Category Archives: Education

Still More TERF Wars Stuff

Posted on by
Reply

The New York Times has an opinion piece up titled Trump Cannot Define Away My Existence. As  Daniel Patrick Moynihan once noted, a person is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. Using someone’s actual genetic sex to determine his (XY) or her (XX) “gender” instead of using some imaginary “gender” the person wishes were true does not erase that person’s existence. However, it does sort them in an objective manner into categories such as which restroom to use.

Meanwhile, there’s a piece over at The Federalist taking note of the fact that the law the Obama Administration used to allow people to select their own gender for Federal government purposes bans discrimination on the basis of sex. Sex is something that is biologically determined, so it would seem that the current administration is correct in returning government regulations and procedures to a scientific basis.

The changes are to take place under Title IX section of a 1972 law that bars sex-based discrimination in federally funded education institutions, but could have far broader implications, in areas such as single sex settings and set aside programs.

Progressives are predictably outraged by the fact that the Trump administration will no longer allow pseudoscience to define the words “man” and “woman,” but this is a common-sense move that will help the government better protect women’s rights and avoid the confusion of trying to regulate the myriad genders that have been invented in the past several years.

It is important to understand that this change will in no way affect how trans people or anybody else choose to label themselves. Rather, it will allow the government to have an objective standard when implementing federal programs. Without such a standard, a haphazard set of rules exists as to who qualifies for legal protections under Title IX.

The Truth isn’t bigoted.

There Are Differences

Posted on by
2

Why are the so many more men than women in jail? Why are there so many more women in nursing and men in engineering? The answer is that while both men and women are the same in terms of intelligence and other mental traits on average, the standard deviations are not the same for both sexes for all traits. Thus, because the standard deviation for agreeableness is narrower for men, it is likely that at the extremes of the population more men will be disagreeable and wind up as criminals or will be more interested in things than people and wind up as engineers. A similar difference in the standard deviations for general intelligence means that men make up the majority of morons and the majority of geniuses.

Stacy McCain has a post up about the censorship of a politically incorrect presentation made by a scientist from CERN who took notice of the relative lack of women in the field of nuclear physics.

Evidence of innate behavioral differences between men and women (i.e., in terms of group averages) has certainly not been “discredited.” Herrnstein and Murray have explained in The Bell Curve that average group differences are not predictive of any individual’s ability. However, when institutions start implementing “diversity” formulae based on numerical representation of groups, we discover that these differences matter very much. When activists complain that certain groups are “underrepresented” in some area, and turn this into a political grievance, the result is likely to be an erosion of standards and the use of deliberate discrimination to achieve a more “diverse” outcome. Institutions are hijacked for a political agenda, so that CERN — which presumably should be devoted to pursuing advancements in nuclear physics — is now instead expected to “encourage women” and “promote diversity.” This is similar to the mentality that produced the Atlanta public school cheating scandal.

Read the whole thing.

Life is becoming like a series of scenes from old Monty Python episodes. Nobody Everybody expects the Spanish Feminist Inquisition!

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

Posted on by
4

Zach Beauchamp has an error-filled post over at Vox claiming that leftist professors are more likely to be fired for political speech than conservatives are. He cites the data an conclusions from a Canadian study showing that between 2015 and 2017 three times as many leftist profs were fired for their speech than conservatives.

When dealing with probability, something is considered more likely if the odds of its occurrence are higher than another event. If there are roughly ten times as many leftists professors as there are conservatives (and that’s close to the Real World average) and only three times as many are being fired, then the odds that any given conservative will be fired are roughly three times greater than that happening to any given leftist. The exact value will depend a bit on the size of the population of profs. Math is hard, but that doesn’t change the meaning of likely.

Beauchamp uses his erroneous conclusion to spin up an attack of the actions some states legislatures have taken to protect free speech on public college campuses. As organs of the State public schools are constrained by the First Amendment.

In Wisconsin, the strictest of these states, rules drafted by the state university’s board of regents allow students to be expelled if they are found to have disrupted the speech of other students three times.

Protecting free speech on campus by expelling students for their political activism: just what the First Amendment’s drafters intended.

Well, yes, that’s exactly what the Founders intended. The right to peaceably assemble implies the right not to have that assembly disrupted. Violence and intimidation are not protected forms of speech.

Beauchamp seems to have trouble with both probability and civics.