Sam Smith comes out as genderqueer

October 25, 2017

On 10/24/2017 at 2:21 PM, StrawberryBlond said:

By the way, everyone, I was following this story online and I looked through the comment section and saw 2 separate people claiming that they went to school with Sam and can confirm he's lying about this for publicity and attention. I didn't notice the first time I read it that Sam claimed that he wore make up, false eyelashes, Doc Martens, leggings and long fur coats to school. I thought he just meant in general, but no, he said he went to school like this. Most British schools require uniforms, some of which even cover what coat you wear (not even denim jackets are allowed at many schools) and a lot of schools also don't allow make up. Sure enough, both these people claimed that Sam never wore such things to school and as they went to a strict Catholic school, uniform restrictions were paramount and anyone who came in wearing make up was either told to wash it off or sent home. They said that Sam never dressed like this - "quite the opposite, actually." And yeah, I don't know of any British Catholic school that allows its students to wear the attire and make up he was describing.

All in all, it sounds like he's highly exaggerating to jump on a bandwagon. And if he felt just as much female as he did male, he would be showing his feminine side a good 50% of the time but no, whenever he's performing or in an interview or at an awards show, he's either in jeans and a t-shirt or a suit with no make up on. So, what's the truth, Sam? Also, "feeling like a woman" is about a whole lot more than wearing a dress and make up. As a woman, I can clarify that most genuinely.

I brought up conservatives to point out that a lot of liberals are guilty of the same crimes they always vilify conservatives for (automatically believing everything they hear from other liberals, only trusting liberal news sources, arguing the validity of facts and statistics if they don't support a liberal viewpoint, using any excuse to push a liberal agenda, defending other liberals unquestionably, etc). You don't need a "credible study" to back up this claim. You can't get studies to do with this stuff anyway. If you want to see it, just live life and look at liberal media (with a critical eye) and you'll witness it. I used to be a traditional liberal who never trusted conservatives and labelled them as out-of-touch people with close-minded viewpoints. Then I got a bit older and realised how limited this view was and how liberals were guilty of the same things in reverse and could really rival the conservatives when it came to refusing to listen, being arrogant and refusing to acknowledge facts that they didn't like. I'm not making up any narratives or contradicting myself, you're just struggling to accept what I'm saying. And I never said that it's just liberals who suffer from this. I'm saying exactly what you're saying - every group can be guilty of this. And that's why liberals need to stop acting that they're immune to it.

I was just saying above how every group does it to some extent. But every group also thinks they don't do it. It's a natural thing to refuse to look inward but we've got to try harder to do it. I'm not attacking, I'm not giving a narrative, I'm just being critical towards my own. Blasphemy, I know.

You weren't making it clear what you wanted me to provide sources on. The idea of whether gender queer was a real thing or my critique of liberals. For the first one, there is no scientific proof that gender queer or any of these other "genders" is genuine, it's an undiscovered realm that science hasn't looked at yet. And as for my critique of liberals, well, you just need to search "liberal media lies" online, but Blaire White's top ten round-up will get you started. And don't just glance over it because she's not liberal, she looks at each case from a completely non-biased viewpoint (#1, #5, #6, #7, #8 and #9 are the most shocking):

I wasn't trying to blanket all liberals, I just said a lot of them suffer from certain problems that they think they don't have. Maybe provide sources of your own before you criticise me. As you'll also have seen from my paragraph before my replies, I've exposed how Sam is likely lying about the extent of his clothing choices for publicity and attention.

I never said he can't do what makes him happy, I just disagreed that gender queer is real. Science hasn't backed it as of yet, nor has it backed any of these countless other "genders" that have come to light. Personality and preferences are not the same thing as gender identity and I think that's what's being confused here.

And I didn't make sweeping generalisations.

How is what I'm saying ironic? The longest word/high faluting phrase I used was probably "definition." As opposed to other people on this thread coming away with stuff like "psychological," "sociological" and "anthropological."

Blaire white is literally my favorite political commentator so thanks for posting her. She's a total goddess.

October 26, 2017

3 hours ago, StrawberryBlond said:

I can't speak for English schools for this but that's certainly not the case in Scotland. From what I've seen, schools all over Britain require you to wear a uniform your entire school life. However, England does have the concept of sixth form college which is basically like a dry run of university, so you're allowed to wear what you want. But as some people who'd been to school with him said, he never wore stuff like this. And when I say bandwagon, I mean the "gender nonconforming" trend as of late. It's now all the rage to claim that you're not completely cisgender, that you identify as multiple genders or none at all. Because this idea has taken off, its led people who were perfectly comfortable with who they were to claim that they're now something else and are in a rush to put a label on themselves, it's like peer pressure. And some are definitely just doing it for attention and to be cool and edgy. Appealing to the SJW market is big business now. Sure, it's a polarising business plan but there's a lot of people out there who will now be drawn to Sam just for the reason that he is different from everyone else now. It's shallow, but that's just how things work. The gay community got majorly interested in him after he came out and admitted his whole debut album was about a guy. So, while appealing to niche markets may seem risky, it's actually very lucrative. So many female artists lied/exaggerated about being bi when they started out after Gaga made it popular to confess this sort of thing. The record labels told them to do it to reel in the LGBT community as well as straight males who were turned on by the thought of 2 girls together but liked knowing that they still had a chance.

I'm not degrading him for no reason, I'm making valid criticism of something very real. I would never bully someone, by the way. He's a celebrity, he's put himself out there to be judged. It's not the same thing.

I really don't know what to say to all this. All the jargon just put me right off. Try speaking normally. You can't find every single liberal online and look at every time they cite or don't cite a source. That's just common sense. I'm just asking you to live life and observe liberals. You don't have to carry out studies.

When I said "look with a critical eye," I wasn't throwing out the concept of science and statistical analysis, just asking people to observe. I don't see any liberals calling for studies on whether or not conservatives always provide sources or not, they just assume that conservatives are always wrong, they don't need studies for that. Funny, huh?

I honestly don't really understand what you're asking here. And I've been to university. I'm not going to conduct studies of my own, I don't have the time and no one's paying me. You don't have to go to that extent to criticise your own. Just act normally. The fact that liberals gets so defensive when their way of life is questioned is proof that there's a severe lack of inward thinking involved. It's a self-centeredness superiority complex that needs seen to.

I am speaking normally. There is "jargon" because explaining critical thought involves words that are not used in everyday language, because we do not everyday speak about thought itself. Nevertheless, the words are very simple to understand and easily googled. Of course you can't find every single liberal online, just like you can't find every single rock to test if it falls to the ground to come to the conclusion that gravity exists. It's called taking a sample. It's called designing an experiment. You can actually calculate the probability that the results of your sample were from random chance versus some underlying cause. That's called statistical analysis. I'm not expecting you to conduct the study, I'm just baffled that you would suggest that such an easily quantifiable topic (that means countable) would not be able to be studied and therefore you can absolve yourself of the burden of proof for your claims. I know you weren't "throwing out" science, but for someone that talks a lot about being critically minded (often in contrast to liberals and SJW), you have refused to apply the basic tenants of critical thought in your own life. Critical thought means systematic thought. It is literally the exact opposite of "common sense" and "just live and observe." I already explained in my last comment why the human brain isn't capable of coming to rational conclusions without systematic thought, so I don't know why you are repeating this suggestion as if living and observing will ever get you close to an accurate world view. "Common sense" means "I didn't bother to actually collect data, control for variables, or control for biases, and therefore have no systematic way of approaching what I have experienced and observed, nor did I look up any sources that did, so I'm just going to draw a conclusion based on what I feel is right." The whole point of my comment is that that way of going about your life is literally the furthest thing in the world from critical thinking, and if you genuinely cared about critical thinking, and not just being able to claim you are a critical thinker when you actually aren't, you would have some understanding of and concern about of all the things you just called "jargon" and "off-putting" : empiricism, experimental design, quantifiability, controlling of variables, cognitive biases, heuristics, logical fallacies, statistical analysis, and statistical significance. If these are "off-putting" to you, and you believe you can come to rational conclusions about the world without careful consideration of these, then you are absolutely not a critical thinker. You are a common-senser and have no room to be criticizing other liberals and SJW's for not being critical thinking themselves.

