes women can give birth and breastfeed (though it doesn't seem like being raised on formula alone is much of a problem these days). I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.
People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.
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