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Being double jointed is something you are born with.

Being male is something you are born with.

Being male and competing against females is something you choose to do.


> naturally occurring genetic outliers among men unrelated to gender

This is just not true. Many sports are categorized by weight for the most obvious example.


Yes. Which is what I proposed for all differences. Note that classifying by weight is not banning athletes like is happening in the olympics.

Heavy weight boxers are banned from competing against feather weight boxers.

If you are going to insist ontologically that men are women and women are men then words have no meaning and you aren't ceding any ground at all.

But that's not what they said.

Yes it is. Note the parenthetical.

>(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)

This is incoherent as an argument. It conditions the category on checking off boxes on a medical treatment list. I hope it's not necessary to explain why this is absurd.


I read the statement as follows:

There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.

Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt

I’m unclear on what you find absurd about this?


> There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.

But that’s not how it’s defined. People have been using that word in every language humans ever invented for thousands of years to mean biological female. If you want to argue that there is something else that isn’t biological sex and you want to invent a word for it, go nuts, but “woman” is already defined. Words can and do change definitions over time, of course. If it’s your contention that the definition by consensus has already changed, say so, but there are billions of people on this earth who haven’t got the message, which seems odd for something determined by consensus of the people who use language.

Putting that aside, since sports are about physicality and accomplishing things in the real world, it makes no sense to base them on “identity” - something that cannot be detected or defined by anyone but the self identifier - rather they should be based on physical aspects of reality.


I’m not defending this definition, but I will point out that gender has never been about the chromosomes you were born with. It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.

Plus it’s totally normal for words to have more technical detail than they first appeared. The idea of a sex binary doesn’t fully exist so we’d need something to deal with that anyway.

I personally support segregation based on hormones as the fairest option available. Otherwise if you use purely a genetic test there are plenty of women with high t levels without an sry gene and no one disputes that high t levels confer a biological advantage in many sports


Going even further back, gender denoted, originally, a linguistical construct associated with sex but not strictly dependent on it, as seen on romance languages like Spanish, Portuguese, etc. [1] There, words have their own gender and, sometimes, the gender of the word and the sex/social gender of the subject may disagree. Ex.: "ant" in Spanish is "hormiga", but this noun is exclusively feminine with no masculine form.

[1] https://etymologyworld.com/item/gender


> It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.

I don't know any culture which defined gender by how you dress and how long your hair is rather than what is between your legs. You would be called a girly boy or a boyish girl.

So girly and boyish is how you are perceived, girl and boy is your sex, that is how almost every culture defined it through all time.


This part:

>except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt

"I took a drug, therefore I am now a woman" is not a reasonable position to hold. The debate starts out with one based on an identity, and then in the very next formulation reduces that identity to which medicines you take.


No, but that’s not what the statement is saying. It’s arguing that we should add the minimum restrictions we can to the women’s sports category and that hormones might be a reasonable one

This started out with a claim that “trans women are women full stop”, which implies that there’s no difference in the categories, and has since retreated to “in order for trans women to compete as women, they have to take these medicines”.

So which is it?


This implies that males who identify as women but do not undergo HRT are not women in the context of sports (and their gender in other contexts remains ill defined, especially in the absence of perverse incentive). This is a form of misgendering, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.

    This is a position that one could take up, but it comes
    at a steep cost. It holds the societal acceptance of
    transgenderism hostage to a biological account of
    sex-gender. This is problematic for several reasons.

    Moreover, it is worth highlighting the problems with
    suggesting that sex, as biologically based, determines
    the gender with which one psychologically identifies
    [...] Second, whatever criterion is offered to ground
    this similarity would inevitably disqualify many women,
    for not all women share the same hormone levels,
    reproductive capacity, gonadal structure, genital
    makeup, and so on. (Tuvel 2017)

Again I don’t take it be saying that. It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic so we should require hrt so that elite sport doesn’t require trans women to skip hrt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165

Such a common pattern, I'm tired of seeing it. "That's not what it's saying, those words actually mean..." again and again, ad infinitum. A perverse form of moving the goalposts. Your reply has no relation whatsoever to what was previously stated, it is a new argument entirely.