This isn't being defensive, this is explaining actual critical thought 101 to someone that consistently accuses others of lacking it. Your refusal to cite a source *in a very post about liberals refusing to cite sources* was dripping with too much irony to not comment, and the last line of your last one is too. Girl, get some self-awareness. Read a book on critical thinking if you actually want to come on here and accuse others of lacking it. Just because you believe other liberals don't do it (again, citation needed) doesn't absolve you of your burden of proof when you make claims, and enforcing the burden of proof in debate is not "getting defensive." It's asking the other party to hold their own and not waste your time.

October 26, 2017

21 hours ago, scallywally said:

You are deluded?!! oh my god. What backwards town are you from? The funny thing is you believe what you are saying is true.

Firstly you compare your own Scottish agenda and then you think Gaga made to say that sortve thing popular?? ****, have you never heard of Marlene Dietich, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Madonna, Annie Lennox, Boy George, Marilyn, Prince?????

You are a lost cause. I love the fact you added that you have been to Uni. That's what Trump says everytime somebody calls him stupid. You say you have found facts opposite to what Sam said without showing any proof then you say no one is going to pay you for doing studies of your own. (What to get a grasp of real life? You shouldn't need to be paid to learn how the world works)

Ask for your student loan back. Waste of money.

None of you agreeing or putting down this are Gaga fans, or brain dead and don't listen to a word she says.

What am I so deluded about? Tell me.

I'm not comparing a "Scottish agenda," I'm merely saying that where I'm from, we don't have the concept of uniforms stopping after GCSE level, so it wasn't my first thought when I think of dressing however you want at school. It's weird, when I saw some tv programmes set in English schools when I was young, the kids sometimes didn't wear uniforms which I thought was weird as we know that's not the case in reality (my only theory is that the production company didn't want to spend money on uniforms for all the lead actors and extras so just told them to come in their own clothes). And not everyone goes to sixth form college anyway - do we even know if Sam completed his education? And Gaga did make "female singer coming out as bi" popular. So few people did this before then. So many more started coming out right from the beginning of their careers after this (Nicki Minaj, Jessie J, Azealia Banks, Angel Haze, Halsey...). I've even read articles about how Nicki and Jessie basically lied about their feelings because they forced to by their labels because it had become such a trend lately.

I didn't add that I've been to uni to brag about being smart, I said it because I was pointing out that all this jargon confuses me even though I ran into it at uni (been out of practice with it for a long time, though), so imagine how much it confuses someone who's never been confronted with it?

The fact that science doesn't support all these new genders (yet) is all the evidence you need for the moment. Liberals used to fail to support something until it could be proven by science and statistics but now it's a case of "this person believes this condition is genuine, therefore, it must be true." And the suggestion is that I should carry out a wide scale study of all the millions of liberals worldwide. I don't see how I'm supposed to do that. I think I need to get paid to work out how the world works when it involves lots of time and research that most of us don't have.

Are you serious? You think my university education was wasted because I have different opinions to you? Wow. I think it opened my mind enough to know that such a viewpoint is the opposite of progressive.

I can be a fan of Gaga while also having my own mind. I support LGBT rights and being whoever you want to be - I think that's all Gaga's putting forward. Just because I don't agree with every little thing that my fave believes in doesn't mean I'm not a true fan. Being a fan of an artist is about the music more than anything.

21 hours ago, Chic said:

Blaire white is literally my favorite political commentator so thanks for posting her. She's a total goddess.

I definitely don't agree with her on everything, especially her anti-feminist views. I just think she's a bit too sheltered in some ways and is lucky enough to never have had extreme sexism happen to her. And even if she hasn't, she doesn't seem to realise that there are a whole lot of other Western women who have gone through unimaginable amounts of sexism in life, so it's by no means an outdated problem that ended a few decades ago, like she's tried to claim before. I've said for a long time that anyone who thinks that we don't need feminism anymore is either a man or an extremely lucky, sheltered woman. Blaire can very much be a "if it doesn't happen to me, it doesn't happen to anyone else either" kinda person, which is grating. But yeah, there's a lot of other issues where she's absolutely spot on. I just wish she would put them down a bit more respectfully sometimes, without resorting to unnecessary mocking complete with valley girl hair flipping.

18 hours ago, rpggal said:

I am speaking normally. There is "jargon" because explaining critical thought involves words that are not used in everyday language, because we do not everyday speak about thought itself. Nevertheless, the words are very simple to understand and easily googled. Of course you can't find every single liberal online, just like you can't find every single rock to test if it falls to the ground to come to the conclusion that gravity exists. It's called taking a sample. It's called designing an experiment. You can actually calculate the probability that the results of your sample were from random chance versus some underlying cause. That's called statistical analysis. I'm not expecting you to conduct the study, I'm just baffled that you would suggest that such an easily quantifiable topic (that means countable) would not be able to be studied and therefore you can absolve yourself of the burden of proof for your claims. I know you weren't "throwing out" science, but for someone that talks a lot about being critically minded (often in contrast to liberals and SJW), you have refused to apply the basic tenants of critical thought in your own life. Critical thought means systematic thought. It is literally the exact opposite of "common sense" and "just live and observe." I already explained in my last comment why the human brain isn't capable of coming to rational conclusions without systematic thought, so I don't know why you are repeating this suggestion as if living and observing will ever get you close to an accurate world view. "Common sense" means "I didn't bother to actually collect data, control for variables, or control for biases, and therefore have no systematic way of approaching what I have experienced and observed, nor did I look up any sources that did, so I'm just going to draw a conclusion based on what I feel is right." The whole point of my comment is that that way of going about your life is literally the furthest thing in the world from critical thinking, and if you genuinely cared about critical thinking, and not just being able to claim you are a critical thinker when you actually aren't, you would have some understanding of and concern about of all the things you just called "jargon" and "off-putting" : empiricism, experimental design, quantifiability, controlling of variables, cognitive biases, heuristics, logical fallacies, statistical analysis, and statistical significance. If these are "off-putting" to you, and you believe you can come to rational conclusions about the world without careful consideration of these, then you are absolutely not a critical thinker. You are a common-senser and have no room to be criticizing other liberals and SJW's for not being critical thinking themselves.

This isn't being defensive, this is explaining actual critical thought 101 to someone that consistently accuses others of lacking it. Your refusal to cite a source *in a very post about liberals refusing to cite sources* was dripping with too much irony to not comment, and the last line of your last one is too. Girl, get some self-awareness. Read a book on critical thinking if you actually want to come on here and accuse others of lacking it. Just because you believe other liberals don't do it (again, citation needed) doesn't absolve you of your burden of proof when you make claims, and enforcing the burden of proof in debate is not "getting defensive." It's asking the other party to hold their own and not waste your time.

