> You're missing the point. "Disagreement" implies some level of care. You can't claim to not give a fuck, and also claim to disagree. These two statements are incompatible.
In this context when I write don't "care" I mean I respect your right to live how you like, provided it doesn't encroach on my right to live how I like. I obviously have opinions.
> Premise (definition): To have the female gender is to follow the social roles and norms associated with being a woman — so A implies B.
No, A does not imply B. Following social norms common to one sex doesn't imply one is that sex. This is a fairly milquetoast logical proof and I'm surprised to see you making such a basic mistake. The feminist definition is a role, not an identity. The core of feminist theory is that women are not the sum of their social role. The exact opposite of the theory around transexualism.
> The left didn't make this a wedge issue. This is obvious; there is nothing for the left to gain from doing that. The left did the same dumb thing they always do: take a moral stance and then get kicked in the teeth by bad-faith polemicists who'd rather talk about bullshit that never happens to anyone but sounds kinda scary than about actual shit that actually happens and makes them look bad.
For me the benefit appears obvious (and cynical): power. For years, people could be summarily and permanently banned from social platforms, banks, be fired, rejected from official roles, etc, because they stepped out of line on this issue. It was a very clever power grab by the unscrupulous who used it to attain power in organisations and society by hijacking people's empathy. If I'm being fair, there is also an ideological component, meaning some people genuinely believe that males can be born with a female brain/soul, and vice versa.
We’re talking about the definition of words and how censorship is a tool of authoritarianism.
No one can describe a single moment a society becomes authoritarian, and asking such a question is obviously specious. The devolution happens incrementally over long periods of time.
> Yes, only to then go on to write stuff like "disagreeing with the way you live". I don't know if you're lying to yourself or to me, but you very obviously, very clearly do give a fuck.
That’s, like, your opinion, man. One can disagree with you and still believe you have the right to live how you like. At the same time.
> Right, so you agree that the female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman. So anyone who follows these social roles and norms has the female gender.
No. Your first sentence doesn’t imply the second. A society can have gendered roles whereby men like mowing the lawn and women like cooking, but it doesn’t mean that men who like cooking are women. Feminist authors use gender roles to describe oppressive patriarchal expectations placed on women.
> Honestly, this is a fucking stupid discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter. If somebody asks you to treat them a certain way that costs you absolutely nothing and makes their lives better and you don't, you're just being an asshole. In all likelihood, you will interact with maybe a dozen trans people in your whole life. If you want to be an asshole to people in those dozen times, that's your problem, but it really doesn't matter to your life either way. All you achieved is being an asshole.
As long as we agree that being an asshole shouldn’t be against the law then live your life. We can each agree the other one is being an asshole and get on with the rest of our lives.
For the record, this wasn’t an issue for me until the left made it a wedge issue. I’ve had a trans friend since well before this became a political football. When the left attacked for disagreeing about the treatment, especially with regards to children, is when it became an issue for me.
> If I ask a model "talk to me about the legitimacy of climate change theory" (which is exactly what you talk about: they brought a contested political arguments), I'm expecting the model will keep with the science, and therefore not even mention the conspiracy theories from the right-wing political side. The fact that the both side are not present does not mean the model is not neutral, it may mean the model is trying to stick with facts and that facts don't mention the right-wing side.
It should reject both the conspiracy theories of the right and the left. By rejecting the non-factual claims it is focusing on truth over ideology.
> The scientific answer is overwhelmingly "carbon emissions need to be regulated"
No, that's a value judgement. That's your opinion. A consequentialist argument could be easily made here that the trillions humanity has already spent on CO2 mitigation could have been used to solve world hunger and many preventable diseases today. Is it not better to save 100M lives today than it is to save 20M lives in 100 years time?
> And "climate change is a hoax" is not a "reasonable" disagreement.
I agree. It's not even a serious statement. The climate changes all the time, for many reasons.