Nope, I’m consistently saying the same thing. When have I said something else?

> It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic

This was never said by anyone until you came along with that comment, which is a totally different idea (effectively a non sequitur). Can you quote who echoed the same argument?


I said "Sports should only be segregated by this <gender identity> category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt"

That was trying to elaborate on citruscomputing's argument where they said "Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care."

I'm rephrasing those two points. Apologies if I initially described that badly, but I'm just restating the perverse incentive they were talking about


All biological categories are fuzzy around the edges. Those fuzzy edges do not invalidate the category. The existence of small #'s of people with actual physical intersex conditions (not "I feel like <x>") in no way conflicts with humans being sexually dimorphic.

Exactly.

If it took 90 minutes + a Claude Code subscription then the most anyone else is going to be willing to pay for the same code is... ~90 minutes of wages + a Claude Code subscription.

Ofc the person earning those wages will be more skilled than most, but unless those skills are incredibly rare & unique, it's unlikely 90 minutes of their time will be worth $100k.

And ofc, the market value of this code could be higher, even much higher, the the cost to produce it, but for this to be the case, there needs to be some sort of moat, some sort of reason another similarly skilled person cannot just use Claude to whip up something similar in their 90 minutes.


This is what happens to every software valuation when production cost drops to near zero. The moat was never the code. Companies still pricing themselves on engineering effort are going to have a rough conversation with investors once any competitor can replicate the core product in a weekend. The only things that still hold are proprietary data and distribution lock-in.

It's open source scratching an itch. But 99.9% of coders wouldn't know what the library is for. Those that do don't use agents for coding (in my experience sample size 1).

Then we could say your initial estimate for the value was overestimated?

So public sector unions can do no wrong? Can never ask for too much? The public, and by extension, the politicians that they elect, is never allowed to question or refuse their demands?

What happens when a creative writer pens an influential treatise on economic and politics, but it turns out he was completely wrong on many key empirical aspects of human behaviour, leading to tens of millions of deaths, yet his followers will not see his failure and keep trying to turn over society to produce his false utopia?

I'm not sure what you're referring to. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations?

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They are implying the higher classes will cull the rest.

The comment you just made will also be scraped and added to LLM training corpora.

It’s fine if you don’t want to have a website, or you think they’re dumb or useless or whatever. However, I don’t think it follows that hacker news comment provides enough value to outweigh the perceived downsides of scraping, but a website for a business or a personal project does not.


That's the point; there's not much practical difference anymore between a comment posted on a site I don't own and content posted on one I do. In both cases, it will be mined by corporations who want to capture all possible traffic.

Yes, you are correctly articulating the downside of posting both on platforms and on your own website . I just think you are neglecting the other side of the ledger - the benefits or upside of each.

4 disguised promotion submissions in 2 weeks including this one, 0 contributions on any other topic except your own product. Give it a rest, go buy some ads or something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47267204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47273958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47301395


> the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must

So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with: a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.

Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.


Wow, so now the US oil barons who lobbied Trump to kill renewables and EVs are even worse than Mohammed "Bonesaw*" bin Salman Al Saud? That's really something, if you look at it that way...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...


Either you're too smart for me or I just can't follow you, but could you please expand a bit on your comment? I find it hard to link it to the parent, but I realize that may be on me.

Sorry, it was referring more to the grandparent comment, that referred to Saudi Arabia behaving more responsibly than the US, and Mohammed bin Salman is of course the crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia.

They're comparing Saudi Arabia to a drug dealer; I don't think they're ascribing any moral virtue to the Saudi regime. They just believe the Saudis are acting more intelligently.

How you use worse implies a wider judgment than how someone behaves on a single issue. Real people are more complicated than Disney characters.

Yes? I don't think you can argue in good faith that the latter causes more total harm and damage than the former. It's really quite something to look at it in a different way..

How many people have Trump’s wars in Venezuela and Iran killed?

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