I do understand what all your words mean (though I had to remind myself what empirical meant) but the thing about long words are, they're easy to understand in isolation, but when they're thrown together, they start becoming overly complicated and it's easy to lose your way. I'm saying that if I, someone who's been confronted with words like this through my time at university, struggles to get to the gist of what you're saying, then how would someone who isn't educated in this stuff know what you're on about? Of course you can do a study based on a sample size but that is one of the first criticisms of such experiments - that they're unreliable because the sample size wasn't big enough. There's no truly reliable test as regards how people think anyway because we're too diverse and complex and you'd literally have to ask all several billion of us how we feel to truly get the right answer. Whenever I see a study conducted about something that affects me, my first thought is always: "They didn't ask me or anyone else I know." If we had, the study outcome could have been very different. You can use a small sample size to test something like if gravity exists because inanimate objects are not complex or diverse like humans are. Critical thinking is defined as "the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement." And that's exactly what I do. Basically, don't automatically believe something just because it's said by someone on your side. Don't believe someone's claim of a study where a source is not cited. Don't automatically believe statistical evidence, look for inconsistences that altered the results. Don't approach an issue with your political affiliation in mind, just look at it for what it is. This is for sure what I learned in university. I don't know what's changed since I graduated.

I think you only need to cite a source if you're referring to an actual study. As I wasn't doing that and was just talking about what I'd observed in life, I didn't see a need to do that. I can't even remember every single YouTuber who failed to cite a source or every video I watched. And I didn't say every liberal fails to be self-critical, just that there's an epidemic of ones like that. It's not something that you can give a solid citation to. If it involves people, you have to involve yourself with them, many of them, to get a true understanding of them. A citiation of a few liberal YouTubers videos won't fully get the message across.

October 27, 2017

2 hours ago, StrawberryBlond said:

What am I so deluded about? Tell me.

I'm not comparing a "Scottish agenda," I'm merely saying that where I'm from, we don't have the concept of uniforms stopping after GCSE level, so it wasn't my first thought when I think of dressing however you want at school. It's weird, when I saw some tv programmes set in English schools when I was young, the kids sometimes didn't wear uniforms which I thought was weird as we know that's not the case in reality (my only theory is that the production company didn't want to spend money on uniforms for all the lead actors and extras so just told them to come in their own clothes). And not everyone goes to sixth form college anyway - do we even know if Sam completed his education? And Gaga did make "female singer coming out as bi" popular. So few people did this before then. So many more started coming out right from the beginning of their careers after this (Nicki Minaj, Jessie J, Azealia Banks, Angel Haze, Halsey...). I've even read articles about how Nicki and Jessie basically lied about their feelings because they forced to by their labels because it had become such a trend lately.

I didn't add that I've been to uni to brag about being smart, I said it because I was pointing out that all this jargon confuses me even though I ran into it at uni (been out of practice with it for a long time, though), so imagine how much it confuses someone who's never been confronted with it?

The fact that science doesn't support all these new genders (yet) is all the evidence you need for the moment. Liberals used to fail to support something until it could be proven by science and statistics but now it's a case of "this person believes this condition is genuine, therefore, it must be true." And the suggestion is that I should carry out a wide scale study of all the millions of liberals worldwide. I don't see how I'm supposed to do that. I think I need to get paid to work out how the world works when it involves lots of time and research that most of us don't have.

Are you serious? You think my university education was wasted because I have different opinions to you? Wow. I think it opened my mind enough to know that such a viewpoint is the opposite of progressive.

I can be a fan of Gaga while also having my own mind. I support LGBT rights and being whoever you want to be - I think that's all Gaga's putting forward. Just because I don't agree with every little thing that my fave believes in doesn't mean I'm not a true fan. Being a fan of an artist is about the music more than anything.

I definitely don't agree with her on everything, especially her anti-feminist views. I just think she's a bit too sheltered in some ways and is lucky enough to never have had extreme sexism happen to her. And even if she hasn't, she doesn't seem to realise that there are a whole lot of other Western women who have gone through unimaginable amounts of sexism in life, so it's by no means an outdated problem that ended a few decades ago, like she's tried to claim before. I've said for a long time that anyone who thinks that we don't need feminism anymore is either a man or an extremely lucky, sheltered woman. Blaire can very much be a "if it doesn't happen to me, it doesn't happen to anyone else either" kinda person, which is grating. But yeah, there's a lot of other issues where she's absolutely spot on. I just wish she would put them down a bit more respectfully sometimes, without resorting to unnecessary mocking complete with valley girl hair flipping.

I do understand what all your words mean (though I had to remind myself what empirical meant) but the thing about long words are, they're easy to understand in isolation, but when they're thrown together, they start becoming overly complicated and it's easy to lose your way. I'm saying that if I, someone who's been confronted with words like this through my time at university, struggles to get to the gist of what you're saying, then how would someone who isn't educated in this stuff know what you're on about? Of course you can do a study based on a sample size but that is one of the first criticisms of such experiments - that they're unreliable because the sample size wasn't big enough. There's no truly reliable test as regards how people think anyway because we're too diverse and complex and you'd literally have to ask all several billion of us how we feel to truly get the right answer. Whenever I see a study conducted about something that affects me, my first thought is always: "They didn't ask me or anyone else I know." If we had, the study outcome could have been very different. You can use a small sample size to test something like if gravity exists because inanimate objects are not complex or diverse like humans are. Critical thinking is defined as "the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement." And that's exactly what I do. Basically, don't automatically believe something just because it's said by someone on your side. Don't believe someone's claim of a study where a source is not cited. Don't automatically believe statistical evidence, look for inconsistences that altered the results. Don't approach an issue with your political affiliation in mind, just look at it for what it is. This is for sure what I learned in university. I don't know what's changed since I graduated.

I think you only need to cite a source if you're referring to an actual study. As I wasn't doing that and was just talking about what I'd observed in life, I didn't see a need to do that. I can't even remember every single YouTuber who failed to cite a source or every video I watched. And I didn't say every liberal fails to be self-critical, just that there's an epidemic of ones like that. It's not something that you can give a solid citation to. If it involves people, you have to involve yourself with them, many of them, to get a true understanding of them. A citiation of a few liberal YouTubers videos won't fully get the message across.

Ok well I'm glad you do understand several aspects of critical thought, but you still have the one same critical misconception I've been talking about in there mixed with the other valid rules, "Don't approach an issue with your political affiliation in mind, just look at it for what it is." This is what I keep challenging. The human brain is LITERALLY incapable of turning off bias and partiality, and I'm sorry if you were never taught that at your university (maybe you have just forgotten it?) but it is a well-established scientific fact that is essential to critical thinking. Because if you believe your brain can be objective (which as you just pointed out is part of the definition of critical thinking), then you are always going fall into traps. Maybe not all traps if you at least understand some of the rules, but it will be more often than you think. The worst most insidious bias humans have is the meta bias that we believe we are objective (non-biased) when we are absolutely not. That is why critical thought must be systematic rather than holistic, exactly counting each piece of data and conducting statistical analysis rather than just walking away with your overall impression of the data set. There are many many experiments to show that humans are incredibly bad at looking at data sets and coming to accurate conclusions about them without actually sitting down and doing the calculations (or having someone do them for them). You can see how believing a that a given method is objective when it in fact is not would lead a person to believe that certain methods of coming to conclusions would be critical in nature when in fact they are not, right?