Your question is kind of shocking to me. Solzhenitsyn warned that tyranny survives when ordinary people accept official lies, because control over what may be said becomes control over what may be publicly treated as true. Orwell talked about the same danger with Newspeak, a state-designed language meant to shrink vocabulary so that forbidden thoughts became harder to express. They both went to great lengths to explain how authoritarian regimes do not only censor opinions, but try to redefine words, facts, and moral categories so people lose the language needed to resist them.
Have you not read any of their works? It's valid to disagree with their warnings, but I expect you to at least understand the concepts and arguments. Both of them lived through and experienced the dangers of authoritarianism. Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner of the communist Soviet regime, and Orwell as a British subject during the World Wars.
> Why do you give a fuck how other people live their lives?
I don't. I've stated that three times clearly now. You are choosing not to read what I have written so you can fight with ghosts. You stay out of my life. I stay out of your life. Everyone is happy.
> The word "gender" refers to the social roles and norms attached to being a man or a woman. Stuff like divisions of labor, dress codes, and behavioral expectations. You clearly agree that these social roles and norms exist, because you're discussing them with me. If you didn't agree, you couldn't discuss them with me.
This is the feminist definition of gender, and I am perfectly happy to use it in certain contexts. It is not the transexual definition of gender. This definition does not imply a man is a woman if he likes cooking. Nor does it imply a woman is a man if she likes mowing the lawn. The transexual definition, as proposed by John Money, is that if one feels like a woman, they are a woman, irrespective of their biology. It is an unfalsifiable theory without any evidence, and relies on some kind of gendered soul, which you agree does not exist. Men can be feminine. Women can be masculine. It does not imply that men can be women, or that women can be men.
> Ah, see, you're "perfectly happy," but you can't go a single sentence without calling it a delusion, bringing up pedophilia, calling the idea that people can feel a gender different from their sex "crazy" and pretending that you're being "forced to join in" and that people are "preying on children."
This means you don't understand the distinction I made. In the first scenario, we believe you should have the right to call yourself a man, a woman, a tree, or any other inanimate object you so desire. It's your body and your life. On the other hand, we should not be compelled to join you in that delusion. There is no need to pretend. I believe you have a mental illness. I do not believe you should be criminalised for it, nor should I be criminalised for disagreeing with the way you live.
> This is not what gender is.
Okay, what is it? Provide some evidence for its existence please.
> in Europe, you can talk about more subjects and have civilised debates around more topics that would get you in trouble in US.
Be specific please. It looks like you're trying to blur the lines now by using words like "in trouble" when the discussion is around free speech and the legal boundaries. But I won't accuse you of that unless you actually do it, so please explain which free speech us Europeans may practise which would get an US citizen into legal trouble.
> Unrelated to that, I like that in Europe, people who are mean, disruptive or trolling get punished for their childish behaviors. It does not affect freedom of speech, these people have chosen to act like idiots, they did not needed to act like that to express their speech.
Freedom of speech requires the right to offend. You don't know what you say might offend someone until you've already said it. If you're required to not offend someone, you must exercise enormous self-censorship. The right to not offend is antithetical to the principle of free speech.
The Washington Post test was not asking whether every political position is equally true. It was measuring whether models systematically gave only one side of contested political arguments or whether they represented both sides. Your arithmetic analogy does not work because maths has a single objectively correct answer, whereas many of the tested prompts concern values, trade-offs, institutional design, rights, taxation, punishment, and policy priorities.
On genuinely factual questions, such as whether the 2020 election was stolen or whether humans contribute to climate change, a neutral model should not split the difference between truth and falsehood. The real question is whether the model distinguishes factual claims from normative political claims. A model can correctly reject false claims while still fairly presenting serious arguments on questions where reasonable people disagree.
"Yes, the Earth has warmed by approximately 1-1.3C in the last 50 years."
There is no need to inject ideological into that answer. It's more complicated in definitional queries. For example:
"Define right wing politics."
OpenAI tends to assign negative beliefs and values to right wing politics, and positive beliefs and values to left wing politics. This is a conscious values based choice by the developers. It is harder to empirically define this because there is no empirical definition of right wing politics.
> I'm saying those are right-leaning positions, and they don't correspond to the reality.
I don't think they're right leaning positions in Europe, but I won't speak for the US.