That's all my main point, but I just have a few comments on some other things you just said. 1) A sample does not mean a small sample, a sample can contain millions of individuals. The whole point of statistical analysis, which I've mentioned a few times now, is that you can actually *calculate* the probability that the results you see are from random chance versus a genuine trend. I'm sorry to do this again, but if you are going to say that human beings are too complicated to study, I would like to see the calculation you used to show that the sample size necessary to study the human population to account for these complexities is greater than or equal to the population on earth, or a reference to someone that has come to this same conclusion and the calculation they have used. That brings me to my second point, that 2) empirical facts need a citation if they are to be believed, otherwise they are hypotheses. That is what empirical means, that the truth depends on specific facts about the world and therefore must be determined by experiment rather than logic or math alone. This is as true outside of academia as in it, the burden of proof does not change just because your audience may be less educated on what that burden is. If it is true (which it very well might be) that a study has not been done as to how frequently liberals cite sources versus the general population, the critically minded thing to do would be to say that *in your experience* it appears to you that liberals cite sources less than the general population, BUT that you admit that you do not have the data or data analysis necessary to support this claim, therefore it is merely a hypothesis. It's that simple. You're allowed to have opinions about things that have not been studied, BUT it is critical to acknowledge when a matter is empirical and when the truth of your claim is independent of your belief in it and therefore requires evidence to be proven. The un-critical thing to do is double down when someone tells you that the claim is empirical and needs a citation, and instead insist that it is self - evident to anyone that looks at the world with a "critical eye," no calculations needed. Particularly if you are going to then put forward the exact opposite excuse, that it is too complex and therefore cannot be studied at all (so it's too complex to extrapolate from the analysis of the data set to the general population, yet it's suddenly self-evident of the population from the data set if, instead of analysis you just look at it???)

Finally, I would like to pose some questions for you to think about. A study finds that Group A performs action x at W frequency, group B performs action x at Y frequency. Groups A and B are aliens with superior complexity to human beings. Should the complexity of groups A and B have any bearing on the sample size we need to compare the frequencies W and Y with statistical significance? If so, why? And how would that information be introduced into the calculation? Do you believe in the findings of modern medicine, which is based in human physiology, microbiology, and molecular biology, which are systems independently much more complex than human psychology, and as a system are incomparably more complex? Should modern medicine be discounted as a science because it is too complex and therefore not truly capable of study? Do you believe the study of human beings entirely impossible? Do you believe that psychology and sociology are quack sciences? If so do you have calculations to support these views (as above)? It is important to critical thought to have reasons why we believe certain avenues of study cannot yield informative results, and have calculations to back up why a given study needs a given sample size (in your case, why you believe the sample size must be greater than or equal the total population) in order to achieve statistical significance. If we don't have standards, how can we evaluate the research of others? And if we do have standards, have we set them in such a way that they do not arbitrarily change between disciplines (e.g. Psychology and medicine)? All things to think about.

October 27, 2017

Some people think they know everything, met all types of people and heard their stories already and walked in the shoes of others. They then declare their own point of view is correct whilst coming across with a pretty ignorant and uneducated point of view.

@StrawberryBlond That wasn't aimed at you. just incase you were worried. It was a general statement you gradually learn when you've seen it over and over again. Don't take it personally. Just with your posts you might recognize a couple of those traits which is why I responded. The other reason Ive replied, not to argue is because you asked me 'why am I deluded?' ah, well you went on about school uniforms and questioning his education where he says in the interview 'when I was 17'. Then you said you didn't have time to look things up so why make quite a ridiculous strong standpoint on something you admitted you hadn't got time to look into?

You expect somebody to question that wouldn't you? If it was the other way round you would. The world is still turning because of democracy, not 'I'm right youre wrong, I haven't got time to look into it' lol. I'm sure youre laughing now as am I over how silly it was. Its OK, weve all done it.

The only issue I have with your reply to me is that you say you support LGBT. You don't unfortunately and if you haven't got the time to learn about new things as you said that's a shame. To learn how to be more open minded is probably more important than taking the time to write lengthy posts which are taken as insulting. In life you get the response back the way you speak. Its nice to be nice. Its also great if you back up what you say with the link to the '2 people' you found online that say Sam is lying. If you can please do, I can do some research on them and maybe forward it to Sam because I have a bit of OCD and like facts. The world runs on facts not something you read on the internet so please put the link in. Thanks.

oh and add Sinead, Kurt Cobain, Alanis, Mel B, Billie from Green Day, Freddie Mercury, Jessie J, Elton, Courtney love (even went out with winona ryder) Fergie, Debbie Harry, Michael Stipe, Janet Jackson, Grace Jones, Janis Joplin to your magic Gaga was first list. If you have time to look things up there would be no need for people to get defensive. This is what happens. I don't want you to look bad or feel foolish but if you can dish it out you must understand what you get back in return. Hope you aren't offended. Madonna had a girlfriend for quite a while, her girlfriend Jenny has still got the tattoo of her.

Looking forward to research those 2 people out. Anybody needs to know if they are being slandered, Sam would deserve a payment award or a jail term from the others.

I'm sure we can sort this out. #peace

October 27, 2017

On ‎2017‎-‎10‎-‎26 at 12:10 AM, MetalliGa said:

Genderqueer? More like I want to dress as either gender but labels make me special

This... and if u dont agree you're an ''IGNORANT MANIFESTANT'' kids these days ehhh

October 27, 2017

On ‎2017‎-‎10‎-‎25 at 11:03 PM, Saint Laurent said:

Who are you to tell somebody what their gender is though? Who do you think you are?

Ignorance manifests in the strangest places sometimes.

Can you stop with the one million genders bullshit?... Plus its funny how you judge me immediately as an IGNORANT MANIFESTANT when I and millions of people plus hundreds of scientists disagree... ''Ignorant'' must but be your favorite overused word eh?

Here's a tip - go read some more.

October 27, 2017

2 minutes ago, Skrill said:

Can you stop with the one million genders bullshit?... Plus its funny how you judge me immediately as an IGNORANT MANIFESTANT when I and millions of people plus hundreds of scientists disagree... ''Ignorant'' but be your favorite overused word eh?

Here's a tip - go read some more.

You're confused - that's okay.

P.s. the word you were looking for is manifestation.

October 27, 2017

1 minute ago, Saint Laurent said:

You're confused - that's okay.

Oh you dont know how to respond d'awww... go ahead judge me once again child

October 27, 2017

2 minutes ago, Skrill said:

Oh you dont know how to respond d'awww... go ahead judge me once again child

It's difficult to engage with somebody who has little to offer in terms of intellect, to be perfectly honest with you.

There are two biological sexes - male and female. Sex is completely binary and nobody can be a sex that they are biologically not. That's what science offers us.

Gender is referenced when discussing social and cultural issues surrounding identity. Gender is a complete social construct and has absolutely nothing to do with what your anatomy was at birth, or indeed, what it is now. Science has no logical place in a debate concerning gender identity since it is as far removed from biology as is possible.

If you would have said 'there are only 2 sexes' you would have been totally correct, but there are actually a number of different genders and a persons gender is entirely chosen by themselves, or society.

Most of us are assigned a gender, for example, I was assigned the gender of a man. That is different to my biology - I am biologically man and also have been assigned/have chosen the gender of a man. Should I feel like I would rather be a woman, I would still be biologically male, but my gender would be female.

This is where the term 'transgender' has come from. If you are biologically male and your gender is female you are trans - gendered i.e. you exist across BOTH the male sex and the female gender.

That same principle can be applied to each and every individuals personal wishes or feelings - they may identify as whatever gender they feel they are, but their sex i.e. their biology is unchangeable.

This really isn't difficult to understand tbh and if you feel so aggressive about non-traditional gender roles that you feel the need to describe them as 'cancerous', someone really ought to have a word with you about respect for other people. In actual fact, you're wrong, people like YOU are the cancer of society, people who refuse to accept that people have an absolute right to express themselves exactly as they feel inside.

I suggest you talk to somebody about your anger towards freedom to express yourself as any gender you want. Use your privilege to become more educated and more understanding.

Just to reiterate, since you think I'm uneducated for some reason unbeknownst to me, I study gender, sexuality and the law as part of my law degree and am almost undoubtedly more educated in this subject than you so, actually, you...

Spoiler

An authoritative, academic book without pictures preferably, since the latter is clearly what you've been using to educate yourself with recently.

October 27, 2017

17 hours ago, rpggal said:

Ok well I'm glad you do understand several aspects of critical thought, but you still have the one same critical misconception I've been talking about in there mixed with the other valid rules, "Don't approach an issue with your political affiliation in mind, just look at it for what it is." This is what I keep challenging. The human brain is LITERALLY incapable of turning off bias and partiality, and I'm sorry if you were never taught that at your university (maybe you have just forgotten it?) but it is a well-established scientific fact that is essential to critical thinking. Because if you believe your brain can be objective (which as you just pointed out is part of the definition of critical thinking), then you are always going fall into traps. Maybe not all traps if you at least understand some of the rules, but it will be more often than you think. The worst most insidious bias humans have is the meta bias that we believe we are objective (non-biased) when we are absolutely not. That is why critical thought must be systematic rather than holistic, exactly counting each piece of data and conducting statistical analysis rather than just walking away with your overall impression of the data set. There are many many experiments to show that humans are incredibly bad at looking at data sets and coming to accurate conclusions about them without actually sitting down and doing the calculations (or having someone do them for them). You can see how believing a that a given method is objective when it in fact is not would lead a person to believe that certain methods of coming to conclusions would be critical in nature when in fact they are not, right?

That's all my main point, but I just have a few comments on some other things you just said. 1) A sample does not mean a small sample, a sample can contain millions of individuals. The whole point of statistical analysis, which I've mentioned a few times now, is that you can actually *calculate* the probability that the results you see are from random chance versus a genuine trend. I'm sorry to do this again, but if you are going to say that human beings are too complicated to study, I would like to see the calculation you used to show that the sample size necessary to study the human population to account for these complexities is greater than or equal to the population on earth, or a reference to someone that has come to this same conclusion and the calculation they have used. That brings me to my second point, that 2) empirical facts need a citation if they are to be believed, otherwise they are hypotheses. That is what empirical means, that the truth depends on specific facts about the world and therefore must be determined by experiment rather than logic or math alone. This is as true outside of academia as in it, the burden of proof does not change just because your audience may be less educated on what that burden is. If it is true (which it very well might be) that a study has not been done as to how frequently liberals cite sources versus the general population, the critically minded thing to do would be to say that *in your experience* it appears to you that liberals cite sources less than the general population, BUT that you admit that you do not have the data or data analysis necessary to support this claim, therefore it is merely a hypothesis. It's that simple. You're allowed to have opinions about things that have not been studied, BUT it is critical to acknowledge when a matter is empirical and when the truth of your claim is independent of your belief in it and therefore requires evidence to be proven. The un-critical thing to do is double down when someone tells you that the claim is empirical and needs a citation, and instead insist that it is self - evident to anyone that looks at the world with a "critical eye," no calculations needed. Particularly if you are going to then put forward the exact opposite excuse, that it is too complex and therefore cannot be studied at all (so it's too complex to extrapolate from the analysis of the data set to the general population, yet it's suddenly self-evident of the population from the data set if, instead of analysis you just look at it???)

Finally, I would like to pose some questions for you to think about. A study finds that Group A performs action x at W frequency, group B performs action x at Y frequency. Groups A and B are aliens with superior complexity to human beings. Should the complexity of groups A and B have any bearing on the sample size we need to compare the frequencies W and Y with statistical significance? If so, why? And how would that information be introduced into the calculation? Do you believe in the findings of modern medicine, which is based in human physiology, microbiology, and molecular biology, which are systems independently much more complex than human psychology, and as a system are incomparably more complex? Should modern medicine be discounted as a science because it is too complex and therefore not truly capable of study? Do you believe the study of human beings entirely impossible? Do you believe that psychology and sociology are quack sciences? If so do you have calculations to support these views (as above)? It is important to critical thought to have reasons why we believe certain avenues of study cannot yield informative results, and have calculations to back up why a given study needs a given sample size (in your case, why you believe the sample size must be greater than or equal the total population) in order to achieve statistical significance. If we don't have standards, how can we evaluate the research of others? And if we do have standards, have we set them in such a way that they do not arbitrarily change between disciplines (e.g. Psychology and medicine)? All things to think about.

I'm not interested in talking about the technical aspects behind our brains. The point is, you can be as unbiased and objective as you can possibly be. Normal people don't think about stuff this indepth. I feel like you're on a mission to just prove that you're smarter than me with all your big words and technicalities. It's like artists who correct people who say that black and white are colours, clarifying that they are tones. That kind of indepth stuff just doesn't go down well in real life, especially among non-scientists. Talk to me on my level.

I never said that I wasn't basing all this on my own experience. In fact, I do use the phrase "in my own experience" an awful lot. When someone is stating their opinion, assuming that they are referring to their own experiences is pretty much a given in my book, I don't think it needs to be said. When I say that people need to just go out into the world to see what I'm talking about, that is a way of providing a citation of sorts. It's like saying: "If you do this, perhaps you'll start to share the experience I'm talking about."

Your first question involves a group that doesn't exist, as you say "aliens with superior complexity to human beings." How am I supposed to imagine such a possibility in reality? You can't pull out ridiculous theories like that and then expect them to be taken seriously. I operate under this current reality, not a mythical, potentially far-off reality where we can communicate with aliens. Medicine is different to humans - it is inanimate, it cannot think, it cannot breathe, it cannot do anything a human can. Complexity has a different context when we're talking about medicine. Yes, the study of humans is possible, no psychology and sociology are not quack sciences (I actually studied sociology briefly at university and psychology was actually something I considered). I just believe in studying humans in a case by case basis, individualism and suchlike. You can obviously talk in more generalised terms when referring to those with the same political affiliation, so long as you don't throw around statements like "all." Yes, I have reasons why I believe certain avenues of study cannot yield informative results but they will differ depending on what we're talking about. Put it this way, I always roll my eyes when I see ads for foundation that claim that 87% of women said it matched their skin tone and then says in the small print at the bottom that it was tested on 1000 women and over 800 said it worked. That is nowhere near big enough. Maybe 1 million women would be a bit more reliable, considering how many varieties of skin tone there are. And during the build-up to the Scottish referendum, there were always polls being released claiming that so much percentage of the population where going to vote yes and so many were going to vote no. And every time, all I could think was: "I'm no, my entire family bar one is no, yet none of us have ever taken part in this poll, which means there must be many more just like us, therefore, that no percentage should be way higher. We're only a population of 5 million, this poll needs to be bigger." Yes, we all have to have standards in which to evaluate research but yes, they do have to change between disciplines because there are different standards within those disciplines.

13 hours ago, scallywally said:

Some people think they know everything, met all types of people and heard their stories already and walked in the shoes of others. They then declare their own point of view is correct whilst coming across with a pretty ignorant and uneducated point of view.

@StrawberryBlond That wasn't aimed at you. just incase you were worried. It was a general statement you gradually learn when you've seen it over and over again. Don't take it personally. Just with your posts you might recognize a couple of those traits which is why I responded. The other reason Ive replied, not to argue is because you asked me 'why am I deluded?' ah, well you went on about school uniforms and questioning his education where he says in the interview 'when I was 17'. Then you said you didn't have time to look things up so why make quite a ridiculous strong standpoint on something you admitted you hadn't got time to look into?