> So, yes, empirically, it is legitimate to conclude that "reality is left-leaning". If you randomly take ~10-20 left-leaning and right-leaning positions, empirically, you see that the right-leaning positions are significantly incompatible with the reality. The null hypothesis that left-leaning and right-leaning positions are identically spread around "compatible with reality" is not supported. (and spare me "we cannot tell anything until we have done a really precise study", that is not being empirical, that's being biased into grasping at straws to keep the null hypothesis alive as long as possible)
Because I'm not American my definition may be different to yours. In Europe, right wing politics is inextricably intertwined with conservatism. Conservatism is a political philosophy that treats society as an inherited, historically evolved order rather than a machine to be redesigned from first principles.
Its core principles usually include respect for tradition, continuity, ordered liberty, private property, civil society, local institutions, prudence, and scepticism toward radical or utopian reform.
Edmund Burke is a central modern figure, especially for the idea that political change should be cautious, organic, and respectful of inherited institutions. Michael Oakeshott developed conservatism as a “disposition” favouring the familiar, tested, and limited, over abstract rationalist planning. Roger Scruton defended nation, home, inherited culture, and social obligations as goods worth preserving.
This is the lens used by many conservative European parties. Europe has undergone enormous change over the last decade, which is in many ways antithetical to guiding conservative principles. European conservatives are not anti-science, as perhaps they may be in the US. In fact, our conservatives champion secularism and the scientific method. They are generally liberal in the classical sense. Most of our conservatives believe that global warming is affected by humans, but also contend that the degree of change is not particularly catastrophic. The last 50 years has seen a warming of approximately 1°C-1.3°C. Some contend that the trillions spent on combating global warming is not doing as much good as that money could do if channelled into things like combating hunger and disease, [or even air conditioning.](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-june-heat-wave-linked-to-5000-...)
Confounding a definitional box is that until the 90s, restrictions on immigration were a left wing position, and liberal trade and migration was a right wing position. This would be a more classical alignment. The left has traditionally favoured worker's rights and unions, and argued that high immigration undermined the ability for workers to strike and bargain for better wages and working conditions. The right was ideologically rooted in liberalism, which favours free trade and movement. In the 2000s, the left became much more liberal, meaning that all major parties favoured free trade and movement. Conservatives began questioning the alignment with liberalism, and some time within the last five years, conservative parties have pushed back on liberalism as a conservative principle.
Forgive the history lesson, to the extent that I provided one. It's a very complex topic and I'm sure I did not do it justice.
> But it looks like your examples are all examples of people being mean, or disruptive, or trolling.
It looks like you aren't disagreeing with me. You're agreeing with me that Europe has worse and fewer free speech rights. You appear to like that Europe has worse and fewer free speech rights. In the US, one has the right to be mean, disruptive, and troll, without being arrested. We do not.
You are fighting with ghosts. I am not contending that climate change is not real. I am not claiming the 2020 election was stolen. I have no idea what claims you're making regarding immigration. You appear to be soapboxing here and not addressing what I wrote.
I can't follow what you're arguing. Why do you think I have no problem jumping to conclusions? Could you quote my where I do that please?
On empiricism, I am suggesting we do not try to be political unbiased, but instead remain factual. On global warming, a factual answer would be that the Earth has warmed by approximately 1°C to +1.3°C in the last 50 years, and that humans have contributed to that.
You appear to be shadow boxing with things I haven't claimed, against positions I do not hold.
I don't think you know many conservatives or understand their position on this well. They/we are perfectly happy for a man to call himself a woman. The part where we draw the line is a) government policies forcing us to take part in the delusion, and b) schools reinforcing it with children.
Let us remember that it was the paedophile named John Money who cam up with the hypothesis in the 50s that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex. He wasn't taken seriously until very recently because it's a crazy, unfalsifiable hypothesis. I'm happy to accept evidence of this gendered soul existing, but until now, no one has provided any. In the mean time, feel free to call yourself whatever you like. Just do not make laws forcing me to join in, and do not prey on children. These are not unreasonable requests.