You expect somebody to question that wouldn't you? If it was the other way round you would. The world is still turning because of democracy, not 'I'm right youre wrong, I haven't got time to look into it' lol. I'm sure youre laughing now as am I over how silly it was. Its OK, weve all done it.

The only issue I have with your reply to me is that you say you support LGBT. You don't unfortunately and if you haven't got the time to learn about new things as you said that's a shame. To learn how to be more open minded is probably more important than taking the time to write lengthy posts which are taken as insulting. In life you get the response back the way you speak. Its nice to be nice. Its also great if you back up what you say with the link to the '2 people' you found online that say Sam is lying. If you can please do, I can do some research on them and maybe forward it to Sam because I have a bit of OCD and like facts. The world runs on facts not something you read on the internet so please put the link in. Thanks.

oh and add Sinead, Kurt Cobain, Alanis, Mel B, Billie from Green Day, Freddie Mercury, Jessie J, Elton, Courtney love (even went out with winona ryder) Fergie, Debbie Harry, Michael Stipe, Janet Jackson, Grace Jones, Janis Joplin to your magic Gaga was first list. If you have time to look things up there would be no need for people to get defensive. This is what happens. I don't want you to look bad or feel foolish but if you can dish it out you must understand what you get back in return. Hope you aren't offended. Madonna had a girlfriend for quite a while, her girlfriend Jenny has still got the tattoo of her.

Looking forward to research those 2 people out. Anybody needs to know if they are being slandered, Sam would deserve a payment award or a jail term from the others.

I'm sure we can sort this out. #peace

Hmm, I don't know if it was just a general statement. Very strange that you said it, addressed to no one in particular just before you said this to me. And you don't have to tell me about gradually learning something when you see it over and over again, I know of that very well. Just because you're being indirect about it doesn't mean it wasn't aimed at me. I could maybe go into a few indirect statements about you, but let's not go there.

I don't recall him saying when he was 17. I don't go back and read every tiny minute part of an article. Just like I'm sure a lot of other people don't. You don't have to hold me to an incredibly high standard that you don't do for others who you allow to make mistakes.

Who are you to say I don't support LGBT? You barely know me. I believe this is just the first time we've spoken. You don't know enough about me to make that judgement. I respect sexual orientations that are scientifically sound and make sense. I don't just mindlessly accept whatever bizarre self-diagnosis as the real deal. And don't try to tell me that I can't write lengthy posts just because you disagree with them. I am a lot more open minded than you give me credit for but you'll never know that as you're not taking the time to get to know me. How do you know I'm not nice? You're just seeing me wound up about a topic that I feel passionately about, it happens. Now, when I provide this link to you, I don't know how you're going to go about it but please do not attempt to hack into these people's accounts or harass them. They are within their rights to use their right to free speech and shouldn't be threatened with jail time. People also write slanderous things about Gaga online and I never report them. Most people don't even look up articles when they're more than a day old anyway, so don't worry, most people won't even have seen it. The second comment got deleted (whether by the poster or the site, I'm unsure, but the other one is still there - go to the comments section, click on "Best Rated" and look at the comment 13 down from the top): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5009139/Sam-Smith-discusses-cross-dressing-past-time.html#comments

I'm not saying that Gaga was the first to ever speak about being bi but she was the first to do it right from the beginning, she never covered it up for a short while, like most other singers do. Most of them only wait until they've achieved a certain level of fame and success before admitting that stuff, but Gaga was honest from the beginning. Also, she was one of the new generation of popstars to state that she had a gay fanbase and say how much she loved them. Up until that point, plenty of the biggest names in pop never even acknowledged their gay fans, now they do it as a matter of course.

36 minutes ago, Saint Laurent said:

There are two biological sexes - male and female. Sex is completely binary and nobody can be a sex that they are biologically not. That's what science offers us.

Gender is referenced when discussing social and cultural issues surrounding identity. Gender is a complete social construct and has absolutely nothing to do with what your anatomy was at birth, or indeed, what it is now. Science has no logical place in a debate concerning gender identity since it is as far removed from biology as is possible.

If you would have said 'there are only 2 sexes' you would have been totally correct, but there are actually a number of different genders and a persons gender is entirely chosen by themselves, or society.

The problem is, "sex" and "gender" are still used in the same sense throughout life, so it understandably gets many confused. Honestly, it wasn't until recently that I even looked up this distinction and was shocked because all my life, I've been taught that they're the same thing. I think back to all the forms I've ever filled in where sex/gender is asked and when it comes to word choice, it's a 50/50 split between "sex" and "gender." I've always just seen it as "some people don't say the word 'sex' because it makes some people laugh." It's just a matter of which word you prefer. That's what I've seen all throughout life, even in biology textbooks.

The thing is, gender and personality are 2 different things. How you want to dress, talk, express yourself, etc. won't change your gender. Those things are personality differences. Even I myself, who identifies as a woman, do not feel 100% female all the time, but that doesn't make me feel like I want to identify as anything else. It just means that my personality is going in a certain direction one day. You're allowed to be express masculine and feminine traits without having to change your gender identity. It just seems to limited and outdated to think, for example: "You display 'masculine' personality traits, therefore, you must identify as male on some level" and vice versa. And who decides what is "male" and "female" behaviour anyway? For such a supposedly open minded theory, it's all about applying labels and championing social constructs instead of just letting people be truly free.

October 27, 2017

1 minute ago, StrawberryBlond said:

I'm not interested in talking about the technical aspects behind our brains. The point is, you can be as unbiased and objective as you can possibly be. Normal people don't think about stuff this indepth. I feel like you're on a mission to just prove that you're smarter than me with all your big words and technicalities. It's like artists who correct people who say that black and white are colours, clarifying that they are tones. That kind of indepth stuff just doesn't go down well in real life, especially among non-scientists. Talk to me on my level.

I never said that I wasn't basing all this on my own experience. In fact, I do use the phrase "in my own experience" an awful lot. When someone is stating their opinion, assuming that they are referring to their own experiences is pretty much a given in my book, I don't think it needs to be said. When I say that people need to just go out into the world to see what I'm talking about, that is a way of providing a citation of sorts. It's like saying: "If you do this, perhaps you'll start to share the experience I'm talking about."

Your first question involves a group that doesn't exist, as you say "aliens with superior complexity to human beings." How am I supposed to imagine such a possibility in reality? You can't pull out ridiculous theories like that and then expect them to be taken seriously. I operate under this current reality, not a mythical, potentially far-off reality where we can communicate with aliens. Medicine is different to humans - it is inanimate, it cannot think, it cannot breathe, it cannot do anything a human can. Complexity has a different context when we're talking about medicine. Yes, the study of humans is possible, no psychology and sociology are not quack sciences (I actually studied sociology briefly at university and psychology was actually something I considered). I just believe in studying humans in a case by case basis, individualism and suchlike. You can obviously talk in more generalised terms when referring to those with the same political affiliation, so long as you don't throw around statements like "all." Yes, I have reasons why I believe certain avenues of study cannot yield informative results but they will differ depending on what we're talking about. Put it this way, I always roll my eyes when I see ads for foundation that claim that 87% of women said it matched their skin tone and then says in the small print at the bottom that it was tested on 1000 women and over 800 said it worked. That is nowhere near big enough. Maybe 1 million women would be a bit more reliable, considering how many varieties of skin tone there are. And during the build-up to the Scottish referendum, there were always polls being released claiming that so much percentage of the population where going to vote yes and so many were going to vote no. And every time, all I could think was: "I'm no, my entire family bar one is no, yet none of us have ever taken part in this poll, which means there must be many more just like us, therefore, that no percentage should be way higher. We're only a population of 5 million, this poll needs to be bigger." Yes, we all have to have standards in which to evaluate research but yes, they do have to change between disciplines because there are different standards within those disciplines.

Hmm, I don't know if it was just a general statement. Very strange that you said it, addressed to no one in particular just before you said this to me. And you don't have to tell me about gradually learning something when you see it over and over again, I know of that very well. Just because you're being indirect about it doesn't mean it wasn't aimed at me. I could maybe go into a few indirect statements about you, but let's not go there.

I don't recall him saying when he was 17. I don't go back and read every tiny minute part of an article. Just like I'm sure a lot of other people don't. You don't have to hold me to an incredibly high standard that you don't do for others who you allow to make mistakes.

Who are you to say I don't support LGBT? You barely know me. I believe this is just the first time we've spoken. You don't know enough about me to make that judgement. I respect sexual orientations that are scientifically sound and make sense. I don't just mindlessly accept whatever bizarre self-diagnosis as the real deal. And don't try to tell me that I can't write lengthy posts just because you disagree with them. I am a lot more open minded than you give me credit for but you'll never know that as you're not taking the time to get to know me. How do you know I'm not nice? You're just seeing me wound up about a topic that I feel passionately about, it happens. Now, when I provide this link to you, I don't know how you're going to go about it but please do not attempt to hack into these people's accounts or harass them. They are within their rights to use their right to free speech and shouldn't be threatened with jail time. People also write slanderous things about Gaga online and I never report them. Most people don't even look up articles when they're more than a day old anyway, so don't worry, most people won't even have seen it. The second comment got deleted (whether by the poster or the site, I'm unsure, but the other one is still there - go to the comments section, click on "Best Rated" and look at the comment 13 down from the top): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5009139/Sam-Smith-discusses-cross-dressing-past-time.html#comments

I'm not saying that Gaga was the first to ever speak about being bi but she was the first to do it right from the beginning, she never covered it up for a short while, like most other singers do. Most of them only wait until they've achieved a certain level of fame and success before admitting that stuff, but Gaga was honest from the beginning. Also, she was one of the new generation of popstars to state that she had a gay fanbase and say how much she loved them. Up until that point, plenty of the biggest names in pop never even acknowledged their gay fans, now they do it as a matter of course.

The problem is, "sex" and "gender" are still used in the same sense throughout life, so it understandably gets many confused. Honestly, it wasn't until recently that I even looked up this distinction and was shocked because all my life, I've been taught that they're the same thing. I think back to all the forms I've ever filled in where sex/gender is asked and when it comes to word choice, it's a 50/50 split between "sex" and "gender." I've always just seen it as "some people don't say the word 'sex' because it makes some people laugh." It's just a matter of which word you prefer. That's what I've seen all throughout life, even in biology textbooks.

The thing is, gender and personality are 2 different things. How you want to dress, talk, express yourself, etc. won't change your gender. Those things are personality differences. Even I myself, who identifies as a woman, do not feel 100% female all the time, but that doesn't make me feel like I want to identify as anything else. It just means that my personality is going in a certain direction one day. You're allowed to be express masculine and feminine traits without having to change your gender identity. It just seems to limited and outdated to think, for example: "You display 'masculine' personality traits, therefore, you must identify as male on some level" and vice versa. And who decides what is "male" and "female" behaviour anyway? For such a supposedly open minded theory, it's all about applying labels and championing social constructs instead of just letting people be truly free.

It's about the choice to identify as whatever you want - I didn't once say that society should impose gender roles on people, I think quite the opposite.

October 27, 2017

29 minutes ago, Saint Laurent said:

It's about the choice to identify as whatever you want - I didn't once say that society should impose gender roles on people, I think quite the opposite.

It's all very well to say you are gender fluid, for example, and that you feel like a woman one day and a man the next, for example. But that still doesn't change how you were born, your hormones, sexual organs and physical sex. It's just a personality thing. Unless you are trans and therefore want to actually want to change your sex, your gender expression is nothing more than personality. We are what we are born as regardless of how we feel inside. Even intersex people still have a sex, it's not a third sex/gender. Why can't you just be comfortable being the sex you were born as (apart from trans, obviously) but just dress and express yourself however you choose? Why must this be somehow connected to your body and the way it was born? Whatever I feel, it doesn't change the fact that I'm a biological female, which is the way I was born (and no, I was born this way, not assigned, suggesting that the doctor could choose to lie). My sex and how I choose to express myself are 2 completely different things.

October 27, 2017

7 minutes ago, StrawberryBlond said:

It's all very well to say you are gender fluid, for example, and that you feel like a woman one day and a man the next, for example. But that still doesn't change how you were born, your hormones, sexual organs and physical sex. It's just a personality thing. Unless you are trans and therefore want to actually want to change your sex, your gender expression is nothing more than personality. We are what we are born as regardless of how we feel inside. Even intersex people still have a sex, it's not a third sex/gender. Why can't you just be comfortable being the sex you were born as (apart from trans, obviously) but just dress and express yourself however you choose? Why must this be somehow connected to your body and the way it was born? Whatever I feel, it doesn't change the fact that I'm a biological female, which is the way I was born (and no, I was born this way, not assigned, suggesting that the doctor could choose to lie). My sex and how I choose to express myself are 2 completely different things.

That's the whole point entirely sex = biology at birth, gender = how you identify (i.e. how you feel)...

I don't really know what you're talking about at this point, gender is in no way connected to your body (unless, of course, you choose it to be by undergoing physical changes).

Clearly you haven't taken the time to read even a small piece of anything that I've written...

October 28, 2017

5 hours ago, StrawberryBlond said:

I'm not interested in talking about the technical aspects behind our brains. The point is, you can be as unbiased and objective as you can possibly be. Normal people don't think about stuff this indepth. I feel like you're on a mission to just prove that you're smarter than me with all your big words and technicalities. It's like artists who correct people who say that black and white are colours, clarifying that they are tones. That kind of indepth stuff just doesn't go down well in real life, especially among non-scientists. Talk to me on my level.

I never said that I wasn't basing all this on my own experience. In fact, I do use the phrase "in my own experience" an awful lot. When someone is stating their opinion, assuming that they are referring to their own experiences is pretty much a given in my book, I don't think it needs to be said. When I say that people need to just go out into the world to see what I'm talking about, that is a way of providing a citation of sorts. It's like saying: "If you do this, perhaps you'll start to share the experience I'm talking about."

Your first question involves a group that doesn't exist, as you say "aliens with superior complexity to human beings." How am I supposed to imagine such a possibility in reality? You can't pull out ridiculous theories like that and then expect them to be taken seriously. I operate under this current reality, not a mythical, potentially far-off reality where we can communicate with aliens. Medicine is different to humans - it is inanimate, it cannot think, it cannot breathe, it cannot do anything a human can. Complexity has a different context when we're talking about medicine. Yes, the study of humans is possible, no psychology and sociology are not quack sciences (I actually studied sociology briefly at university and psychology was actually something I considered). I just believe in studying humans in a case by case basis, individualism and suchlike. You can obviously talk in more generalised terms when referring to those with the same political affiliation, so long as you don't throw around statements like "all." Yes, I have reasons why I believe certain avenues of study cannot yield informative results but they will differ depending on what we're talking about. Put it this way, I always roll my eyes when I see ads for foundation that claim that 87% of women said it matched their skin tone and then says in the small print at the bottom that it was tested on 1000 women and over 800 said it worked. That is nowhere near big enough. Maybe 1 million women would be a bit more reliable, considering how many varieties of skin tone there are. And during the build-up to the Scottish referendum, there were always polls being released claiming that so much percentage of the population where going to vote yes and so many were going to vote no. And every time, all I could think was: "I'm no, my entire family bar one is no, yet none of us have ever taken part in this poll, which means there must be many more just like us, therefore, that no percentage should be way higher. We're only a population of 5 million, this poll needs to be bigger." Yes, we all have to have standards in which to evaluate research but yes, they do have to change between disciplines because there are different standards within those disciplines.

Hmm, I don't know if it was just a general statement. Very strange that you said it, addressed to no one in particular just before you said this to me. And you don't have to tell me about gradually learning something when you see it over and over again, I know of that very well. Just because you're being indirect about it doesn't mean it wasn't aimed at me. I could maybe go into a few indirect statements about you, but let's not go there.

I don't recall him saying when he was 17. I don't go back and read every tiny minute part of an article. Just like I'm sure a lot of other people don't. You don't have to hold me to an incredibly high standard that you don't do for others who you allow to make mistakes.

Who are you to say I don't support LGBT? You barely know me. I believe this is just the first time we've spoken. You don't know enough about me to make that judgement. I respect sexual orientations that are scientifically sound and make sense. I don't just mindlessly accept whatever bizarre self-diagnosis as the real deal. And don't try to tell me that I can't write lengthy posts just because you disagree with them. I am a lot more open minded than you give me credit for but you'll never know that as you're not taking the time to get to know me. How do you know I'm not nice? You're just seeing me wound up about a topic that I feel passionately about, it happens. Now, when I provide this link to you, I don't know how you're going to go about it but please do not attempt to hack into these people's accounts or harass them. They are within their rights to use their right to free speech and shouldn't be threatened with jail time. People also write slanderous things about Gaga online and I never report them. Most people don't even look up articles when they're more than a day old anyway, so don't worry, most people won't even have seen it. The second comment got deleted (whether by the poster or the site, I'm unsure, but the other one is still there - go to the comments section, click on "Best Rated" and look at the comment 13 down from the top): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5009139/Sam-Smith-discusses-cross-dressing-past-time.html#comments

I'm not saying that Gaga was the first to ever speak about being bi but she was the first to do it right from the beginning, she never covered it up for a short while, like most other singers do. Most of them only wait until they've achieved a certain level of fame and success before admitting that stuff, but Gaga was honest from the beginning. Also, she was one of the new generation of popstars to state that she had a gay fanbase and say how much she loved them. Up until that point, plenty of the biggest names in pop never even acknowledged their gay fans, now they do it as a matter of course.

The problem is, "sex" and "gender" are still used in the same sense throughout life, so it understandably gets many confused. Honestly, it wasn't until recently that I even looked up this distinction and was shocked because all my life, I've been taught that they're the same thing. I think back to all the forms I've ever filled in where sex/gender is asked and when it comes to word choice, it's a 50/50 split between "sex" and "gender." I've always just seen it as "some people don't say the word 'sex' because it makes some people laugh." It's just a matter of which word you prefer. That's what I've seen all throughout life, even in biology textbooks.

The thing is, gender and personality are 2 different things. How you want to dress, talk, express yourself, etc. won't change your gender. Those things are personality differences. Even I myself, who identifies as a woman, do not feel 100% female all the time, but that doesn't make me feel like I want to identify as anything else. It just means that my personality is going in a certain direction one day. You're allowed to be express masculine and feminine traits without having to change your gender identity. It just seems to limited and outdated to think, for example: "You display 'masculine' personality traits, therefore, you must identify as male on some level" and vice versa. And who decides what is "male" and "female" behaviour anyway? For such a supposedly open minded theory, it's all about applying labels and championing social constructs instead of just letting people be truly free.

But why would you not be interested in talking about the technical aspects of our brains when that is the very thing we use to think? It would be the very same thing as having a discussion about a study or poll you've cited and saying "I'm not interested in discussing the technical aspects of how this poll was conducted," when someone points out its limitations and that your conclusions fall outside its limitations. You are citing your brain as a source and I'm pointing out that it has limitations and those limitations prevent it from generating valid conclusions of the kind you've put forward, without data analysis. "Being as objective as we possibly can be" means being systematic. There is no way, as I've said before, to just turn off the biases and partiality in our brains. Looking at things holistically, without putting in the work to be systematic, will be equally biased all the time, because that's how our brains are wired and we can't re-wire them. We can learn to not fail into certain logical traps and heuristics, but the biases never change. For biases all we can do is rely on external systems of analysis like statistics, controlling of variables, etc. because those controls cannot come from within us but must be constrained upon us.

All that I'm trying to do is get you to understand that, when there are very clear ways to be systematic about a given topic, e.g. it is a quantifiable data set, the best approach is to be systematic and find the answer within a margin of confidence by experiment. If that's not possible then next best is to make a hypothesis and retain a degree of skepticism about it. The worst is to insist that it can be known without doing the analysis at all. That's it. Your painting analogy would only hold if the artist were correcting someone using this inaccurate view of black and white as the premise of some conclusion that no longer holds when the inaccuracy is corrected. It's not a technicality if it completely invalidates an entire way of gaining knowledge about the world that you previously believed was legitimate. And again, just because "normal people don't think this in depth" doesn't mean that rational thought and legitimate ways of gaining knowledge about the world aren't worth educating people about. By that logic, normal liberals (in your view) don't cite sources, so why are you trying to get them to, that doesn't fly in those groups, talk to them on their level, etc. etc.

Why would I waste my time trying to prove I'm smart to strangers on the internet? The only reason I'm even talking to you about this is because you're the one that brought up citations and burdens of proof, and very often refer to your arguments as rational, evidence-based and in contrast to other users who you characterize as feelings based or irrational. So clearly it is a topic (ability, task, whatever you want to call critical thought) you either care about or at the very least care to have the appearance of being good at. Generally, when people care about being good at a task, they like to know ways they can improve, which I have tried to provide you. Why be so averse to new information entirely relevant to something you put on the air of caring about?

My point of those questions wasn't to actually have you answer them here, but to get you to think about whether you can specifically explain (to yourself or on here, it doesn't matter, but it would take a much longer post to really fully answer them) what *specifically* is the standard you have for statistical significance. So far you seem to be saying you use some kind of holistic "does it feel like enough people?" approach, because you have not provided a formula that has an input of certain variables (which based on your previous comment should include complexity as one of them (which by the way is also how you would answer the alien question, I was trying to get you to provide a general formula since all that was provided were unkowns) and an output of necessary sample size. Instead you gave some specific examples and what you would think about them, rather than a general, systematic standard. Of course, if you don't have a background in statistics coming up with a general formula would be difficult so I was hoping you would take the opportunity to look up what formulas statistians actually use, and see if and how complexity enters to equation. Of course different fields will have different standards, but they will not be ARBITRARILY different. There will have to be some logical way of going from the subject matter being different to specifically how the calculations are different. You gave some answers of why you believe human psychology and medicine are different (animate vs. inanimate), but it's not immediately obvious to me how you get from that to the need to have different standards in statistical significance. Maybe that is true, but it would definitely take some working out to get from one to the other. But again, my whole point in those very difficult questions is to get you to question what the basis is for your much higher skepticism for studies of human thought and behavior than you have for their biology, which is much more complex. The fact that these questions are so very difficult to sufficiently answer should I would hope get you to be a little more critical of how you are approaching science (even the social sciences) and whether or not you are truly being "as objective as possible," or whether you're letting biases, heuristics, and logical fallacies get you to see irrelevant details as relevant and vice versa. I understand you see this at nit picking, but if you genuinely value having legitimate methods of coming to accurate conclusions about the world, it is necessary to question our own ability to question, and try to get better.

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Sam Smith comes out as genderqueer

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